Tell me if the apostle Peter's words don't describe exactly what we're watching unfold today.
"But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies… In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated stories." — 2 Peter 2:1–3
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. "That could apply to practically any Christian denomination." And you're not wrong. But we're focusing here on the Watchtower Society — the Organization of Jehovah's Witnesses — and here's why: out of every church and religious organization in Christendom, they are the ones who have placed the name of God front and center. They've built their entire identity around it.
Most churches never use the divine name. Few Bible translations even include it — despite the fact that it appears in the Hebrew Scriptures over six thousand times. We'll get into that more as this series continues. But today, the point is this: just as Peter warned, millions of loyal, obedient Jehovah's Witnesses have followed the unscriptural conduct of their leaders — and in doing so, they have brought "the way of truth into disrepute."
And how have they done that? More than anything else — through shunning.
If you choose to leave the Organization — even if you never say a single negative word about the Watchtower Society — you will be shunned. A child. A brother or sister. Your elderly parents. The moment they officially withdraw, they are cut off. And it doesn't stop there. When a whole family leaves, their children — their teenagers, their young kids — are effectively shunned too. Cut off from every friend they've ever known. Every playmate. Overnight.
That is not discipline. That is not love. That is cruelty. It is inhumane. And it is the direct result of twisting the word of God to serve the goals of a cult.
But here's the devastating consequence that I don't think gets talked about enough.
By clinging so tightly to the name Jehovah — while acting in ways that are the opposite of what that name represents — this organization has made itself synonymous with that divine name in the minds of millions of people. So now, when someone hears the word Jehovah, they recoil. They feel disdain. Disgust. Not reverence.
Jehovah’s Witnesses set out to exalt that name. Instead, they have heaped reproach upon the very God they claim to honor.
If you're someone who has left the Organization — if you walked away because you were sickened by what you saw — I want to speak directly to you for a moment.
You may have reached a point where you don't even want to use the name Jehovah anymore. I understand that. Maybe you've heard that the name itself is of demonic origin. It isn't. Maybe you've been told it's just an invented word. It isn't. Maybe you prefer Yahweh, or Yahveh, or Yehovah — I'll explain my own preference for Yehovah later in this series, and we'll walk through the variations in spelling and pronunciation across languages. But none of that is the deciding issue here. Again, we’ll get into it in a future video.
There is another group however who say: "I don't use the name at all. I'm a child of God. I call Him Father — or Abba." I can respect that. And it's true — a child doesn't usually address their parent by name. But that doesn't mean a son or daughter doesn't know their father's name. And it certainly doesn't mean they would stand by while someone drags that name through the mud.
So let me ask you something. Have you ever stopped to wonder why almost every Bible translation today replaces the divine name YHWH with the generic title LORD? Why would anyone remove the name of God from the very book given to us so that we could know Him?
Think about what that does. When you take out the name and replace it with God or Lord, you depersonalize Him. You push Him further away. You make Him a force, a concept — not a Father.
But Jesus came to close that distance. He came so that we could move from being orphans — not knowing our Father — to being children again, welcomed back into relationship with Him.
So ask yourself: who doesn't want us to know God? Who benefits when that connection is severed? You already know the answer. I don't need to say it. But understand this — he is cunning. His most effective move isn't a frontal attack. It's a sideways one. He gets you to adopt his thinking and convinces you it was your idea all along.
Jehovah is demonic. No.
It's just an invented name. No.
It's not even the right pronunciation. Beside the point.
"Father" is good enough. Is it?
Because "Father" tells me about your relationship with God. It says nothing about who He is. And our purpose — yours and mine — is to make His name known. To clear it of the reproach heaped upon it. Not just by the Watchtower Society, but by every church that has gone to war, exploited the vulnerable, and committed every manner of sin while claiming to serve the God of the Bible.
When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, look at how He began:
"Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…"— Matthew 6:9
He acknowledged the relationship — Our Father. But then, immediately, before any personal request, before anything else: hallowed be your name. To hallow something means to make it holy. To sanctify it. The very first priority expressed in that model prayer is a desire to see God's name treated as holy. And our role — if we are truly His children — is to be part of that. To bear His name before the world and demonstrate, through how we live, what it means to belong to Him.
Is this important to Yehovah? Let Him answer that.
“God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: Yahweh, the God of your ancestors—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you. This is my eternal name, my name to remember for all generations.” (Exodus 3:15 New Living Translation)
“I AM LORD JEHOVAH, and this is My Name, and my honor I shall not give to another, neither my praise to carved things.” (Isaiah 42:8 Peshitta Holy Bible)
“And I have sanctified My great name, That is profaned among nations, That ye have polluted in your midst, And known have the nations that I am Jehovah, An affirmation of the Lord Jehovah, In My being sanctified in you before your eyes.” (Ezekiel 36:23 Young’s Literal Translation)
This is not ambiguous. Yehovah views His name as foundational. And the reason matters: in Hebrew, a name isn't just a label. It carries meaning. It carries identity.
Here’s what we have to understand about the language that God uses to reveal his name to us. Hebrew—specifically, ancient Hebrew—did not have tense in the way English or Greek does. English verb tenses are primarily anchored to time — past, present, future. Biblical Hebrew verbs are primarily anchored to aspect — that is, whether an action is complete or incomplete, regardless of when it occurs.
The two main Hebrew verb forms are:
The Perfect tense which describes a completed action. It is often translated as past tense in English, but it doesn't have to be. It simply means the action is viewed as a whole, finished unit.
The Imperfect tense which describes an incomplete or ongoing action. It is often translated as future or present, but again, time is not the determining factor.
The divine name — Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh in Exodus 3:14 — uses the imperfect form of the verb hayah (to be). Because it is imperfect aspect, it resists being pinned to any single point in time. It does not mean only "I am," or only "I was," or only "I will be." It encompasses all of it simultaneously.
And this circles back directly to the divine name YHWH itself, which most scholars understand as a third-person form of the same verb — meaning roughly "He causes to become" or "He who is, was, and will be." The name is essentially a grammatical statement about the nature of God's existence: timeless, continuous, self-sustaining.
This is one reason the divine name is so irreplaceable. Substituting "Lord" or "God" loses all of that. Those are titles. YHWH is a statement about the nature of being itself — and Hebrew grammar is precisely what makes that possible.
So don't fall into the trap of treating His name as optional. Don't let the misconduct of an organization — or centuries of bad translations — rob you of something that God Himself called eternal.
His name matters. It always has.
Stay with us. In the next video in this series, we're going to dig deeper into where the name comes from, why it was removed, and what the best evidence tells us about how it was pronounced. Thank you for watching — and for your continued support of this channel.