El Shaddai

Intro

Remember the last time you felt unprepared for that test, work project, intierview, hard discussion, etc?

Oft life feels like that doesn’t it lol

I came across this incredible quote on this coffee cup, when prepping that you can see on the screen, “My life feels like a test I didn’t prepare for!”

Anyone relate?

Simililarly, the discussion goes back to our school experiences verses real life experience

I’m so glad I learned about paralellograms instead of how to do taxes. It has really come in handy this parallelogram season!

Life is hard, and you know what, Life is still hard even if you are a follower of the one true God and a believer in Jesus!

It has always been since the fall, humanity will struggle, and sometimes that struggle is our own doing, sometimes it is others, and sometimes, God gives us a struggle to work through

I remember the story of David and Goliath

1 Samuel 17:33 “33 But Saul replied, “You can’t go fight this Philistine. You’re just a youth, and he’s been a warrior since he was young.””

Giftedness cannot be measured by status. Higher does not always mean better. And further does not automatically mean greater.

In the Valley of Elah, the nation waited on a champion. One might have assumed that those higher in social status would step forward to battle a giant standing in the middle of the valley taunting their army and blaspheming their God. But they would be wrong. Men who had risen high in the ranks of the army, gone further in social recognition as warriors, even the king, commander and chief of the army, were unequiped for the challenge and unequal to the task. Status wasn’t everything. In fact, status was nothing, an incompetence as useless as unfitted armor.

David by contrast had no social standing, no street cred. No one wrote of how he had beaten back a bear or laid a lion out like a prize fighter. When the famous prophet Nathan had shown up at the family estate, even David’s own father overlooked him (1 Sam 16:11). Pining away with “those few sheep” he worked in faithful obscurity (1 Sam 17:28). But when he stood before Goliath, the nation learned that artificial human perceptions of status were utterly irrelevant when compared to one’s God-given abilities.

The gauntlet each of us run in this life is not made up of obstacles laid to prevent or stifle our success. It is simply preparation for what comes next, in this life and in the next. The bear and lion were only rehearsals for the real fight. The obscure service was proving ground where humility could be forged.

David then showed how The God Almighty, and his armies, would then uproot and kill Goliath, it is by God’s power that David accomplishes the impossible!

Today we look at the name of God that we run into, when we have run out of ourselves

The name of God that is one of the ealiest covenantal names of God, and used extensively through the book of Job, it is the name El Shaddai: The God Almighty

This name is beautiful for all it’s implications, but it also has much more than power

It is about God’s power, but it is more about his power and his all sufficiency for our needs

In fact the idea of Almighty has this connotation that God is so powerful that he simply overpowers whatever is the obstacle, since nothing is an obstacle to God,

He is the God that created our Universe, and he’s also the one that holds the universe together, and also the one that work miracles within his world

Ultimately, El Shaddai shows us a God that is there regardless of our circumstances

Unfortunately we are pretty dense as people, and it oft takes us to hit a dead end before we realize there is God

Our problem has always been, always will be that we are not satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other, and that gets us in trouble!

Corey Ten Boom says it so well, “You may never know that JESUS is all you need, until JESUS is all you have.”

Life is difficult for everyone on this earth

Sometimes we think God is not coming through for us when he said he would, and it makes us burdened

Othertimes life goes so off our plans that we can’t even think God could use it, and we become bitter

Or we might have everything taken from us, and it leaves us simply broken

Yet, there is hope,

What we see is that when we are most vulnerable, that is when we God becomes most visible

Burdened

Abraham was burdened

God had called him from his home, and he left everything to follow this unknown God

There were many promises that YHWH had given Abraham, but they all took time to fulfill, and Abraham was running out of time

He was getting old, he was losing strength to fight, and virility

God had promised him a child, and that child was no where to be found yet

However, before these things could be fully thought upon, there were two crises

His nephew Lot who had journeyed with him was kidnapped!

So Abraham set off with his household army to rescue him, and God delivered them!

