Is He Your Adonai?

Excerpt from To Know Him by Name: Discover the Power and Promises Revealed in the Hebrew Names and Titles of God, by Rabbi Kirt Schneider

Knowing God as Yahweh Jireh, the Lord our Provider, or Yahweh Shalom, the Lord our Peace, requires us to trust Him to provide for us or give us peace. The burden is on Him to meet our needs. But when we call on God as Adonai, the responsibility shifts to us and our need to respond to Him in loving surrender and obedience.

Adonai is found more than 400 times in the Hebrew Bible. When we call on God as Adonai, it means we look to Him not only as the One who can bless us but also as our master. To know God as Adonai is to understand that He is the rightful owner of our lives and our responsibility is to do His will.

Moses understood this. When he called on God as Adonai, Moses took the posture of a servant (Exodus 4:10). Even though Moses felt unqualified to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, he understood that he was responsible to submit to what Adonai told him to do.

Today, many believers love experiencing God’s presence, but they aren’t willing to truly submit to Him as Adonai. They love how they feel as they’re worshiping God, but as soon as they leave the church building, they do whatever they want, and Adonai is pushed to the side.

They think of God as a means to get what they want instead of making Him their Master and Lord. It’s as if they think He exists to serve them when in reality the opposite is true.

Many churches today preach the concept of love without the understanding of sin and repentance. To know that we sin and fall short of the glory of God means knowing that we must come to Christ fully, ready to surrender our life to follow Him.

Paul said, “You are not your own…you have been bought for a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20 NASB). We don’t belong to ourselves. Yeshua, the visible manifestation of the invisible Adonai, purchased us for Himself, not “with corruptible things…but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18–19 NKJV). We were bought with the shed blood of Yeshua and freed from the power of sin and death. And now, as Jude says, Yeshua is “our only Master and Lord” (Jude 1:4 NASB).

The Maker of the Universe wants us to relate to Him as Adonai. He wants to bring us to a place of submission because surrender and obedience releases His peace and blessing into our lives.

There is more to following Yeshua than saying the sinner’s prayer. We must surrender our lives to Him. Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter” (Matthew 7:21 NASB). Elsewhere Yeshua said, “If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me” (John 12:26 NASB). There are Christians who think they are free to do whatever they please and refuse to be submissive and obedient to God. But Yeshua said, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15 NASB), meaning our obedience to Him actually reveals our love for Him. If Messiah Yeshua is truly our Adonai, we will respond to Him in obedience.

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