What's in a Name?

“Micah his son, Reaia his son, Baal his son,” (1Ch 5:5 AV)

Names are not important, right?  Perhaps.  But one can tell a few things based on what names are used.  The question is, who in Israel would name their child after a pagan god?  This was only a generation or two before Assyria came and invaded Israel.  Not all that surprising that a pagan god was the name sake of a Jewish son.

We name things after that which we admire or value.  My wife and I became second amendment adherents.  When we moved to the south, we learned from our hosts to appreciate the freedom to keep and bear arms.  With that appreciation came an interest in different makes and models of handguns.  One in particular struck my wife as a desirable handgun to own.  However, they are not cheap!  The base models ran around $800.  The mid-range easily exceeded a thousand dollars.  On a preacher’s salary, there was no way that was going to happen.  Promising that one day I would give her a Kimber, she brought home a black lab rescue dog which we promptly named Kimber.  She now has her Kimber!  Just a side note:  we took the dog to a firing range to shoot skeet.  He ran back into our van and under the seats because he didn’t appreciate loud noises.  The gun dog that doesn’t like guns!  How ironic.

Names mean something.  Names reveal something.  Whether it’s sports teams, Nick names, favorite haunts, etc, what we name things reveals a lot about what we value or tolerate.  Even a wife takes her husband’s last name because she desires to be known by what he stands for or has or will accomplish.  Names mean something.  We should be careful of the names we use.