Easter Devotional Guide

Eighteenth Day:

"Manoah said, 'Tell us your name so we can honor you after our son is born.' 'No,' the angel replied. 'You don't need to know my name. And if you did, you couldn't understand it.'" Judges 13:17-18

Manoah had plenty of issues to work through. Why God chose to send Samson as this man's son is not very apparent. First of all, Manoah refused to heed the message conveyed to his wife. He did pray to , regarding the message, but apparently in an attitude which seemed to disregard his wife as capable of transmitting the message she had been given.

Manoah was put out that the angel of had not met with him. He did not like that the angel had appeared and spoken directly with his wife. As husband, his was the important role. He should have been addressed as Abraham had long before been told of Sarah's impending pregnancy. Instead, he had been overlooked and ignored. Speaking to his wife had been enough for the angel, but Manoah's sense of self-importance and protocol was injured by the action of the 's messenger.

When he could not make the angel follow his preconceived procedures, he asked the angel to tell him his name. The petition was ostensibly to enable Manoah to honor the messenger of , but there was much more to the request than that. Knowing one's name was understood as having power over the one named. As man had been given authority to name the animals in the Garden of Eden, he had been granted authority over the animal world. So Manoah now desired some sort of leverage over this messenger of who would not bow to the rules of propriety.

Manoah did not know what he was asking. His world of understanding was too limited for him to fully recognize the implications of his request. Questions of tradition, culture, status, class, and ranking people in order of importance had too much control over his thoughts and actions. Without recognizing it, he was trying to force God into a box of his comfort. He wanted God to be more controlled—to follow the rules by which he ordered his world. He asked for the angel's name, not recognizing he could never control God or God's dealings with humanity. He would not even have been able to understand the name of the messenger, nor would it have mattered.

The importance of the visit by 's messenger was not to raise Manoah's importance. It was not really to do with Manoah, at all. The importance of the meeting was to communicate with his wife that God was about to do something special with and through her. She had now received God's instructions more than once. The message was the important issue. Manoah's attention should have been focused on what God was planning to do. All he could focus on, however, was himself and his own issues and feelings of inadequacy. God was intervening in his life, but what he really wanted was control, a sense of power, and a greater degree of self-importance.

He felt threatened and robbed of position when God spoke to his wife. He felt injured, when there had been no change in his own life. God had just not chosen to confirm his sense of self-importance. In his plea for prestige, he missed rejoicing in God's attention to his family. He was too blind to see it.

Determine where you expect God to follow your notions and submit them to Christ as Lord.

"Lord, help me to worry less with my sense of self and more with your plans and mission."

—©2009 Christopher B. Harbin

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