Why The Name of God Is Not Important*

Every day when you return home from work, your darling wife carries your infant daughter to the door to greet you. When the door opens, you are greeted, daily, by the sound of the voice of The Love of Your Life saying "It's DADEEEEEEEE!!!" Your daughter very well might only be able to say one syllable at a time, for many months. During that time, your name will be "DEEEEE" because that is what she hears every day.

If your 11 month-old girl is in her bed in the morning, freshly awoken from a night's sleep (at 05:23 AM) and she sees you come into the room, she will hold out her arms and say "Dee!" and you will smile and pick her up. She can't walk very well, and one day she falls and skins her knee. She cries out Deeee!!! and looks right at you with her eyes moist with tears of pain . . . tell me you will not be emotionally moved by her feeble attempt to communicate with you by calling your name.

If you call me dayvihd, dahveed, dayve, or (as one girl in my kindergarten class did) daybihn, you are referring to myself, regardless of how you pronounce David.

The tetragrammaton is unpronounceable only in part because the vowel points were not recorded. But it does not matter what God said his name is, when he introduced himself to Moses. Regardless of if you say yahweh or jihhohvah or jeezis or yayhohshuah, if you refer to the one true, living God who is self-existent, the creator of all things, who loves grace, mercy, justice, and YOU, you have got the name right because you have got the person right.

If you say God and mean a black stone which has a hateful, capricious, petty, spiteful personality, you have not got it, regardless of how you pronounce it. If you say Jesus and mean a man who was born as a result of sexual congress between two humans, you have not got it. If you say Lord and mean somebody with four or more arms, you have not got it.

Even if the vowel points had been recorded, you would get it wrong. You don't speak Hebrew the way Moses did. And Moses was a stammerer, so he may very well have mispronounced the name, if he had dared to speak it.

It does not matter how His name is properly spoken. It does not matter if you mispronounce it. What matters is that you believe the proper things about the God. Moreover, the pronunciation of the unspeakable name is not something over which Christians should part company. If your otherwise-doctrinally-sound church insists on one pronunciation or another, it is probably well done if you just avoid the subject entirely.

What you need to worry about instead is whether or not you are going to punishments or reward after you die. Are you safe from the punishments coming to you?

You can be, and you can be sure of it.

********
*with the understanding that I am only discussing the controversy over pronunciation of the tetragrammaton here. Taking the name of the Lord in vain is still bad. Cursing it (whatever you think it is) is worse. Words still mean things, but we need not get all wrapped up in a word we cannot pronounce.