By My Name Yahweh I Was Not Known

The Voice Behind Creation

Isaiah 48:12-16 — Who Is it? - Episode 4

There is a passage in Isaiah that most readers pass through without stopping. It does not announce itself as remarkable. But if you slow down and listen carefully to who is speaking, something extraordinary surfaces — a voice that claims to have made the universe, and then, in the same breath, admits it was sent.

The passage is Isaiah 48:12-16, and it opens with words that leave little room for interpretation:

"Listen to me, O Jacob, and Israel, whom I called. I am he; I am the first, and I am the last. My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens." — Isaiah 48:12-13

This is not the language of a prophet or an angel. This is the language of the Creator. The one speaking claims personal, direct responsibility for the existence of everything. And the title — "I am the first and I am the last" — is not a poetic flourish. It is a declaration of absolute, uncreated existence. The one who was there before creation.

Now here is where careful readers need to pause. That exact title appears again in the New Testament — not applied to the Father, but spoken by Jesus himself:

"Fear not, I am the first and the last." — Revelation 1:17

"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." — Revelation 22:13

Jesus is not borrowing the title as an honor given to Him. He is claiming it as His own — the same identity declared in Isaiah 48. The speaker in Isaiah and the speaker in Revelation must be the same person.

This matters enormously for how we read verses 14 and 15, where the same voice continues — summoning Israel, declaring purposes, describing historical events He has set in motion. The voice is consistent. The authority is unbroken.

Then we reach verse 16.

"Draw near to me, hear this: from the beginning I have not spoken in secret, from the time it came to be I have been there. And now the Adonai Yehovih has sent me, and His Spirit." — Isaiah 48:16

The Hebrew is unambiguous. The word translated "has sent me" — שְׁלָחַנִי (sh'lacháni) — means exactly that. He was sent. The one who laid the foundation of the earth, who called Himself the first and the last, now identifies Himself as the sent one.

But look carefully at who is doing the sending. The Hebrew title used here is Adonai Yehovih — a combination so deliberately constructed that the Masoretes gave it its own unique spelling to distinguish it from every other use of the divine name. This precise pairing — H136 and H3069 in Strong's numbering — appears consistently throughout the Hebrew scriptures as a reference to the Father himself, the sovereign, ultimate divine person. It is never used of a messenger or an agent.

This is not accidental. The sender is identified with a title that can only mean the Father. And the sent one — who just claimed to be the first and the last, the one who was there before creation — cannot be the Father, because the Father does not get sent. The distinction between these two persons is not implied or inferred in Isaiah 48:16 . It is lexicographically locked into the text by the specific title the Hebrew uses for the sender.

This is not an awkward editorial seam, and it is not a different speaker stepping in at verse 16. The Hebrew grammar carries the same first-person voice from verse 12 all the way through without interruption. What changes at verse 16 is not the speaker — it is the depth of the disclosure. The voice moves from cosmic declaration to personal revelation.

The one who was there before creation was also sent into history by the Father. Creator. Authorized agent. One person, holding both realities without contradiction. I wonder if Jesus had this passage in mind when He addressed His Father as "the only true God" and Himself as the one who was sent( John 17:3 ).

Verse 16 is not the problem in this passage. It is the revelation the whole passage was building toward.

Part 2 will follow that thread directly into the New Testament, where the significance of that sending — and the Spirit mentioned with it — becomes clearer than perhaps anywhere else in scripture.

The Sending and the Word

Isaiah 48:16, John 3:34- - Who Sent What?

At the end of Isaiah 48:16, after identifying Himself as the one sent by the Lord Yahweh, the speaker adds something easy to read past:

"And His Spirit."

Two words in English. Three in Hebrew. But they carry more weight than their size suggests, because they answer a question the sending naturally raises — sent to do what, exactly? And by what means?

Six centuries later, a man standing at the Jordan River gave the answer.

John the Baptist had spent his entire ministry inside the language of Isaiah. He had identified himself as Isaiah's "voice crying in the wilderness." He knew that scroll deeply. So when he described Jesus to the crowd around him, his words were not casual:

"For he whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure." — John 3:34

The structure of that sentence deserves careful attention. John does not say Jesus speaks God's words and also has the Spirit. He says Jesus speaks God's words because the Spirit is given without measure. The Greek word gar — translated "for" — makes the Spirit the reason for the words. The Spirit is the source. The words are what the Spirit produces when the Son speaks.

