​In Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer, Jesus prays to His Father, saying, “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). In this verse, Jesus communicates two important facts: God’s Word is truth—God’s Word equals truth—and it’s by that truth that God sanctifies us, or sets us apart for holy service to Himself.

In the same prayer, Jesus prays for His disciples and all who will believe in Him through the gospel (John 17:20). Believers accept God’s words (John 17:6) and accept Jesus as God’s Word (John 17:8). God is truth, and His truth brings salvation to all who accept it (Titus 2:11). Further, God’s written and living Word will sustain believers as they are in the world (John 17:14).

In the High Priestly Prayer in John 17, Jesus confirms that He brought the message of salvation to the world: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Jesus’ mission of bringing the truth has been accomplished (John 17:4), and He turns the focus of His prayer to God working through the disciples and other believers. He confirms that believers will be rejected by the world for believing “Your word is truth,” but believers are also assured joy, God’s protection from the evil one, and sanctification by God’s Word (John 17:13–19).

The Old and New Testaments both affirm that the words recorded in the Bible are God’s words and that they are true. Since God cannot lie, His Word is truth: “As for God, his way is perfect: The Lord’s word is flawless” (Psalm 18:30). Since God is eternal and unchanging, His Word is always the same: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35; cf. Isaiah 40:8). Jesus uses the Word as He rebukes the devil who was tempting Him: “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4; cf. Deuteronomy 8:3).

If we want to know truth, we will look in God’s written Word (2 Timothy 3:16–17) and look to Jesus Christ (John 14:6; 2 Corinthians 4:6; Hebrews 1:3). John refers to Jesus Christ in John 1:1–2, saying, “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” The Word is God’s total message, and Jesus embodied that full message, which is why He is called the “Logos,” or “Word,” of God (Colossians 1:19; 2:9). God is truth. His Word is truth. Salvation comes by accepting Jesus and agreeing that “Your word is truth.”

Jesus said, “Your word is truth.” When we look at the Bible, we see truth. The Bible does not merely contain the truth; it is the truth. Every word is truth, in every part of the Bible. “The words of the LORD are flawless, like silver purified in a crucible, like gold refined seven times” (Psalm 12:6). This is the doctrine of the verbal, plenary inspiration of Scripture.

How we respond to God’s written Word and the Word made flesh has an eternal impact on us. Since God’s Word is truth, rejecting the Bible and rejecting Jesus is rejecting God Himself. Believing, cherishing, studying, and obeying God’s Word is the key to salvation, understanding God, and living abundantly (John 10:10). No matter what we may face in this world, we are sustained by the truth prayed over us in Jesus’ prayer: “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).

​The Bible tells us that when Christ returns to the earth He will establish Himself as king in Jerusalem, sitting on the throne of David (Luke 1:32–33). The unconditional covenants demand a literal, physical return of Christ to establish the kingdom. The Abrahamic Covenant promised Israel a land, a posterity and ruler, and a spiritual blessing (Genesis 12:1–3). The Palestinian Covenant promised Israel a restoration to the land and occupation of the land (Deuteronomy 30:1–10). The Davidic Covenant promised Israel a king from David’s line who would rule forever—giving the nation rest from all their enemies (2 Samuel 7:10–13).

At the second coming, these covenants will be fulfilled as Israel is re-gathered from the nations (Matthew 24:31), converted (Zechariah 12:10–14), and restored to the land under the rule of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. The Bible speaks of the conditions during the millennium as a perfect environment physically and spiritually. It will be a time of peace (Micah 4:2–4; Isaiah 32:17–18), joy (Isaiah 61:7, 10), and comfort (Isaiah 40:1–2). The Bible also tells us that only believers will enter the millennial kingdom. Because of this, it will be a time of obedience (Jeremiah 31:33), holiness (Isaiah 35:8), truth (Isaiah 65:16), and the knowledge of God (Isaiah 11:9, Habakkuk 2:14). Christ will rule as king (Isaiah 9:3–7; 11:1–10). Nobles and governors will also rule (Isaiah 32:1; Matthew 19:28), and Jerusalem will be the political center of the world (Zechariah 8:3).

