He Named Himself on the Worst Morning of a Man's Life

My grandmother had a name for God that I have never heard anybody else use.

She would say it while she was doing something else, which is how you know a thing is real. Peeling something, or getting the wash in ahead of the rain. She would say the name and then say the year after it, like a footnote. Fifty-nine. Sixty-three.

I did not understand until I was much older that she was not being poetic. Those were the years. Something had happened in each of them, and afterward she had a name for God that she had not had before, and she said it with the year attached because in her mind the two things were the same fact.

I have sung about a hundred titles for God in my life. Most of them came out of a hymnbook and went straight back into it. There is a whole shelf of them in my head that I know the tune to and have never once used.

She had four, maybe five. And every one of them had a year on it.

Where the plainest name came from

There is a name for God in Genesis that people put on wall hangings, and almost nobody knows what morning it came from.

A man walks three days to a mountain to do the worst thing he has ever been asked to do. Three days. That is the part the story insists on and the part we hurry past, because it means he had time to think about it at every meal.

And at the top, when it does not happen, he does something a scholar would not have thought to do. He names the place.

And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovahjireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen. (Genesis 22:14, King James Version)

He does not write a psalm. He does not formulate a doctrine of providence. He puts a name on a piece of ground, and the name means the LORD will see to it, and from then on the hill itself is the sentence.

That is where the name came from. Not a seminary. A hill, on the worst morning of a man's life, at the exact moment the thing he dreaded did not happen.

You have a God who names Himself at the site rather than in the abstract, and Genesis 22 is where that pattern is set rather than in anybody's theology, and it is His Spirit who takes a title off a page and fastens it to a place you have actually stood.

The others came the same way

Once you see it in Genesis you see it everywhere, and it changes what a name is for.

A pregnant runaway slave in a desert, spoken to by an angel, does something nobody had done before her: she names God herself.

And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me. (Genesis 16:13)

That is not a title she was taught. That is a woman who had spent her life being looked past, saying out loud the one thing she had just learned about Him.

Moses builds an altar after a battle and calls it the LORD my banner (Exodus 17:15). Gideon, terrified, builds one and calls it the LORD send peace (Judges 6:24). Every one of them is a person putting a marker on the ground at the spot where something happened.

And not one of them waited to be qualified first. Hagar was a slave with no standing at all. Gideon was hiding in a winepress when the conversation started. You have the same permission they had, and it never rested on your position or your understanding (Genesis 16:13), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who makes a person bold enough to put a word on what He has just done.

You were never meant to carry these as vocabulary, and the reason your list is long and thin is that somebody handed it to you instead of you finding it, which is what the pattern in Genesis and Exodus and Judges is actually showing, and the Spirit is the one who turns a word you inherited into a word you own.

That is not a criticism of hymnbooks. I love them and I intend to keep singing out of them. It is only that a title sung is a title borrowed, and a title named is a title held.

What a name is for

Here is the plain use of it, and it is smaller and more useful than people expect.

A name is a handle. After a particular kind of trouble, where God met somebody inside it, the name they come away with is the handle they reach for the next time that same trouble comes around. Not a general name. That one.

That is why my grandmother's four names had years on them. She was not sentimental about the years. She was filing.

And it is why a shelf of a hundred sung titles does not help much at two in the morning. A hundred handles that have never been gripped are not a hundred handles. They are a decoration.

You have at least one already, and you have probably not called it by name yet, and Genesis 22 says the naming happens after the event rather than before it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a specific week back to mind so you can put a word on it.