Our Savior's Names

We seem to have many names that Jesus goes by in the English language. Some of them our fairly obvious, when we refer to Jesus part of the Godhead as the Son, we mean He was born of God the Father on Earth. But some of them come from words from other languages that we have adopted into our church and we might not understand exactly what they mean.

Here's a fairly straight forward one, Jesus. That's a name, right? There are people with that name in today's world. Jesus actually means "Savior." Matthew 1:21 says, "₂₁She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins." Two verses later we come across another name, Immanuel, meaning, "God With Us." ""The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel"--which means, "God with us.""

How about Lord, of course we can assume this comes from the more popular term as referring to a master, or some sort of royalty, but it also means, "I Am." It also refers to grace and forgiveness. Luke 2:11 states, "Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord." Exodus 3 talks a lot about the name of the Lord. Verse 14 God instructs Moses on how to introduce Him, "₁₄God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.' "" The Jews believed that God's name was too holy to speak so they coined the names Jehovah and Javeh. But both of these roughly translate into "I Am." Jesus Christ, often says, "I am" to emphasize who He is throughout His ministry.

The last two are Christ, which is Greek and Messiah, which is Hebrew. Both of these terms mean, "Anointed One." John1:41, "The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, "We have found the Messiah" (that is, the Christ)." Acts chapter 10 states, "₃₇You know what has happened throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached-- ₃₈how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him."

Jesus name differs from language to language, but these are the names we often come across in our studies. As you can see, each name confirms that Jesus is in fact God and also glorify Him! What a privelage to know you may have been praising him without even knowing it.