My mother wanted to honour the glory and romance of Cleopatra and Mark Antony by naming her second son, Antony. It lasted all of a week. Apparently, the local Postmaster of the small Post Office in our small village phoned my father and informed him that his wife had misspelled his son’s name. My father thanked him as he (as the story goes), crammed the missing “h” into the name on the birth certificate. It seemed little consolation to my mother that no one ever called him Anthony, anyway.
There was to be no mistake or confusion in the naming of Jesus. He was named for his mission. For it was the angel who commanded Joseph: “Mary will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).
“Jesus” is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew “Joshua,” which means: “Yahweh is salvation.”
Jesus is indeed “Saviour” of his people.
Jesus left us in no doubt as to why he, The Eternal God, entered time and space: He said, “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). Mankind, lost in its sins, needed a Saviour to deliver it from the power, guilt, and contamination of sin.
All of us, in our personal attempts to satisfy our passions, ran headlong into the chains of sin. It is a sad irony that now that we are saved, we give little thought to that eternal prison to which we had set our course. Thus, we must lift our heads and hearts and cry:
Hallelujah! What a Saviour!
“For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:9).
John Staiger
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