The Name of Jesus Christ: Manifestation of the Divine Nature & Power of God

Enoch B. Mnisi, DD21 September 202631 min read

Introduction

The question that lies underneath every failure of Christian maturity, and it is rarely asked directly: by what faculty does a man perceive the things of God? We assume the answer. We assume that because a man can read, he can understand; that because he has a Bible open before him, the contents of that Bible are accessible to him. But Scripture itself forecloses that assumption. "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1 Corinthians 2:14) The things of God are not withheld out of divine reluctance. They are withheld by the nature of the case, because spiritual realities require spiritual organs of perception, and a man who has not developed those organs will handle the sacred text for a lifetime and come away with nothing but information.

My claim in this essay is this: the presence of God is not a feeling, not an atmosphere, and not an accident of temperament, but a theophany, an appearing, which is invoked under conditions that Christ himself has specified; and those conditions converge entirely upon the divine Name. Where two or three are gathered in that Name, he is there. Where the spirit, soul and body of a single man are gathered in that Name, he is there. The Name is not a label attached to a person who exists independently of it. After the accomplishment of the incarnate Logos, God vested his whole being, reputation and power within that Name, so that the Name has become the sole point of contact between the created and the Uncreated, the only door by which a finite being may enter the life of the Trinity and survive the entrance.

But a man cannot wield what he does not esteem, and he cannot esteem what he has never been taught to value. So the argument proceeds in stages. I begin with the necessity of spiritual understanding as the precondition of all growth. I move from there to the question of memory, and to the peculiar amnesia of Western Christianity, which has lost the ancient landmarks and therefore cannot cite two thousand years of divine faithfulness as evidence in its own favour. From memory I move to witness, which is the ground on which the Christian claim stands and on which every rival claim collapses. Then I turn to the conditions of the theophany in Matthew 18, to the exposition of Philippians 2 and the exaltation of the Name, to Noah as the antitype of grace, and finally to the interior warfare in which the Name is the only serviceable weapon.

The stakes are not academic. A generation that has no stored record of what the Name of Jesus has accomplished will have no confidence to deploy it, and a generation without confidence in the Name will be enslaved by every thought that rises against it. Depression, despair, the persuasion that one's life is without value: these are not moods. They are strongholds, and they are dismantled by one instrument only. What follows is an argument for the recovery of that instrument, and for the recovery of the heritage which teaches a man what it is worth.

The Architecture of Spiritual Development

Built into the architecture of spiritual development is a prerequisite which no amount of sincerity can circumvent. If a man intends to mature in the things of God, he must possess spiritual understanding of spiritual things. This is not a preference of the devout; it is a structural requirement, and the failure to meet it produces stagnation no matter how earnest the seeker. Spiritual things are comprehensible only through spiritual mechanisms. A man without the relevant faculty for apprehending them will remain arrested at the point where those faculties were required, and he will not know why.

Paul locates the source of this knowledge precisely. "But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God." (1 Corinthians 2:10) He presses the point further in the verse following: "even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God." (1 Corinthians 2:11) The Spirit of God is therefore the possessor, the revealer and the manifester of the things of God, which are spiritual by nature. There is no secondary route. There is no accumulation of study which, at sufficient volume, converts itself into spiritual perception. The things of God belong to the Spirit of God, and they are dispensed on his terms.

This is why the training of the spiritual faculties is not optional devotional refinement but the basic labour of the Christian life. There are muscles responsible for capturing and computing what is spiritual, and they are developed by exercise. Scripture holds out to us a category of divine intention that has not yet entered human perception at all: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." (1 Corinthians 2:9) That which God has prepared exists already. It waits on the development of the organ capable of receiving it. The believer who never undertakes that development does not lose a luxury; he forfeits the inheritance for which Christ laid down his life, an inheritance which was never meant to be forfeited by ignorance.

