God Has a Name

1.Comer draws out the significance of the divine name "Yahweh" — often rendered LORD in our English Bibles — and explains that it comes from the Hebrew verb "to be." How does knowing that God's name is essentially "I AM" change how you think about who he is?

1.Comer notes that "compassionate" is the first adjective God uses to describe himself in Exodus 34:6. Why do you think God leads with compassion? What does that sequencing tell us about God's priorities in how he wants to be known?

1.How would you define "grace" in your own words before engaging with Comer's chapter? After reading, how has your definition expanded or shifted?

1.Comer points out that the Hebrew phrase often translated "slow to anger" is literally "long of nose" — a vivid idiom for someone who doesn't flare up easily. What does that earthy, embodied image communicate about God's temperament that a more abstract phrase might miss?

1.Comer spends time unpacking the Hebrew word hesed, which appears in Exodus 34:6. He suggests no single English word captures it fully — it combines love, loyalty, and covenant faithfulness. What gets lost when we flatten this into a single word like "love"?

1.Comer pairs "abounding in love" with "abounding in faithfulness" — the Hebrew word here is emet, meaning truth, reliability, and constancy. Why do love and faithfulness need each other? What would God's love look like without his faithfulness to back it up?

1.Exodus 34:7 says God maintains love to "thousands" — meaning thousands of generations — while visiting iniquity to "the third and fourth generation." Comer draws attention to the asymmetry here. What does it tell us about God that his love dramatically outpaces his judgment in scope?

1.Comer draws attention to the three distinct Hebrew words in Exodus 34:7 — often translated wickedness, rebellion, and sin — arguing that together they cover every category of moral failure. Why do you think God uses three words rather than one? What does that exhaustive list tell us about the scope of his forgiveness?

1.After a string of grace-saturated attributes, Exodus 34:7 closes with "yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished." Many readers find this jarring. How does Comer frame this attribute — is it a contradiction of the earlier ones, or is it consistent with them?

1.Comer returns to his opening thesis: what you believe about God shapes who you become. After working through Exodus 34:6–7, has your picture of God changed in any significant way? If so, how?

1.Comer's central claim is that wrong ideas about God — even partially wrong ideas — quietly deform us, and that accurate ideas about God have the power to transform us. Looking back over the entire book, which wrong idea about God did you most need to have corrected? What was the source of that distortion?