What's In a Name?

I love the names that are given to people and places in the Old Testament. They didn’t just name their children John or Samantha or Trevor because they liked the sound of the name. They came up with names that spoke to the deep meaning of something that had happened in their life. This “naming” of their experience was a powerful way of expressing their own life perspective that had grown out of their struggle or joy.

Joseph did this with his first two children. Joseph’s life had been marked by a long series of betrayals, injustices, and disappointments. Any one of these could easily have made him an angry, bitter, resentful, or vengeful man. But they didn’t. And the first glimpse we see into how Joseph’s suffering had shaped his heart was in the naming of his two sons.

“Joseph named his firstborn MANASSEH and said, ‘It is because God has made me forget all my trouble and all my father’s household’. The second son he named EPHRAIM and said, ‘It is because God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.’” Genesis 41:51-52

Two names that speak powerfully to how suffering had shaped the heart and soul of Joseph into a humble, healed, God-honoring man. A man who sees his present situation as chief administrator of all Egypt under Pharaoh as something that came, not in spite of his suffering, but directly because of it. Not happenstance or coincidence, but directed by the hand of God. When Joseph named his sons Manasseh and Ephraim he was putting his own suffering into proper perspective. At the same time he was demonstrating for us the surrendered life that God calls us to.

Manasseh: “God has made me forget all my trouble”. Obviously Joseph is not having a lapse of memory here. “Forgetting” has nothing to do with an inability to remember. It has everything to do with how those memories are remembered and their effect upon us. Joseph had arrived at a place where, by God’s grace, he was able to let go of the sting of his suffering. Those events had hurt him and hurt him deeply but they were not hurting him any longer.

We all have experiences that need to be renamed in our lives. Our hope is that we are moving toward a place where all of our suffering can be called ‘Manasseh’. The sting of it removed and replaced by an assurance of God’s grace in using them to perfect His person in us. These experiences may be a deep hurt or injustice inflicted on us by a friend or loved one. It may be the loss of something or someone that we just can’t seem to get past. It might be an illness or physical struggle of some kind that causes us to dwell on the better days prior to its onset. Whatever this suffering is must be seen in the light of God’s grace and renamed so that the sting and power they have over us is removed with His help and mercy.

But just having the sting removed is not enough. God doesn’t merely want us to experience 'Manasseh Grace', He wants us to go on to embrace 'Ephraim Grace'. “God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.” Joseph doesn’t see his life as merely healed from the past, there is a present fruitfulness that emerges from the soil of his suffering. He was not where he was in spite of his suffering; he was there because of it. He was there because God had shaped and formed him in his suffering, not freeing him from it but using it as a divine tool for sculpting his soul and preparing him for this place of service. The brash, proud teenage boy who got himself into trouble with his brothers was gone. Joseph was now a man of profound wisdom, humility, and discernment, all of which had been carved into his soul by God with the tool of suffering.

Who wouldn’t like a life that was pain free, worry free, a life untouched by deep disappointment and discouragement? There is part of me that wants to believe that this kind of life must infinitely better than my own. I wonder, though, what life would be like if we spent as much time and energy yielding to God and the tool of suffering as we do fighting it. I think we all deeply desire a life of wholeness and fruitfulness. But this is generally arrived at through trial and suffering not in avoidance of it. And really, who can avoid it? In our obsession to be rid of all trouble and heartache we usually just created fertile ground for anger and resentment. How much better is 'Ephraim Grace' where fruitfulness comes to us not in the absence of difficulty but as a direct result of it. I am becoming increasingly convinced that suffering is a tool. Who uses that tool, and to what end, depends entirely on to whom our lives are yielded: ourselves or God.

In reading the Joseph story I was convicted that my own complaining about my suffering needs to be replaced by renaming my suffering Manasseh and Ephraim. This won’t necessarily remove the suffering but it does hold the power to transform it into something that actually will bring to me my deepest desire: wholeness and fruitfulness.

I wrote this prayer in my journal after some reflection on Joseph’s experience.
“Lord, I surrender my heart and life to You, not to be set free from suffering, but to be shaped and formed by it under the power of Your Holy Spirit. Make whole and fruitful in the land of my suffering.”

What’s in a name? That depends entirely on the name you're using.