The Names of God: Jehovah Hoseenu
By Rev Charles Seet
(Preached at Life BPC, 8 am service, 8 Sep 2002)

Text: Psalm 95

We are now in our third month of our series of messages on the Names of God. We have seen how these names reveal God’s attributes and character to us. To summarise briefly what we have learned thus far about God through His many names, we have seen that God is eternal, all seeing, almighty, and that He is the highest one of all. We have also learned that God is our shepherd, our peace, and the One who remains ever faithful to His covenant promises.

Now, before we go any further, let me emphasise that all these things that we have learned about God through knowing His Name should make a deep and lasting impact in our lives. They should affect the way we trust Him and His promises. Psalm 9:10 tells us, “And they that know Thy name will put their trust in Thee…” This means that the ones who put greatest trust in the Lord are those who know His name well. And so if you want the ability to trust in God even in times when it is most difficult to trust in Him, make sure that you know His name well!

And when you do that, you will also find that this knowledge will increase your love for God. This is implied in Psalm 91:14 where God says – “Because he hath set his love upon Me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known My name.” Can you see here that the one who has set his love upon the Lord, is the one who has known His name?

In addition, the full knowledge of God’s Name that you have been receiving through this series of messages should also enhance and improve your worship of the Lord both in your personal devotions and in church. One reason why some Christians today are lacking in spirit when they worship is that they do not fully know the Lord whom they worship. For the same reason some have changed their form of worship from one that is filled with order, sanctity and reverence to one that is flippant, noisy, free and disorderly. They do not fully know the One whom they worship. It is only when their understanding of God’s name or character grows, that they will learn to worship Him the way they should. In Exodus 34:5-7 we are told that when God proclaimed His name to Moses on Mt Sinai, “Moses made haste, and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshipped.”

At that very moment when Moses heard God proclaiming His name fully to him, he was so overwhelmed and caught up with a sense of God’s awesome majesty, purity and goodness, that he could not help but to bow down spontaneously before God in holy, reverential worship.

It is my prayer that all these results will be the impact of this study of God’s names, in your life, that through knowing these names you will gain the willingness and ability to put your fullest trust in God, that you will grow in your love for Him, and that you will delight in worshipping God in holy reverence.

And this morning we will consider one name of God that should cause us to do these things. It is the name “Jehovah Hoseenu” which means ‘the LORD our maker’. Since the Lord is our maker, we ought to put our fullest trust in Him. For what better hands can there be, into which we can safely commit ourselves, than the very hands that have made us? Secondly, since the Lord is our maker, we ought to love Him with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind. It was for this very purpose that God created us in His image – in order that we may love Him. For only creatures who bear His same divine image have the unique ability to love God. Thirdly, since the Lord is our maker, we ought to delight in worshipping Him, for as the highest of all creatures God has made, we are should be zealously showing forth the praises of Him who has made us with such wonderful wisdom and exquisite design. That is why the psalmist said in Psalm 95:6 – “O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.”

I. The Meaning of the Name

Before we go further into the responses that the Lord deserves from us for being our Maker let us first explore the full meaning of this name. This name is found only in Psalm 95:6. But the same idea behind this name can be found in many other verses of scripture. E.g. Psalm 100:3 – “Know ye that the LORD He is God: it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves…” In Isaiah 54:5, the prophet Isaiah says to the people of Israel – “For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is His name…” In Ecclesiastes 12:1 we receive the exhortation, “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth…”

A. Creation

All these verses express the truth that the LORD is the One who has made us. But they also bring out slightly different connotations of the word ‘Maker’. When we look at Psalm 95:6, the connotation of the term ‘Maker’ in this verse is God’s work of creation.

This can be clearly seen in the two verses just before it – vv.4,5 – “In His hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the hills is His also.  The sea is His, and He made it: and His hands formed the dry land.” As the psalmist meditates upon God’s marvelous works of creation – the deep places of the earth, the hills, the sea and the dry land - he is moved by all this to say, “O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.”