Revelation 20:2-7 gives the precise time period of the millennial kingdom. There are countless other passages that point to a literal reign of the Messiah on the earth. The fulfillment of many of God’s covenants and promises rests on a literal, physical, future kingdom. There is no solid basis for denying the literal interpretation of the millennial kingdom and its duration being 1,000 years.

How did Yeshua become Jesus? Anyone who speaks more than one language or has done work in translating knows that names can pose a particular challenge.

Most often, when it comes to names, they are transliterated (which means the sounds of the original word are carried over as closely as possible using the letters of the new language) rather than translated (where a word in the new language that expresses the meaning of the original word is substituted). An example of transliteration would be Moshe becoming Moses, Ya’akov becoming Jacob. Yet Ya’akov has also undergone metamophosis, becoming James in English, Santiago in Spanish, and Jacques in French!

WE WILL NOW SEE HOW THE SAVIOR’S GIVEN NAME, YESHUA, BECAME JESUS.In first century Judæa and Galilee, the name Yeshua (pronounced ye-SHOO-ah) was very common, and shared fifth place with El’azar (Lazarus) in popularity as a name for Jewish men. The most popular male names at that time were Shim’on (Simon), Yosef (Joseph), Yehudah (Judah or Judas), and Yochanan (John).

In the Holy Land at the time of Messiah, Aramaic had replaced Hebrew in everyday conversation, although Hebrew remained Lishon HaKadosh (the Holy Language), and was used in worship and daily prayer. The two languages were related, as close as Italian is to Spanish.

The modern day Hebrew alphabet is actually the Chaldean or Babylonian letters, which replaced the Paleo-Hebrew script after the captivity. (Interestingly, at the time of Jesus, the Paleo-Hebrew characters were used to write in Aramaic!).

Yeshua was the Aramaic version of the Hebrew name Yehoshua (Joshua), and means “Yahweh saves.”
By the time of Nehemiah, Joshua was known as Yeshua, the son of Nun (see Nehemiah 8:17, KJV).

Throughout Messiah’s lifetime in Galilee, Samaria, and Judæa, of course, the name Yeshua presented no problem for those who spoke Aramaic and read the Bible and prayed in Hebrew. But outside of the Holy Land, it became a different story as the Good News spread. Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language, or has heard foreigners speak English, knows how difficult it can be to pronounce a foreign language correctly.

Different languages have sounds that others do not have, such as the sh sound in English does not exist in Spanish, and Americans have difficulty learning how to roll their rr’s in Spanish. The Gentiles of the Roman Empire spoke Greek and Latin, and simply could not pronounce Yeshua.
It contained sounds that did not exist in their language.

LIMITED SOUNDS IN GREEKWhen the Gospels were written in Greek, therefore, the Evangelists had a real problem regarding how they might render our Lord’s name into acceptable Greek. The initial Y (Hebrew and Aramaic letter yod) was easy. The Evangelists could use the Greek letter iota, written I, since it was pronounced like the y in yet.The next sound was a vowel, and that was a little more difficult.

Unlike the Greek, all the letters of the Aramaic-Hebrew alphabet are consonants.

The marks for the vowels were not invented by the Masoretic scribes until some centuries after Messiah, and were simple dots and dashes, placed above or beneath the letters. The first vowel on the Saviour’s name was pronounced like the e in yes, and the Evangelists believed they could approximate that sound by using the closest Greek letter eta, which had an ei sound like the a in gate. (The capital Greek letter looks just like our English letter H.)
Then followed the first of two almost insurmountable problems with Hebrew and Aramaic pronunciation. There was no letter for the sh sound in the Greek alphabet. Such a familiar name as Solomon was actually Shlomo in Hebrew; Samson was Shimshon, and Samuel was Shmuel. Like the Greek translators of these Old Testament Hebrew names, the Evangelists used the Greek sigma (s) for the Hebrew shin (sh) when rendering Messiah’s name.

The next letter in the Aramaic name Yeshua was the Hebrew letter waw (Modern Hebrew’s vav), which here represents the sound oo as in too. It was easy for the Evangelists to duplicate this sound in Greek. It takes two letters, however, the omicron (o) and the upsilon (u). But that easy substitution was followed by the biggest problem of all: the final a sound. In Greek, there was no substitute for the Hebrew letter ayin.

