Names of God: Yeshua (S09, E07)

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel Podcast. My name is Jason and I am

the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In the podcast today, we are continuing to go through an eight-episode series on the names of God.

In the teaching today, we are going to be learning about the name of God,

Yeshua, which means Yahweh saves.

This name of God is the personal name that Jesus would have answered to in the first century.

It shows us that God saves, which is what this sermon looks at through the lens

of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Thanks for joining us as we die.

Is for one person to call out, he is risen, and for the audience to respond, he is risen indeed.

And so we're going to try that here today. If you are willing,

I invite you to say he is risen indeed after I prompt you.

He is risen.

Praise be to God. Jesus, our Savior, the one who was anointed by God to come

into our lives as a human being is risen from the dead.

And it is a glorious, glorious event.

And we're going to celebrate it by learning about how Easter,

how Resurrection Sunday and Good Friday, or the crucifixion of Jesus,

are so twined together that you can't have one without the other.

Paul even goes so far to say, we are to be pitied, the most pitied in this world,

if both of these things aren't true.

But before we get there, we're continuing on our Names of God series.

And as we've discovered over the past several weeks, God has many different

names or titles, and each of them reveal a little bit more about God.

And it's like a game that we can play online or a game that you play during

trivia time where only partial pictures, only partial parts of a picture are revealed at a time.

And the first one who guesses it is the one who gets it right.

So it's going to look a little bit like this. We're going to have a couple of

examples of this because this is really what we're going through in this series,

revealing more and more about the grandiose picture of God.

And so we're going to start with a black screen and we're going to take part

of the black away so that it reveals a part of the picture.

And if you want to scream out, if once you know what it is, I encourage you to do that.

So here is the first one.

And again, if you know what it is, shout it out.

Let's see. Yeah, good job.

So only a couple of frames were revealed and you could tell what it was,

an apple. All right, here's the next one.

Yeah, one of you said it really early.

Yeah, an acorn. And that's what it's like as we go through these different names of God.

What Mike talked about last week was El Shaddai or the Lord Almighty and how

everyone in heaven in Revelation chapter four is crying out, holy, holy, holy.

And that's the Lord Almighty. That is El Shaddai.

And we learn about how powerful he is through the name Elohim, the very strong one.

And the Bible calls him the strong one of strong ones. So it doesn't matter

if you can move a car just by pulling it or a bus like in the Ironman or the

strength competitions that they have.

God is the strongest of the strong. And each of these reveal a partial picture of who God is.

And I hope as we end the series next week, we will have a fuller picture of how great God is.

And today's name reveals the gloriousness of Easter.

It reveals how beautiful God is...

And it's, we're going to go back to the Hebrew word that was used,

but it's going to be a journey to get there.

Because this name of God is a very, very common name of God in English. It is the name Jesus.

But Jesus is translated from the Greek, Iesus.

And Iesus isn't his original name. It's not what Mary would have called him.

Mary would have called him Yeshua.

But that's not the full name. That's like calling Benjamin Ben.

All right? It's a contracted part of his name.

His real root name is Yehoshua.

Yehoshua, which we get in English as Joshua.

But for some reason, because of the way it was translated from Yeshua, we get the name Jesus.

And Jesus in the Hebrew, it means the Lord saves.

And this is Lord in all capital letters, which is the personal name of God.

And so what it really means is Yahweh. And when we talked about that,

we learned that it's the eternally self-existent one.

The eternally self-existent one saves.

This is the name of God, Yeshua.

And this is the name we're going to really dive in and figure out how it ties

Good Friday and Easter Sunday together, the crucifixion and the resurrection.

And it reminds me of a song, a theme song from a show that I wasn't allowed to watch when I was a kid.

And many of you will probably know it because it's very recognizable to me even

though I never watched it.

But it's love and marriage, love and marriage. They go together like a horse and carriage.

This, I tell you, brother, you can't have one without the other.

And the idea here is you can't have Good Friday and Easter Sunday without each other.

They are both intrinsically tied together in a way that I didn't even realize

until I began studying for this week.

This is a new revelation to me, and so I hope it is to you.

But before we get to that, we're going to look at the proclamation of Jesus's

name, Yeshua, and look at what's happening.

So we're going to start in a very December oriented scripture passage,

Matthew chapter one, something we would normally hear around Christmas time,

but then we're going to get to the crux of it in first Corinthians 15.

So as we open to Matthew chapter one, I'm going to pray.

God, I pray that you will take your word. I pray that you will light our path with it.

I pray that you will reveal your truth to us.

I pray, Father, that your greatness will be seen and heard today.

And if there's one thing we hear, I pray, Father, it's the most important thing for us.

Jesus, I lay this all at your feet. Amen.

In Matthew 1, verse 18, we read this.

