God is with Us // The Amazing Names of God, Part 5

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

Life’s a journey – and we’re all on different places along that journey. And no matter – who we are, or how we’re wired on the inside – none of us can travel that road alone. Many people feel as though they are – and that’s a tragedy – because when God is with us – we’re never alone.

Well, here we are towards the end of yet another week and already the year’s slipping by so quickly, each one of us on life’s journey. And it is a journey, isn’t it? Sometimes it feels like its all uphill, other times it's a bit easier. Sometimes it feels like we’re wandering through a swamp, other times we’re up on the mountain tops. Life is a journey.

I remember once when I was training to be an officer in the Australian army, we went on a survival exercise. It lasted for a good many days, and for most of that time we didn’t have too much to eat. We were very hungry. And to make things a lot worse, we received instructions over the radio to march to this particular grid reference on the map. That’s where they promised they would have food waiting for us.

And so we’d march like 35, 40 sometimes 50 kilometres in a day, over mountains and through dense jungle with our packs on our backs, weakened by the lack of food. And when we arrived there and radioed in they told us, oh well, they couldn’t get the food through. March to this other grid reference, another 50 kilometres over that other hill over there, almost back to where we started from.

This went on for days and days, when it rained and we were wet and cold, it was pretty demoralising, I have to tell you. But there’s one thing, one thing that made it bearable. We were a small group, five of us, and having each other around kept our spirits up. The thing that made it bearable was that none of us was alone.

Too often in life it feels like we’re alone. We can be surrounded by lots of people at work at home sometimes, at yet we can still feel as though we’re completely alone. There are a few reasons it happens that way.

Sometimes, actually we are alone. Some people live on their own and don’t have any real friends or family around them. Whether or not they go to work, they can actually in a very real sense be desperately lonely.

Other times we have people around in our lives – friends, work colleagues, husbands, wives, family – but there’s no emotional connection. The thing that stops us feeling alone is that we’re connected with someone else at a deep, emotional level. There’s someone that understands, someone that cares, someone that’s here for us. And if we don’t have that, then we feel alone.

And sometimes there are people there who want to understand and care and be there for us, but we’re hurting so badly that we can’t accept their love. The deeper a hurt is, the more isolated we feel. People who are in their last stages of life often experience that. Soon they’re going to be separated from their love ones. Perhaps they’re lying in a hospital bed and they feel completely alone on this journey.

I remember when we were out on that survival exercise, climbing up some steep slopes through prickly lantana, so hungry that we’d stopped being hungry, we just wanted to give up. And then someone would crack a joke or someone would put a hand on another man’s shoulder and say, “Come on, it’s only an exercise, it will be over in a few days.” And just that connectedness, just that simply being together is what kept us going.

We need that. And whilst I’m a person who doesn’t mind being on their own, and I naturally drive through things, I stay focussed on the end game, that’s just who I am, I need that too. It doesn’t matter who we are, what our personality type is, we can’t live life alone.

Throughout this week on the program, we’ve been looking at some of the different names used for God throughout the Bible. And whilst you and I are quite happy with the one name we’ve been given, many names are given to the One Living God in His Word the Bible, because through those names, He reveals Himself to us. He speaks to us; He tells us who He is and what He’s like.

And the whole point of looking at these different names during the course of this week and next week too, is to connect us – you and me – with the reality of who God is right in the middle of where we are right at this moment on our journey; to draw close to Him; to know Him so that we’re ready for the next part of our journey.

Too often I think, we talk about God or we learn about God. Every now and then you meet someone – someone who has something, you just know from the radiance on their face and the look in their eyes and passion in their voice – you meet this someone who’s been in the presence of God, someone who lives in God. And you think to yourself, I want what that person’s got.

And that thing, that deep life knowledge of God, that’s just not for Mr or Mrs Super Christian it’s not just for the spiritually elite, it’s for everyone, every ordinary person like you and me who puts their trust in Jesus. And so today we’re going to look at one of the names of God – Emmanuel. It comes first and foremost in a prophecy in the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament about the coming of Jesus, centuries before it even happened. Have a listen. Isaiah chapter 7 verse 14:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.

What does Emmanuel mean?

Look the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’. (Matthew 1:23)

God is with us on our journey. Up until that point the odd king or prophet had been in a deep relationship with God. But when Jesus came then, all of a sudden, God was with us. He walked the dusty roads, He sat in the synagogues and in the market place and taught and healed people. All of a sudden people could see first hand what God was like. John says this in his Gospel chapter 1 verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

It wasn’t the prophets telling the people who God was or what God had to say, it was no long mere words but now the people could see God for themselves because the Son of God had been born – Emmanuel – God is with us.

In the Old Testament God travelled with His people through the Exodus, through the wilderness, for forty years and His presence was in the Tabernacle, the Temple. Here John said, “And the Word became flesh and (literally) Tabernacled amongst us”, He came to dwell in our midst. And on that journey John writes, “we have seen God’s glory with our own eyes”. In Hebrews chapter 1 verse 3 it says:

Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being

And then Jesus ascended into Heaven. He left behind His Holy Spirit, the very presence of God in us. My friend, God is with us, with us on our journey. We can be completely without any other human relationship and yet know God with a joy and a reality that causes His glory to fill our hearts, to shine through our faces, to sparkle in our eyes, to fill our voices with His being.

And when we believe His Word over our circumstance, when we trust in what God says, when we put our faith in the Emmanuel, the God who is with us, then we will know in our own experience that God is in fact in this place. We need faith.

Without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. (Hebrews 11:6)

Why haven’t some of us experienced this blessed assurance of the very Presence of the living God? Because we haven’t believed in Him; we haven’t stepped up to the plate and said, "You know something God, I believe what your Word says, I believe that you are indeed my Emmanuel, I believe that you are with me because my faith is in Jesus, Your Son – Emmanuel."