Though the ayin has no sound of its own, it controls a vowel sound. In this case, the uh sound at the end of Yeshua was easily sounded in Greek or Latin as the a in father. A final a on a name, however, was most commonly feminine in both Greek and Latin (as in modern day Spanish). Thus it was decided to drop the Hebrew ayin completely, and replace it with the final Greek sigma (s), which most often indicates the masculine gender in the nouns.
They followed this protocol throughout the New Testament, changing Mashiach (Messiah) to Messias, Elijah to Elias, Jehudah (Judah) to Judas, etc. Throughout the Roman Empire, then, Yeshua had become the Greek name Iesous, pronounced yay-SOOS. And this remained Messiah’s name throughout the Roman Empire so long as Greek remained the dominant language.
But after some centuries Greek lost its favoured position and Latin took its place.

In the last quarter of the fourth century, the Bible was translated from Greek into Latin by Jerome, who had no trouble rendering the Greek Iesous into Latin: it became Iesus.

The emphasis was placed on the first syllable and pronounced YAY-soos, since the Romans liked to accent the second from the last syllable.

WHERE DID THE J COME FROM?In about the 14th century, in the scriptoria of monasteries where Bibles were copied by hand, monks began to elongate the initial I of words into a J. The pronunciation remained the same—like the y in yet—but the monks thought a J looked better. Probably the first monks to do this were German, because the letter j in that language sounds the same as the y in English, as still seen in their language today (German ja is pronounced yah). The name Iesus, consequently, evolved into the familiar written form of Jesus by the 17th century.

Everyone still pronounced it YEE-sus, however, and the official liturgical Latin its pronunciation remained YAY-soos. A copy of the original 1611 King James Bible renders Jesus as Iesus, and Jeremiah is spelled Ieremiah. Way back in the fifth and sixth centuries, some pagan Germanic tribes, called the Angles and the Saxons, invaded England. Augustine of Canterbury converted them to Christianity in 596 A.D. Of course, Augustine established Jerome’s Latin translation as England’s official Bible. The Anglo-Saxons learned that the Saviour’s name was Iesus. Naturally, the Germanic Anglo-Saxons converted the initial Latin I into the German J. They pronounced the name, however, as YAY-zoos, since a single s between two vowels is sounded like our z in Germanic languages (like the English measure and pleasure.)

When the Normans invaded England in 1066, they brought with them the French language. Since neither the Anglo-Saxons nor the Normans would surrender their language to one another, the two became wedded, and eventually evolved into Modern English. The Normans influenced the pronunciation of the first letter of names beginning with the stylized I which looked like our modern J. They brought the French pronunciation of j (zh), which evolved into our English sound of j. When the commission was given for the first official translation of the Bible into English in the early 17th century, the Latin Jesus was carried over unchanged into the new English Bible. The average English citizen of the day probably pronounced the name JAY-zus, which ultimately evolved into our Modern English JEE-zus.
The long process was now complete.
​
A name that began as the Aramaic Yeshua, would remain written in English as it was in Medieval Latin, but now would be pronounced in English-speaking countries as the familiar name Jesus.

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First things first: We need to understand the trajectory of the Old Testament, essentially a history of ancient Israel. It’s not exactly the kind of history you would find in a textbook. There’s certainly more poetry, and there are details that biblical scholars have found to be puzzling, if not outright historically inaccurate. The history of ancient Israel in the pages of the Bible is more theological, more about what God is up to in the lives of God’s people, rather than a History Channel documentary.

Way back in Exodus, after God had brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt and into the promised land, it wasn’t long before Israel got itself in trouble — repeatedly. The pattern was predictable: When Israel would enjoy a time of peace, they got comfortable, perhaps too comfortable, even lazy. They started to ignore the laws God had given them to establish order and justice and promote the wellbeing of their neighbor, and they began to worship the gods of their neighboring nations. Inevitably, this would get them in some sort of mess with those nations, and they would cry out to God for deliverance, who would, inevitably, deliver them. And repeat…

Early in Israel’s history, that deliverance would come through “judges,” leaders that God would raise up specifically to help Israel when they got themselves in trouble. Later, Israel decided they wanted a king, to be like the other nations around them. Not entirely without irony, it’s being like other nations around them to begin with that constantly got Israel in trouble — so you can already start to see the problem here.

