Why important?

Why is it important to know and use God’s personal name? -
Do you have a close relationship with anyone whose personal name you do not know? For people to whom God is nameless he is often merely an impersonal force, not a real person, not someone that they know and love and to whom they can speak from the heart in prayer. If they do pray, their prayers are merely a ritual, a formalistic repetition of memorized expressions.

True Christians have a commission from Jesus Christ to make disciples of people of all nations. When teaching these people, how would it be possible to identify the true God as different from the false gods of the nations? Only by using His personal name, as the Bible itself does.—Matt. 28:19, 20; 1 Cor. 8:5, 6.

Ex. 3:15: “God said . . . to Moses: ‘This is what you are to say to the sons of Israel, “Jehovah the God of your forefathers . . . has sent me to you.” This is my name to time indefinite, and this is the memorial of me to generation after generation.’”

Isa. 12:4: “Give thanks to Jehovah, you people! Call upon his name. Make known among the peoples his dealings. Make mention that his name is put on high.”

Ezek. 38:17, 23: “This is what the Sovereign Lord Jehovah has said, ‘ . . . And I shall certainly magnify myself and sanctify myself and make myself known before the eyes of many nations; and they will have to know that I am Jehovah.’”

Mal. 3:16: “Those in fear of Jehovah spoke with one another, each one with his companion, and Jehovah kept paying attention and listening. And a book of remembrance began to be written up before him for those in fear of Jehovah and for those thinking upon his name.”

John 17:26: “[Jesus prayed to his Father:] I have made your name known to them [his followers] and will make it known, in order that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in union with them.”

Acts 15:14: “Symeon has related thoroughly how God for the first time turned his attention to the nations to take out of them a people for his name.”

Although many Bible translations have removed the name of God, many translators deemed it inappropriate for God to be called by a personal name. Jehovah’s Witnesses both pronounce it and prefer using the New World Translation which restores the divine name more than 7,000 times. In ancient Hebrew manuscripts, the personal name of God (still seen in certain translations such as the original King James Version in Psalm 83:18) was originally written with four Hebrew consonants called the Tetragrammaton. While many did not translate it or use it because they felt that such was not showing proper reverence for the holiness of the name or because we do not know exactly how that name was originally pronounced, Jehovah’s Witnesses argue that scriptures like John 17:6 and 26 along with Joel 2:32 highlight the importance of God’s name and the fact that it was used by faithful Jews and even Christ himself. They also argue that not knowing the original pronunciation of God’s name should not stop people from using it, just as our not knowing the exact pronunciation of Jesus’s Hebrew name has not stopped modern Christians from using it.

Jehovah’s Witnesses do not claim to be the first to use the form “Jehovah,” acknowledging that some earlier renditions render the Tetragrammaton as “Yahweh.” However, the modern rendition best recognized is “Jehovah” as previously noted by William Tyndale, Bible scholar Joseph Bryant Rotherham, and translations like 1901′s American Standard Version.