Abraham did not just deliver Lot, but as well as the people of Sodom and Gomorrah!

Yes the same cities that God would soon destroy himself!

On way back, Abraham meets a guy named Melchizedek who was a priest king from the city that would become Jerusalem

What is intersting is that Melchizedek blesses Abraham, not the other way around, and for blessings to work, the higher has to bless the lower

He also utters a new name of God, El Elyon, or God the Most High

It means that YHWH is exalted beyond all others, he is in a class of his own

So this reveals something to Abraham, as he will immediately turn around and put this name of God in his mouth!

He says this ultimate God above all others blesses Abram, and he has given Abram the victory, and then Abram gives Melchizedek a tenth

Then in stark contrast the king of Sodom comes in and is like, oh well great job!

(While this guy was running with his tail tucked between his legs, he doesn’t even get his name written, it’s just a vague king of a city state)

So the king is like, well you can have all the loot, please return all the people!

There is a contrast, Abram refuses, because he wants to show his reliance and trust in the lord!

Abram says I’ve made an oath to my God, El Elyon, that I will take nothing from you, so you cannot say I made Abram rich!

Sodom will have no part in the fulfillment of material wealth promises to God’s chosen vessel of Abram!

In response to such great faith, God honors Abraham by coming to him in Chapter 15 and making the full Abrahamic covenant with him, and promising him an heir!

Then 25 years pass, that’s a long time for anyone, that’s a lot of life and water under the bridge

25 years ago for me, I was in 5th grade, and the cradle robber Tabitha would of been in 8th grade lol

Life is hard and rough, and Abraham had no one but he and his wife who were following YHWH, and they made the big second crisis themselves

God had promised a child, but what could be done, they were getting older, and even at this point it seemed Sarai knew she couldn’t have kids

So at they decide to be pragmatic, and take God’s promise into their own hands, and conceive a promised child through a servant girl named Hagar, who bears Ishmael

Except this is not what God wants or commands, and it has major implications today as Ishmael receives part of the blessing of multiplying but is the father of the arabs

God appears again in Chapter 17, and says to Abraham, I am El Shaddai!

You shall live in my presence and be blameless, I will set my covenant between us, and I will multiply you greatly!

Then God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, the father of nations, and you will posses Canaan as the promised land, and Sarai became Sarah- a noblewoman of God

How does Abraham laugh at the revelation of El Shaddai?

He laughs, he says, God how can a nation come from me and my wife, we are old, our bodies have lost their virility!

Let Ishmael be the promised son!!!

But God said no, Isaac will be the one who will fulfill the promise, and he will be born next year!

Burdened Abraham

With a great God and great promises, but many were unfulfilled

So God gave him a bit more of a glimpse of who he is through Melchizedek, and that helps Abraham takes the next step

Yet, as awesome as Abram learning about God there and it growing his understanding of God, he still falls short and then fails spectacularly by trying the Hagar/Ishmael experiment

Abraham is wondering something like this I suspect

If I serve the El Elyon, the most high god, exalted above all, then what is taking so long for him to fulfill his promises?

So he thinks, well, I havn’t heard from God in over 10 years, maybe he forgot? Or maybe I just need to take this into my own hands!

Then God shows up as El Shaddai when Abraham and Sarah are well past the child rearing years, as well as child making years

The reason is that El Shaddai is not just almighty for battle, but almighty in accomplishing his plans and promises

He is almighty to make a man and woman that naturally cannot conceive a child, to conceive

God appears to Abraham not as simply the God who is exalted over All, no, he is the God is Almighty and overpowering to all

When El Shaddai says something, it will be done

When El Shaddai makes a promise, nothing can stop it from being fulfilled

El Shaddai is the God who can do the impossible

Romans 4:20–21 “20 He did not waver in unbelief at God’s promise but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, 21 because he was fully convinced that what God had promised, he was also able to do.”

