Friends, today I continued a conversation with God I've been having for some time which I believe will become a book He and I will write together. It's a book on making disciples under the leadership of the Holy Spirit. I hope to paint a vivid picture of Christ's disciple-building ministry as an essentially Spirit-driven affair. Chapter 1 is all about identity and the significance of the gospel records giving us the names of the 12 disciples (Mark 3:16-19). I hope to discuss some of treasures buried in the biblical concept of naming and its significance for the discipleship as well as disciple building. I hope to also paint a picture of the ways in which the names of the disciples defined their greatest points of struggle and redemption. But to get there, I found I had to dig back into the Genesis account. Here is what I've come up with so far. If this topic is of interest to you, I'd value your feedback and ideas!
It begins with identity, with calling: calling by name.
Naming is no small
affair. Naming was one of the first jobs given to the first human: “Now look
here Adam. I’ve made all these animals. Now I want you to name them.” You might say that naming was an act of
co-creation with God. After all, in Genesis we see that after forming the
animals from dust, God brought them to the man “to see what he would name them;
and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (Gen. 2:19).
God, who formed man from dust and breathed the life of His own Spirit into the
man’s nostrils is waiting on the edge of his seat to see what identity this
dust-and-spirit man would assign to each of his creatures. So Adam, resting in
the creative power of God’s life reverberating through his bones calls out each
creature: giraffe, vole, hippopotamus, egret.
This act of will, this
assigning of identity became a prophetic act. As Adam’s mind comingled naturally
with the mind of His Father[1],
out came a name. And the name stuck. God honored the identity given by the man
and caused that identity to weave itself in and through the individual stories
of each creature. Eugene Peterson eloquently writes:
The first use of language
in the Garden is naming animals and birds... Naming identifies. Naming, when
done well, captures something of the essence of the life so named.[2]
This is truer still of
the names we give each other: Helen, Jason, Ichabod, Harold. Names are powerful
things. Names are relational. Names tie our journey to another person’s
destiny. That’s why so many names in the bible relate to the mother’s story or
the circumstances surrounding the child’s birth. Consider for instance, the
ways in which the children of Leah are named in relationship to her ongoing
quest to win the affection of her husband. Reuben:
the Lord has seen my misery. Simeon: the Lord heard that I am not loved. Levi:
my husband will become attached to me.[3]
The first words spoken
about a human by another human are relational. They are words of intimate
recognition and delight:
“This is now bone of my
bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called
‘woman,’
for she was taken out of
man” (Gen 2:23)
Man’s first recorded
words are poetry, “our basic intimacy language—the language used by gurgling
and cooing infants, by lovers, by pray-ers.”[4]
In this exultant love sonnet, Adam finds himself in the emerging story of his
partner. He identifies her in relational terms. He first recognizes her
according to her position toward himself: she has his bones. Eve Bonewoman, the
perfect complement to Adam Dustman.
She is ezer k’negdo,
the beautiful “opposite-yet-alongside helper-and-deliverer.” She is a “life-saver!”[5]
She completes the man in fully expressing the image of God through intimate
relationship. Sex and companionship in reciprocal unity of will and purpose become
the enduring word picture of God’s relationship with His people.
In chapter 3, Adam
assigns his wife her proper name on the heels of God’s prophetic word about
their destiny after the fall. She would be Eve, “because she would become the
mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:20). It is a present designation pointing to
a future reality. Eve would become the mother of the living, but the way in which
she would actualize her name would be a grand milieu of pain and redemption.
A Name is a Battleground
Adam Dustman was a
gardener, a master groundskeeper. In the context of unashamed union with his
Father, he could tend any garden with ease. A seed fallen to the ground would
spring from the earth in a tender shoot, impossibly green and delighted to grow
as it breathed in the life of God swimming through all creation. Adam knew when
to water, prune, harvest, and replant. Large firm tomatoes jostled each other as
they ripened on the vine, eager to be plucked and enjoyed for their sweetness.
Crisp apples virtually rained down from overhead, wanting nothing but to
nourish God’s creatures and recreate themselves in a hundred new plants. Adam
was good at this. But one day, God’s groundskeeper bit into the wrong fruit
with a disobedient heart massaged by complacency. Connection ended. Shame
entered the world. When it did, his assigned name (Adam: “Red”, as in “Man of
the Red Earth”) became a battleground. Now the earth from which he was formed
and which had so eagerly yielded itself to him became an adversary and an
obstacle to him. Just as his heart hardened against God in disobedience, the
soil itself hardened against the man. “By the sweat of your brow you will eat
your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for
dust you are and to dust you will return.”[6]
For her part, the woman
ate the fruit hungering to be something she believed she could never be: like God, knowing good and evil.[7]
Yet Eve was like God in the sense of
bearing his image. Yet in striving to achieve through works what was
essentially hers by grace, connection with both God and her husband was lost.
Now striving and pain would become the battlefield of her identity. “With
painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your
husband, and he will rule over you.”[8]
Yet God would redeem
their names. The woman would indeed become the “mother of all the living”. And
though she would bear the pain of childbirth, we see a glimpse of God’s
redemptive purposes in her joyful surprise at the birth of Cain: “With the help
of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” In this exclamation she properly
ascribes to God his role in the creative act and she rejoices in the miracle of
life being brought fort from life. Ultimately one of her own decedents would
require to help of the Lord to “bring forth” the Man, who would redeem all things including her own sin. Adam
too would find a reminder of his original earthy identity in every bite of food
his family enjoyed. The image of God within him was marred but not lost
entirely. One day, a descendant of Adam named “The Last Adam” would come as an
imperishable seed of God’s final redemption, planted in Golgotha’s red earth in
a newly-dug tomb surrounded by (of all things) a garden,[9]
and springing defiantly to life after 3 days in order to bear life-giving
“spirit fruit”. As Paul says, “’The first man Adam became a living being;’ the
last Adam, a life-giving spirit.”[10]
Names are God’s idea. Names are beautiful. Names carve out the spaces in which
our identities come under the greatest attack and find the greatest
restoration.
[1] I use Father
instead of creator in keeping with Adam’s designation as “the son of God” in the
geneology of Christ (Lk 3:38)
[2] Eugene H.
Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand
Places. (Grand Rapids: Eerdsman, 2005), p. 80.
[3] Gen 29:31-35
[4] Peterson, p.
81.
[5] http://www.ransomedheart.com/daily-reading/ezer-kenegdo
[6] Gen 3:19
[7] Gen 3:6
[8] Gen 3:16
[9] John 19:41
[10] 1 Cor 15:45
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