What’s In a Name?

Scripture References: Matthew 1:21; Luke 2:21

AYDS, a diet-control candy, made great profits for its manufacturer from 1941 until the 1980s. By 1988, sales dropped as much as 50 percent. Nothing in the product changed, but something in society had. The words AIDS, the disease, and AYDS, the diet suppressant candy, became indivisible to people. They instinctively identified the candy with the dreaded killer.

The Apaches called him Goyakala—the Yawner. The Mexicans called him Heronimo, anglicized by Americans to Geronimo. Could anyone ever fear a yawner? But the very name Geronimo terrified residents of Mexico and Arizona in the 1880s. Besides, as one writer said, American paratroopers wouldn’t leap out of planes in World War II screaming “Goyakala!”

Mark Lindsay, a British actor, chosen from a hundred actors to play John Lennon in a biographical movie, was fired shortly after he was hired—because his name wasn’t Lindsay. He had taken that name only a few years before when he joined British Equity and found another actor there with his real name: Mark Chapman. Another Mark Chapman had murdered John Lennon in front of his townhouse in New York City, December 8, 1980.

In the Bible a person’s name often expressed something particular about that individual: Moses, because Pharaoh’s daughter drew him from the water; Adam, because God made him father of all. The name also represented the person’s nature—which surfaces the greatest of all names: Jesus, Savior; Christ, anointed.

Courtesy of Speaker’s Sourcebook of New Illustrations by Virgil Hurley © 1995 by Word, Incorporated.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.