Just as El Elyon gave a new understanding to Abraham about who God was, and helped him take a step of faith of depending on God’s promises, so El Shaddai speaks to a man who is burdened by unmet promises

If you want to speak of vulnerable places, infertility is perhaps one of the most difficult feilds to walk through

So here in his burdened, vulnerable state, Abraham sees God in a new way, as the one who is so mighty that nothing and no one can stand before him

It doesn’t remove the mistake of Ishmael, but it does show that God is not done with Abraham and Sarah, and has a plan for them greater than they could ever fathom themselves

It forces them to take God as who he is, a God that is Almighty over all of creation, and yet is himself,

He is a God that reveals himself on his terms, and that should bring us great comfort

As Anglican writer Evelyn Underhill so aptly says, “If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.”

The Burdened Abraham, got more than he expected, he came to know not just a God who called him, not just the God exalted above all, but the God with the the power to make it all happen

When Abraham was most vultnerable, God became most visible

Bitter

So we now turn to another story of El Shaddai and the people of God, we skip nearly 800 years to the future to another faithful Isrealite in the book of Ruth

Not Ruth herself, but the figure in which we first meet and end in the book of Ruth, her mother-in-law Naomi

While Abraham shows us the burden of struggling with when God will move, Naomi points us to when we wonder why God didn’t work the way we thought he should!

Naomi

Naomi mean pleasent, and by all accounts she was an upright woman

She lived in the lawless time of the judges, where Israel was even worse than the pagans around them!

There is a terrible famine and her husband and sons leave and move to the country of Moab, and while there her sons marry gentile women

However tradgety strikes, her husband and both her sons die, and leave her an old widow, and her daughter-in-laws equally dispossessed

So Naomi lost everything that would bring her joy or fulfillment, and there are no children to carry on the family or give a hope of a future, and being in Moab, there is no family around

So Naomi returns home with Ruth in tow, and when people see her, they are shocked by her change

Ruth 1:19–21 “19 The two of them traveled until they came to Bethlehem. When they entered Bethlehem, the whole town was excited about their arrival and the local women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?” 20 “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara,” she answered, “for the Almighty has made me very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since the Lord has opposed me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?””

These are harsh things!

She says that El Shaddai has made her

Very Bitter

Come home empty

Act Opposed to her

Afflicted her (one translation says ‘brought calamity upon!’

So what are we to do with these hard statements?

This is not Hebrew Poetry that we can take as some symbolism, no this is narrative, and it is quite straightforward

In isolation this might be difficult, but we do have other Biblical stories to pull from, that do indeed show God afflicting his people, and even causing them bitterness!

Just think of the Exodus, the Isrealites went through several plagues alongside the Egyptians, and all the plagues were directly sent from God

Then God brings a plague against people who grumbled about the Mana in the Desert

David (the man after God’s own heart), had God’s angel ready to strike at Jerusalem, and 70k people were killed by God’s direct hand for David’s sin

Then we have the captivity of Babylon and Assyria to end out the Old Testament

Even in the NT we have stories like Acts 5 where Ananias and Sapphira drop dead by God’s hand for lying to the Holy Spirit,

Even last week we had communion and read from 1 Cor 11, and we spoke of not taking the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, but Paul then says directly after that, it causes sickness and even death among members for continually abusing God’s communion!

Ultimately, God being El Shaddai means that he is all powerful and able to weave things as he desires, and sometimes living in a sinful world means we have a lot of why’s for God, just like Naomi

Later we see Solomon write these wise words about life and it’s wildly unknown nature:

Ecclesiastes 7:14“14 In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity, consider: God has made the one as well as the other.

Yet the most interesting thing about Naomi is not her bitterness, but is her default desire to rely on the same El Shaddai that had afflicted her

“We must learn to interpret our experiences by what we know about God through His Word instead of interpreting what God is like by our experiences. If we do not ground our belief about the nature of God and His disposition to us in the Scriptures, we will reject much of what He says about Himself when we face difficulty.” ― Jim Berg, God is More Than Enough: Foundations for a Quiet Soul

Our experiences are always unique, and God certainly uses our experiences to help us grow and mature, but never let emotions run the show, that simply leaves you unstable to fall over on a light breeze!

