My Name Is

As is Your name, O God,
So is Your praise to the ends of the earth;
Your right hand is full of righteousness. Psalm 48:10 English NASB (Hebrew Bible 48:11)

As is Your name – What is your name? Ah, but I am not asking about the appellation you received at birth. I am asking about the name that God gave you, the name that expresses your purpose and being in this world and the next. George MacDonald rightly suggests that the name God’s gives is our true identity.

Based on the words of Yeshua to the Church in Pergamum, recorded in Revelation 2:17b: “…I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it,” MacDonald writes:

“The giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the ‘Come, thou blessed’, spoken to the individual…The true name is the one which expresses the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man’s own symbol – his soul’s picture, in a word – the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is…It is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with his name upon it, for then first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completeness that determines the name: and God foresees that from the first because he made it so: but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what the word meant…Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. God’s name for the man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom He had in his thought when He began to make the child, and whom He kept in His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success – to say ‘In thee also I am well pleased’.”[1]

MacDonald continues this theme when he writes: “Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that of no one else. Hence he can worship God as no man else can worship Him…For each, God has a different response. With every man He has a secret – the secret of a new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter…There is a chamber also…in God Himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man – out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made – to reveal the secret things of the Father.”

My friend, John Adam, pointed me to this MacDonald insight. It brings me to tears. I don’t know my name. Perhaps you don’t either. I am a man who lives without an identity, a wanderer far from the home where I am known as myself. I am sure God knows my name but I have not grown to the place where He has revealed it to me. I have not yet become what He envisioned. I am not yet His thought of my fulfillment. And it grieves me beyond words. How I long to be known by the name only He knows! The tears are streaming from my face as I write these words. Now, at this moment, no one knows me—not even myself. I need my name, desperately! Then, and only then, will I know His name. Some days the “glass darkly” is just too much to bear.

Topical Index: name, George MacDonald, Revelation 2:17, Psalm 48:10

[1]George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, “The New Name,” p. 67 of the 1867 edition.