Sermon Tone Analysis

I have not always loved the name Res.

When I was growing up, it was far too easy for people to tease me — and I allowed it to bother me far too much when they did so.

Reese’s pieces.

Rees-ey cup.

Whatever.

Then there was the time that I thought Walter Cronkite was saying my name as my dad watched the nightly news from another room.

“RECently, in Washington....”

Many have wondered through the years about the significance of how my name is spelled and pronounced.

There are other Reeses in the world, but probably not many who spell their name the way I do — RES.

I was named after my father, Roy, and my grandfather, Everett.

So, my real name is Roy Everett Spears III.

But both Roy and Everett were alive when I was born, and Mom didn’t want me to be Little Roy or Little Everett.

So she took my initials to make the name I would be called from birth.

I don’t know how she came up with the pronunciation; I’ve always assumed it had to do with the drugs they gave her for pain during childbirth.

But her decision to pronounce my name with a long, rather than short, vowel has been one of the defining complications of my life.

Just a couple of years ago, one of my seminary professors, upon learning that he’d been pronouncing my name wrong prior to meeting me in person, actually asked me, “Why haven’t you changed your name in all these years?”

I don’t know.

Maybe I’ve just come to like the fact that even the correct pronunciation of my name tells people they’re going to have to deal with me on my terms.

Annette would probably say that I play by my own set of rules.

And it’s all my mother’s fault, because she’s the one who gave me this name.

I was doing a little bit of research into names as I prepared this message, and I learned that non-standard names began to come into vogue in America after WWII.

Prior to that, the U.S. was full of Roberts and Jameses and Marys and Bettys.

Now, we have rock star Frank Zappa’s children, Moon Unit and Dweezil.

Not to mention the child of Elon Musk, whose name can’t be typed without special characters and apparently can’t even be pronounced by humans.

Perhaps Res isn’t so bad, after all.

My name has significance to me, and not just because its pronunciation tells people they’re going to have to deal with me on my own terms.

It’s significant to me, because it reminds me of my father and my grandfather.

Whenever I sign my legal name, I’m confronted with the fact that I come from a certain stock of people, that I carry on their legacy to some extent.

And names in the Bible often had similar significance.

For instance, Simon bar Jonah was Simon, son of Jonah.

Sometimes the significance of a name was in the event that created the name.

Babel, which means confusion, was the name given to the place where God stopped construction of the great tower by confusing the languages of the people who worked on it.

The name “Moses” comes from the Hebrew word that means “to draw out,” because he was drawn out from the water by the Egyptian princess after His mother placed him in a basket of reeds and floated him in the Nile River.

But nearly as important as the meaning of names in the Bible is the one who GAVE the names.

Abram, whose name meant “high father” was a childless old man when God promised him a son through whom a new nation would be born and then gave him a new name, Abraham, which means “father of a multitude.”

Throughout the Bible, name-giving is a picture of authority.

God gave Adam authority over the newly created earth and then allowed Adam to assert that authority by naming all the animals in it.

But God named mankind, as we see in Gen 5:2

We normally think of Adam and Eve as the names of the first man and woman.

But what this verse tells us is that God called them both ish — Adam, which means mankind.

WAnd what this suggests to us is that God had created man and woman to be partners.

When Adam awoke from the sleep that God had induced in order to take Adam’s rib to make the first woman, the Bible tells us he called her ishshah, which is simply the feminine version of the word ish.

This suggests to me that Adam considered Eve at this time to be an equal partner with him in the created order of things.

She was still ish, just like he was, but she was now the feminine version of ish.

In fact, we don’t the name Eve until after the two had sinned against God in the Garden of Eden.

Genesis, chapter 3 records that event, along with God’s response to it.

He pronounces a curse on the serpent who tempted them to disobey.

And then He describes to Eve and then to Adam the consequences that would follow their choice to disobey Him.

Look at what God says to Eve in verse 16.

That line that reads, “your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you,” has been widely misinterpreted throughout the centuries.

In the context of the first three chapters of Genesis, what we SHOULD see is that the fellowship God had created in the Garden — this place of perfect shalom, of perfect peace and contentment and order — had been broken.