Matthew 1:18

This is how Jesus the Messiah was born. His mother Mary was engaged to be married

to Joseph, but before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin,

she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit.

And so Jesus's name is proclaimed here, and he's also given a title of the Messiah.

Messiah is the Hebrew word for anointed one, and it's translated into the Greek word Christ.

So if you ever hear Jesus Christ, it's Jesus, his name, and Christ, the title.

It's Jesus, his name, Messiah, the title. He is the one who was sent into this

world, anointed by God, given a task from God to do.

And we also learn here about Mary and Joseph, his earthly parents.

And this engagement that they

were in was different than the engagements we have in our day and age.

Once, there were three stages to marriage. One is that the parents of the son

would select the bride, and they would negotiate with the parents of that child,

and they would be betrothed to each other.

They would be on a course for this marriage.

The second stage, which would happen much later, would be that there would be

a prenuptial agreement that was made.

And in this prenup, there were

all sorts of different characteristics that could be thrown into them.

And this is the moment that we find Mary and Joseph.

They are what we would consider engaged, but it's much more than that because

they have signed a legally binding document.

They have signed this prenup.

And so Matthew can call them husband and wife here because they are technically

together and they're technically married. And there's only two ways to get out

of this sort of engagement.

One is that one of the people would die.

And the other is through divorce, another legal proceeding.

And so Mary and Joseph were really connected at this point in time.

They just hadn't come together. They hadn't consummated the relationship and

they weren't living together at this time.

And so this is where we find them. And Mary is pregnant. And this is a very

serious issue because in this stage of the engagement process,

this would have been considered adultery.

This is one of the things that Jesus would later call out. It's okay to divorce

your spouse if they have committed adultery against you.

This was very serious. And to Joseph's knowledge, he knew he wasn't the father.

And so he went to the logical conclusion that somebody else was,

and he assumed that it was a human being.

And so God steps in and stops him from divorcing Mary.

In verse 19, we read, Joseph, her fiance, was a good man and did not want to

disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly.

As he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream.

Joseph, son of David, the angel said, Do not be afraid to take Mary as your

wife, for the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, Yeshua,

for he will save his people from their sins.

So Jesus, as the anointed one, is coming from God with the purpose of saving God's people.

This is what the jews had been waiting for for 600 years since the babylonians

came in and ransacked jerusalem took every almost everyone captive to babylon and.

Destroyed the temple destroyed the king's house and all of that they had been

waiting for the promised anointed one the messiah to come for that long 600 years.

And in that time, they had been captured by Babylon. They had been captured

by other city-states and groups, eventually to the point where they were taken over by the Greeks.

At one point, they gained their freedom from the Greeks.

But then the Romans came in. They came and conquered and took over.

And so most of the last 600 years for the Israelites have been in bondage to somebody else.

They were not free to make their own constitution or their own rules.

They were completely subjected to a higher authority.

And so most Jews thought that the Messiah was going to come and free them politically.

Give Israel its own city-state again. Let it have its own king and ruler and not be ruled by Rome

or those in Athens or wherever else the people came from that they were conquered by.

This is what they expected. But the angel was very clear here right at the beginning.

Jesus, Yeshua came to save as his name suggests, but he came to save their people,

from their sins, from their rebellious acts.

Sin in the Bible just means you miss the mark.

And as a follower of Jesus, we hold up the mark of God.

This is the standard that we need to live by because we are following and pursuing

a relationship with God.

But that relationship is very, very hard. Or that mark is very, very hard to attain.

It's impossible for us.

But Jesus says what is impossible with man is possible with God.

And so Jesus comes onto the scene as someone who is willing and able to save

us from our rebelliousness, from our brokenness. Thank you.

And this is what the angel proclaims. Yeshua, Yahweh saves.

That's what Jesus came to do.

And we all are here on Easter. We've all heard the story before of how Jesus

died on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins.

We've all heard that Jesus walked out of the tomb a live person on Easter Sunday.

But why do we celebrate it? Why is it so important?

What does this have to do with God saving us?

To answer that, we're going to turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 15,

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

and we're going to start midway through the passage.

And so let me briefly recap what the first 11 verses of 1 Corinthians 15 says.

Paul is giving his reasons why people should believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

He says, the 11 disciples, they all saw Jesus alive after he had been crucified.

He says, not only that, there have been up to 500 people who saw him at one

time, most of whom are still alive, though some have passed away. They have died.

And Paul is giving them this reason because they could go and talk to those

who were alive and who saw him.

They could interview them and check out their stories and make sure that what

they were being told by Paul is true and accurate.

And so he invites them, if you really want to understand if Jesus is alive, go to any one of these.

You've heard from me, now go to others.

And so it was based upon actual evidence of eyewitness accounts.

