"I will publish the name of the Lord:"
(DIVINE NAMES: IN all religious utterances, whether through prose or poetry, in pulpit or periodical, by preacher or pamphleteer, the name of Deity is of frequent recurrence. Perhaps one should say names, rather than name; yet each term but indicates some trait or element in Him whose nature is indivisible, whose existence is harmony.
The name God, as we all know, is generally regarded as only another way of spelling Good. Not only has God the attribute of goodness, but he is Good, in the very essence of His being.
"God is Love," says John; meaning not merely that God is loving, or has the attribute of love, but is Love; that is, Love is His nature. The Bible calls God just, merciful, pitiful: but it nowhere says God is Justice, God is Pity, God is Mercy, as it says God is Love. In other words, as Love is the fulfilling of the Law, so is Love the fulfilment, or completion, of the divine omnipresence.
Some of the old Pagan writers and poets call God by the name of Father; or rather they call one god by that title. Virgil speaks of Jupiter as the pater omnipotens, meaning the all-powerful Father, — not so much of mankind, or the universe, as the Father of other deities, — that is, the chief god among many. Christianity applies this term to God very differently, meaning by the phrase, "Our Father who art in Heaven," to indicate the spiritual relation which He bears towards His creation; not that the Creator is a Father in a fleshly sense, even of Jesus, as men are fathers, but that this imperfect epithet, as expressive of a tender and world-wide human relation, best shows what God is to man and the universe.
Well does the writer remember first hearing God called the Great I Am, and being told that this was a phrase used in the old hymns; and in the first Sunday-school lesson-book the writer ever studied, there was this sentence, which excited much wonder, printed in this peculiar way: "God said: I AM THAT I AM." What does this mean? "I am that I am," or "I am because I am," or "I am what I am." This is an attempted English equivalent of the Hebrew word Jehovah, or Yahweh, and is really a proclamation of the eternal existence and supremacy of the Infinite One, who then and thus declared Himself to the open thought of Moses.) Vol. 6, 11/1888
