There is a verse in Ezekiel that should haunt the modern church. God is surveying a nation in collapse, cataloging its corruptions, and then he says this:

"And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it. But I found none." (Ezekiel 22:30)

Here is a contradiction I carried for years without ever stopping to resolve it.

Genesis 22 opens with four words: "God tested Abraham." Then James, in the New Testament, says this: "Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God,' for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one" (James 1:13). God tests. God never tempts. And I had a vague sense that those were two different things, so I filed it and moved on.

Our culture is obsessed with finding your why. There are bestsellers about it, TED talks about it, whiteboard sessions at work about it. Start with why, we're told, because the why is what survives when motivation runs out. And honestly, the instinct is right. A life without a why underneath it goes hollow fast.

What it means to call on the name of the Lord, and why one Hebrew word runs from Eden to the New Jerusalem

Where this started

I couldn't get past Genesis 10.

I was reading through the early chapters of Genesis and kept tripping over one phrase. "Then people began to call on the name of the LORD." "He built an altar there and called on the name of the LORD." Abraham did it. Isaac did it. It shows up in the Psalms, in the prophets, on the lips of Elijah, and then Peter and Paul pick it up and make it the definition of a saved person: "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."

I'd read past it for years. I assumed it meant something like praying hard when things get bad. This time I stopped and asked what the text was actually doing with it. And what I found is that the Hebrew word for name, shem, is one of the threads that ties the whole Bible together and lands on Jesus.

This is my attempt to lay that out so that the next time you read "call on the name of the LORD," you know what you're looking at.

Ask most Christians to draw the story of the Bible and they will draw a straight line. Creation on the left, the cross in the middle, the new creation on the right. There is truth in that line, because history is going somewhere and Scripture insists on it. But a straight line cannot explain why the Bible keeps repeating itself. It cannot explain why Abraham goes down into Egypt during a famine centuries before his descendants do, why the prophets describe Babylon as a second Egypt, why Matthew says of a toddler carried home from the Nile that "out of Egypt have I called my son" (Matthew 2:15). The Bible does not read like a line. It reads like a wheel that keeps turning, and the question every serious reader eventually asks is whether that wheel is going anywhere.

For years I have used the phrase “wrestling with God” the way most Christians use it. It described any hard season where I was struggling to figure out how to submit, how to change, how to bend my life toward God’s will. The wrestling was the searching, and submission was the finish line. I suspect that is how most of us use it.

Most people who grew up in or around the church think they already know what the Golden Rule means. Treat others the way you want to be treated. Simple. Fair. The kind of advice that fits just as well on a motivational poster as it does in a sermon.

But that reading skips something the rule quietly assumes: that you actually know who you are.

There comes a moment in every Christian’s life when someone sits across from you and shares a pain so deep that it shakes the room. A loss so brutal, a trauma so personal, or a betrayal so devastating that their heart can only land on one conclusion: “God did this to me.” When that happens, you feel the air get heavier. You feel their grief, their confusion, their anger and suddenly your own heart starts scanning for something helpful to say.

And that’s where most of us get it wrong.

Deep down, every person craves friendship that is safe, loyal, and enduring. We want to be known fully, and still loved deeply. This longing is not a weakness, it is part of the way God designed us. From Genesis to Revelation, God reveals Himself not only as King, Judge, or Creator, but also as Friend. His covenant with humanity was always meant to be relational at its core. When Jesus came, He fulfilled that desire by laying down His life and inviting us to be His friends.

To be clear: This friendship never replaces His holiness or His Lordship. He remains God and we remain His creatures; mere images of the true God; simply a breath from the one who is eternal. But it does mean that the Holy One of Israel stoops in love to call us not only servants but also companions.

The Bible tells one story from beginning to end: God’s pursuit of intimacy with His people. He never designed humanity for distance, ritual, or endless sacrifices. His plan was always direct fellowship where he would be walking with us, speaking with us, and being near to us. Yet sin fractured that design, and humanity chose to hide, to retreat, to set up intermediaries.

The remarkable thread of Scripture is that God never gave up. Again and again, He simplified the path back to Himself, making righteousness accessible even when people strayed. From Eden to Sinai, from the wilderness to Calvary, God consistently pointed to the day when all barriers would fall. And in Jesus, the true friend and Savior, that longing was fulfilled.

From the very beginning of time, God’s desire has been clear: He wants to dwell in deep relationship with His creation. The Bible is not simply a book of history, laws, or inspirational sayings but instead it is an amazing love story. At its heart, Scripture reveals a God who longs for covenant, who binds Himself to His people as a husband binds himself to his bride, and who endures heartbreak, betrayal, and rejection yet never ceases to love.

Covenant language saturates the pages of Scripture. Words like faithfulness, steadfast love, husband, bride, adultery, and marriage appear again and again because they reveal God’s heart. The covenant is not cold legalism but a sacred vow of intimacy and devotion. From Adam and Eve in the garden to Christ and His church, the Bible tells one unfolding story: God desires a marriage-like union with His people, one marked by love and righteousness.

Jesus fulfilled every word God ever spoke about Himself. God is righteous (Psalm 11:7), and so was Jesus. In His life, Jesus revealed not only what righteousness looked like in action, but also what it felt like when rooted in the heart. He didn’t just follow God’s commands—He embodied them.

Jesus calls us to live righteously, just as He did (Matthew 5:20; 1 John 2:6). If righteousness is treating others as you would want to be treated (Matthew 7:12), then many in the Old Testament attempted it through actions, but their hearts remained distant (Isaiah 29:13). Jesus came to expose that disconnect and to fulfill the law, not just in word, but in spirit (Matthew 5:17–18).

Imagine humanity as one vast aspen grove: hundreds of trunks above ground, yet a single living root beneath. From God’s vantage point, every life is woven into that root system. What one branch does inevitably feeds life —or poison—into the whole.