“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6). Perhaps we can be forgiven if we mistake those words from Isaiah for those of George Frideric Handel. Whenever I hear or read that passage from the King James Version of the Bible, I hear Handel’s thunderous anthem of praise. Messiah, Christ, Lord, Redeemer, Savior, or Messenger of the Great Council[i] are some of the many names for the One who is the way, the truth, and the life (see John 14:6).

Many of our modern cultures around the world have lost the significance of names. Cultural values and mores seem to come and go with quite a regularity. So, it appears in Western culture, the naming of a child does little else than designate this child from the one upstairs or the one down the street. Those in the ancient Near East believed names were far more than designations for persons, places, or things. Names possessed power because the name revealed a thing’s essence, purpose, function, or meaning.

Even while our modern culture has blinders over the eyes and earbuds in the ears, we can still detect the significance of getting the name right. For example, in story and myth, children readily sense something unspoken in a villain named Flemington Farquart versus one named Hannibal Bloodbane. The latter is a man to be feared, whereas the former seems to be the character of one more suited to selling ice cream. Have you ever noticed how many heroes in TV or cinema have the name “Jack”? Jack Bauer, Jack Ryan, Jack Shephard, Jack Sparrow, Jack Dawson, Jack the Mountie, and the list goes on. Even C. S. Lewis preferred the nickname, Jack. He preferred Jack to Clive Staples. When was the last time the heroic protagonist had the name Adolf, Genghis, or Rasputin?

While the feel, mood, and years of cultural baggage and phonetics are built into the simple verbal expression of the name, there is far more going on than meets the ear or eye. Significantly, the mystery of godliness seems to begin and end in taking upon oneself the Name—even the sacred name of Jesus Christ. Members of the restored Church of Jesus Christ possess a key of knowledge regarding the power of names, and it has everything to do with the covenant path culminating in the temple. Indeed, if we can restore the ancient significance of names, succeeding generations can possess greater purpose, meaning, and direction.

The Church incorporates a sacred ordinance for “naming and blessing children.”[ii] The ordinance involves giving a child a name and doing so by the authority of the Melchizedek Priesthood. Why not just call the child whatever you want? Why is the naming done by the authority of God’s sacred priesthood? Why all the hubbub? What does it matter if Zacharias wished to name his son Tom, Dick, Harry, or Zacharias? Why did it have to be Iōannēs, or “John” in English (Luke 1:13)? Why did the angel of the Lord strike Zacharias dumb for wanting to follow tradition? What about Simon, the brother of Andrew? Why did the Lord go about changing his name to Peter? And what’s wrong with Abram and Sarai? What’s all this business turning them into Abraham and Sarah? We could go on with Saul to Paul, Jacob to Israel, etc., but you get the picture.

In the ancient Near Eastern world, a person, place, or thing did not have existence unless it was named. Names were associated with identity, role, and function. Thus, in their worldview, creation and existence were always in the context of naming, separating, “and assigning functions and roles in an ordered system.”[iii] Ontology, the nature of being, emphasizes what is most significant to culture. To the ancient Near Eastern world, existence was how the parts of the cosmos functioned, not their material status.[iv] This is one reason why the names of Pharaohs were struck off obelisks and temples by their successors, for if one could blot out the name, existence would cease. The power of life and death was in the name.

Words serve a function in that they illuminate and reveal the ultimate nature of things. The word is far from simple communication or designation, but knowledge of the essential reality of the thing itself. Indeed, the name of a thing is the ultimate expression of that knowledge. Max Heidegger wrote that language is “the House of Being.” Words and language, he continues, “are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are. For this reason, the misuse of language, in idle talk, in slogans and phrases, destroys our authentic relation to things.”[v] Therefore, when we change the meaning of words like man, woman, or marriage, we destroy our ability to authentically relate to one another in truth or conversation.

To the ancient poets and philosophers, naming a child is the most sacred responsibility new parents have regarding their newborns. Naming is a religious rite that shapes the purpose and destiny of that child. The child was to become the name, and the name became the child. If the parents named their child after their favorite chariot model, they would be considered not only ignorant but profoundly profane. “This naming,” Heidegger writes, “does not consist merely in something already known being supplied with a name; it is rather that when the poet speaks the essential word, the existent is by this name nominated as what it is. So it becomes known as existent [real]. Poetry is the establishing of being by means of the word.”[vi]

Peter Kreeft observed that,

The power of words is based on the fact that real things are found in words. Words are not merely things among a world of things, things with one additional feature, the ability to point to other things. No, words are the encompassing frame of the world of things. . . . Since things are encompassed by words, our wonder at the things is encompassed by our wonder at the words. . . . The power of things comes to us in the power of their names. Words have power, not only to communicate, intellectually, and not only to suggest, emotionally, but also a magical power that can produce physical effects. . . . We know there are words that sacramentally effect what they signify.[vii]

The most sacramental word that effectuates what it signifies is the Word that was made flesh and dwelt among us (see John 1:1-4). He has many names, and every one of these names possesses a sacramental effect when we receive Him by covenant. The result is a process resulting in a perfect unity “till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (see Ephesians 4:12-13).