And like the psalmist, we too should meditate often on our Lord’s marvelous work of creation. Contrary to what evolutionists have been saying, we are not the products of blind, directionless chance, working over billions of years through random processes of genetic mutation and natural selection. But we are the products of God’s deliberate design and infinite power. The first two chapters of Genesis  reveal that God made all things out of nothing, merely by speaking them into existence. God simply spoke the command, ‘Let there be light, and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). Hebrews 11:3 puts it this way – “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”

And everything was made by God within only six literal days! The sun, the moon, the stars, the land and sea, all the species of plants and trees, fishes, birds, insects and animals, from the biggest to the tiniest organisms – the Lord did not need billions of years to make them all, but a mere six literal days. And at the climax of those six days, God made man: Genesis 1:27,28 – “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

All these may have been in the thoughts of the psalmist when he wrote in Psalm 95:6 – “O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.” Surely we must bow down in humble adoration and worship at a God who can accomplish such a marvelous work of creation! Dearly beloved, whenever you have the opportunity to get close to nature, like when you visit a nature reserve, or go overseas to climb a mountain, or cruise down a river in a place like Taman Negara, don’t forget to appreciate God’s handiwork, and say “O Lord, how great Thou art! How great Thou art!

And when you do that, please remember that you yourself are also a testimony to God’s marvelous handiwork. You must not stop at just praising God for His marvelous works of creation around you, but you must go on to meditate on His marvelous work that brought you into existence! This brings us now to the second connotation of the name “The Lord our Maker”

B. Conception

One passage that really brings out this connotation is Psalm 139:14 - “ I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.”  God is your Maker. He made you right at the moment of conception. He created your soul and body, and made you unique and different from all others. Think of it. Out of the billions of people who live today and who have ever lived on the face of this earth, there is none who is exactly like you! Even identical twins have the different fingerprints and personalities.

Did you know that a miracle takes place in every mother’s womb? If you could only see the millions of intricate little events that must happen in exact and precise co-ordination and in proper sequence when a new person is developing from a single cell into a newborn child, you would truly marvel at how awesome God’s creative power is! I had the opportunity to study embryology when I was a medical student 20 years ago. I still remember my professor, Dr Frank Voon, telling the class that there are so many things that can go wrong in the formation of a new human being from the moment of conception right until delivery, and if just one small little detail fails, there would be disastrous results!

If you ever want to know what God’s awesome power is like, you do not have to look very far. Just look at the marvellous design and formation of your own mind and body. And when you do this, think of this: Can any man ever claim credit for the making of a new human being? The answer is obviously no. “Jehovah Hoseenu” the Lord our Maker is the only One who should be acknowledged and given any praise for this. And that’s not all you should acknowledge and praise your Maker for. While you praise Him for what He did in your conception, you must go on to praise Him for giving you your present condition.

C. Condition

This is the third connotation of the name “Jehovah Hoseenu” that must be considered. It is brought out by verses like Psalm 100:3 – “Know ye that the LORD He is God: it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves: we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture.” Here the psalmist is praising God for making Israel His people, the sheep of His Pasture. They were constituted together as God’s covenant people. They were enjoying all the covenant blessings of dwelling in the Promised Land, and the privilege of entering into the courts of the Holy Temple with thanksgiving. Such was the blessed condition that the Lord had bestowed upon them.

You will notice in this verse that the psalmist was very careful to say, “it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves”. This is a strong reminder to God’s people never to think that they had made themselves into a great nation. The blessed condition they enjoyed was not of their own making, but God’s.

The same thing must be said of each and every believer. You must never think that the blessed condition you enjoy today is of your own making. It is God who has made you what you are today. The apostle Paul testified, “But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10). Whatever abilities you have are from God. Whatever successes you have enjoyed in your life – they are all from God. Whatever blessings, privileges and assets you have gained in life – they would not be yours today if God had not been gracious to bestow them upon you. And most of all, the fact that you now are saved from sin, and enjoying the blessings of salvation as a child of God – that is clearly something you can never claim any credit for.