But when it comes to life, I cannot know the depths of your loss, or even your joy, I can have empathy with you, but God can know exactly what you are experiencing

Naomi doesn’t run from God, she throws up an honest plea of where she is, with a heavy sigh of “El Shaddai, Why?”

She threw herself unto El Shaddai, knowing He is the only one who can actually deal with her pain and loss

She can’t do anything, she is an old widow, she has no power in any way, she will be lucky not to starve if we are honest

In her bitterness, she begins to get better by trusting in God

This certainly doesn’t answer all the questions she probably has, but she trusts God to work in her pain

We can see how El Shaddai did work, since we have way more information that Naomi did, but notice we can’t answer the ‘why’, only the ‘what happened’

Naomi is returning to Bethlehem, where we just saw a crazy story at the end of the book of Judges and a massive civil war over the wickedness that was done!

Ruth in the Hebrew Bible is actually part of the Book of Judges, and so it acts as an Epilogue, that God is still working even when his people are far from him!

Noami also had left her promised inheritance in Bethlehem with her husband and kids

This was a terrible thing to do, it was a move away from God’s people and land into a dark and pagan country of Moab, he ran because it was hard and there was famine!

However, when her husband and kids died she was left, stuck, but there was hope in Bethlehem it seems!

It resulted in first Ruth coming with her, and then Naomi helping arrange their marriage as kinsmen redeemer, and then being able to reclaim the inheritance land they had lost when they went to Moab

Of course, the greatest personal joy for her was Ruth and Boaz’s child Obed

Ruth 4:16–17 “16 Naomi took the child, placed him on her lap, and became a mother to him. 17 The neighbor women said, “A son has been born to Naomi,” and they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.”

El Shaddai showed up in an amazing way to a bitter woman, who was made better by the blessing of El Shaddai

When we are at the end of ourselves, and maybe even in a very disadvantageous place, God is with us, working behind the scenes

When Naomi was in her most vulnerable, hurting place, God showed up in a way we had not seen in all of Scripture up to that point

When we are most vulnerable, God is most visible

For the burdened Abraham

For the Bitter Naomi

For the Broken Job

Broken

Job is a tough book to read, full of excruciating loss, failed friendships, and one terrible nagging wife

Yet, for those in such dire straights, Job shines like a beacon of hope, that the people of God can go through hell and walk out again, because of who our God is

Job does not care so much about the why things are happening, or when things will end (although those certainly come up),

Job cares about the where, where is God in this mess where everything Job had known, loved and cared about was ripped away

Job is the book in which 48/51 uses of El Shaddai are used, so we ought to pay attention

In the opening verses of Job we find that Job was a righteous man, he was a rich man, and he was a deeply religious man that is an example to any of us of a godly man

He had character to please God and people, the only one not really impressed with Job is in fact Satan

So God allows Satan to attack Job’s Livestock, Sheep, Camels, and then his children

They are all taken, slaughtered, or killed

Then in the second round, Job’s health is taken as he is covered in boils and sores

On top of that, his wife turns on him, telling him to curse God and die, and his friends come and after sitting for a few days to mourn, just become frenemies and pile on him

Job what secret sin do you have, otherwise God wouldn’t do this?

What people did you wrong, otherwise God wouldn’t do this, etc

In light of this great loss, Job does this incredible thing, he weeps and worships

Job’s emptiness points him to the fact that God is enough

Job 2:9–10 “9 His wife said to him, “Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!” 10 “You speak as a foolish woman speaks,” he told her. “Should we accept only good from God and not adversity?” Throughout all this Job did not sin in what he said.”

How is El Shaddai used in Job?

There are many passages with it, but here are a few to help us understand the name El Shaddai

Job 6:4 “4 Surely the arrows of the Almighty have pierced me; my spirit drinks their poison. God’s terrors are arrayed against me.”

