HE'S COMING BACK
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
HE’S COMING BACK
by Adam Carroll Draper
I saw a bumper sticker once that read, “Jesus is Coming!” Then, underneath that it read, “Look Busy.”
There is something funny and troubling about it at the same time. It’s funny because (unlike Santa) he really does see you when you’re sleeping, so looking busy is not going to hide anything. It is troubling because it exposes how little we know our Lord – or (if that’s the world’s perception of us) how little we show him to the world. I suspect that loosely relates to how we call him Jesus like it’s simply a name, as if God gave it to Mary because he liked the sound of it. English misses the meaning completely. Jesus, as his name, is an Anglicization of the Latin version of his given name. In Hebrew (I mean, he was a Jew) his name was more like Yeshua or Yahushua, which means “YHWH (Yahweh) saves.” OK, but what does YHWH mean? Now, that’s getting at it. One rendering that I like is, “He causes to be.” Yeshua means “the salvation of YHWH” or “He causes to be saved.”
Read through the Old Testament in English and we see references to “God” and “Lord,” but that is not how he referred to himself. He doesn’t say his name is God, or even give anything like what we understand as a name. It’s not like he says, “I’m the Lord God George.” No, he describes his nature when he gives a name. The Jews he spoke to got that. He was speaking Hebrew after all (which is kind of the point), but what he said doesn’t translate well into English.
Remember in Pulp Fiction when Bruce Willis jumps out of a window after killing his boxing opponent when he was supposed to take a dive? He gets into a taxi driven by the lovely foreigner, Esmeralda, and tells her his name is Butch. She asks him what his name means. In other cultures, his name might fittingly mean something like “He who jumps in garbage cans.” But he responds, “I’m an American, baby; our names don’t mean [bleep].”
Alright, before you get offended that I engaged a banality while talking about God, chill. I am just using humor to make a point.
Remember in Exodus when God sends Moses into Egypt to lead the Hebrews out of bondage? Moses says something like, “If I tell them the God of their Fathers sent me, they are going to ask me, ‘Oh yeah, what’s his name? What do I say?” In the King James version, we read in Exodus 3:14: “And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you.” In the Orthodox Jewish version (OJV), the same passage reads: “And Elohim said unto Moshe, Eh-heh-yeh ashair Ehheh- yeh (I AM WHO I AM); and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the Bnei Yisroel, EHHEH-YEH (I AM) hath sent me unto you.” So I Am That I Am or I Am Who I Am, that’s not all that different. It has also been translated, “I Will Be What I Will Be.” The thing is that Hebrew is not read like we read English. For one, there aren’t any vowels like we use them. The letters are more like a series of pictures that get across an idea, a sense, or a meaning that is at once tremendously more descriptive, but less exact.
I Am That I Am. I have always loved that, but the Hebrew Interlineal Bible indicates that the literal translation for what the OJV renders Eh-heh-yeh ashair Ehheh- yeh is “I shall become who I am becoming.” And when God told Moses to tell the children of Isreal “EHHEH-YEH” sent you to them, the literal translation for that is “I shall become.”
What?
Yeah, there is a lot more to this translation stuff than “I take the Bible literally.” I know people who will only read the King James version of the Bible. Ok, but the Bible wasn’t written in English. Are they saying, “I take the King James version of the Bible literally?” Really?
I saw another bumper sticker once that read: “Jesus is coming – and is he pissed!” That’s as funny and troubling as the one I first noted – for the same reasons. It wouldn’t be funny if a point wasn’t being made, and that point is troubling. If that is the world’s commentary on what Christians are teaching about Jesus, he might deserve to be pissed. It would more likely make him weep, as in, “Jesus wept” – and that would be for the same reason. (Selah).
All I am saying is that we have missed something somewhere. It is the divine nature. We say he’s good, but if we don’t know his nature, we don’t know what good is. These are the elementary particles I wrote about in another missive. It’s his essence, his goodness, that we long to experience.
“O taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Yeshua HaMashiach Bah! Jesus the Messiah is Coming! This is good news. YHWH saves. This is the gospel. What if the King returned today? He said, “My sheep hear my voice.” Cool, what does his voice sound like?
And does he speak Elizabethan English?
If you got anything out of this missive, please give it a thumbs up, comment and/or share it. It helps. I sincerely appreciate the fact that you took the time to read it.