Part 4

  Revealing the Details of the Definition of Yehoshua     – Our LORD Jesus’ Name –

 

                                  “for there is no other name under heaven                                                                              that has been given among men,                                                                                         by which we must be saved”                                                                                              Acts 4:12 (NASB)

   When Stephen stood before the Sanhedrin court, in recounting the history of their people, he refers once (Acts 7:45) to Joshua, specifically when Joshua brought in, with the people into the promised inheritance of Canaan, the tabernacle, which Moses’ generation had made in the wilderness.  If you look in your side margin, in many Bibles, the note in that verse pertaining to “Joshua” shows that the Greek text of this name spelled it “JESUS”.

   I’m sorry, Beloved, but I have to chase a rabbit for a moment (it may seem to some), from something Jesus stated, because of this from Stephen’s testimony.  You will understand why as you read through this.

  “He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”                         

   And Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”                           

  And Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.                            And I also say to you that you are Peter (“Petros – [small] rock”), and upon this rock (“Petra – [large] rock”) I will build My church; and {the} gates of Hades shall not overpower it.” ”                                                                   Matthew 16:15-17 (NASB)

   There is so much to say and to unveil from this event.  But one thing in particular has stood out to me in the last year, and now some more as I write this.

  We all know that Peter was originally called Simon.  The combined double use of his name, “Simon Peter”, occurs only twice in the first three gospels.  That to which we hardly pay attention is that “Simon” is Hebrew in origin, and “Peter” is Greek in origin.  It is not insignificant when the Holy Spirit has the writers to join the two together – this is not just happenstance to fill the pages of the letters each writer scribed this in this manner.  Simon’s name in Hebrew is “Shimone”, which means “hearing” (ref. Gen. 29:33).  Moreover, Jesus also mentioned Hebraically Peter’s surname, or rather, the family name (that is, the father’s name) by which is his identity.  His surname, “Barjona”, literally is “son of Jona”, meaning, “son of (the) dove”.   That about which Jesus is ecstatic is that Simon Peter is hearing from … the Holy Spirit of His Father.   Yes, Jesus said that Simon Peter got the revelation from His Father; what you need to see and hear, Beloved, is that the Father’s voice is His breath, and His breath is His Spirit, and His Spirit was in Jesus at that time (ref. Mk. 1:10-11; I Cor. 2:10-16).  He called this one who heard a “son of the dove who heard from His Father”, and thus called him a rock (“Petros”).

  The larger revelation is that the large rock (“Petra”) is the truth of the whole bride of Christ hearing the Father Who is revealing His Son, His Son as the Anointed One because He is the Son of the Living God.  Beloved, when the revelation of Jesus, the Anointed Son of the Living God, becomes a revelation to each of us, to each single one of you, this Anointed Son will look at each one of you and tell you, you are hearing by the Spirit, you are hearing His Father who lives in you by His Holy Spirit (Jhn. 14:23b; Mat. 10:20b).

   But here is what I believe the LORD Jesus has put on my heart as to this joint use of “Simon Peter”, that is, Hebrew name with Greek name, in the revelation of hearing from the Father, and this hearing concerning Christ, the Son of the Living God:  The revelation of Jesus, the unveiling of Jesus from the Father in this hour, where hearing is going to be clearer and clearer, will come about in the revelation of Jesus from out of the Hebrew Old Testament through the Revelation of the finished work of the cross in the Greek of the New Testament.

 There is coming, and already is, by the Holy Spirit in this hour, globally, to and then through Spirit-filled believers who are hungry, and those who will be made hungry because of this, who seek to know the Word, not the book, but the Person from the book (Ex. 33:13 “… let me know Your way that I may know YOU”!), there is an unveiling from the scriptures – both Hebrew and Greek, Old and New Testaments – of Jesus, such as we have not seen or comprehended (Isaiah 64:4 & I Corinthians 2:9); and, I’m telling you,  Dearly Beloved, it is going to affect, first small, but then increasing and increasing, churches, and then communities, and then cities and even certain nations.  This revelation is going to be a revelation where God is going to cause ALL His goodness to pass by; and we will have a revelation of the Name of Christ Jesus our LORD which will affect individuals, and then families and friends and neighbors, and I’m telling you, there will be a change occur on the News, radio and TV.  There will be areas in nations where the news reports will be only good because of what the good-news, the gospel of our LORD Jesus Christ, will work to change populations – says the LORD.

   In case some of you are asking as to why this “rabbit trail”, if you look back to the top paragraph of this section and also to the first of the Nuggets series (Part 1), it is the issue of Jesus’s name being identical to Joshua, even I showed to you at the top,  in Stephen’s defense of Acts 7.  Thus,to properly understand the definition of Jesus’s name, we need to see its Hebrew’s roots.  We already accounted for the first half of this Name as tying directly back to YHVH.  But lets looks more closely at Jesus’s Name in its entirety

   As had been mentioned in a previous Kairos in this series, Joshua’s original name was Hoshea (Num. 13:8, 16), which means “Deliverer”.  But the root from which this name stems, brings out the fullness, the broad scope, of all that this Name denotes, far, far more than we have seen or comprehended in Christendom.  The Hebrew root is from the verb “yasha” – (yaw-SHAH).  From Strong’s Concordance: “properly to be open, wide, or free, i.e. (by implication) to be safe; causatively to free …”.  From Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon: “TO BE SPACIOUS, AMPLE, BROAD, figuratively to be opulent … The signification of ample space is in Hebrew applied to liberty, deliverance from dangers and distresses  … as on the other hand narrowness of space is frequently used of distresses and dangers”.