Israel’s history of kings was an uneasy one — each king evaluated based on how well they upheld the laws that God had given the people way back at Mt. Sinai, not long after their deliverance from Egypt, laws that were meant to govern how the people lived in relationship with God and, just as importantly, with one another. Laws, in other words, that were about justice and social welfare.

Enter the prophets. These were figures set up in stark contrast to Israel’s kings, whose job it was to challenge the king when he led the nation away from observing these laws of justice and social welfare.

To make a long story short, Israel’s period of monarchy ended even worse than it began: with a divided nation of Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Soon, Israel would be conquered by Assyria, and not long after, Babylon would conquer Judah.

It’s in the midst of these turbulent latter days of the monarchy that we encounter Amos, a shepherdunsure of his own status as a prophet, but nevertheless faithful to God’s call. Amos came from the south, from Judah, but his prophetic career took him north to Israel. Amos’s message was clear. In the opening judgment against Israel, Amos declares: “Thus says the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment: because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way…” (2.6-7). Economic injustice and social inequality is the chief judgment leveled against Israel, and for this, God threatens to destroy them. (Like I said, good old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone!)


The passage we heard read today comes in the latter half of the book, after Israel’s sin of neglecting social justice and promoting prosperity for the few at the expense of the many has been made clear. After all this, God shows Amos five visions of destruction. In the first, God prepares to send a plague of locusts and, in the second, a shower of fire. In both of these, Amos is able to intercede on behalf of Israel, and God backs down.

But in the third, finally, we get the plumb line. It doesn’t really matter if you know what a plumb line is because the vision of a plumb line is not actually a plumb line. The meaning of the word in the original Hebrew is uncertain. “Plumb line” is one translation. A better translation is “tin” — as in, one of the metals that makes bronze, the metal of choice for making weapons in the ancient world. So the vision is, more accurately, a huge pile of tin, a stockpile of materials to make weapons — essentially God declaring war on Israel. And in this vision, unlike the first two, Amos does not intercede. Israel’s sin is too much. Destruction is inevitable.

The final two visions confirm what the third suggests. In the first of these, God shows Amos a basket of “summer fruit.” Well, that sounds pleasant enough (almost like something that would go nicely in sangria!). But in the original text — and this is why you should all learn Hebrew — it’s a pun. The word for “summer fruit” sounds a lot like the word for “end.” Forget melons and mangoes (and sangria). This is a vision, yet again, of the inevitable destruction of Israel — a point made abundantly clear, in case the people haven’t been paying attention, in the final vision, in which God speaks orders of destruction directly. Destruction is inevitable.

So now what?

Immediately after the fifth vision, Amos ends with this: “On that day I will raise up the booth  of David that is fallen, and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it… I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them…” (9.11, 14). God promises restoration. Restoration presupposes that everything has indeed been destroyed, but it reminds us of the overwhelming message of the prophets, Amos included, indeed the message of the whole of Scripture: God’s final answer to God’s people is always yes, not no. Restoration, not destruction. Life, not death.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t take God’s threats earlier in Amos seriously or take for granted that everything will somehow be okay in the end. As if to say, it doesn’t really matter because God will forgive us anyway and fix everything. The promise of restoration and life is inevitable and certain, but it shouldn’t be taken as a license to ignore and even perpetuate social injustice.
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Theologian James Cone reminds us that even God’s wrath and anger are part of God’s love. God is not angry in the book of Amos for the sake of being angry. God is angry because God loves God’s people too much to ignore the ways we hurt and inflict pain on each other. Cone writes, “The wrath of God is the love of God in regard to the forces opposed to liberation of the oppressed.” In other words, God’s righteousanger in the midst of so much human suffering, oppression, and injustice shows just how much God cares. God’s wrath is God’s love. Indifference to suffering, oppression, and injustice is not love; it’s apathy. God is not apathetic. God is angry because God cares for and loves God’s people too much to let us keep going on in the ways that harm our neighbors. Tough love, we might say.

Tough love — and unrelenting love. This is the promise of Amos, even amidst destruction: God’s love does not give up on us, even when we are guilty of sins that perpetuate systemic injustice at the expense of others’ humanity. This is the promise for us: God’s love does not give up on us, no matter how many times we mess up, no matter how badly.
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God’s love
does not,
cannot,
will not
let us go.

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