Psalm 9:10 tells us "Those who know Your name will put their trust in You". Do we know His name?
In order to trust Him, we need to!
Elohim - The Creator
El Elyon - The God Most High
El Roi - The God Who Sees
El Shaddai - The All-Sufficient One
Adonai - The Lord
Jehovah - The Self-Existent One
Jehovah-jireh - The Lord Will Provide
Jehovah-nissi - The Lord My Banner
Jehovah-mekoddishhkem - The Lord Who Sanctifies You
Jehovah-shalom - The Lord Is Peace
Jehovah-saboath - The Lord of Hosts
Jehovah-raah - The Lord My Shepherd
Jehovah-tsidkenu - The Lord Our Righteousness
Jehovah-shammah - The Lord Is There
God is so beyond our comprehension that He uses lots of different names to help us begin to grasp who He is, His glory, His power, His love. Today I want to focus on just one - Elohim - The Creator. For those of us who are Christ-followers, we probably have no difficulty embracing Him as The Creator in a macro-sense-- we are confident that He created the world and everything in it. And that everything He made is good. And that He is The Ultimate Creator, beautiful and powerful and good. We stand strong against worldviews that purport otherwise. But when it gets down to the "micro" level, we might be a little shaky. The level of His creation of us. Of you. Of me. Oh, now I don't mean that we think we evolved from an amoeba. Or that random cells arbitrarily assigned themselves as this function or that. No, not that. But deep down do we celebrate and cling to Him as Creator of us, including our physical characteristics, the circumstances of our birth, our abilities (or lack thereof)? Do we accept ourselves as having been conceived and fashioned by Elohim? With the assigned purpose to give Him glory? Do we believe that every single detail of who we are was orchestrated by our always good, always loving, always powerful Heavenly Father in order to establish a relationship between us and Him? Or do we think He must have made a mistake or two in His design? Do we hold to a desire that He had tweaked a few details differently?
My prayer is that we, that I, would grasp our Elohim and His creation of us so completely that we wouldn't feel the need to expend our energy on trying to change our unchangeables. And that we wouldn't catapult into anxiety and discontentment and insecurity over our efforts. And that we wouldn't be consumed with thoughts about how God could've done things differently. And then anger and disappointment towards Him because He didn't.
May we heed Proverbs 18:10 which encourages us that "The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous runs into it and is safe". Elohim dreamed us up and designed the particulars of who we are just as He desired. To bring Him glory. And to bless us. He loves us. And He doesn't love us because He made us --- He made us because He loves us. We are beautiful and precious in His sight. Run into the strong tower of Elohim!