A further dimension of this concerns life itself, and not doctrine only. Life has complex strata and structures, and its governing machinery is not visible from within it. To understand what controls and governs life, a man must stand in close proximity to the One who instituted it. God established life as the field of creaturely participation, and for a creature to participate in life successfully, which is to say as it pleases God, it must understand the boundaries, the mysteries and the secrets by which life actually functions. This is why Paul prays for the Colossians "that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding" (Colossians 1:9), and why the neglect of that understanding brings the whole edifice down. Without it, the spiritual life does not merely slow. It crumbles, and it takes the inheritance of the next generation with it.

The Christianity of Amnesia

When God gave Israel the laws and constitutions by which they were to live, he attached to those laws a commandment concerning memory. They were to inscribe the words on the posts of their houses and on their gates, to bind them as frontlets between their eyes and as a sign upon their hand, and to rehearse them daily in the household and to their children. "And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." (Deuteronomy 6:7) The rationale is stated with great precision in the parallel injunction concerning the Passover: "And it shall be for a sign unto thee upon thine hand, and for a memorial between thine eyes, that the LORD'S law may be in thy mouth." (Exodus 13:9) God gave laws, and with the laws he assigned a commandment for generational heritage, so that successive generations would carry in their memory the works of God in the deliverance of his people.

Consider what would have followed had Israel proved unfaithful in this stewardship. Suppose they had failed to imprint, record and store the workings of divine power in their midst, and failed to transmit them forward. Subsequent generations would have lived divorced from any knowledge of God's exploits among his own people. They would have faced their own crises with no arsenal, no precedent, no evidence of what the God of their fathers had done when circumstances were comparable. They would have been forced to reconstruct from nothing what had already been established at enormous cost. The commandment concerning memory is therefore not sentimental. It is a provision of weaponry for a generation not yet born.

The Christianity of the West is a Christianity of amnesia. It has lost the ancient landmarks, and having lost them it cannot make strong reference across the generations to the consistent workings of God in continuity with the apostolic heritage which our Lord Jesus Christ founded. "Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set." (Proverbs 22:28) What results in the churches is a peculiar kind of guesswork, in which individual believers are left to their own imaginations, attempting to determine what God has done by direct reference to the biblical text alone, while two thousand years of history, which is the continuation of the heritage Christ began in the age of the Incarnation, is simply absent from the reckoning. Then we wonder why something is missing. Something is missing. We removed it ourselves.

The consequence of this gap is subtle and it is severe. Certain doctrines in Scripture appear simple on the surface, and on deeper meditation prove to be vortices leading into tremendous power and transformative potential, provided a man holds to them as to life itself. But those of us standing at the latter end, cut off from the Christian heritage of the ages, find it difficult to appreciate the value of such doctrines. We read something in Scripture, recognise that it is powerful, and cannot determine whether it has any bearing on our lives. A man knows that he ought to pray. He does not know whether prayer is powerful, because there is a gap in his computational capacity, in his ability to analyse the weight of a thing, and the gap exists because he has no sources to cite.

Observe what Hebrews 11 does with precisely this problem. Paul cites men who did not belong to his generation, men who lived long before his time, and uses them as the defining references for the faith by which God validates a man. He reaches back into the patriarchal ages and draws on the rich heritage of the fathers to establish a doctrine for the present. He recalls those who "stopped the mouths of lions" (Hebrews 11:33). This is not antiquarianism. It is argumentation from the accumulated record, and it is the very procedure that Western Christianity has abandoned. How shall a man be confident that the Name of Jesus is powerful and sufficient for his own generation if he holds no record, no memory, no stored database of what that Name has accomplished through the history of time?

Witness and the Validation of Revelation

This brings the argument to the question on which everything turns. Why is Islam false? Why is Judaism true as far as it goes? Why is Christianity the ultimate and final faith? The answer is witness. "He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself... And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son." (1 John 5:10,11) And the corollary, stated elsewhere by the same apostle, is severe: "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father." (1 John 2:23) He that does not have the witness of God does not have the Father either.