Growing up in Christ begins by first receiving an earthly name, then receiving the covenant name.  This naming process continues along the covenant path, and the faithful disciple becomes the name, and the name becomes them. Members of the restored Church of Jesus Christ have a unique opportunity to give a child a name and a blessing (see D&C 20:70). This naming is done by the authority of the Melchizedek Priesthood. If parents wisely consider the sacredness of the rite in giving a child a name, that child has a Divine function to perform in God’s ordered system of creation. Therefore, when a child is given a name by revelation, they become the name, and the name becomes them.

When the child grows and chooses to enter a covenant relationship with the Lord in baptism, they take upon themselves a new name, even the sacred name of Jesus Christ. They now have a unique identity because they have a new function to fulfill in the Father’s house of order. So, clearly, it is not about self-identification, which is the world’s way; it is being identified with God our Eternal Father in the name of Jesus Christ. Elder Dallin H. Oaks testified, “we do not witness that we take upon us the name of Jesus Christ. [Rather], we witness that we are willing to do so. (See D&C 20:77.) The fact that we only witness to our willingness suggests that something else must happen before we actually take that sacred name upon us in the [ultimate and] most important sense.” Elder David A. Bednar taught “the baptismal covenant clearly contemplates a future event or events and looks forward to the temple.”[viii]

This new name is a new creation. The child is a new creature; the life of the old name has been consumed, heightened, broadened, deepened, and sanctified with a new Name (Mosiah 27:26; 2 Corinthians 5:17). The covenant disciple now has a new identity, commission, and purpose, which ultimately can prophetically be described as “growing up” in God and receiving “a fulness of the Holy Ghost” (D&C 109:15). George MacDonald, the great Scottish writer and pastor of the 19th century provides profound insight into the name, the covenant, and the Lord as the stone of Israel. He wrote a commentary on Revelation 2:17:

The giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the “Come, thou blessed,” spoken to the individual. . . . The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man’s own symbol—his soul’s picture, in a word—the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees who the man is. . . . It is only when the man has become his name that God give him the stone with the name upon it, for then first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completeness, that determines the name: and God foresees that from the first because He made it so: but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived completeness, named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. God’s name for a man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom He had in His thought when He began to make the child, and whom He kept in His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success—to say “In thee also I am well pleased.”[ix]

In his A Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis cogently distills the problem and the solution affecting our contemporary world. He wrote that “the first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. . . . The first thing to understand the object before you: as long as you think the corkscrew was meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them.[x] So it is with names. One sure way to destroy a civilization is to redefine names and words according to subjective whim. Truth is consequently lost in the confusion. When an individual self-identifies by using words or names subjectively, objective truth is lost, and the individual becomes “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7).

No wonder Helaman gave his two sons the names of Nephi and Lehi and then sealed those names upon their heads by a clarion call to remember: “Behold, my sons, I desire that ye should remember to keep the commandments of God; and I would that ye should declare unto the people these words. Behold, I have given unto you the names of our first parents who came out of the land of Jerusalem; and this I have done that when you remember your names ye may remember them; and when ye remember them ye may remember their works; and when ye remember their works ye may know how that it is said, and also written, that they were good” (Helaman 5:6).

Each week, we are called to remember the Lord’s broken body and redemptive blood by participating in a sacramental ordinance. We recall, renew, and remember the Redeemer by reaffirming His Divine Name in our lives. For all intents and purposes, we have been created in the image of God to minister as the image of God. When we take upon ourselves His holy Name, we receive his image in our countenances. We experience a mighty change of heart because we have become someone new (see Alma 5:14-19). Old things have passed away, and all things have become new. We are created by the Name.

When we were children, we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas. So why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?[xi] This Christmas season, let us renew and reaffirm our covenant with The Wonderful Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, and The Prince of Peace. As we rejoice in the One who is Joy,[xii] greater peace will be among men and women of goodwill. For the goodness of God, his truth and beauty will grow in us because Emmanuel dwells among us (Matthew 1:23). Because he is the way, the truth, and the life, we will be “like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season” (Psalms 1:3). Praise God if we become trees of life—evergreen, everlasting, and eternally letting our light shine and bearing witness of the glory of God (see Matthew 5:14-16).

[i] The Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, offers a much different rendering of Isaiah’s passage that could be the subject of lengthy study: “Because a child was born to us; a son was given to us whose leadership came upon his shoulder; and his name is called “Messenger of the Great Council,” for I will bring peace upon the rulers and health to him” (Isaiah 9:6; The Lexham English Septuagint [2019]).

[ii] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/priesthood-ordinances-and-blessings/naming-and-blessing-children?lang=eng

[iii] John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate, (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2015), 29, 45.

[iv] Ibid., 26.

[v] Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1961), 11, (emphasis mine).

[vi] Martin Heidegger, “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Existence and Being, (Chicago: Regnery, 1949), 304.

[vii] Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings of the Rings, (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2005), 157-59

[viii] Elder Dallin H. Oaks, “Taking upon Us the Name of Jesus Christ,” Ensign, May 1985, 81; Elder David A. Bednar, “Honorably Hold a Name and Standing,” General Conference, April 2009.

[ix] George MacDonald in C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology, (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 8-9.

[x] C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, (Oxford University Press, 1961), 1.

[xi] Paraphrased from G. K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy; the actual quote is: “Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?”

[xii] See President Russell M. Nelson, “Joy and Spiritual Survival,” General Conference, October 2016.