What’s in a Name?

When Crystal and I adopted our daughter, everything about it took planning. But the part that felt impossible was the name.

With Payton, our biological son, it was different. He was a blank page. We were hoping over him. But our daughter already had a name when she came to us. Naming her did not mean filling an empty space. It meant speaking a new word over a life that was already underway, a life with a history we had not been there for.

And that is the thing about a name. Most of the time it is hope expressed as a blessing. You lean over a crib and you say it out loud for the first time… Grace, Hope, Noah, which means rest… and here is what nobody says while it is happening: the child has not done a single thing yet. She has not been gracious to anyone. He has not given anybody rest. You are not describing them. You are hoping over them. And you do not know if it will hold. Grace can grow up graceless. Hope can grow up into someone who has quietly given up on everything. The name goes out into a life that has not happened yet, and you do not get to know for twenty years whether it told the truth.

Now open Isaiah nine, verse six, and watch it do the exact same thing every hospital nursery has ever done. “For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders.” A baby. A son. And then a list of names you hope the baby grows into.

Except these four names were not hopes.

They were not spoken over a blank space, waiting to come true. They were spoken as fact, into a specific and nameable disaster, and they were true the second they left the prophet’s mouth. Centuries before the child showed up to answer to any of them. Nobody was gambling. This was not a guess about who the boy might become. This was an answer, already written down, waiting for the right moment to be read out loud.

Your name is an aspiration. These four were already true before the child could draw a breath.

The Wrong Side of the Kingdom

You have to know where the announcement landed to feel how strange it was.

In 2 Kings 15:29 the roof caves in. “In the days of King Pekah of Israel, King Tiglath-pileser of Assyria came and captured Ijon, Abel-beth-maacah, Janoah, Kedesh, Hazor, Gilead, and Galilee — all the land of Naphtali — and deported the people to Assyria.” That is not a poem. That is a list of towns that used to have people in them. Naphtali, gone. Galilee, gone. And Isaiah 9:1 pairs Zebulun right alongside Naphtali in that same swept-away northern country, the first to feel the boot.

This is the far corner of the kingdom. The forgotten margin. The part nobody in the capital thought about until the enemy was already standing in it. These are the people who got conquered first by Assyria and grieved longest.

Meanwhile, down south, Jerusalem was busy being clever. Listen to how Isaiah talks to them a few chapters later. “Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffers who rule this people in Jerusalem. For you said, ‘We have made a covenant with Death, and we have an agreement with Sheol; when the overwhelming catastrophe passes through, it will not touch us, because we have made falsehood our refuge and have hidden behind treachery.’” (Isaiah 28:14-15)

Read that again. They made a covenant with Death and felt safe about it. They were behind walls, cutting deals, sure the catastrophe would knock on someone else’s door. They had enough security left to scoff at the very warning that could have saved them.

One end of the kingdom is under the boot, deported, written off. The other end is safe enough to mock. And the four names in verse six do not go to the scoffers behind the walls.

They go north. They go to the conquered end. They get spoken over the exact people the rest of the world had already stopped naming at all.

If you have ever been the one everybody quietly wrote off, you already know which end of that kingdom you would have been standing in.

Who Do You Call at 2 A.M.

Picture what desperate people were actually doing while they waited for a word from God that seemed like it would never come.

Isaiah caught them at it. “When they say to you, ‘Inquire of the mediums and the spiritists who chirp and mutter’… shouldn’t a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living?” (Isaiah 8:19) That is the scene. A defeated people, out of options, leaning down toward the ground to catch a whisper from the dead. Chirping and muttering. Straining to hear something, anything, because every other voice had gone silent and they could not stand the silence.

That is the room the first name walks into. Wonderful Counselor.

Do not soften “Counselor” into a life coach with good boundaries. In the ancient world a counselor was a war-room word. The counselor is the voice a king leans on when the army of Assyria is camped outside the wall and the wrong decision gets a whole city killed. This is not advice about your feelings. This is the guidance you cannot afford to get wrong.