   The whole issue of YHVH-shua/Jesus being our Deliverer is the grace-truth fact of Him having set us free from bondage to sin AND setting us into the spacious, ample, broad, even opulent Liberty of all that His sacrifice, His shed blood, purchased for us.  He delivered us out of in-order-to bring us into the blessings of that kingdom transfer.  This is not a separate matter in the character of our LORD God, Beloved!  We have not taken this to heart.  We have for too long seen “salvation” as that which is alone “from Sin”, without seeing that “inheritance into” in this life is one single entity of all what Jesus’ sacrifice wholly denotes.  The fact is that our believing, our thinking, has made “inheritance” as that which occurs after we give up this body.  The example of Numbers 14/Psalms 95 sternly shows us the displeasure of the LORD towards the very generation He so brazenly and powerfully delivered out of Egyptian bondage, that, in seeing such mightiness of deliverance they refused to believe He was big enough to accordingly lead them victoriously into (gaining) the promised land – Num. 14:23, “Promised REST ” as the Holy Spirit would call their inheritance – Ps. 95:11; Heb. 3:11.

   What comes to mind is an historic event very well known in this country whose immediate ramifications of which many are not aware.  This example, I believe, is generally how we have viewed “salvation”.  At the end of the civil war in the United States, April 1865, the emancipation proclamation freeing the slaves having been enacted two years earlier, in January of 1863, at the end of the war when the southern slave states were finally defeated and the slaves set free, so very many, in the thousands, ex-slaves made their way north … But most, of those who left the south as well as those who stayed in the south, never ever came out of the poverty of slavery.  They had been freed out of, but had nothing of inheritance into which to enter or gain.  Conditions remained really bad for so many of them.

   This is not what Salvation is, Beloved.  Yet this is unwittingly how salvation isis and has been conceived in the minds of people – freedom from sin, period!  Freedom from sin is monstrous, huge, and I believe so much more than what we have experienced as an every day reality.  But the name of Jesus, of our YHVH-shua/Joshua, is the revelation of “broad, ample, spacious Liberty” that has “opulence” tied to it.  I know this offends some reading this.  But this is not my setting into the Name what already is as a Biblical Grace-Truth of who Jesus is, of who He is to us because of what all His shed Blood has purchased for us through the raw brutality of that sacrifice to which Jesus willingly submitted on our behalf.

 “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,  that He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.”                       II Corinthians 8:9 (NASB)

   Gesenius, in his lexicon, ties the root word, “yasha”, in its figurative definition of “opulent”, to another related Hebrew word, “shua” – (shin-vav-ayin) – This word has a twofold meaning that initially causes one to think, “how do they get such entirely different meanings?”  It has in it the dual meaning of “rich/wealth” and “to cry for help”.  It’s root goes back to “freedom”, which encompasses “ample” and “opulence”.  The “cry for help” is by one who is impoverished, for whatever reason, i.e. Bondage to a slave holder; and the cry for help is to one who is free and in that freedom is one who has (owns) ample, broad possession, testifying to his wealth.  This Deliverer, Beloved, is not one who only has the means to set one free from slavery, but also one whose opulence, wealth, even spacious holding, has and is willing to be the one to set the one crying for help, the one crying for deliverance from slavery, into the freedom, the liberty of his wealth!

  The whole picture of this is seen in the entirety of what was the Hebrews’ deliverance, both out of Egypt and then into Canaan with land and houses and vineyards and dug wells, all existing built and established towns and cities and farms, etc., all that this displays in showing to us YHVH’s whole intent in setting His people free … out of and into.  You cannot see their work of salvation, in what God did to set them free from Egypt alone as what our salvation means … for YHVH’s intent was never to have them live and die in the wilderness for forty long, dry years.

   YHVH-shua, this compound Name of our LORD unveiled, reveals that the salvation of YHVH is a work of Liberation to wholly break off the slavery of Sin’s pharaoh, thus the slavery to sin itself – everything that means “missing the mark of the Glory of YHVH, of God” – and then, by that very same grace, setting us into that very inexhaustible glory (Rom. 5:1-2: Eph. 1:3-8), the opulence of the ample, spacious freedom of what all Jesus left to come down to take in His hands and feet the nails – all of which reveals the double portion of grace – the hand of grace nailed in grace – YHVH .

   The continual holding up, unveiled, the view of the ark of the New Covenant, reveals to us ongoingly the kindness of this rich God to personally come and tabernacle among us without condemnation because through His Son, He gave so costly a sacrifice to bring us into a Liberty, a revelation of grace that will take all eternity to comprehend the wealth of it.  But Abba Father has never intended for our generation, whichever generation reads this, to die and then find out afterwards into what we were to have possessed in this life.  Eternity does not start when we lay this body down.  Eternity became a living reality the moment we believed into Jesus, our YHVH-shua.

   Let us set our sights, our hearts and minds, into searching out the treasure, the inheritance that is ours now through the revelation of the Name of our Savior-and-LORD.  Let the revelation of our YHVH-shua, our LORD Jesus, be an ongoing treasure hunt and treasure discovery each and every day of the rest of our days here on this earth.

 “I-do_not_{let-myself}-cease giving-thanks for you(-all), mention of-you {making-myself}-to-do in my_prayers,in-order-that the God of-the LORD of-us, Jesus Christ, the Father of ‘Glory’ might-give to-you a spirit of-wisdom and of-revelation in the true/full-knowledge of-Him having-have-been-enlightened, the eyes of-the heart of-you, towards knowing, you, what is the hope of-the calling of-Him, [and] what, the riches of the glory of-the inheritance of-Him among the saints,”                                                                                        Ephesians 1:16-18  (lit. frm Grk. txt. word order)                             (bold “you” is emphasis in Grk. txt.)

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Part 5 – the Finale – Seeing New Testament verses in the Revelation of His Name “LORD Jesus”