Meditation: The Words of Jesus, No. 2
"Get thee behind me, Satan."
31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. 32 He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
Mark 8:31-33, NIV
Until Moses stood in the revealed presence of the Lord on Sinai, the Israelites only knew the Lord by his Ugaritic nomer “El.”
And El had been lost into the Canaanite pantheon, though they believed him to be the greatest of the gods. On Sinai, El refused his given name and named himself forever: YHWH. We would say Yahweh, or Jehovah, both transliterations of the original pronunciation that has been lost for centuries.
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