And then Isaiah stacks a word in front of it that he does not use lightly. Wonderful. The Hebrew is pele, and it does not mean lovely or heartwarming. It is the word Scripture keeps in reserve for the things only God can do. Miraculous. The kind of act that makes you step back. So this is not a warm counselor. This is a counselor whose guidance is a miracle.

Here is the edge of it. The contrast is not good advice against bad advice. The people down on the ground listening to the dead were getting access. Somebody was chirping. There was a voice. It was available and it cost money and it told them something. The problem was never that they had no counsel. The problem was that the counsel was counterfeit, and the true Counselor’s plan was not merely clever… it was God’s own.

We do the ground-listening too. We do not call it mediums. We call it doom-scrolling at midnight, or asking six people until one of them says the thing we wanted to hear, or following whatever voice is loudest right now, not because it is wise but because it is there and the silence is unbearable. The chirping has an app now. It still chirps.

But a plan is only as strong as whatever is behind it. Good direction does not save anybody if nothing on earth is strong enough to carry it out. Which is why the child does not merely advise. Look at the verse again… “the government will be on his shoulders.” He does not point at the weight. He picks it up.

The Champion Who Never Came

These were people who had watched their own walls fall.

That matters. When Isaiah says the next name, he is not talking to a nation that felt strong and wanted a little backup. He is talking to people whose memory of Assyria coming over the wall was fresh enough to make them flinch. They had already learned exactly how strong they were not.

Mighty God. In Hebrew, El Gibbor. Let us break it down… Gibbor is a battlefield word. It is the champion, the warrior who steps out to the front when the line is already breaking and the battle is already lost. And El is the word for God. Not a mighty man. Not a better general. God himself, as the champion.

Feel what that does. Everyone in that broken northern country was praying for a stronger king, a bigger army, a better version of the thing they already had and had already watched fail. And the promise refuses to be that. The deliverer was never going to be an upgraded them. It was never going to be a tougher Israel. The rescue always required God himself to step down onto the field and stand where the line was breaking… as a person, in the fight, where you could see him.

A God who does not send help from a safe distance but comes down and stands on the ground as a man.

Anyone who has been in real trouble knows the need. It is not only that you needed someone stronger than you. It is that you needed someone stronger than everyone standing next to you. That kind of alone where you look around for help and realize every person who is supposed to save you is just as overmatched as you are. That is the moment El Gibbor was spoken into.

But a champion who wins your battle and then walks off is a mercenary, not family. And people who have lost everything do not just need someone strong. They need someone who does not leave when the fighting stops.

The One Who Did Not Leave

In Hebrew, to be the “father of” something means to be the master of it. The owner of it. The one it belongs to.

So “Eternal Father” is not first a warm word. It is a claim of ownership. Father of eternity means he owns forever. Time itself belongs to him. State it that plainly, and then hear what it costs the people who first heard it.

Because think about who they were. These were people who had lost real fathers. Real sons. Real homes. Deportation does not take an idea from you. It takes your family and marches them off in a line to a country you will never see. Father, son, home… those were not metaphors to them. Those were the exact things Assyria had just ripped out of their hands.

And into that specific wound the name lands. Not “God is like a nice father.” The one relationship these people had just watched get violently stripped away is the one God claims as his name that does not expire. Eternal Father. The father who does not get deported. The one who does not get dragged off in the line with everyone else.

This fear does not require losing a country. It is the dread of being the one who gets left when things fall apart. The sense that everyone eventually goes, that love is a thing with a shelf life, that if you look away long enough the important people will not be there when you look back. That is not a small fear. For a lot of people it is the fear, the one underneath all the others.

Eternal Father is spoken straight into that. He owns forever, which means he is not going anywhere.

Saved for Last on Purpose

It comes last in the verse. Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, and then, at the end, Prince of Peace. It waits because peace is what all the rest of it was aiming at. The counsel, the strength, the staying… none of it was the goal. They were the road. This is the destination.

Prince of Peace. The Hebrew under “peace” is shalom, and if you translate it as mere quiet you have already lost it. Shalom is not the absence of noise. It is the presence of wholeness. Nothing missing. Nothing broken. Everything in its place and every account settled. It is not the room going silent. It is the room being complete.

