Abraham: What’s In a Name?
Genesis 17:1-8, 15-16
Reader’s Digest is full of interesting little tid-bits of information—some enlightening, some challenging, but most always, funny. They appear at the end of articles as little slices of life that readers have submitted in hopes of being published. One such tid-bit is the story of Fruit Stand. When the 1960s ended, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district reverted to high rent, and many hippies moved down the coast to Santa Cruz. They had children and got married, too, though in no particular sequence. But they didn’t name their children Melissa or Brett. People in the mountains around Santa Cruz grew accustomed to their children playing Frisbee with little Time Warp or Spring Fever. And eventually Moonbeam, Earth, Love and Precious Promise all ended up in public school. That’s when the kindergarten teachers first met Fruit Stand. Every fall, according to tradition, parents bravely apply name tags to their children, kiss them good-bye and send them off to school on the bus. So it was for Fruit Stand. The teachers thought the boy’s name was odd, but they tried to make the best of it. "Would you like to play with the blocks, Fruit Stand?" they offered. And later, "Fruit Stand, how about a snack?" He accepted hesitantly. By the end of the day, his name didn’t seem much odder than Heather’s or Sun Ray’s. At dismissal time, the teachers led the children out to the buses. "Fruit Stand, do you know which one is your bus?" He didn’t answer. That wasn’t strange. He hadn’t answered them all day. Lots of children are shy on the first day of school. It didn’t matter. The teachers had instructed the parents to write the names of their children’s bus stops on the reverse side of their name tags. The teacher simply turned over the tag. There, neatly printed, was the word "Anthony."
So what’s in a name? Everything. Just think of the struggle you went through as you tried to find just the right name for that new baby. Perhaps there was even an argument or two before a name was finally decided upon. Our name identifies us to the rest of the world. Our name gives us our place in our family. We have named our children Adam, and Joshua, and Brittney, and Kelsey. Now, I can tell you from personal experience that these children are their names. I could not conceive of Adam being anything but Adam. It defines who he is, and it describes him. He is the first. And Joshua, well, what can we say about Joshua, but he is himself, and to think I wanted to name him Andrew. But he is not Andrew, he is Joshua. It is the same with Brittney and Kelsey. Now that they have been given those names, they could not ever be anyone else. It was the same way in Bible times. A person’s name was more than a mere identifier. One’s name said something about who the person was, just as God’s Name reveals His attributes and character. There is something revealing in a person’s name. And we discover lots of names in our encounter today. Let’s see what we learn from these names.
Genesis 17:1-8
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, "I am God Almighty; serve me faithfully and live a blameless life. [2] I will make a covenant with you, by which I will guarantee to make you into a mighty nation." [3] At this, Abram fell face down in the dust. Then God said to him, [4] "This is my covenant with you: I will make you the father of not just one nation, but a multitude of nations! [5] What’s more, I am changing your name. It will no longer be Abram; now you will be known as Abraham, for you will be the father of many nations. [6] I will give you millions of descendants who will represent many nations. Kings will be among them! [7] "I will continue this everlasting covenant between us, generation after generation. It will continue between me and your offspring forever. And I will always be your God and the God of your descendants after you. [8] Yes, I will give all this land of Canaan to you and to your offspring forever. And I will be their God.”
God’s Name:
I must tell you first, that we have been calling him Abraham for the last few weeks, but long before he was Abraham, he was Abram. And his wife, long before she became Sarah, was Sarai.
Remember with me for a moment that it has been thirteen years since we last encountered Abraham. Then, Abraham had taken matters into his own hands, and had quite made a mess of things. Imagine if you will, living in a household for thirteen years with two women at each other’s throat, and a rambunctious child that even God said would be a “wild ass of a man!” It was thirteen years of bitterness, anger, contempt, jealousy, envy, and we might even say, outright rebellion. Thirteen years of living with the consequences of taking matters into his own hands. Any way you care to phrase it, it was thirteen years of hell.
For thirteen years God was silent. I’m sure Abraham had, more than a few times, wondered where God was in the midst of his suffering. Then God breaks into their lives in a new way with a fresh revelation of His power and person. And he reveals this new name—God Almighty. Until now, Abraham had simply known God as Yahweh, that unutterable name of God. But for the first time, God tells Abraham, “I am God Almighty.” The Hebrew calls him “El-Shaddai.” It means “all-sufficient.” With this name, God was identifying himself to Abraham in the midst of his circumstances. He was saying to Abraham, “You have been learning for thirteen years the total inadequacy of your own efforts, through Ishmael. Now learn a new thing about me. I am El Shaddai. You have discovered by sad experience how futile your plans and efforts can be without me. Now learn how capable I am to do everything that I desire to do, whenever I desire to do it.” How we need to discover this truth! We need desperately to recover the reality of El Shaddai, the God who is sufficient for whatever we are going through right now! This is what Abraham and Sarah learned.
After God reminded Abraham of WHO He was, He then told Abraham exactly what HE was going to do. Five times God says, “I WILL” do this, “I WILL” do that. The main point we learn in this new revelation of God is that God establishes the covenant with Abraham. He comes from the heavens and does the courting. He establishes the relationship. He lays down the rules for it. This is a picture not of man coming to God but God coming to man.
