Name of God - El Olam: The Everlasting God
El Olam: The Everlasting God
Daily Verse: “Abraham planted a tamarisk tree at Beersheba, and there he called on the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God.”
☆ Genesis 21:33 NASB
Let's Talk About It: As I studied out this name of God, I was amazed at some of the meanings of olam (oh-lawm) which is the Hebrew word used for everlasting in this verse. While it can mean everlasting, it also means concealed, or time out of mind. It can also mean frequentatively which is an adverb of the verb frequentative. This verb means a repeated action. I believe this is why God first refers to Himself as I am that I am. He always was, and always is, and always will be. He is frequentative and eternal. He is the everlasting God because there is no other but Him. He stands outside of time itself. In fact, time is merely a construct of this earth to help us gauge moments of this life. It doesn’t exist outside of this world.
If you have been able to keep up with me so far (and no, I don’t mean to seemingly make your brain explode), then you understand that God, since the beginning, has tried to express Himself in the fullest sense, however we simply do not have the vocabulary and/or means to be able to embody all that He is with one name. This is one reason why we have been studying His names. Without doing so, we simply don’t have a complete picture.
It would be like trying to put a puzzle together but missing half the pieces. We might be able to figure out what we’re looking at if it’s something we’ve encountered before, but what if it isn’t? What if it’s something we have never encountered and couldn’t imagine or picture because it dwells outside of this world we find ourselves in?
Back to this verse, we see that Abraham has just finished making a covenant with Abimelech and has sworn an oath to him three times. He is memorializing this covenant with the planting of a tree. If you’ve been following along with studying God’s names from the beginning, you’ll remember I told you that there are many steps in the cutting of a covenant. The last step was usually to build a memorial. Here Abraham demonstrates this. It is amazing to me that He calls this memorial El Olam as it makes it clear that Abraham attributes his ability to even make this covenant because of God and the blessing He has promised him.
God clearly provided Abraham some sort of revelation of what was to come if He knew to attribute everything to God. God must have given Him the full picture; And so He does for us as well. Many of us receive incredible words of revelation when we are called, sometimes so much so that we don’t even believe it, attributing it to our own imagination. However, God sees us for who we truly are…who we are in Him. What’s more, when He cut the covenant with Abraham, He had each of us in mind. How’s that for mind blowing?! - Crystal