And remember who heard it. People under occupation. For them “peace” had only ever meant the pause between one invading army and the next. It meant the quiet stretch before the next boot came over the wall. Peace, to them, was a held breath. It was the gap. It was never a thing you got to keep.

So hear the difference. A treaty is a pause. A treaty is two exhausted powers agreeing not to swing for a while, and everyone knows it will not last, and everyone is already watching the border. Shalom is not a treaty. It is not a pause in the fighting. It is a finished state, a wholeness that is not waiting for the next thing to break it, because there is no next thing.

And this is where the announcement stops being ancient and becomes the most personal thing in the book. Because the child who carries this name does not merely negotiate a peace between you and God, the way tired kings sign a paper and go home. He does not broker it from a distance. He is it. The peace is not an agreement he arranges. The peace is himself, handed to you.

You know the weariness this is aimed at. It is not the weariness of war. It is the weariness of a peace that never holds. It is getting to a good stretch in your life and, instead of resting in it, bracing… because you have done this before and you know how the story goes. The quiet always ends. The other shoe always drops. You have stopped trusting the good weeks because the good weeks have a body count. You do not dread the storm anymore. You dread the calm, because you know what usually follows it.

And into that… into the person who cannot let themselves believe a good thing will last… comes a name that says the wholeness is not the gap between disasters. It is the end of them.

But does it hold? That is the only question that matters now.

He Went There Anyway

Turn to Matthew, chapter four, and watch where Jesus decides to live.

“He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali.” (Matthew 4:13)

Read those last two words again. Zebulun and Naphtali. The exact ground from the beginning of this. The conquered corner. The forgotten margin. The first towns to fall, the ones deported and written off, the ones the scoffers behind the walls never spared a thought for.

Centuries pass, and Jesus does not set up in Jerusalem, behind the safe walls, among the people who still felt secure. He walks up to the wrong side of the kingdom and moves in. And Matthew tells you exactly why. “This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah… The people who live in darkness have seen a great light, and for those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.” (Matthew 4:14-16)

Same ground. Same forgotten place. Same words, spoken once over people in defeat and now spoken again over the same dirt, and this time the light was standing on it.

This is the one who carries all four names at once. Not “God” in the abstract. Jesus. The counsel you cannot afford to get wrong, and he is it. The champion strong enough when everyone beside you is overmatched, and he stepped onto the field as a man. The Father who owns forever and does not get dragged off in the line. The peace that is not a treaty but a person. Four names, spoken as fact into a disaster, and then a carpenter’s son moves to Capernaum and starts answering to all of them.

And notice this, quietly. These were never only ancient words. Direction you can trust. Strength that does not run out. Someone who does not leave. A peace that finally holds. Those are not four ideas about God. They are the four things people are still most afraid of running out of. The chirping and muttering never stopped. Neither did the fear of being the one who gets left. He walked into the exact place all four of those fears live.

So here is what is left to you.

Everybody has a Zebulun and Naphtali. A corner of your life you have already conceded. The part you assume is too far gone, too far north, too long ago written off to expect anything good to come and stand in it and call it by a name. You have made your covenant with that. You have decided the light dawns somewhere else, for someone with better walls.

He went there anyway. He always goes to the wrong side of the kingdom first.

The name your parents gave you was a wish, and you have spent your whole life waiting to see if it would hold. These four names were never a wish. They were true the moment they were spoken, and they are still being spoken, over the exact ground you gave up on.

What would it be, to hear your own forgotten corner named by something good… and to believe, this time, that the name is telling the truth?

Yours in Christ,
Mike Palmer
Pastor, Red River Baptist Church

P.S. The four names were spoken over the corner of the kingdom everyone had already stopped naming. If you have a corner like that… a marriage, a kid, a habit, a version of yourself you quit expecting anything good from… come Sunday anyway. We are starting the Christmas in July series right there, in the ruins, because that is exactly where He starts.

This article is drawn from the first sermon in the ‘Christmas in July’ series at Red River Baptist Church — He Started in the Ruins, Isaiah 9:1-7 (with Matthew 4:13-16).