There Is a Name Written on a Stone That Only Two People Ever Read

He has been called it since he was about thirteen and he could not tell you who started it.

It is not cruel. It is not even inaccurate, exactly. It came out of one incident that everybody found funny at the time, and it stuck, and by the time he was old enough to mind it, minding it would have made it worse.

Now it is what he answers to at the store, on the block, in three group chats, and on the mouth of a man who has known him since first grade and probably could not produce his given name under pressure.

Here is what he has noticed. He does not act quite the same when he is called it. There is a set of things that man does. There is a way that man talks and a set of things that man is expected to find funny.

And it is not a name. That is the thing he keeps circling. A name is something you are given. That is something that was decided about him at a moment when he was not consulted.

A name only two people ever read

There is a promise near the start of Revelation that most people have never had explained to them.

To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. (Revelation 2:17, King James Version)

Which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.

Only two parties ever see that name. The one who wrote it and the one it is about.

Think about what that rules out. It cannot be voted on. It cannot be shortened by a group. It cannot be shouted across a parking lot by somebody who has known you since first grade.

There is no version of that name that the block gets a copy of.

You are given a name that no room has access to. Revelation 2 says only the receiver knows it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a promise about a stone feel like something about a Tuesday.

He renamed a man at a first meeting

There is a scene in John that happens fast and is easy to read past.

Somebody brings his brother to Jesus. They have never met. This is the first sentence out of His mouth.

And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone. (John 1:42)

He acknowledges the existing name and then puts another one on him inside the same breath.

And the new name is not a description of what Simon was. Anybody who reads the rest of the Gospels knows Simon was not a rock. He was impulsive, he talked over people, and he collapsed at the worst possible moment.

The name was not a summary. It was a decision about what he would be, said out loud before there was any evidence for it.

You have been named by somebody who was not describing the current situation. John 1 puts the naming at a first meeting before one thing had happened, and it is His Spirit who makes an early scene feel like it has bearing on a man of twenty eight.

The wrestler refused to leave without one

There is a strange night in Genesis where a man fights somebody until dawn and refuses to let go.

And in the middle of it, he gets asked a question.

And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. (Genesis 32:27)

He has to say it out loud. His name meant something like heel-grabber, or supplanter, and it had been accurate his whole life. Saying it was an admission.

Then this:

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)

He says the old one out loud first, and then it gets replaced.

And he walks away from that night with a limp he keeps. The renaming does not come with everything else being fixed.

You are renamed by God without the rest of it being tidied up first. Genesis 32 has the new name and the limp in the same paragraph, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that combination land as honesty rather than as a shortfall.

God says the naming is His to do

There is a line in Isaiah where God says outright who is doing the mouth work.

And thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the LORD shall name. (Isaiah 62:2)

Which the mouth of the LORD shall name.

He does not delegate it. He does not put it out to the community. He does not let it emerge from an incident that everybody found funny at the time.

He specifies the mouth.

You are named by a mouth that outranks every other one. Isaiah 62 says whose mouth does it and rules out the rest, and it is His Spirit who makes an old sentence about naming reach a man who answers to something he never agreed to.

And the name gets written on somebody, not shouted

There is one more, and it is the most physical of them.

Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God. (Revelation 3:12)

Write upon him.

Not announce. Not publish. Not circulate. The name goes on the person, the way a maker's mark goes on something he made.

And go no more out. Whatever else that means, it means the arrangement is not under review.

You are marked rather than labeled. Revelation 3 uses a writing-on word and not a broadcasting word, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between the two feel like something a man can lean on.