The Name You Gave Yourself After

He sent everything he owned across the water in the dark and stayed behind.

The ford was wide and shallow and cold, and the crossing took most of the night. The flocks went first, in batches, the drovers calling low to each other over the noise of the river. Then the servants. Then the children, carried. Then his two wives. Then the last of the baggage, and the last lamp going away from him along the far bank until it was one small moving light in a black country.

Then there was nobody left on his side of the water but him.

He was going home, and that was the trouble. Twenty years earlier he had left that country fast, in the dark, ahead of a brother who had every reason to want him found. Tomorrow the road ran straight at that brother. He had sent gifts ahead in waves, four hundred head of livestock spread out over a day's walking, which is what a man does when he is trying to buy a morning he cannot buy.

And then somebody came at him out of the dark, and they wrestled.

Not for a minute. All night. Two men locked up on a riverbank in the cold, neither one letting go, the water going by, the sky over the far hills starting to go gray. And somewhere in the last hour the stranger touched him at the hip and something in the joint went, and he could not stand square any more, and he held on anyway.

Let me go, the stranger said, because the day is breaking.

I will not let you go, he said, unless you bless me.

And then came the strangest question of the whole night.

What is your name?

The stranger was not gathering information. He knew. He had known since the first hold. He was not asking so that He could learn something. He was making the man say it out loud, in the dark, on his own, with a hip that had just gone: say what you have been called, and say who you have been.

So he said it. Jacob. The name meant the one who grabs a heel, the one who comes in behind and takes what was not handed to him, and every person in that family had watched him earn it twice.

You have a name like that.

Not the one on your bank card. The private one. The one you issued to yourself after the thing you did, in a car park or a bathroom or a hospital corridor, when you looked at what you had just done and quietly decided what kind of person does that. You have used it every day since. You use it in your own head so fluently now that it does not even sound like an insult any more. It sounds like accuracy.

And the sun came up over that ford on a man with a limp and a different name.

The naming was taken out of his mouth

Look at the order of that night, because the order is the whole message.

He is asked his name. He says it. And the moment it is out of him, it is not his any more, because the One who asked for it is the One with the right to replace it.

And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.Genesis 32:28

That is not encouragement. That is not a man being told to think better of himself before breakfast. It is a naming, and a naming is an act of authority: it is done by somebody who has the standing to do it, over somebody who does not get a vote in it.

Which is exactly where you have been going wrong, and it has nothing to do with your effort. You have been doing the naming yourself. You issued a name in a corridor with nobody present and no authority behind it, and you have honored that name every morning since as though it had been handed down from somewhere. Genesis 32:28 is written to take the pen out of your hand, and His Spirit is not showing it to you as an old story about somebody tougher than you.

In an oath, the names get traded

This is the part nobody explains, and it is the part that makes the rest make sense.

When two parties bound themselves to each other in the ancient world, they did not only swap goods. They swapped names. Each one took something of the other's name into his own, so that from that day the two answered for each other: insult one and you had insulted the other, and everybody within a day's walk knew which household stood behind which man.

Now hear what God does with three men in one line. He calls Himself, out loud, in front of a nation, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He takes their names into His own name and keeps them there for the rest of the book. He does not do it because they were impressive. Two of them lied about their wives and one of them is the man on the riverbank.

So you have not been given a nickname to encourage you. You were named into an oath, and the name you carry now is not a description of your behavior, it is a statement of whose household you belong to. That is written and it does not move, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing in you rather than filing itself away as information.

The name is yours before it sounds true

Notice what did not happen at that ford. The man did not go away feeling like a prince. He went away limping, at sunrise, to meet a brother he was still afraid of.

The new name did not arrive because his self-image improved. It arrived because Somebody with the authority to name spoke, and a name given like that is yours on the day it is given, whether or not you can say it without flinching. Genesis 32:28 records the giving and never once records the feeling, and the Spirit seals what has been given rather than waiting on a mood. You were not asked to feel it first. You have never once been asked to feel it first.