“May the LORD answer you in the day of trouble! May the name of the God of Jacob protect you!…May we shout for joy over your salvation, and in the name of our God set up our banners!…Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.” (Psalm 20:1–7, ESV)
The Importance of Names
We don’t think much about names these days. When choosing names for our children, we spend most of our time thinking about names that “sound good” or that we like. We think little about their meaning, attempting to apply the meaning to this child. We come up with a name we like and assign it.
Yet, in the Bible, a name was more than a name. A name was a description of someone or something. Typically, the name cut to the essence of their being. This is why our Bibles often have footnotes, explaining what the Hebrew names mean. It’s important to the story.
The Power of Naming
When we recognize the importance of giving something/someone a name, we must also recognize the authority and power that comes with the task. Throughout the Bible, naming something meant having authority over that thing.
See how this works with Adam and Eve. In Genesis 1 it says, “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” (Genesis 1:28, ESV). Then, in the next chapter we read, “Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.” (Genesis 2:19, ESV). Providing names for the animals was an act of having dominion over them.
We also see this with God in Genesis 1. Here is a repeated refrain at the beginning: “God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night…And God called the expanse Heaven…God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:5–10, ESV). As the Creator, he has the authority to provide names for what he created.
God Names Himself
This also brings us to an important recognition regarding the names of God. Herman Bavinck reminds us, “We do not name God; he names himself” (Reformed Dogmatics, 98). By trying to name God, we would be attempting to place ourselves in a position over God. Yet, He is the Creator and we are a creature. He is the only one with authority to name himself.
So, we turn to Him—and His Word—to find out what names He gives himself. We recognize that “God is what he calls himself and calls himself what he is” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 99). That means, when God teaches us His names, He is revealing himself to us accurately and more fully. We can learn a lot about our God by knowing and understanding the names He gives Himself. That’s why we’ll be taking the next few weeks to look at the names of God and dive a little deeper into their meaning—seeking to understand what they reveal about our God.
God’s Name Is Who He Is
One final thing to understand about the name of God. Scripture uses the phrase “the name of God” interchangeably with God himself. Look at the Psalm at the beginning of this post. It ends by saying, “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.” (Psalm 20:7, ESV). The Psalmist is not talking about the “name of the Lord” in a literal sense. He’s talking about what that name represents—the essence of God and his character. We do not trust in the words, but in the God those words describe. We trust the name of the Lord because it describes the Lord we trust.