Dearly beloved, since you now know all these things, you must acknowledge the Lord as the One who has made you what you are today. As we have seen, the Lord is our maker in at least three significant ways – in His work of Creation, in His bringing about our Conception and existence in this world, and in His bestowing upon us our present Condition making us what we are today. If it were not for “Jehovah Hoseenu”, the Lord our Maker, where would we all be today?

II. The Implications of The Name

You know, as God’s people we stand in a relationship with God that has been described in different ways. One desription is that of the Father and child relationship. Another is the Master and servant relationship. In the message we had five weeks ago we saw the Shepherd and sheep relationship used to portray our relationship with God. But of all these descriptions, the one that is most basic and fundamental is the Maker and creature relationship that we have with God. And now we must consider two important implications of this relationship. Firstly:

A. Submit Yourself Fully To God’s Authority

We must submit to His authority to own us, to rule over us and to direct us, for all these are logically speaking, the Creator’s rights over the ones He has created. If we do not submit to His authority, we would be just like the Israelites who rebelled against the Lord. The latter part of Psalm 95 tells us what happened to them (vv.7b-11): “To day if ye will hear His voice, Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted Me, proved Me, and saw My work. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known My ways:  Unto whom I sware in My wrath that they should not enter into My rest.”

These are very strong words of indictment from God against the Israelites who lived at the time of Moses. Despite all that the Lord had done for them, they rebelled and complained against God. As a result of that, they were sentenced to wander for forty years in the wilderness until the whole rebellious generation had died out. Only their children were allowed to enter into the land of Canaan. They were just like the clay in the potter’s hands that refuse to yield to the potter. This analogy is used in Isaiah 45:9 – “Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands?”

Perhaps there may be some in our midst who are striving with their Maker. Perhaps you have been rebelling against God’s authority instead of submitting to Him. The Lord has been speaking to your heart again and again of your need to obey Him, to put away some secret sin that you have been keeping in your life, or to follow the path that He has chosen for you to take. But you refuse to yield to Him. If this is true of you right now, please listen to what the Lord your Maker says to you in His Word. “To day if ye will hear His voice, Harden not your heart”(Psalm 95:7b). Please don’t harden your heart. Don’t grieve your Maker any more, but yield yourself to Him completely. The clay that yields itself most readily to the Potter’s hands will soon be moulded and shaped into a beautiful vessel that is fit for God’s use!

Now we proceed to the second implication of the relationship that God has with us, as our Maker. And this implication is that you must:

B. Live Your Life For The Lord, Not For Yourself

Colossians 1:16 tells us that “all things were created by Him and for Him.” In other words, we must find our purpose for living in Him. Now that we know that God is our Maker, we cannot live for ourselves anymore. To keep on living for ourselves would be to claim that we have no Maker, or that we are our own maker. But the God’s Word reveals that Lord is our Maker, and so we must now live our lives for Him! God should become so much a part of your life that you cannot live a day without Him. Let me ask you this: Is your commitment to God placed right now on the same level as all your other commitments in life? If it is, then you need to change your thinking. You need to make God the center of your life.

And you can do this is by trusting fully in Him, by loving Him with all your heart, and by delighting to worship Him with all your being. These were the three things that were mentioned at the beginning of this message. And now that you have understood why you ought to be doing these things, what you need to do now is to apply them to your life. You must allow this knowledge of God that you have gained today to make a deep and lasting impact in your life.

Meditate on these things. Ask the Lord to examine your heart, to see if you have not submitted to His authority in any way. Ask Him to help you yield yourself to Him completely, as clay in the potter’s hands. And make a firm commitment today to trust in the Lord, to love Him and to worship Him.