Ask the question concretely. Who was present to witness when Muhammad received the revelation he claims to have received? No one. The revelation is enclosed within a single consciousness, and there is no external corroboration available in principle. Now ask the same question of Moses. Who witnessed the giving of the law? An entire nation stood at the mountain. Ask it of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Who witnessed it? Not one man, but multitudes of men, so that the integrity of the theophany, the manifestation itself, is preserved in a plurality of testimonies rather than resting on a single uncorroborated report. This is precisely why Scripture insists that "no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation" (2 Peter 1:20). Revelation requires witnesses for validation. A private revelation with no witnesses has no mechanism by which its integrity can be substantiated, and no claim upon the conscience of another man.

Our Lord makes this the explicit vocation of the apostolic company. "But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth." (Acts 1:8) The Church is constituted as a body of witnesses. Its authority is evidentiary. It exists to hold and transmit the substantiated record of what occurred, and this is the reason why a Christianity divorced from its own history is bound to be corrupted. Sever the transmission and you sever the evidence; sever the evidence and the faith becomes a matter of private persuasion, which is the exact condition it was designed to escape.

I want to press further here, because the connection between the two halves of this argument is easily missed. The doctrine of witness and the commandment concerning memory are the same doctrine viewed from two angles. Witness establishes the record; memory transmits it. A tradition that keeps its witnesses but loses its memory has evidence it cannot reach. A tradition that keeps its memory but has no witnesses has continuity without foundation. Christianity possesses both, and the peculiar tragedy of the modern Western church is that it has retained the first while discarding the second, and then wondered why its confidence has evaporated. The evidence is intact. The chain of custody has been broken by our own hands.

The Conditions of the Theophany

Let me now take up the text on which the whole practical argument rests. "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." (Matthew 18:20) Christ specifies two conditions for the invocation of his manifested presence. The first is a company: two or three, a body rather than an isolated individual. The second is that the gathering be centralised upon his Name. The Name is the object of the unity, the focal point around which the gathering occurs. Where these two conditions are met, the consequence follows: there am I.

This is a relational expression, and it has an immediate ecclesial application. But it carries a metaphysical application as well, because man himself is a triad. "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." (1 Thessalonians 5:23) If the condition is that two or three gather in his Name, then the spirit, soul and body of a single man constitute such a company, and they too require a congregational point around which to assemble. So there is an ecclesial gathering, and there is an interior gathering, and the same promise attaches to both. If I can bring two or three men together around the Name of Jesus, he is present. If I can bring my own spirit, soul and body together in the Name of Jesus, he is equally present.

Notice what this does to the question of assurance. The man who has met the conditions is not left to ask himself whether God has come. He is not dependent on the testimony of his own sensations. Christ has stated the conditions and stated the consequence, and the consequence is declarative: there am I. These are the terms on which a spiritual dimension is activated. No man who fails to unify his tripartite being can warrant the presence of Jesus, and no amount of physical assembly compensates for the absence of that interior operation. A deliberate unification of spirit, soul and body in the Name must take place, and it is this interior labour, rather than the outward congregating, which most believers have never attempted.

Here is why the stakes attached to this condition are so high. "How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him." (Acts 10:38) Jesus Christ healed all who were oppressed of the devil because he was anointed. If he was anointed then, he is anointed now. Consider that every miracle recorded of him was accomplished in his presence; his presence was involved in the working of every mighty deed. To have his presence, therefore, is to have everything one needs. And he has told us the condition on which that presence is given.

This is also the reason so many believers have no experience of the presence of God, and it is worth stating plainly. The presence of God is not a feeling. It is a theophany, a manifestation, an appearing, an entrance into a reality outside the bounds of time and space. It is a dimension in God where God is as real as anything the senses perceive, and more real. A man who is waiting for an emotional confirmation is waiting for the wrong thing and will interpret its absence as divine silence. The instruction is otherwise: bring the interior being, spirit and soul and body, into the Name of Jesus, and you will find him there, because he has undertaken to be there.

