Mensa Otabil - An Excellent Name (10/28/2025)
Welcome to a brand new week. I trust that you’re doing very well. This week, we’re going to focus our devotion on God and His names, and we’re going to look at how God has revealed Himself to us through His name. We' ll start today with a general introduction to the subject, and then from tomorrow, I’ll begin taking the names of God in sequence.
We’ll be talking about the name of the Lord, and we will look at Psalm 8, verse 9, which says, «O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth!» In our world today, names are not very meaningful, but in the world of the Bible, at the time it was written, both the Old and the New Testament, names were very important. People’s names told a lot about themselves, and the names of locations said a lot about those locations.
We’ve come to a point where people really like the sound of a name rather than the meaning of a name; however, in the Bible, it was not so much the sound of the name but the meaning of the name. God, in revealing Himself to us, used His name to show us who He is. God is huge; He has no beginning and no ending, and it is impossible to know Him fully. However, we know Him through the way He has progressively revealed Himself to us.
From Genesis through Exodus, through the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament right into the New Testament, we continue to see God showing us different aspects of Himself. Most of the revelation we have of God is based on His name, and the passage we read today says that the name of the Lord is excellent. In other words, His name is great, grand, and beautiful. We will see how those names relate to us.
Remember that a lot of what we believe about God is based on the name we call Him. In fact, our whole salvation is based on a name, believing in a name. When we pray, we use a name in prayer, and so the names of God and how they apply to us are very important. God’s name reveals His nature and His acts; His nature is who He is, and His acts are what He does. As we watch what He is doing, we begin to understand who He is.
This is how the people of the Bible understood God: they watched the works of God. They observed how He handled situations and manifested in circumstances, and then they understood, «Ah, this is how God is; this is the nature of God.» His works reveal His nature, and in that revelation, we come to a name of God that is appropriate for that revelation. Sometimes God Himself also reveals His name to us, and we’ll find that as we study. There are times He would say, «I am so and so; I am God who does so and so.»
There is our discovery of Him that helps us to put a name on what He’s doing, as well as a name He tells us that He is. So, either in His self-revelation or our understanding of Him, we place all that knowledge in the context of a name. That’s why studying the names of God is very important. They help us understand Him, to know Him, and to know how to receive what He has for us, even in our prayer life. Knowing the name of the Lord is very important.
The takeaway we want to go with today is that the name of the Lord, no matter how it is revealed to us, is excellent, wonderful, powerful, and achieves so much for us in our walk with Him. I trust that this study will enrich your prayer life, enhance your knowledge of God, and enrich your Christian walk as you seek to do the will of the Lord every day.
Let us pray. Say with me, «Heavenly Father, thank You for revealing Yourself to us. Help me to trust You at all times and in all situations. In Jesus' name, Amen and Amen.»