They didn't have Instagram or Twitter.

They couldn't snap a picture of the resurrected Jesus on their phone.

They relied on eyewitness testimony.

And so those are what the first 11 verses of 1 Corinthians 15 are about.

And so we're going to jump in to verse 12 here.

Because the Corinthians were very concerned with the Greek thought of the day,

that only there's this shadowy existence after death.

Only the spirit lives on and it's just a very weird and vague afterlife.

They thought of what we would think of ghosts.

That's what they thought of the afterlife there.

And so Paul tries to refute that And he says, But tell me this.

Since we preach that Christ rose from the dead, why are some of you saying there

will be no resurrection of the dead?

For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either.

So he begins with a very common rhetorical device in writing in his day.

He is establishing common ground.

The Corinthians can go and look at eyewitness testimony.

They can go and interview the people themselves and they can say,

all right, all of these peoples, their stories are the same, basically the same.

And so this is a reliable fact. Jesus is alive from the grave.

And so he's using this common ground that they have as an emphasis to build

his point about our resurrection, about our afterlife.

And so this is where he starts. We all believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

This is the evidence for it. Jesus is alive.

And he says in verse 14, And if Christ has not been raised, then all of our

preaching is useless and your faith is useless.

And we apostles would all be

lying about God, for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave.

But that can't be true if there is no resurrection of the dead.

And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised.

And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins.

So he uses the word if a lot here. And again, this is another rhetorical device

to help them to understand his argument.

We have this common ground that Jesus is alive.

But if you say that we don't have a resurrection from the grave,

if you believe that we don't have this, then you're denying what you already said you believe.

And it goes all the way down to the point where Paul says, then your faith is

useless and you are still guilty of your sins.

You see, Good Friday doesn't mean anything if the resurrection doesn't happen on Sunday.

Because Paul argues elsewhere in the book of Romans chapter 6 that the wages of sin is death.

Romans 6 · chapter mention

And he pulls his understanding of that in this passage.

And he's saying if there is no resurrection of the dead, then our sins are not

forgiven. Because our death is what we owe for our sins.

We are alive or we have the promise of being alive in the future.

Because Jesus is alive today.

Because if there is no resurrection, then we are still in our trespasses.

We're still in our sins and our brokenness and rebellion.

And Jesus's blood, as we sang earlier today, would be a lie.

We aren't washed free from that sin.

It does not make us white as snow. And so Paul is laying it on very thick here,

that Jesus's death and resurrection are tied together in a way,

like I said, I didn't realize until I started studying for this.

Like they go together. You can't have one without the other.

Because without the resurrection, the cross is meaningless.

Our sins are not forgiven. And we have no hope.

Our faith is useless. We are lost.

But the angel said that Jesus, Yeshua, came to save us from our sins.

And therefore, Jesus is alive, and so will we be, because our sins are gone.

When we confess our sins, when we repent of them, and when we believe in the one that God sent.

Paul ends it by saying this, And if our hope in Christ is only for this life,

we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world.

But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead.

He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died.

Jesus' blood does wash away our sins because he lives.

We will live too. This is what Easter is about. And this is why you can't have

Good Friday without Easter Sunday.

It is completely meaningless. The thieves on the cross, their lives are completely meaningless.

What Jesus announced to the thief on the cross, that today you will be with

me in paradise, it's completely meaningless.

If Jesus isn't alive today, then we are to be pitied more than anyone else on this planet.

We have a false hope.

It's useless. But because he lives, as the song says, we can face tomorrow, today.

We have come through yesterday.

Because he lives, all fear is gone.

Because he lives, our hope is secure.

And all we have to do is say, is declare with our mouth that Jesus is Lord.

And believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, and we will be saved.

The tomb is empty. The eggs have been emptied. There is no longer this barrier

that holds life in place.

God has saved us.

Yeshua, Yahweh saves.

And we rejoice and we're so thankful because he lives. Let me pray.

Lord God Almighty, we come before you today and we just give you thanks and

praise for this weekend.

We thank you for what Good Friday really means.

And we thank you that death could not keep you,

that you were stronger than our adversary of death and you were stronger than

our adversary of sin and that you took care of them for us that if we just repent

and believe the gospel you,

will have a place for us in eternity that because you live.

Again for joining us in the discussion about the name of God,

Yeshua, which is translated as Yahweh saves.

The significance to this name is that it shows God's plan of redemption and

the reason Jesus was born as a person.

His work on Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday tie together the meaning of

Jesus's name and his purpose.

If you would like more information about Faith Chapel and its ministries,

please visit the website gofaithchapel.org.

Next week, we continue the series on the different names and titles of God in the Bible.

Each of these descriptors show us something about who God is.

Join us next week as we look at the name Yahweh Jireh. Have a great week.