We do not come alive to God until we congregate in his Name. The reality of God does not become tangible to us until we are united in the Name of Jesus, and the reason is not arbitrary. The Name of Jesus is the only name in the universe capable of expressing the totality of divinity and the totality of divine power. There is no other name capable of transmitting God's dimension of reality. After the accomplishment of the incarnate Logos, God vested his entire being, reputation and power within that Name, and so the only way the divine presence manifests in its fullness to a human being, and the only way a human being acquires the capacity to contain God, to apprehend God, to perceive God, is through that Name. The marriage of the created and the Uncreated takes place in the Name and nowhere else. God uses the vehicle of his Name to reach us; we must unite ourselves in that Name to reach him.

Him Who Bears the Name: The Argument of Philippians 2

If the Name is the locus of divine presence, then everything depends on who bears it, and Paul sets out the answer with unmatched precision. "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God." (Philippians 2:5,6)

The form of God

Being in the form of God speaks of a mode of expression, and the participle indicates a state permanently held rather than an achievement arrived at. He did not begin to be in the form of God. He was always in the form of God. Form here denotes the outward expression of what a thing is interiorly, which is why Jesus is the outward expression of God to creation, and why he can say without qualification, "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14:9). There is no requirement to see what is inward when one has seen what is outward.

Thought it not robbery to be equal with God. The Greek term rendered robbery, harpagmos, occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, and much has been debated about what it expresses. Read in context, it means this: to be in the form of God was a matter of right, not of seizure. He did not regard equality with God as plunder, as something snatched, because he already possessed it. And the equality in view is not the equality of a second figure with a first. It is equality of nature, equality of essence, the very being of God.

The consequence for how we read the Incarnation is decisive. His descent into the material was the manifestation of divinity, not its concealment. The Incarnation is God disclosing himself to creation, not God hiding himself from it. It is not the elimination or suspension of his divinity but its disclosure, which means the Incarnation is never a matter of contention regarding his status but the fullest demonstration of it. Jesus, being man, did not discard who he was. The humanity did not diminish the divinity. Jesus is God, God incarnate, the Uncreated, the only begotten of the Father.

This is why the apostle can write that "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father" (1 John 2:23), and why a religion which denies that Christ is the only begotten of the Father cannot be the true religion and cannot be worshipping the true God. Islam denies precisely this: it affirms that God is one and that he has not begotten. On the same ground Judaism cannot fit the mould, since it denies him whom the Father has sent. The criterion is not cultural and it is not arbitrary. It is the confession of the Son. "And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist." (1 John 4:3) I will say it as plainly as the apostle does: a god who is confessed precisely by the denial that Jesus Christ is the Son come in the flesh is the spirit of antichrist, and the Allah of that confession is Satanos himself. This is not a judgment upon Muslims, whom we are commanded to love and to whom we owe the truth; it is a judgment upon the confession.

Kenosis without diminution

"But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men." (Philippians 2:7) He did so voluntarily, and he did so as God. He made himself of no reputation; no one made him of no reputation.

I want to state this next point precisely, because it is widely misunderstood. While he was a man he never ceased governing the universe. His becoming man did not suspend the ordering of the stars while he walked the roads of Galilee. He did both simultaneously, being at once man and the God of the universe. Heaven continued to be sustained by him. He mastered the arrays of the galaxies while he moved through the land of the Jews. He did not stop being what he had always been merely because he became what he had not been before. Some hold a false picture of Jesus in which becoming man entailed ceasing to be God. He did not cease to be God. He did not cease to be the only begotten. John's own tense settles it: "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." (John 1:18) He does not say who was in the bosom of the Father. He says which is.

So while yet a man he retained the entire function of Godhead, and this is why creation itself convulsed at his death. The sun refused to shine and there was "darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour" (Matthew 27:45); "and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent" (Matthew 27:51). The God of creation had died. He had surrendered himself to the limitation of man, and he is the theanthropos, the God man, without ceasing to be either.