Isn’t this a refreshing picture of our God? The big catch phrase we’ve been hearing in religious circles for many years now is how to “have a more personal relationship” with God. We can buy books from many Christian authors that lay out plans for us to develop a personal relationship with God. They start by insinuating that we aren’t a true Christian if we haven’t personally done what they’ve done—like asking Christ into our heart or being re-baptized or having that “conversion experience.” “BUT,” they say, “if we follow their program, we can get that experience.” They’ll tell us how to treat our spouse, how to pray, how to worship in a “meaningful” way. They’ll tell us exactly what kind of prayer to pray to invite God into our heart. The picture they draw is that in order to have a relationship with God we have to climb up some mountain and make the first contact. Then once we get up there we need to meet his requirements, do what he asks, in order to really have that meaningful relationship.
Initially, this sounds good to us. We like the sound of that philosophy because it gives us the power and gives us something to do. It even has Biblical words and quotes. But God describes us as being born DEAD and in sin, and still as WEAK, even as Christians (Mark 14:38). The more programs that are prescribed, the more depressed we can get as we think to ourselves, “I haven’t been sorrowful enough, I haven’t experienced that burning in my heart. I haven’t asked God into my heart. I haven’t prayed the way they are telling me. I haven’t used their kind of worship!” The problem always comes down to a feeling or a certain hoop that I inevitably haven’t jumped through yet to get to that “personal relationship”.
That’s what makes this picture of God so much more comforting. God, El Shaddai, doesn’t ask Abraham to climb up a mountain to find Him. God comes down to Abraham, this old man, and establishes the relationship with HIM and says, “This is what I’M going to do for you!” It puts the focus on the all-sufficient God and what HE will do, not on what WE do. That’s the way God works. That’s the God I take comfort in. God doesn’t ask me to climb a mountain before He’ll come to me. El Shaddai comes to me as old, and as weak, and as sinful as I may be. He seeks the relationship and establishes it. He uses His power to come to ME through His Son, Jesus Christ, the Word of God, through the fellowship of the body of Christ, through baptism, and through communion. And we learn all this from the name God gives to himself.
Abraham and Sarah’s New Names
When we see God in a new way, when we have a fresh encounter with God, it always makes a corresponding change in us. We can never encounter God and remain unchanged. For Abraham and Sarah, the change was denoted in the new names that God gave them. Listen:
Genesis 17:5
What’s more, I am changing your name. It will no longer be Abram; now you will be known as Abraham, for you will be the father of many nations.
Genesis 17:15-16
Then God added, "Regarding Sarai, your wife—her name will no longer be Sarai; from now on you will call her Sarah. [16] And I will bless her and give you a son from her! Yes, I will bless her richly, and she will become the mother of many nations. Kings will be among her descendants!"
Abram was “exalted father.” But think how embarrassing this name must have been for Abram. Every time he ran into a merchant or trader the question must have always come up, “So Exalted Father, how many children do you have?” For 86 years, Abram had to answer that question “None!” Then, for another thirteen years, he could only say, “One.” I can hear that merchant or trader now saying, “Some exalted father you are, old man!”
And Sarah, too. How would you feel living almost all your life with a name that means “contentious”? We know from her experience with Hagar that Sarai could be a contentious woman. She first gave her maid, Hagar, to Abraham to bear a son, then when she got pregnant, Sarai became jealous and ran her off.
Proverbs 21:9 says:
It is better to live alone in the corner of an attic than with a contentious wife in a lovely home.
Solomon penned those words in Proverbs. You have to remember he was a man who had over 1,000 wives. Maybe he knew a thing or two about contentious women!
Sarai had likely been a problem wife, nagging and complaining about the situation at home for the last thirteen years. Perhaps the rumor mill around Canaan land was spinning strong grinding the talk about Sarai and her barrenness. But things were about to change.
Several centuries before Christ, Alexander the Great came out of Macedonia and Greece to conquer the Mediterranean world. On one particular campaign, Alexander received word that one of his soldiers was continuously and seriously misbehaving. The soldier’s character was, in fact, becoming a stain on the Grecian army, and to make matters worse, the soldiers name was Alexander. Alexander the Great summoned the solider to his tent, and upon the soldier’s arrival, his commander asked him his name. “Alexander, sir,” was the soldier’s reply. Alexander the Great, with a stern eye, looked the soldier in the eye and said, “Well, then, either change your behavior or change your name.”
God changed Abram’s and Sarai’s name, and with it came a change in their behavior. “You are now Abraham.” Abraham means “father of many.” And Sarai’s name became Sarah. She who was contentious became princess. Both new names were evidence of what God was doing in their lives. God said, “Abram, for years you’ve been trying to exalt yourself. Now, I’m going to do my work in you.” And to Sarah, “Sarah, in your own strength you’ve gotten bitterness and strife, but with my way you’ll get dignity.” Again, we find it is a story about God. To both Abraham and Sarah God said, “You have learned that I am God Almighty. Now you are ready to bear fruit and receive the promise I have made.”
Like Abraham and Sarah, we change when we learn who God is. Perhaps our names are not changed, but our lives are. When we learn who God is we find our strength in what He can do, not in what we can do. When we learn who God is we find that the very weakness that we thought would be our undoing is actually what God will use to build His kingdom. Jesus comes to us, and he calls us by our names, and he says, “I am ready to complete in you the work I began. Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
Maybe for you, God has been up there or out there, removed from you and your circumstances, and you’ve never encountered the God who is right here in Jesus Christ. Here him calling you now, and he’s calling you by your name. It took thirteen years for Abraham and Sarah to realize the hopelessness of living in their own power. How long will it take you?