The terror of God being against you is not something to be taken lightly

Job 31:35 “35 If only I had someone to hear my case! Here is my signature; let the Almighty answer me. Let my Opponent compose his indictment.”

Job then says that he will challenge God into a court, he cannot stand what he has faced!

El Shaddai shows that God is good and working for his people, but also that he is terribly and dreadfully strong to accomplish his tasks!

Job is brutally honest before God, and God steps out and answers Job, even though he never needed to

Job 38-42 are some of the most powerful verses in the Bible, it’s says, Alright Job, I’ve heard you, now let’s contend!

It is a wall of questions about the things Job doesn’t know, alluding to his suffering, and the things he doesn’t know behind the scenes!

God fixes the broken Job, but what he really fixes about broken Job is his understanding of El Shaddai

Job 42:3–5 “3 You asked, “Who is this who conceals my counsel with ignorance?” Surely I spoke about things I did not understand, things too wondrous for me to know. 4 You said, “Listen now, and I will speak. When I question you, you will inform me.” 5 I had heard reports about you, but now my eyes have seen you.”

We said earlier that Job’s main question was where is God?

The answer was right there, alongside him, God answers his question, but he never answers the why to Job (we know that Why though because of that heavenly dialogue scene)

Job learned to trust a person, not a plan, and to trust the person in ultimate control of the universe

Potent

What Abraham, Naomi and particularly Job show us is that blaming God will get us nowhere

Life will be unfair, life leaves us vulnerable, but will we cry out and reach out to God in those times or harden our hearts away from him?

We cannot change our circumstance, but we can change our response

During one session, the pastor pointed out that because God is love, no matter how bad things get, Christians should praise Him.  Afterwards, a man came up to him in great agitation. “Dave, I can’t buy what you say about praising God in the midst of evil and hurt.”  Then he went on to say what many people secretly feel, “I do not believe that when you lose someone you love through death, or you have cancer, or you lose your job that you ought to praise God.”  After a moment’s silence, this pastor replied very simply, “What alternative do you propose?”

We have so much information about El Shaddai than any of the great saints we’ve talked about today!

When life is hard, we have to throw ourselves at something!

Albert Camus is perhaps best known for writing books that advanced the philosophical concept of existentialism. Existentialism emphasizes individual freedom, choice, and responsibility, and the search for meaning and purpose in a seemingly meaningless and absurd world

In his honest assesement, comes to this for an unbeliever, ““The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”

So what he says is what gives us hope to keep going when life gives us seemingly no hope at all?

That is where we see Jesus in all his beauty, all his power, all his godness, yet one who is aquanted with our sorrows

Jesus says to come and throw our burdens on him, we will find rest for our souls

We throw ourselves at him, because what else can we do, we might wonder have questions about where, why, and whem, but he answers the most fundamental, the who question

No matter what is done to us, Jesus will make the wrongs right, afterall, the second most references to God Almighty after Job? It’s in Revelation, when we will see God come and bring about his kingdom by his power!

We can trust Jesus to right the wrongs

If you don’t know Jesus today, or if you’ve been walking far away from El Shaddai, come back home, come rest under his wings!

Benediction

1 John 4:4 “4 You are from God, little children, and you have conquered them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.”

Psalm 91:1–9 “1 The one who lives under the protection of the Most High dwells in the shadow of the Almighty. 2 I will say concerning the Lord, who is my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust: 3 He himself will rescue you from the bird trap, from the destructive plague. 4 He will cover you with his feathers; you will take refuge under his wings. His faithfulness will be a protective shield. 5 You will not fear the terror of the night, the arrow that flies by day, 6 the plague that stalks in darkness, or the pestilence that ravages at noon. 7 Though a thousand fall at your side and ten thousand at your right hand, the pestilence will not reach you. 8 You will only see it with your eyes and witness the punishment of the wicked. 9 Because you have made the Lord—my refuge, the Most High—your dwelling place,”