Discovering Our Identity, Part 4

God Knows My Name

Names are special: “Nothing is as musical to the ear as the sound of one’s own name.... We yearn to be known and known by name.” In a world where we are known by our numbers: Social Security number, bank account number, customer number, credit card number, library number, and on and on, it is invigorating when we hear our names.

Amazingly, the Good Shepherd calls each of his sheep by name.(John.10:3) Who am I? I am Bernie Schock and my Creator knows my name. God is not an impersonal force. Not The Great Ocean of Being that swallows and abolishes our identity at death--as eastern religions believe. God knows my name and will call me Bernie Schock for all of eternity!

God often renamed people in the Bible so that the new name reflected a new or a heightened identity. When God changed Abram to Abraham, his new name pointed toward God’s earlier promise to make his descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky. His new name, his nickname was now: father of many. (This may have seemed like a bad joke to childless Abram!)

We also give each other nicknames. One of the boys on the soccer team that I coached for seven years affectionately called me “Snoop Bern Dog.” No one remembers how it started but it is alive today and reminds me of that mostly enjoyable experience of coaching boys.

I find intriguing a promise that God makes to some of his faithful: “To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.” (Rev.2:17) Is it possible that when I stand before Jesus he will whisper in my ear a new, intimate name that will only be known by the two of us? What a wild thought!

Discovering Our Identity, Part 3

God Knows Me

 

God promised the aging Abraham and Sarah a son. But when God was unexpectedly slow in fulfilling his promise, Sarah came up with a ”brilliant” solution. She offered her servant Hagar to her husband as a surrogate child bearer. It didn’t take long for this harebrained plan to run amok. When jealous Sarah mistreated pregnant Hagar, Hagar ran away.

But God chased after Hagar, finding her in the desert. He asked her: Where have you come from, and where are you going? Hagar was stunned by this conversation: You are the God who sees me. I have seen the one who sees me. Hagar then gave God the name, You are the God who sees me.

Ben Patterson explains Hagar’s perspective: “For a slave girl who had no rights of her own, who was no more than a piece of property to her master, . . . there could  be no better name. He cared for her. He saw her. He saw her! To God she was not a slave, she was Hagar. Certainly Abram and Sarai had not seen her. But she was a person, and she now knew that God saw her as such and that what happened to her mattered to him.”

Similarly, when Jesus went to the home of Simon, the Pharisee, and a prostitute lavished her perfume, her tears, and her kisses on Jesus’ feet, Simon was horrified.  Jesus confronted Simon’s blindness: Do you see this woman? Simon could not see that woman. To him, she was a category, a classification, a kind of woman—a whore. She was not that to Jesus. She was a person, his sister, a daughter of God. Jesus has never seen a kind of person. He sees only you and me. To know that, to really be struck by that truth, is to be transformed.”

Who am I then? As David contemplated the glory of the heavens, the work of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars, he asked: What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? When we contemplate the vastness of the universe and an earth with billions of people, it is mind boggling to think about a God who actually sees me and knows me, a God who knows me down to the number of hairs on my head!

In other ancient Near East religions, the gods remained “remote and aloof . . . They created and observed, but they did not intervene in events.” The concept of a personal God who wanted to have a relationship with a servant girl, was wildly radical. Like Hagar, you may think you are disposable—but God doesn’t! He sees you. He sees you! He sees you!! And he wants to help you become the person he created you to be. God sent Hagar back to Sarah. Her God-given task was to serve Sarah and raise up her own son. She obeyed the God who had her in his sights.