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THE NAME OF THE LORD

The name of Jehovah is a strong tower; the righteous runneth into it and is safe.—Proverbs 18:10.

I am not sure that we have often prayed, with understanding and sincerity, the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be thy name!” We presume to understand what is meant by the “kingdom” and the “will” of God, in the second and third petitions. We feel that these and the petitions that follow them directly concern us. But what is meant by the name of God? On this point we are not in the clear. To be honest, does not the term sound strange and distant to us? Have we not secretly asked ourselves what really is the vital and weighty thing in the word ‘name’? We found no answer, in spite of the excellent definition of the term in the Lutheran and Heidelberg Catechisms. This is a fact worthy of consideration. For the petition, “hallowed be thy name,” was the first that Jesus put into the mouth of his disciples; and it is the gate of entrance to all the others. If we do not enter by this gate we shall be perplexed and confused when we offer the other petitions, however well we may think we understand them. This is not merely a so-called “religious” question. For as one prays so one lives and walks and behaves.

He who prays our Lord’s Prayer aright will be heard; in difficult and adverse circumstances his way will become clearer, more steady, more perfect, as perfect as the way of a man can be. Indeed we do not see many men walking so perfect a way. Even we ourselves are not men of this sort. Perchance the real trouble in our difficult times is that we are so dull of hearing and that in our lives so little of the perfect way is manifest. On this account we are restless and like the disciples we are driven to ask Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray!”—to pray so that we shall be heard. Both they and we have been taught how to pray; therefore we are not to learn something new, but to apply and practice what we have been taught. To speak honestly, we stumble, as it were, into the Lord’s Prayer, when we offer the petition, “hallowed be thy name!” and when we think we are advancing into the other petitions, which we presume to understand better than the first, we are actually standing still. Our failure to listen attentively, our uncertain and disorderly conduct, the want of answers to our prayers, is evidence of this fact; and, if we are not to sink like Peter into the waves of the sea, we must begin anew with the cry, “Lord, help us!” yea, with the simplest and profoundest thing—with the beginning, with the name of the Lord.

But what is meant by the name of the Lord? The answer of the text is not learned, not pious, not ingenious; but short and complete as the answers of the Bible usually are: “The name of the Lord is a strong tower.” We are quite right when we feel that here we have to do with something alien, that we are standing on the outside, as it were, against an astounding other which is not in any way a part of ourselves.

The name of the Lord does not come from the heart, the head, or the conscience. One cannot experience Him, that is, take Him into one’s life so that He becomes a part of oneself. The name of the Lord is and remains far rather a contradiction that is raised against us, a hostile bridge-head in the midst of our land. Jesus teaches us to pray: “Our Father who art in heaven!” With these words the deepest things, the only thing necessary, all is said, that we can say to God and that has the promise of being heard. Upon these four words: “Our Father in heaven,” one’s life can be based, by them one can live and die—providing we say these words after Jesus as He has said them for us. Because this truth is not self-evident, Jesus spoke more than these four words.

The first and the most direct is a call to halt! halt, for you have taken the name of God upon your lips. Do you know what ye have done? Perhaps the noblest thing that a man can do, perhaps the meanest; perhaps the saving act of humility and knowledge, perhaps the act of immeasurable conceit and haughtiness. What have we to do with God? Praying is not a work like other works. “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground!” The name of the Lord is to be hallowed. Otherwise prayer is not prayer. Pray that you may pray aright, that you will actually pray to God. Then perchance you will learn further how to pray; and, while you pray, ye are heard already because you have prayed to God.

One cannot walk so easily on a straight and even path, into the presence of the Father in heaven, not even through Christ—above all, not through Him! Only when one has become severely and unequivocally serious with the hallowing of the name of God, then in Him, that is in Christ can he come to the Father. The name of God is the name of God. It is repellent, stern, yes, terrifying. That is the “strong tower” of our text. Later we are told one can flee to it and be exalted by it. But first one must have discerned how like a tower, like a rock, how threatening He rises ahead of him. He who has never fled before Him, cannot flee unto Him. And he who there has not been humbled, cannot there be exalted. But, once again, what is meant by “the name of the Lord”? The name of a thing or a man is the symbol by which we are taught that this is this, he is he; the limits by which we distinguish persons or things, that are equal or similar, from one another. So it is with the name of God. It is the mark of God’s separateness and otherness over against everything that is not God. He who speaks the name of God makes use of this mark.

But there is another trait peculiar to the name of God. In the beginning of the Bible (and what we read there is full of meaning) we are told that man, by God’s command and yet by his own free and rational judgment, gave names “to all cattle and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field;” and finally he named the woman, the creature of his own kind. That reminds us that the names we give, the limits and distinctions we draw (between the creatures themselves and between men and other creatures) are valid or invalid according to the accuracy or the error of our insight. They are not worthless but meaningful and useful; we must not be astonished, however, because these limits are so easily defaced and changed, and, in the last resort, so questionable and frail that the names we give and those we hear are not holy but in the end—here the poet is right—are mere sound and breath. But one is wrong when one says this of the name of God. For man did not, and does not, give God His name. The distinctive thing that separates God from every other, also from us men, man is not able to measure; nor can he see the mark that indicates the distinctive thing in God, that divides God’s land from man’s land.

