Named By God And Renamed Every Morning

There is a scene in Judges that is one of the strangest introductions in the whole Bible, and almost everybody misses why it is strange.

A man is hiding. Not standing, not fighting, not praying. Hiding, in a winepress, threshing wheat, which is the wrong place to thresh wheat and everybody in that culture knew it. You thresh on a hilltop where the wind can carry the chaff away. You go into a sunken stone pit to do it only if you are terrified of being seen.

So the picture is a frightened man doing an awkward job badly in a hole in the ground.

And the angel of the LORD turns up and says this.

Not, come out of there. Not, why are you afraid. He says: the LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valor.

To a man in a pit. In the middle of the hiding.

Now picture the reader this is for. He goes in every morning to a man who has a name for him, and the name is not valor. The name is arrives late, or does not think ahead, or is not really a details person, or the one who just does not get it. It is delivered in small pieces, daily, and it has been delivered for four years.

And here is the arithmetic. God has named him. He knows this in theory. He has heard sermons about it. But the naming from heaven arrives occasionally, at church, in a quiet moment, and the naming at work arrives five days a week at nine fifteen and again after lunch.

Volume is not the same as truth, but volume is what a mind absorbs. And after four years the loud one wins, not because it is right, but because it never misses a day.

The greeting described what was not visible

Read the sentence carefully, because the tense in it does the work.

And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him, and said unto him, The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valour. (Judges 6:12, King James Version)

Thou mighty man of valor. Present tense. Not a promise about later, once he had climbed out of the pit and done something impressive.

He was called it while hiding. The name was not a prediction and it was not flattery. It was a description issued from a vantage point that could see something the winepress could not.

You are being addressed by a name that does not depend on this morning's evidence, and Judges 6 has the greeting arriving while the man is still down in the pit (Judges 6:12), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old greeting audible over a name repeated daily by somebody in an office.

And notice what the man says back, because it is important that he argues. He points out his family is poor and he is the least in his father's house. He does not receive it graciously. He disputes it.

The naming does not get withdrawn.

You have argued with this and it has not been taken back, and Judges 6:12 stands unretracted through a whole conversation of the man contradicting it, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps saying a true thing to somebody who is not yet able to agree with it.

A new name is a stated plan

There is a line in Isaiah about naming that is worth putting beside this, because it treats a name as a thing that gets replaced rather than merely improved.

And the Gentiles shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy glory: and thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the LORD shall name. (Isaiah 62:2)

Which the mouth of the LORD shall name. That clause is doing something specific. It is identifying the authority. Not the neighbors, not the market, not the empire, and by extension not a line manager.

There is one mouth named in that sentence and it does not belong to anybody in a building with a car in the lot outside.

You have a naming authority that has been specified, and Isaiah 62 says the mouth of the LORD shall name it rather than leaving the question open (Isaiah 62:2), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that specification hold at nine fifteen on a Monday.

And there is a promise in Revelation about a name that is even more private than that.

To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. (Revelation 2:17)

Which no man knoweth. A name that no colleague, no manager and no reviewer has any access to at all. It is given directly and it is held privately.

You have a name that no man knows and that no man is therefore able to revise, and Revelation 2 puts it on a white stone given personally (Revelation 2:17), and the Spirit of God is the one who lets somebody carry that into a building where a different name is used about them all day.

What this is not

Let me draw a line, because this could be misheard.

This is not saying every criticism is a false naming. Some feedback is accurate and useful, and a person can be genuinely late and also not be the thing four years of remarks have made him into. The two are different questions.

It is also not telling anybody to correct him, or to declare a new name in a meeting, or to explain any of this to a manager. That would go badly and this article knows it.

And it is not promising the naming at work stops. It probably does not. What is on the table is which naming a man stands in while it continues.

And plainly: if that name has become the only thing you believe about yourself, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has begun wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a workplace. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. Asking is not weakness and never was.

You are not being asked to argue with anybody, and Judges 6 has the man contradicting the greeting without the greeting ever being adjusted (Judges 6:12), and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a naming steady while a person catches up with it slowly.