Nor was he confined to the limitations of ordinary human development. At his birth he received the worship of angels: "And let all the angels of God worship him." (Hebrews 1:6) God was born. He chose it. He came in the guise and likeness of sinful flesh, as Paul writes, "God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Romans 8:3), and again, "Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same." (Hebrews 2:14) But this in no way diminished his power. His power was fully retained and his cognisance was full. "And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." (Philippians 2:8) Found in fashion means found in outward condition, found in external appearance. Outwardly a man was found. Inwardly something else entirely was present. And let no one suppose that anything is impossible to him: "Is any thing too hard for the LORD?" (Genesis 18:14) Impossibility is a limitation resident in the mind of finite man. To God there is no such category.

The exaltation and the Name

"Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name." (Philippians 2:9) The wherefore is causal. His obedience, and specifically his obedience unto death, triggered an action from the Father. Because he was obedient, God highly exalted him, raising him to the furthest extremity, to supreme majesty, and gave him a name.

The Greek term for name, onoma, carries the sense of authority, and read in that register the verse states something enormous. God has given him an authority which is above every authority. The authority of Christ is therefore the epoch of all authorities. He is the principality, the head of every authority, which means that all authority in reality flows from him. He is the source, the fountainhead, the wellspring of authority. His Name governs all names. There is no name in the universe to which the Name of Jesus is inferior, for he is the superior magisterium of God. Whoever spends his life among other names spends it on nothing.

"That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." (Philippians 2:10,11) Nothing is exempt from the Name. Every grain of sand, every blade of grass, every leaf of every tree, every iota, every cell in the plains of reality is subject to it, because the Name is the invocation of the One who bears it. It glorifies the Father that everything in the universe bends the knee to Jesus and confesses his lordship.

One consequence of this follows immediately for the life of prayer, and it overturns what most believers assume they are doing when they pray. The highest object of prayer, and the highest weapon in it, is not your words and not your supplications. It is the spirit, the soul and the body that bear the Name. Words are the instrument of the petition; the tripartite being gathered in the Name is the instrument of the power.

All authorities are consolidated under one authority. All names are consolidated under one Name. In the heavens the only name that matters is Jesus Christ. On the earth, for overcoming, for perseverance, for strength, for victory, the only name that matters is Jesus Christ. In the underworld, where the dead abide, the only name that matters is Jesus Christ. His is a universal authority, and this is finally a mystery which the organs of natural perception cannot apprehend. The antinomy is relieved by faith alone. We accept it, not because we have understood the mechanism of the reality, but because it is stated thus, and because by manifestation and proof of deeds he has shown himself to be the chief governor of the universe.

One further observation follows from this, and it explains a great deal about the present age. Every distraction Satan devises is arranged around the apprehension of the power of the divine Name, because it is in that Name that every force opposed to God must subject itself. Mankind's ignorance of the disposition of Christ's power therefore becomes the ultimate strategic objective, and he spares no expense in pursuing it. He will develop technologies which appear outwardly to be advancements for humanity while carrying diametrically opposed spiritual ramifications, so that what presents itself as progress operates in fact as a hindrance to the ascent of human consciousness toward the mind of the Redeemer.

Noah, and Grace as the Mark of Christ

Scripture supplies an antitype which shows what the presence of the Name secures for the man who bears it, and it is found at the point of God's most absolute judicial determination.

"And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them." (Genesis 6:5-7)

The condition of the earth had pushed God to a decision of finality. The stated objective was the eradication of man from the face of the earth, the annihilation of the species along with every beast and creeping thing that walked upon its surface. God had determined to do it.

Then comes verse eight, and it functions as a contradiction of the stated objective: "But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD." (Genesis 6:8) The purpose announced was total. Every man on earth was to be destroyed. Yet Noah, being a man, found grace in the eyes of the LORD, which means that God omitted his own declared agenda on account of the presence of a single man who had found grace in his sight. What was in Noah that God should set aside a determination of that magnitude for his sake, and for his sake alone among the entire race?

