Read About It: Psalm 103:1
My husband says he doesn't believe names mean anything anymore. (It just occured to me I've been blogging an awful lot about my husband lately!) He thinks they are just words - that they don't define a person. I strongly disagree. Jeff says at one time people used names to reveal the person, but that that's not true anymore. He used our last name as an example - Potter - once a job description, now nothing more than a label, an identifier. I still disagree, I think God named, and changed names, at one point in time for a reason and that he still does it for the same reason.
My son and I were talking about Jesus' name a few weeks ago. He was fascinated to find out that "Jesus" wasn't really the Christ's name. It is the Greek version of his name. Oddly enough, we know both his Hebrew (the name he would have gone by, given at birth) name - Yeshua - and it's English translation (the name you'd think English people would use) translation - Joshua. Yet, we use neither of them.
When I went to Poland on missions we had an excellent translator. We loved her so much. She told us we could call he Agnes (the anglicized version of her name) but there was an unspoken consensus among us to call her Agneshka - her Polish name. We did it out of respect for her; after all, it was the name her parents gave her and it's the name she thought of herself as.
Have you ever wondered why we call God "god"? God is nothing more than a label. It is, in fact, the same word that we use to refer to any deity whether fictional, mythical, pagan, or real, all we've done is capatalize it. In fact, god and God are even the same word in Hebrew - El. But most of the places we see God or Lord (or LORD with small caps) in the Bible is not a translation of the word El. Rather, they are replacing the actual names of God. (The term Lord normally replaces Adonai, and LORD in small caps replaces YHWH/Yahweh). Where the Hebrews are reading God's personal name, we read a label! Why is that?
It's hard to get to know someone when you don't even know their name. Names are a very intimate part of relationship. No matter what my husband says, we use them to define ourselves. I am "Megan" (MAYgen) not MEgan or Maggie, or, especially, Carol. So why do we persist (basically unthinkingly) to call God by generic titles and names that are neither his nor our translation of his? What's wrong with Yeshua and Adonai anyway?
Just something that's been on my mind lately.