God's labels

As human beings we love to understand things, to sort out and categorise everything. We sort the contents of our kitchens into frozen goods, tinned goods, fresh produce, spices etc. We sort our books alphabetically, or by topic, or size or even colour. And we sort people into male and female, children, youths, adults and old people. Actually we go much further than this: we sort people into good and bad people, rich and poor people, different racial groups and lifestyles, people who are like us and those who are not, people who read this particular newspaper or drive that kind of car. Then we categorise personality traits, not just (for example) as 'rather gloomy', but 'depressed'; though actually even that won't do, for then we need to decide whether this is seasonal affective disorder, dysthymic disorder, a major depressive disorder, atypical depression, bi-polar disorder ... and so the list goes on.

Actually the list of the ways we categorise people goes on and on ... and on!

All this categorising others helps us to 'pigeon-hole' people and that simplifies our dealings with them enormously. Though in fact none of these labels are as straightforward as they at first sight appear! Even the most basic categorisation as 'male' or 'female' is actually much more complicated than it at first sight appears, and making even this simple division means that we end up not knowing the rich and diverse uniqueness of each individual; we know the stereotypes and the labels but not the person.

God knows each of us individually, even to knowing the number of hairs on their head, so we might suppose he'd be a master at labelling people. But he doesn't appear to use many labels at all in relating to us! There are a very few, though: 'sinner', but this applies to everyone equally; 'loved', yes this applies to every single person too, again equally! But there is one significant division that God accepts and painfully honours - there are those people who will accept his forgiveness and those who will not.

So, when God calls us by name, he is not relating to us through any stereotypes or labels. He knows me as 'Mark', and he knows you as - please substitute your own name.