In Scripture a name is never a bare label; it carries the nature, the character, the presence, and the authority of the one who bears it. So when God discloses His name, He is disclosing Himself — and the whole of the Bible, from a bush that burns in the wilderness to a City where the redeemed wear that name upon their foreheads, is the unfolding of what it means to know it.
The name is the person
To “know the name” of God is to know God; to act “in the name” is to act in His authority and as His representative. This is why the Name is treated with such weight. God chooses to “put his name” in the place of worship (Deuteronomy 12:5; 1 Kings 8:29); the priests are commanded to “put my name upon the children of Israel” in the blessing (Numbers 6:27); and to take the Name in vain, or to profane it, is among the gravest of sins (Exodus 20:7; Leviticus 22:32). To be saved is to “call upon the name of the LORD” (Joel 2:32) — a call the apostles answered not with a bare profession but with the new birth itself. When Peter quotes that very promise at Pentecost (Acts 2:21) and the crowd asks what to do, he answers, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38); and Ananias tells Saul, “arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord” (Acts 22:16) — the calling done in the baptism. To be His is to have His name named upon you.
The form of the Name
“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM… Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” — Exodus 3:14
God’s personal, covenant name is the Tetragrammaton — four Hebrew consonants, יהוה (YHWH). In form it is built upon the Hebrew verb “to be” (hayah). At the bush God names Himself אֶהְיֶה (’ehyeh), “I AM”; YHWH is essentially the answering third-person form, “He is” — the One who simply is, self-existent and ever-present, and who is with His people. The very shape of the word preaches: God is not a god among gods but Being itself, the great I AM.
It was this Name that thundered at Sinai. When the LORD descended in the cloud upon the mount, He “proclaimed the name of the LORD” — and the proclamation was not of bare power but of character: “The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:5-6). The Name and the nature are one: to hear the Name rightly is to hear who God is.
- Out of reverence, the Name came to be left unspoken; readers said Adonai (“Lord”) or HaShem (“the Name”) in its place.
- Later scribes wrote YHWH with the vowels of Adonai, and from that hybrid the English form “Jehovah” arose; scholars reconstruct the original as “Yahweh.”
- The short form Yah survives in “halleluYah” — “praise Yah” (Psalm 68:4).
- Where your King James Bible prints “LORD” in small capitals, the Hebrew underneath is this personal name, YHWH.
The names and the Name
Scripture also calls God by titles that describe Him; these are true and precious, but they are not the personal name:
| Hebrew | Rendered | Sense |
|---|---|---|
| YHWH | the LORD | The personal covenant name — “I AM / He is” |
| Elohim | God | The mighty Creator; the general word for deity |
| Adonai | Lord | Master, sovereign |
| El Shaddai | God Almighty | The all-sufficient, all-powerful One (Genesis 17:1) |
| Yah | the LORD (short) | The poetic short form, as in halleluYah |
The Name becomes flesh
Here the whole matter turns. The angel tells Joseph, “thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). The name is not arbitrary: Jesus (Hebrew Yeshua) means “YHWH is salvation” — the covenant name of God is carried in the very name of the Son. And Jesus did not shrink from taking the Name of the bush upon His own lips: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), and the whole chain of “I am” sayings that follow.
“Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” — Philippians 2:9-11
That is no small claim. The words “every knee shall bow… every tongue” are taken from Isaiah 45:23, where they belong to YHWH alone, beside whom “there is no God.” The Name that is above every name, now borne by Jesus, is the Name of God.
The Apostolic (Oneness) reading
For Apostolic (Oneness) Pentecostals this is the heart of the gospel. Jesus said He came in His Father’s name (John 5:43), that He had manifested and kept that name (John 17:6, 11, 26), and that in Him “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9). So the saving name is not a formula about God but the person of Jesus: “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). This is why Peter answers, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38) — baptism into the one saving Name. The child born in Isaiah 9:6, whose name is “The mighty God, The everlasting Father,” is that same one God with us.
The Name on the redeemed
The story that began at the bush ends with the Name given away in love. In the New Jerusalem, His servants “shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads” (Revelation 22:4; cf. 14:1; 3:12) — the deliberate counter to the mark of the beast. To bear the Name is to belong wholly to God, to be marked with His character and owned by His love. The name that means I AM and He saves is written, at the last, upon the people He has saved.
The honest part
A few things are genuinely debated and worth naming plainly. The exact pronunciation of YHWH is not certain — “Yahweh” is a scholarly reconstruction and “Jehovah” a later hybrid; neither can be proven to be how Moses said it. Devout traditions differ on whether the Name should be spoken at all. And the relationship of the divine names to the doctrine of God is exactly where Oneness and Trinitarian readers part ways: both confess one God and the full deity of Jesus, but they account for the “I am” and the shared Name differently. What is not in dispute across the Scriptures is the weight of the Name itself, and that the New Testament places it, astonishingly, upon Jesus. As always: “prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).