In a previous post I explored the third commandment to see what it means to bear the name of God and how it applies to us.
We live in a moment that needs to understand this—to name yourself is an act of rebellion against God, I argued. It certainly can be an act of rebellion against your parents.
There are a couple of other angles I’d like to push this in to help us see that this applies to most areas of life.
Firstly, when God reveals himself, he reveals his name. The most obvious example is Exodus 34. Moses has asked to see God’s glory (Exodus 33), and God says his goodness will pass before him and he will declare his name, and will see God’s back. Which is wild, and a sign that it’s Jesus who walks in front of Moses, but that’s another story.
Yahweh walks in front of Moses and says that he is Yahweh, Yahweh, a God of compassion and favour, slow to anger and abounding in grace and truth, showing grace to thousands, forgiving sin, but who will not clear the guilty.
That’s his name. It’s who he is. To some very limited degree, our names are who we are too. Have you noticed how often the character in the Bible’s name describes them deeply in some way? Think of how Naomi wants to change her name to Mara (bitter) when her life has crashed around her ears. The narrator has much compassion for her, but steadfastly calls her Naomi, because she is pleasant. Noah is the man of rest (noakh & nuakh). Adam comes from the ground (adamah). Elijah’s job is to declare his own name, ‘My God is Yahweh,’ against Baal, and Elishah’s to declare ‘My God saves.’ Slam their names together and you have Joshua, ‘Yahweh saves,’ which is Jesus’ name in Hebrew.
You get the point; I could go on at length. I think we give this too little credence in the modern world because it seems like a magical relic from the past. When my parents named me Timothy Mark, did they know that being called ‘The warrior who honours God’ would be meaningful to me? Of course not, but in the providence and kindness of God it is.
Of course, there are cases I can’t speak to (sorry Philips of the world, you’re saddled with ‘lover of horses’) and I think you could get carried away. My point is that everything bears meaning, and that includes your name.
Adam’s first task in the world, commissioned to take dominion and fill it, is to name the animals (Genesis 2). Why is this? We’re told it’s to search for a suitable helper and none of the animals are, but that might be missing the way in which naming implies mastery over something.
We could get tangled here. Adam does name Eve, twice actually: first Woman (ishah) because she came from man (ish) and then later Eve (life). Should we judge that Adam is her ‘master’ because of this? No, though he is her husband, and I’ve argued elsewhere that Adam’s naming of Eve is an act of repentance on his part for his failure. He believes the promise.
There is something to it though, naming involves mastery. For other humans we’re talking about the sort of authority parents naturally have over children rather than anything greater than that. For other things though, especially abstract things, it’s an important concept.
This is the application I’m wanting to nudge towards: to solve a problem you need to name it. It almost doesn’t need to be said, but I’ve been in plenty of meetings in numerous contexts where you’re all talking around a problem without anyone coming out and saying what it is we’re trying to solve. When you do this what happens is you talk in circles a lot without coming up with viable solutions. It’s very possible to come up with ‘things’ that you can do, but if they solve the problem it’s by accident rather than design. You need to know what you’re solving to match a solution to it.
Even if we’re talking about the sorts of problems that don’t get solved—and lots of problems in church and Christian life are like those—then if you haven’t named it properly it’s difficult to come up with ways of being to mitigate or avoid that challenge.
This is especially obvious in abstract problems like cultural ones. It’s likely everyone involves sees the thing a little differently. They may be right or wrong, but usually more than one will be right and we need the sharing of what we see to form an accurate picture. You’ve got to get to the problem and name it. It loses a lot of power then. Everyone knows what you’re trying to do and everyone can look at solving it together.
It’s true in the smallest things in life. Say you’re out of sorts, when it’s an ignored phenomenon you can crash about and annoy your nearest and dearest with nary a care (for you, anyway). If you give it attention, you have to name it or be the worst kind of emotional ostrich: I’m grumpy. Which leads to the natural question as to ‘why?’
Perhaps, because we’re more like toddlers than we like to admit, you’re tired or hungry or need to see the sky. Or, perhaps, there’s a reason you’re grumpy. When that arises, the emotions don’t go away but you have gained a modicum of mastery over them and yourself because you’ve named it. You can then deal with them in a godly way.
This applies all over the place, much of it we do subconsciously, but I’ve noticed recently in my own life the way that difficult things are made more tractable by naming them accurately. Sometimes it takes a few goes, sometimes you name it wrongly or imprecisely to begin with, but we must name what we see. It’s what Adam was called to, it’s what Christ—the word of God—does to the world as he rules it with a rod of iron, and it’s what we are called to do in the parts of our lives we have authority for.
Photo by Austin Kirk on Unsplash
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nuakh 