✨ What A Name

I’ve come to believe that religion can sometimes blind us—not to the existence of God, but to His intention.

Not because religion is evil, but because it often replaces knowing God with explaining Him. And explanation, when it stands in the place of revelation, can keep us from seeing who He actually is.

Before commandments.
Before sacrifice.
Before sin-management systems.

There was Genesis chapter 1.

And Genesis 1 is before religion.

It is simply what God did—and in doing so, it reveals who He is.

God creates.
God speaks.
God blesses.
God gives.

He gives dominion.
He gives fruitfulness.
He gives authority.
He gives the earth itself to man.

And He does all of this knowing exactly who man is.

That matters.

God did not give creation to man because man had proven himself trustworthy. He gave it because God is trustworthy. Creation itself was an act of grace—bestowed before performance, obedience, or failure ever entered the picture.

This is why something God says later through the prophet Ezekiel has become so meaningful to me:

“I do not do this for your sake,” declares the Lord GOD, “but for My holy Name’s sake.”

That statement removes us as the stabilizing factor and places the entire weight of redemption on God Himself.

God is saying, “I am not acting because of who you are. I am acting because of who I AM.”

That is telling.

God does not anchor His purposes to human consistency. He anchors them to His own Name—His nature, His character, His faithfulness. He binds His actions to who He is, not to what we do.

And God does not gamble with His Name.

This brings me to what I’ve come to see as one of the great scandals of the gospel.

The scandal isn’t that Adam affected everyone.
The scandal is that Christ did too.

If all were made sinners through one man, then it should not surprise us that all were made righteous through One greater Man. The problem was corporate, and so was the solution.

This does not mean everyone lives as though they are righteous. It means the condition of humanity has been decisively addressed in Christ. Redemption is not a theory waiting on permission—it is an accomplished reality waiting to be known.

And this is where the gospel of the Kingdom comes into focus.

Jesus did not say information would be preached to the nations.
He said the gospel of the Kingdom would be preached.

And gospel means good news—not good advice, not instruction, not a system to follow, but an announcement of what God has done.

When Jesus defines eternal life, He doesn’t define it as duration, location, or reward. He defines it relationally:

“This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”

This is important, because knowing God apart from Jesus leaves us guessing. But Jesus reveals God—not only who He is, but how He relates to us.

To know Jesus Christ whom He sent is to see:

• what humanity looks like as God intended
  
  

• what the image of God looks like unbroken
  
  

• and how God looks at us when He looks at Christ
  
  

Jesus is not merely the means of forgiveness; He is the revelation of identity. He shows us what a Son looks like—and in Him, we see what we are called.

In Christ, we see that God does not relate to us through suspicion or distance, but through delight and faithfulness. We learn that God does not see us through Adam, but through Christ. And because we are in Him, how God looks at Jesus is how He looks at us.

This is the good news of the Kingdom:
not that we are trying to reach God,
but that God has revealed Himself—and ourselves—in His Son.

Knowing is where we rest.
Knowing is where we are empowered.
Knowing is where striving gives way to alignment—

because when we know who God is, and who we are in Christ, we no longer live to earn belonging. We live from it.

This is why the progression of how God reveals Himself matters so much.

At one point He is known as Master.
Then, through Hosea, He says, “You will no longer call Me Master, but Husband.”
And then Jesus introduces Him to us as Father.

A master relates through command.
A husband relates through covenant—but covenant can be broken.
A father relates through origin.

A husband can divorce.
A wife can be widowed.
But a father will always be a father, and a son will always be a son.

Jesus said, “A son abides forever.”

That changes everything.

I know this not only because I’ve read it, but because I’ve lived it.

I was in prison for second-degree murder. Sin doesn’t get much worse than that. During that time, God spoke to me. He gave me understanding. He gave me purpose. And something that still astonishes me to this day is this: He never once brought up what I had done.

Not once.

Not because He was unaware.
But because He had already dealt with it.

God did not speak to me from condemnation. He spoke to me from character. He addressed me not from my past, but from who He is.

I’ve come to believe that sin no longer affects our relationship with God the way it once did. That was the very thing Christ dealt with at the cross. Sin does not define our standing—it has been removed from the center of the relationship.

God knew the condition of the human heart long before we did—and He made provision for it. And He did so not reluctantly, not reactively, but faithfully.

Because He is who He says He is.

Gracious.
Merciful.
Slow to anger.
Abounding in steadfast love.
Faithful.

He did it knowing who we were.
He did it because of who He is.

What a Name.