Sin had already caused Adam and Eve to turn in on themselves.

They now had shame over their naked bodies, where before there had been none.

And each had blamed another when God asked them about their disobedience.

And what God was saying here in verse 16 was that sin meant the intended partnership model of husband/wife relationships was now broken.

Henceforth, what had been created as a partnership of peace would all too often devolve into strife and jealousy.

The woman would want to dominate her husband, and the husband would want to be a tyrant over the wife.

Of course, not all relationships are this way, but I think that if you look at the arguments between husbands and wives, you’ll find that many of them are grounded in this reality: Both parties are struggling for power, to be the figure of authority, when in reality we were created as man and woman to be partners supporting one another and lifting one another up and considering the other to be more worthy than ourselves.

We see just a couple of verses later that Adam began calling the woman Eve.

And in so doing, he was asserting that he had authority over her — just what God said would happen.

So, we have two people whose names were changed in the Book of Genesis — Abram and Ishshah.

What’s the difference?

Well, one was a blessing and one was kind of a curse.

Abram became Abraham and received God’s blessing.

Ishshah became Eve, and husbands and wives have been fighting for control of the remote ever since.

What I want you to see is that when God gives names things, He does so with authority, and the names are fitting and proper for His purposes.

“God called the light day, and the darkness He called night.”

He called childless Abram Abraham, and that man became the father of multitudes.

So, as we continue this series that I’ve called “Time for Something New,” I want to point you to the next new thing promised to followers of Christ — a new name.

Remember that we’ve talked about the new heart and the new Spirit we receive when, by God’s grace, we place our faith in Jesus as the only one who can reconcile we lost sinners to God.

And we’ve talked about then being made by the Holy Spirit into new creatures whose new life in Christ should give us new ambitions, new desires.

And in the Book of Revelation, we see that Jesus promises his followers they will receive a new name in heaven.

We see this in chapter 2, in the letter Jesus dictates to the Apostle John to the church at Pergamum.

We’ll pick up in verse 12.

Now, we talked about this letter a couple of years ago, when we looked at Jesus’ seven letters to the seven churches of Asia.

So, we’re not going to spend too much time on it now.

I’ll remind you that Pergamum was the center for many religious cults, including worship of the Roman emperor as a god.

False gods were so prevalent there that Jesus described the city as the place where Satan dwells.

And it seems that some of this pagan worship had wormed its way into the church there.

So, Jesus calls on that church to repent.

And in verse 17, He promises the overcomers two things: hidden manna and a white stone with a new name written on it.

Now, I believe the overcomers are those who are truly believers.

Jesus told His disciples on the night before His crucifixion not to be afraid of the persecution they would soon face.

Even as He knew He would soon be arrested and crucified, He said, “In this world you will have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”

What I’m suggesting is that we who have followed Jesus in faith — we whom the Bible describes as being IN Christ — are already overcomers.

Just as we share in his death and resurrection, we share in His being an overcomer.

So, this verse in Revelation refers to believers.

And for them, there awaits some of the hidden manna and a white stone with a new name written on it.

Now, the hidden manna is an obvious reference to the manna that came down from heaven each morning to give sustenance to the Hebrew people as they wandered the wilderness for 40 years, waiting for God to allow them into the Promised Land.

A portion of that manna was placed in the Ark of the Covenant and was therefore “hidden” from them.

But Jesus had described Himself as the Bread of Life.

And His reference to the hidden manna that overcomers will receive is His way of saying that all who put their faith in Him and Him alone will receive eternal life.

HE will sustain us in eternity.

So what of the white stone and the new name?

That’s a little harder to work out, and there are several theories.

Now, I’m not dogmatic in my interpretation.

But perhaps the best theory, given the context of Pergamum, where idol worship was widespread and had even infected the church, is that Jesus is making light of what was known as the tesseron.

“A tesseron was “… given to those who were invited to partake, within the precincts of the temple [at Pergamum], of the sacred feast, which naturally consisted only of meats offered to the idol.

That stone bore the secret name of the deity represented by the idol and the name was known only to the recipient.”

[Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Re 2:17.]