There was grace. And grace is not an abstraction. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." (John 1:14) The Logos is full of grace. Grace is the uncreated energy by which God contacts his creation, the uncreated influence of God upon the creature. So when God looked upon Noah he found grace, which is to say he found the imprint, the mark, the scent of Christ upon him, and he spared him. Noah became a beneficiary of mercy because the mark of Christ was on him, and he was preserved from the destruction of the world.

This is the anticipation of John 3:16 in the earliest strata of the narrative: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16) The Son makes a man indestructible. The Name of Jesus is a wonder working force, a grace giving and mercy giving force, and any man upon whom the inscription of that Name is imprinted is saved from the death and destruction to come. This is why we are instructed to worship the Name, to praise the Name, to honour the Name. The Name is the entry point, the access by which the divine triad may be entered at all. It is the name by which we defeat every devil, by which every wrong, every antinomy, every breach may be corrected.

And here the earlier argument about heritage returns with full force. How shall a man know the riches resident in that Name if he does not know the history of its power through the ages of the Church? How it delivered the fathers in the desert. How it delivered the apostles and the saints of old, who "stopped the mouths of lions" (Hebrews 11:33). How it wrought great deliverances for those who trusted in it. How it saved all who called upon it in the hour of their affliction. Without that record, the Name is a word. With it, the Name is an inheritance.

The Interior War and the Weapon of the Name

The recovery of the Name matters most in the place where the real conflict is conducted, and Paul locates that place with unusual exactness.

"For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled." (2 Corinthians 10:3-6)

The weapons are not carnal, not material, not of this world. They exist on another plane altogether, and they are mighty through God for the pulling down of strongholds. But notice where those strongholds are situated. Paul does not describe an external siege. The enemies are not lodged in trees. They are lodged within, arrayed around the mind, assembled about the dianoia, the reasoning faculty, where they fabricate walls. Their purpose in fabricating those walls is to block a man from the knowledge of God, and they exalt themselves as God in the process.

So the call to arms is in fact a call to nepsis, to watchfulness, and the watch is kept inwardly rather than outwardly. Consider what this means concretely. Thoughts of depression, when they attack a man, persuade him that he is nothing, that he is worthless, that he is of no value, that his life does not deserve him or that he does not deserve his life, that he might as well die. These are the enemies against which God provides weaponry. They are not moods to be managed but strongholds to be demolished, and they are demolished by bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.

The question is how a man does this, since a thought that rules him cannot be seized by the same faculty it has already captured. How does one make prisoner the thoughts which govern one's life? Through the Name. This is the point at which the two halves of the argument converge. Learning to go within, to unite spirit and soul and body in the Name of Jesus, is not a devotional refinement added to the Christian life. It is the mechanism of the interior war. Only the Name renders a man impervious to the enemies of his soul. Only the Name grants the victory. Without it a man becomes a slave to depression, a slave to stress, a slave to every satanic formulation in the mind, and he will not understand why his resolve keeps failing him.

But there is a condition attached to the wielding of it, and Noah again supplies the pattern. Noah found grace; grace did not find him. He located it. He searched. If a man does not search he will not find; if he does not knock it will not be opened; if he does not ask he will not receive. "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." (Matthew 7:7) The man who complains that God does not answer has commonly not asked, and Paul has a word for those who imagine they have exhausted their resistance: "Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin." (Hebrews 12:4)

Our Lord taught this with a parable which is often domesticated into something gentler than it is. A man goes to his friend at midnight and asks for three loaves, having a visitor and nothing to set before him, and the friend answers from within: "Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee." And the conclusion: "I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth." (Luke 11:7,8) Asking stands in direct relation to persistence. A man does not resist sin once; he resists it until he dies. He does not ask once; he asks and seeks until he finds. And he does not call the Name once. He calls it in every waking moment, calls and calls and calls again until the mind descends into the heart and the heart ascends to the throne of Christ. There is only one impediment to success in prayer, and it is the inability to persist. The deficiency is importunity, not eligibility.

