They gave them numbers

      The Holocaust victims were given numbers. Presumably when a person is only a number you can care less about them. Yet God calls us by name (Is 43:1-7). The experts say that people love to hear their names pronounced. Beyond this, we call our loved ones by terms of endearment such as Pumpkin, Dearest, Love, Sweetheart, Cutie Pie, or Shnookie Wookums. God calls us by a term of endearment, too—“As indeed he says in Hosea, ‘Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’ and her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved’” (Rom 9:25).

     Naming is a complex and foundational topic but we can start by realizing a few concepts.  In Genesis 2 God gives humankind the task of naming the animals. About this act Leon Kass, a Jewish professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago in his book The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, states:

“Even the most disinterested act of speech, such as naming the animals, is not an act of unmotivated reason; it is important to know one animal from the other, since some may be dangerous, others may be tasty, while still others may strike the human perceiver as amusing or awe-inspiring or potentially useful. To generalize: what A says about B always tells you something about A….To what extent is speech revelatory, to what extent obfuscating? These difficulties, which adhere even to the relatively disinterested uses of speech (like naming the animals), become magnified when reason’s view of the world is colored by the presence of desires and passions” (p. 77-8). 

Truthful naming, then, works to rightly order our existence according to God’s view of the world, instead of fallen man’s lustful desires to possess and control.

     Likewise, as Tory and Elizabeth have counseled us, we need to keep all three states of man—Original man, Historical man, and Eschatological man—in mind all at the same time. So in terms of naming, one of our God-given responsibilities is to work to call forth the new creation that God is creating in Christ. This involves naming and ordering out of chaos those aspects of Christ’s kingdom that are important.

“Good Christian sight is a matter of discernment, and what we see and don’t see is just as much a matter of concern as what we do and don’t do.” And concerning the power of language, “very little effort is given to transforming the way we see the world—to giving Christians a rich and useful language through which certain aspects of the world become more prominently visible and others become less prominently visible. Yet such a transformation is central to what the Christian faith is all about” (Charles Matthews, The Republic of Grace, 12, 33-4).

Therefore, one of the responsibilities that God has given us through his Son is to name and recognize His image in each other. And when we use people’s names and acknowledge their loveliness, we say that they are important to us and to God.

     Hitler may have engraved people’s “numbers” on their forearms but God says, “Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands” (Is 49:16).