This is the mechanism Isaiah 48:16 had compressed into three Hebrew words — sent, and His Spirit. John recognized exactly what he was looking at. He had read the passage. Now he was watching it fulfilled.

But Jesus himself goes further. In John 6, after many followers had walked away from a hard teaching, He said something that reframed everything:

"The Spirit is the one who gives life; the flesh is of no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life." — John 6:63

This is not poetry. The Greek verb estin — "are" — is an identity statement. The words Jesus speaks do not merely carry the Spirit alongside them. They are spirit. They are life. When the Son speaks, the Father's own breath arrives in the form of words.

Peter understood this immediately. When Jesus asked whether the twelve also wanted to leave, Peter answered:

"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." — John 6:68

Not "you have the Spirit." Not "you have the power." The words. Peter had grasped the equation. To have the words of the Son was to have life itself. Jesus essentially said the same thing in John 6:54 with verse 63 as the interpretation.

Then in John 12, Jesus traces those words back to their ultimate origin:

"For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment — what to say and what to speak... What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me." — John 12:49-50

The chain is now complete. The Father issues the commandment. The Son speaks it into the world as words that are themselves spirit and life. The hearer receives not merely information — but the Father's own speech/spirit, arriving in the form of words that give eternal life.

Isaiah 48:16 is a seed containing all of this. The sent one. The accompanying Spirit. Six centuries before John stood at the river, before Jesus spoke in the synagogue, the structure was already there — waiting for the fullness of time to make it visible.

Isaiah saw the structure. John recognized it at the river. And Jesus confirmed it from the inside.

"One Name, Two Persons"

How the Son Inherited His Father's Name

When we say that Yahweh is one, we are right. When we say that the Son is Yahweh, we are also right. The difficulty is holding both statements at the same time without collapsing them into each other — or forcing a contradiction where none exists.

The resolution is not a philosophical workaround. It is a biblical category: inheritance.

A Name That Was Given

The letter to the Hebrews opens with one of the most precise statements about the Son in all of Scripture:

"Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath inherited a more excellent name than they." — Hebrews 1:4

The word inherited is doing enormous work here. An inheritance is not something you generate yourself. It is something bestowed — passed from one person to another by virtue of relationship and appointment. The Son did not claim the name Yahweh independently. He received it.

Paul makes the same point from a different angle:

"Wherefore also Yahweh highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above every name." — Philippians 2:9

Given. By the Father. To the Son.

And Yahweh himself said it plainly to Moses at the very threshold of this mystery:

"My name is in him." — Exodus 23:21

Not his name. My name. The Father is speaking. The name belongs to the Father by nature — and it dwells in the Son by the Father's own placement.

The Father Glorifies His Name Through the Son

In John 12, as the hour of the crucifixion approaches, Yeshua prays openly:

"Father, glorify thy name. There came therefore a voice out of heaven saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again." — John 12:28

The crowd heard thunder. Some heard an angel. What actually happened was the Father speaking — audibly, publicly — about His own name and what He was doing with it through the Son. It was a rare moment when the invisible Father made Himself heard in open air.

Days later, in the upper room the night before His death, Yeshua made the connection explicit:

"Holy Father, keep them in thy name which thou hast given me." — John 17:11

What the Father declared publicly in John 12, the Son confirmed intimately in John 17. The name belongs to the Father by nature. It was given to the Son by appointment.

What Inheritance Actually Means

Hebrews 1 frames the Son as heir of all things (v. 2). An heir is not the original owner — but he is the rightful possessor. The Father did not vacate the name when he gave it to the Son. Both hold it — one as source, one as recipient.

This is why the same name can appear in two relational directions throughout Scripture without confusion:

The patriarchs encountered the Son and called him Yahweh — correctly, because the name is genuinely his.

Moses is now being introduced to the Father as Yahweh — also correctly, because the name originated with him.

Exodus 6:3 is not saying the name was absent from the patriarchs' experience. It is saying the person of the Father — the original holder of the name — was the unknown quantity. They knew the heir. The Son had been present, active, and named — but the one who sent him, the origin of the name itself, had remained behind the veil. They had not yet met the one from whom the name was inherited.

A Distinction Without a Division

The Son is not a lesser Yahweh. Inheritance does not diminish — it transmits. When a father gives his name to his son, the son bears it fully and legitimately. The name is not halved; it is shared — with the father remaining the source and the son the appointed bearer.

One name. Two persons. One as origin, one as heir. That is the framework Scripture itself provides, and it is the framework that makes Exodus 6:3 not a contradiction but a revelation.