The Posture of a Soul That Believes the Name

Let me put the matter to the reader directly, because the argument has a practical form and the practical form is a question about posture. Everything established so far, the faculty, the heritage, the witness, the conditions, the exaltation of the Name, converges upon a single question: what would a man do differently tomorrow morning if he actually believed it? As long as you have breath, as long as your intelligence is intact, as long as your will remains under your own governance, the calling of that Name is a thing you may choose. So the question is not whether the Name is sufficient. It is whether you will take up the posture of a man who knows that it is.

What if you learned how to call that Name? What if you learned to wield it against the foes of your soul and the armies of hell that rage against your destiny? What if you believed the potency resident in the Name of Jesus Christ, and insisted upon it, that every knee should bow and every tongue confess at that Name? What if you staked your life on the promises of his power, and wore that conviction as regalia every time you entered the prayer closet, and every time an insurmountable obstacle rose in front of you?

Scripture supplies the postures. What if the armour you put on persuaded you to address the obstacle as Zechariah addressed it: "Who art thou, O great mountain? before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain." (Zechariah 4:7) What if you looked at the sons of Anak, before whom the spies were "in our own sight as grasshoppers" (Numbers 13:33), and took instead the posture of Caleb, who said "Now therefore give me this mountain" (Joshua 14:12), and of Joshua, who said of the inhabitants of the land, "they are bread for us: their defence is departed from them, and the LORD is with us: fear them not." (Numbers 14:9)

What if you had more confidence in God than in your own abilities, more confidence in God than in your own possessions and resources? What if God were your source of strength for everything, the fountain of your wisdom, your counsellor, your therapist, your physician? What if he were in fact everything you needed in this life and in the next, and you trusted him with the whole of your life as David did? What if you could look into the face of everything that has come to shake you and say that though the seas rage, yet you shall not be moved, because your trust is in the Lord? What if you trained your soul to accept as reality what David affirmed at the end of a long life: "I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." (Psalm 37:25)

There is a caution to be observed even here, and our Lord supplies it. The seventy returned with joy, saying "Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name." And he answered, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." Then he corrected the ground of their rejoicing: "Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven." (Luke 10:17,18,20) The authority is real and the subjection of the spirits is real. But the joy is to rest on the inscription of your name in heaven, not on the display of power in the earth. The Name that subdues devils is the same Name in which your own name is written, and the second is the greater of the two mercies.

Conclusion

The argument has moved from the faculty of perception to the recovery of memory, from memory to witness, from witness to the conditions of the divine presence, from the conditions to the One who bears the Name, and from the Name to the interior war in which it is deployed. These are not separate subjects. They are one subject approached from successive angles, and the subject is the Name of Jesus Christ.

A man cannot use what he does not esteem. He cannot esteem what he has not been taught to value. He has not been taught to value it because the Church in the West severed the transmission of its own heritage and left its children to reconstruct from the bare text what had been established across two millennia of witness. That severance is the wound, and the healing of it is not nostalgia but rearmament. Future generations, if they are to be strong enough to contend with the forces that will confront them in their own time, require the arsenal of past weaponry and past wisdom, because it is in the past that the faithfulness of God and the manifestations of his power stand recorded.

What is recovered when the heritage is recovered is not information. It is the confidence to meet the conditions Christ laid down. Two or three gathered in his Name; the spirit, the soul and the body gathered in his Name; and there, on his own word, he is. Every knee in heaven and earth and under the earth bends at that Name, and the man who bears its inscription is spared, as Noah was spared, from the destruction of the world. The Name is the entrance into the divine triad, the weapon against every imagination that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and the one thing in the universe to which no other authority is superior.

Therefore seek the mercies of God at all cost, and stop at nothing until you have secured the grace by which to live. Noah found grace; it did not find him. The Name is not withheld from any man who will call upon it and keep calling, and the promise attached to it has never once been amended: there am I in the midst of them.