The difficulty of conveying the name of God in words

Words are powerful tools. To those who know them, they provide ready handles to easily describe more ideas with greater clarity and less length than otherwise needed. To those who do not yet know them, words provide an invitation to improve their ability to think and communicate, while their definitions provide the means of coming to comprehend and, hopefully, use them. An interesting property of a dictionary is that all words are defined by other words. If there were a purely novel word, the dictionary would have no ability to define it. How would one define such a word? This is the challenge of defining the name of the Lord.

No textual description can sufficiently describe God. While the character of the Lord can be referred to with a name or title, it cannot be adequately described in words.³ How would you describe everything that God does, how he does it, and why he does it in words? The apostle John said it couldn’t even be done if all the books in the world were dedicated to that purpose.⁴

Every word we have at our disposal means something less than Jesus. To adopt any understandable adjective in attempting to describe him would be to describe him as less than he is,⁵ and yet stringing together these inadequate adjectives is the best we can do. To one who knows him very little, these words provide an invaluable basis from which a more accurate understanding can grow, but there is an absolute limit in the ability of words to fully describe God. God must be experienced to be known.

It is not possible to come to know God through simply reading about or hearing about him. The more part of God’s character can only be discovered incrementally, through many interactions with him over time. However, his name gives us a convenient way to refer to him, providing a placeholder that can be extended and corrected as we progress in our understanding of how he is. More importantly, whatever details may be lacking or flawed, descriptions of the Lord serve the invaluable purpose of providing something we can emulate, opening the door to further revelation.

While there are many who get quite hung up on which single word they should use to address the Savior, it turns out that, whatever the merits of any of the several options, they are all so vastly inadequate that our effort would be much better spent learning how he is and living that way rather than arguing over what to call him.⁶ The label you use to address the Lord matters much less to him than the description you attach to that label and how fully you follow it in your own life. What you call him matters less than whether you call on him, and the most important part of that tends to be your decision to change as a result of it. Rather than being partial to one title for the Lord over another, we ought to recognize that all names are equally insufficient for him. The only sufficient description of God is God himself.

The process of defining the name of God is one and the same as the process of becoming like him. You learn God’s name through assuming all his qualities as you understand them so far, which will result in him revealing more of himself to you as you become more like he is.