The Names of God: Jehovah-Nisi
Flags represent the spirit and identity of countries and serve as national rallying points both in peace and wartime. In the film The Patriot (2000), Mel Gibson’s character hoists a flag in the thick of battle to inspire his fellow soldiers to rush forward behind him. During the war of 1812, American lawyer and poet Francis Scott Keys was undertaking a prisoner exchange aboard a British ship when the British began attacking Fort McHenry, barraging it into the night with explosives. The next morning, the American flag still flying, Keys was inspired to pen the poem that would become his country’s anthem, centered on its flag as an image of the nation’s durability in conflict.
Christians have an otherworldly citizenship that transcends politics or nationality. They are adherents of a “heavenly country” (Heb 11:16). Their heavenly citizenship is from God who “is not ashamed to be called their God.” The Israelites of old were taught to trust God to fight their battles, meaning, whether they won or lost, they could trust God with the outcome (Exo 14:14). In a decisive victory over the persistently hostile Amalekites, a name for God is revealed to Moses: the-Lord-is-my-banner” (Jehovah-Nisi, Exo 17:15). This name was a token, as Moses put it, “that the LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” (Ex 17:16)
The names of God stand for his unchanging person and character. Believers under the New Covenant are called to “fight the good fight of faith”, with the caveat that “the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh” and “our battles are not against flesh and blood,” (1 Tim 6:12; 2 Cor 10:4; Eph 6:12). He is the ensign around which we rally, the guarantee and embodiment of our stability, courage, and hope.
The implications for our earthly struggles are far reaching. God’s name “The Lord is my banner,” means that God will be triumphant in his unrelenting opposition to evil. Evil will ultimately be defeated because God is the victorious warrior. Christians have long adopted the Cross as their symbol. The early church was accustomed to thinking of Christ’s work on the cross primarily in terms of his triumph over the forces of darkness. “It is finished” was his victory cry. Because the Lord is our banner, Christians can have confidence and courage during this present evil age.
While we can have confidence in the Lord, the accompanying moral accountability is to examine ourselves that our loyalty is to him and not to the reasoning of the world, the desires of our flesh, or the deceptions of the devil. The world will offer us various galvanizing points, whether they be political parties, ideologies, nations, technologies, philosophies, or identities. Our challenge is to keep our eyes fixed on the Cross, that is, on the-Lord-is-my-banner.
It is a truism that we live in a polarized time, but believers in the-Lord-is-my-banner are able to rise above the fray. In the tumult of the peoples, we often find a mix of sympathetic, human concerns and distorted moral and spiritual reasonings. Christians are in danger of either dismissing valid concerns or rallying behind worldly causes. People on opposite sides of contemporary issues will warn us about being “on the wrong side of history”. The reality is that a loyalty to God and his cause is the only, singular way to be on the “right side of history”, on the side toward which history is inevitably moving: The second coming of Christ and the final judgment. Christ’s cause must be our preoccupying concern and the source of our assurance as we move through a spiritually treacherous environment. By word and example, in every way, especially through the ordinary means of Word and Sacrament, we must be making disciples from all nations (Matt 28:19-20). The reason so many churches have the Cross in a prominent place in their sanctuaries is that Calvary must be the hilltop from which we survey the battlefield. The Cross as the saving work of our Redeemer is “towering o’er the wrecks of time”. We must be about making disciples of the Lord-is-my-banner, the one who is with us unto the end of the age.
