In Jesse Duplantis’ book Heaven – Close Encounters of the God Kind he talks about being transported to heaven and hearing an angel say “you have an appointment with the Lord God Jehovah”. The purpose of this meeting was to tell Jesse to tell people that Jesus is coming back. Naturally this story is received enthusiastically from his supporters, while it is met with skepticism from his critics. One critic makes an issue out of the angel’s use of the name “Jehovah”. He insists that no angel would use that name for God because the Hebrew name was Yhwh (“Yaweh”), and “Jehovah” is a 16th century invention.
This guys says that “Jehovah” was created by a scholar who took the consonants from Yaweh and the vowels from Adonai and “smooshed them together”, which is just a fancy theological expression meaning he combined them. His reasoning eludes me. He admits that we use the English form “Jehovah”, so why does he insist that angels know better and would never use that form? Angels are multilingual. They spoke to people in the Old Testament who spoke Hebrew. They spoke to the disciples and apostles in their tongues of either Aramaic or Greek. Why would they speak to an American man today in anything other than American English? And as he admits, “Jehovah” is the name we use for God.
The Hebrew name for Jesus is Yeshua (ישוע), but when the angel appeared to the two women at the tomb and said “I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified” (Mat. 28:5) he didn’t use the Hebrew (Yeshua) but the Greek (Iēsous). I suppose it’s possible that he used the Aramaic (Eashoa) and it was just translated into the Greek, but Hebrew was primarily used among those who were educated in the law rather than by the commoners so it’s not very likely that Yeshua was used. It certainly wasn’t stipulated anyway, as was the case in Mark 5:41 when Jesus spoke to the little girl in Aramaic or in John 1:38 where the Hebrew word rhabbi (rabbi) was translated.
Just for the record, “Yaweh” is also an Anglicization of Yhwh, just like Jehovah. In the video below you will hear that the possibilities for the original pronunciation of YHWH are numerous, and there’s no way of knowing for sure how it was pronounced. What we know for certain is that “Jehovah” is the most common name used today in the western world. If you’re going to take issue with Jesse Duplantis’ story you should do it on the basis of whether he described things that weren’t biblical. If he had said that the streets were silver or that the gates to the city were stucco then you could debunk what he said, but to make this the issue is just silly.
Did Jesse really go to heaven? I have no idea. I read through his book and although I have reservations about his story I’m going to withhold judgment on it. If I was a critic though, I think I would look for something a little more solid than the assumption that angels don’t speak modern English.
The critic then proceeds to take exception to the fact that Jesse uses similar wording to the Apostle Paul regarding (presumably) his trip to heaven. So let me get this straight. The evidence that Jesse’s story isn’t biblical is that he uses biblical wording when he tells the story? And that disproves his story HOW?
Obviously the skepticism from Jesse Duplantis’ critics is due more to his theology than it is to the details of his experience. He’s an adherent to the Word of Faith, and that’s what they really oppose. Any opportunity that they see to call him a false teacher, false prophet, or heretic they will seize upon simply because they don’t like what he teaches. But if you’re going to take issue with a doctrine you should stick to the issue of the doctrine itself. When you stray from that and make it into something personal to the point that you don’t even think through what you’re saying, you just end up hurting yourself.