Some years ago I was discussing Bible studies with a well known Fiji journalist and church minister, the late Dr Samuel Berwick, and he told me something that has helped me take my Bible studies forward. Of course I was skeptic at the time, but today I have found his idea and insight very valid and workable.
He told me that Bible study was like eating corn. To enjoy the corn kernel, one has to peel off and completely remove the multiple layers of the corn husk. “Look” he said, “You have to peel off the husk in front of you, and throw it away before you can get to the second layer of husk, to peel it off, than get to the next layer of husk and so on until you get to the corn kernel which we eat.” Makes sense, even though practically, we often try to peel off everything in one go.
But the point he made to me almost thirty, thirty-five years ago was valid then and valid today, especially if one has decided to search for the Creator, Yahweh Elohim, as I have been doing since 2000. We must first get rid of our prevailing thoughts or thinking which are obviously wrong, and replace it with the correct concepts. I had a battle, a virtual civil war, when I was moving away from Sunday worship to get to Sabbath worship. But it was not until I utterly rejected Sunday worship, that I was able to embrace the Sabbath in total as required by the ten commandments. Similarly the Names of Yahweh.
Finding Yahweh is the key, in the same way that Moshe found Yahweh at the burning bush, to begin an interesting relationship. If Moshe turned away, nothing would have happened.
One of the necessary things for us to do is to first find his holy Name. That is what Moshe did, didn’t he? Moses asked for his ID as it were! This ID is important to us too.
If you are looking for someone, you will need to call out his name, so that he can respond to your call and yell back “Here I am!”
It is not that Elohim is mysterious, like someone who has not declared the name by which he is to be remembered! No! The problem is that we have been taught to believe that Elohim is actually called God; and trying to unlearn that lie is quite difficult; a corn husk that needs to be resolved first before we can move any further. But eventually we got there. And the first thing I did after that was to look for a Bible that uses the holy name of Yahweh, and the one I found and bought for our group was the Words of Yahweh.
Thus the search begun! Personally I started out with an assurance which reads “If with all your heart you really want to find me, you shall surely find me, thus says our Yah or El.” Remember that Air from Mendlesohn’s Elijah of the same title?
Of course the English Bible actually reads “Thus says our God.” But the English Bible was formulated in 1601 or thereabout in London I think, and they for some mysterious reasons supplanted the names of Yahweh Elohim, the name by which the Elohim of Isra’el is supposed to be remembered; with the names LORD God, who is the pagan deity of the Canaanites and the Babylonians.
Earlier while I was still in the Church of God, I received some papers from a Church group, who were proclaiming the name of Yahweh, and at the time I rejected those papers outright as dubious. After all I was a member of a Church of God, and spiritual adultery is a strict no-no isn’t it?
Looking back I now realised that my search was somewhat stalled then and there, because I was not able to peel off this particular corn husk, about the true name of Elohim (Mighty One) or if you please the one who is wrongly named LORD God.
So my search was stalled, for until I can resolve this one, I cannot move forward to find Yahweh.
The process began when I was flushed out of the church of god I used to follow, in 2000. I cannot say I left it, because I guess if I found just a little niche where I can fit in, I probably would stay; but there was nothing left for me there. I did not believe in the Trinity, so if I stayed I would always be the odd man out, hence my opinion that I was flushed out, you know like something useless being removed. Often, these kind of things happen to us, for our own good.
But that experience made it easy for me to part with the terms LORD God, when our small group studied the various deities of the ancient world, since the Garden of Eden episode. There are hundreds probably thousand of pagan deities in the pages of the Holy Scriptures. Among them were Gad (gawd or god otherwise called Troops) and Meni his wife, the deities of good luck or fortune and destiny respectively.
One husk was on the way out. As the scriptures (John 4) says “22 You worship what you do not know; but we worship what we do know; for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the time is coming, and it is here, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father also desires worshippers such as these. 24 For Elohim is Spirit; and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth”
In spirit and in truth? Exactly! The truth is between God and Yahweh isn’t it? But which of the two is genuine is for us to decide. Spirit? The interrelationship is between two spirits, our human spirit and the spirit of the Elohim (Mighty One) called Yahweh. Any other spirit apart from Yahweh will not work.
Finding Yahweh is interesting in a very special way, because it demands that we overhaul all our perception about the Creator and the way we relate to him. If we heed the gospels where it says that we should not be deceived by man (Matthew 24:4-5) ; especially those who preach the name of Jesus Christ, it follows that we will have to understand the role of churches and religions, and evangelists and apostles, who assert that they are the way to the heavenly throne. Are they? These are the corn husks we have to remove on the way to the next husk.
We need to understand that religion begun well after Adam and Eve were exiled from the Garden of Eden and the tree of life confiscated from human reach (Genesis 3:23-24), and this touches the very heart of our search for Yahweh.
Some people will assert that to find Yahweh, we need to have wisdom and understanding, which one can find in churches and God-breathed human beings. Unfortunately this is impossible because the truth is that we have to find Yahweh first, before we can find wisdom and understanding never the other way around. Knowing Yahweh is wisdom. To maintain our relationship with Yahweh we need understanding, and understanding is being able to act righteously; when confronted with right and wrong, good and evil etc.
But once one reaches that stage, and look back, one will suddenly be conscious that human religious activities, is exactly like that fig tree which Yahshua saw; a lot of leaves but no fruit (or taqsh) indicating that it was an absolutely hopeless, fruitless fig tree, so he cursed it (See Matt 21:18-22 & Mark 11:12-14, 19-25 ).
And this is why it is needful that we free ourselves of denominational ties, before we can find Yahweh; we need to keep removing husk after husks, to get to the kernel – and in my search, to find Yahweh, the Elohim of Avraham, Yitz’chak and Ya’akov.
- Apenisa Naigulevu