The divine right of giving names belongs not only to man. But as the Bible tells us (again rich in meaning): Only God Himself can call Himself by name, and when men know His name, they know it only (with fear and trembling) because God Himself has revealed it to them—first to Abraham: “I am God almighty!” then to Moses: “I am that I am!” But God has not revealed it that men, again unafraid, may take the name of God upon their lips; but that when men give a name to God according to their own, free, rational judgment, however well or ill they may understand it, they at the same time can and shall keep in mind the name that God has given and gives Himself. It was, therefore, a fine custom of the ancient Jews (and I do not make light of it!) that they refrained from taking the revealed name of God—“I am that I am”—upon their lips; but, filled with awe, they felt that it did not become man to pronounce God’s name and therefore substituted man’s name for God—“the Lord.” By this reserve they were constantly reminded that God Himself was and is He who reveals to His people the unique and distinctive being that He is. At least one may question whether the unrestrained freedom of speech of Christians about the ultimate and deepest being of God ought more to be commended than the diffidence and restraint of the ancient Jew. The revealed name of God, which one keeps in mind but which actually cannot be spoken by human lips, is not mere sound and breath but an eternal name. It is the landmark set by God between Himself and all creatures visible to men, indicating that He is always God and not a creature. This mark of separation is not changeable and perishable, but, in the words of the text, is a strong tower, holy and terrible; therefore, for us He is the strange, the new, the beyond, the above, never from us, never in us, yet to be feared, loved, praised, and invoked by us.

If you will again ask me: what is the name of God and where and how shall we seek it? I can only reply that we usually do not seek Him, but only find Him; or far rather, only those, who already have found Him, can seek Him. He lets Himself be found—that’s it. Where? What else shall I say than what has been said of old: “there where a man sees that he is a sinner, that he must die, that his world passeth away.” There God sets bounds to the endlessness of the sinner’s sin and death, the transitoriness of his world and says: “I, the Holy One, I, who live and reign in eternity, I, the Creator and Redeemer of this world!” This “I,” which is the boundary of man’s land, is the name of God. But God Himself must utter this “I”; otherwise it is vain fanaticism.

But how does He speak this “I?” Again I shall say naught but what has been said of old. There is a witness concerning this “I,” this revealed name fixed for all of us; though we cannot comprehend that the “I” is spoken. The witness tells us that this “I” has been seen, heard, and handled among God’s people and in His only begotten Son; this we are able to hear and to hold for truth. Jesus Christ the boundary of the evil endlessness of man’s land! Jesus Christ, who is, in this man’s land and for all its inhabitants, the spoken “I”! Jesus Christ the name of God! God Himself must bear testimony to His witness—the testimony of the Holy Spirit in the inner man, so that we can and must hold for truth the outer testimony, the witness of the Scripture. Else it is man’s work in man’s land like every other work of man. Thus the “name of God” lets itself be found; so it is with the “strong tower,” that, according to the Lord’s Prayer, stands at the beginning of all praying. It is “strong” because it is wholly built by God himself.

We are told in our text, “the righteous runneth into it.” Mark well, running is not an evidence of strength and virtue, not even when one flees to “the name of the Lord.” We should like to represent the coming to the heavenly Father in another way: as a soaring up and breaking through, as a battle won and a triumphal entry. But we are not to come in this way; for only as the “righteous runneth into it” will God’s name be hallowed. A man who fulfills the first petition will not cut an imposing figure. He is a fugitive: he runs to the strong tower—from which he hears the cry of warning: “Halt! what seekest thou here?”—only because he cannot be at rest anywhere else; because he is pursued and driven from every other place and has no other resort than to seek refuge in the name of the Lord. This is not an uplifting sight. He who “runs” will be called a weakling. Therefore, for example—I say this to the students who are present—theology, in distinction from other sciences, is not a great and honored science, not an advance but a retreat; it is in essence a flight from all human names (also from the human names of God!) to the revealed name of the Lord.

Theology, therefore, does not cut a fine figure. All this must be so. One cannot be, in the words of the text, “the righteous” and at the same time present an imposing spectacle. Here one must make a choice. To “the name of the Lord” we can only “run.” He who walks triumphantly goes where he is exalted; only the humble “run.” He whom this name draws nigh will find all names given of men, spite of all their worth, to be nothing but sound and breath. A man’s confidence in his own understanding and comprehension must be so completely shaken that he cannot keep himself from taking a last impossible step into the darkness in which he and all that he has will be lost forever, unless he believes that through the darkness he will approach the light of God. Believe! That means defeat and flight. How remarkable, how questionable is a man who believes! How great is the danger of conceit, of self-deception through a wish-dream, of a leap which can only be a leap into death! He who believes must drop all these considerations. In this manner and mood one must run to the name of the Lord, not a name given of men, the boundary stone erected by God between man’s land and God’s land.

