In common English vernacular, His name is Jehovah.
Never mind how we got that; it’s just a silly tail-chasing exercise to insist on using the alleged “more accurate” version, Yahweh. Everyone knows who we’re talking about, so don’t look for excuses to make trouble (written with a smirk). What matters is that the name hangs essentially on His being the Creator. Having made all things — at least all the things of which we could be aware — vests Him with a certain amount of privilege. Among those privileges is that everything we could discuss would be pointless noise if we ignore His definitions of the terms. In effect, avoiding His revelation makes every discussion pointless, an airy-fairy exchange of wild imagination.
I often say things like: “The healing miracles of Jesus were essentially a matter of restoring moral justice.” He restored cosmic moral balance by correcting the disharmony arising from the immoral decisions of those whom God vested with moral authority. I realize from a Western point of view that raises other questions such as: “Well, why did God vest these people with authority if they were morally unworthy?” If you understood biblical morality, you would never ask that question. God vests with power whomever He, in His inscrutable divine privilege, decides is the right choice. We are not entitled to an explanation.
There are hints that serve to reduce our moral discomfort if we are willing to pay attention and try thinking beyond the immediate surface of things, but most Western readers of the Bible never get that far. That is, sometimes He explains at least a part of the moral justice background on things that happened. That’s why He called prophets; He vested people with a moral vision to grasp what should have been obvious to anyone with a decent moral perception. But it fell to some extraordinary measure of calling out someone and granting them unusual moral insight to make up for the general lack. If we don’t seize upon what’s available as our share, He tends to grant someone else the collective degree of moral discernment we all reject. Some of these folks were beyond genius in their moral discernment. His truth will not suffer frustration at our general truculence.
Meanwhile, we could all be prophets in effect if we just accepted His calling. Jesus kept saying things like: “If you obey the Father’s calling on your life, you can expect to do miracles such as these, and more besides.” But that obedience includes a complete shift away from Western thinking, in our case. If your head isn’t in the right place, you can’t see what Jesus saw and act according to His authority.
How about them Hebrew boys in the Prophecy of Daniel? How many other Hebrew boys were taken into Babylonian imperial service, but failed to distinguish themselves? It’s hard to imagine there were none faithful, but Daniel rose because God chose him for a special mission. So by comparison, the rest were compromising fools against this quartet of buddies. They were the standard. They should have been the average, but gained a much higher share of God’s authority because the rest were slackers. They saw with Messianic eyes what was just and unjust according to the Creator’s sense of justice. They got results because they were able to find the intersection between Nebuchadnezzar’s wishes and God’s divine provision. They didn’t waste time complaining about having to serve a pagan emperor, but found a way to negotiate the bureaucracy in favor of God’s interests.
While there may well have been a measure of special favor, God explicitly says most of what we see in the miraculous is entirely within reach of all the rest of us. You want some of this? Embrace God’s revelation. Harmonize your mind and soul with the essence of cosmic moral justice, God’s own character, and things will change. Miracles don’t come as some special favor for those who earn the rights, as if God just starts giving them everything they want. They get their wanting fixed on His character and all that other stuff is just the natural result — natural in the sense that it’s what God does in the first place. It’s what He has been doing all along.
That’s moral mechanics.