How is this to be justified before the eye of man? The “righteous” is the man who has received new eyes to see the other in God, His might, His wisdom, His love. Not his way of flight makes a man “righteous”; he is righteous because all other ways are closed to him. Not his running makes him righteous, but the name of the Lord which is the only thing that is left him. Faith is his righteousness; not faith as his work, but faith that lays hold of and subjects him, faith that is a necessity from which he cannot escape. He cannot triumph, cannot be in the right, cannot make claims; for he is a wholly weak, dishonorable, sinful, and unrighteous righteous man. But in such righteousness, through such faith, the first petition: “Hallowed be thy name!” is fulfilled. For when a man “runs” to the name of God and thus gives honor and right to God, not in wisdom but in foolishness, not in power but in weakness, above all not in extreme piety but rather in extreme godlessness, and notwithstanding “runs” thither, lays hold of this name, says “yes,” then God’s name is known, the name revealed only by Him. In this way faith, for which we must pray, is the true hallowing of the name of God.

It has often been said that our time, with the abolition and dissolution of so many human names, signs and boundaries, is especially favorable for understanding what is meant by running to and believing in the name of the Lord. True, in these years we all feel as if we were sailing hopelessly on a sinking ship and we take it for granted that it cannot be otherwise; so, with one accord, we cry: “Lord, how shall we comfort ourselves? we hope in Thee!” On the contrary this is not the real situation. The indications are that the ship may sink and is sinking; yet an ever increasing number of our contemporaries know how to comfort one another in the cinema or at the football game. Even if we, who are of the better sort, examine ourselves, we shall find that all of us at this time comfort one another, though it may be in a refined, spiritual and devout way. We know how to take courage without God, that we have not lost our confidence in others, in human names, and that much remains for us besides refuge in the name of God. Only let us not imagine that this will ever be otherwise! Things are thus because we are human. The ship may continue to sink for a long time, as deep as in Russia and even deeper—yet with the sinking and on account of it, flight into the strong tower and righteousness through faith will not come. If events and conditions, like these by which we are surrounded, cannot teach us faith, by what else can we be taught to believe? To speak as men, we can only say that we do not learn faith, never will learn faith, neither from ourselves nor under the stress of fate and evil times. Faith comes from God each moment, and when it comes we can say nothing else, astonished and perplexed, but: “I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief!”

And now, finally, it is said of the “righteous” who runs to the name of the Lord: “He will be exalted.” I cannot tell whether he will know himself to be secure. Perhaps he himself is not sure. The chief thing, at any rate, is not what he knows or imagines he knows, but what is, not in his own power nor in the power of the “certainty” of his believing, but in the power of the name of the Lord. “He will be exalted”: not in vain has he been subdued, humbled, or put to flight. “It shall be that he who calleth on the name of the Lord, will be saved.” This is his exaltation that he comes into the light of this promise. The holy and dreadful name of the Lord, revealed to those who run thither—for where else shall they go? He is kind, friendly, nigh to save. The mark of that which is other in God is his distinctive doing and giving; only through revelation, an impartation of God passing all understanding, is it given unto us and do we have even the proof that God has graciously turned and come nigh unto us. The boundary, that separates God’s land from man’s land, is the boundary, the aim, and the end of unrest, torment, and tears in which we here live and move. He who runs thither, runs well. Ah yes, his faith is the weak, divided, unsatisfactory faith of man, which each moment deserves also to be called unbelief. And yet, on this account, it is true that he has received another faith from God; and in this faith, though groaning under the whole burden of his human nature and all that belongs to it, he has seen from afar (as the publican in the temple) the throne of God. This seeing from afar is the exaltation of the righteous. Ah yes, fear and trembling continue, even the righteousness that we can know only as the righteousness of the sinner. But in this incomprehensible righteousness of the sinner, the other word has its power which apparently is the reverse of that which we hitherto heard: “He who believes, will not flee.”

He who once has fled from the name of God and then has fled to Him; no, he who, on account of the knowledge of himself, must again and again do this, he really needs no more to flee from no one and nothing to no one and nothing. And if he does it again (and he will do it!), he does not lack in all his uncertainty the most sacred and secret certainty: “I lay me down and sleep in peace; for thou alone, Lord, helpest me, that I dwell in safety.” Glory shines out of his shame, strength out of his weakness. Once again: his safety, his honor, his power do not abide for a moment, but: “Only Thou, Lord!” But this is enough. We conclude plainly as we began: This is the exaltation of the righteous, who has run to the name of the Lord, that he is put on the way to pray aright the Lord’s Prayer, and to pray further: “Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done! Give us this day our daily bread! And forgive us our debts! And lead us not into temptation!” For who the “Thou” is, to whom with all these petitions he turns, can no longer be wholly hid from him.