I do hope that you will make an effort to memorize the Ten
Commandments. Unfortunately, the statistics show that average
Americans, though they believe they obey the commandments, actually
cannot recite them.
This week Andy and I have had some landscaping done at our home to
make a small side patio of brick. After a rock and sand foundation
was put down, it was necessary to build a redwood frame to define the
perimeter of the patio. Because the bricks are being put in without
mortar, the design and structure of the patio is given
boundaries. It will be held together solidly and securely, and
is unlikely to shift or fall apart because of its frame.
I see the Ten Commandments quite a bit like that frame. The framework
God gives us for life is set down in the Ten Commandments.
Within that framework, life offers us many opportunities to apply
the Commandments creatively and faithfully. We are given minds
and hearts to think those specific circumstances through. The Ten
Commandments represent a framework, a set of boundaries, for our
lives, given by God as a gift of grace and protection for us. So
certainly it would be a worthy effort to remember them, to be able to
recite them, and to order our lives by them.
The commandment we're looking at today is the Third Commandment, You
Shall Not Misuse the Name of the Lord Your God.
You've heard of the crime known as identity theft. Identity theft has
become a serious and expensive problem in the United States. One
reason is that only 15 states of the 50 actually call it a crime and
can prosecute it. But what happens with identity theft is that a
person takes your name, your social security number or a credit card
number, and-by means that are way too easy to acquire these
days-actually takes your credit and your good name and applies their
own charges to it. They accomplish this feat by applying for a
new credit card in your name, or by changing the address on yours and
maintaining use of your account until it is discovered several months
later. This type of fraud victimizes at least 400,000 people per
year, to the tune of $10,000 per victim.
Identity theft can cause a terrible disaster. In those 35 states
where it is not a crime, the victim becomes a double victim:
not only does one get defrauded financially, but one also loses one's
credibility. You cannot prove that your identity has been
stolen. Your very name has been so misused, that you cannot
even prove to the authorities you are who you say you are. You will
read some really hair-raising stories and testimonials on the
Internet from people who have had this happen to them.
The feeling we have is outrage, isn't it? It is outrageous
that a person's name would be stolen and used for evil purposes. It
is that outrage I want you to hook into now to appreciate what God is
saying when he says, "Do not misuse my name." It is
identity theft of the worst order when we take God's name and apply
it for evil purposes.
I'd like to spend a little time today talking about how we steal and
misuse God's name. But first, to fully appreciate the holiness and
the weight of God's name, let's look for a few minutes at the history
of the name Yahweh. Written in various forms in the Scripture -
Yahweh, Y-H-W-H (omitting the vowels), or Jehovah - the name we
hallow was given to Moses at the burning bush. Remember Moses was
being asked to lead the people out of slavery from Egypt, and Moses
said to God speaking in the burning bush, "But tell me who is
sending me? What is your name?" And God said, "My name is
Yahweh." "I Am that I Am" is our English translation.
That was the name given to Moses revealing God's nature of being and
eternal existence and presence with him.
That name was so holy that as things were formalized among the
Israelites in the desert, they determined not to say the name of the
Lord but once a year, and that by the High Priest in the Holy of
Holies. The name of God was not thrown around and bandied about. It
was never used, because it was so holy. Israel came to value the name
of God so much that when the Scribes began copying and recopying the
manuscripts of the Old Testament Scriptures, when they came to the
name Jehovah or Yahweh, they would stop, ceremonially bathe all over,
and then go back to the scroll with a new, unused pen. They had to do
that quite often copying the Old Testament!
This commandment is a stern warning because the name of God holds
power. It's sort of akin to a warning sign on an electrical panel.
Stop! Warning! High voltage! Be careful how you touch God. He may be
dangerous! That's how the people viewed the name. Its use carried
power. The name was believed to be filled with the character and the
vitality and power of the person labeled by it. So the name itself
became a very sacred representation of God himself.
The theft of that name takes many forms historically and in our
culture: 1. declaring God's endorsement for something
he would not support. Using God's name in vain, as the King James
says, or misusing the name of God, is declaring God's endorsement for
something he cannot support.
Here's an example. Years and years ago, when I was a new staff person
at Menlo Park church, my office faced the front street. A man walked
in late in the day. Everybody else was pretty much gone. He started
talking, and a story came out that I fell for. He wanted money, but
he was really wanting to get to know me and sort of endear himself to
me. He said, "I want to become a Christian. I want to join the
choir. I want to get involved in the church." Of course I said,
"Well, that's fantastic. That's great!" You know, that's
the kind of conversation you would love to have. So I got him all set
up, and he was scheduled to go to choir on Thursday.
In the meantime, I was beginning to have some misgivings about him
which were confirmed the following Friday when word got back to me
that he was introduced the night before at choir as a new member, and
he said, "I'm a friend of Mary Naegeli's," and began to
work on people to give him money. Now my name was stolen that night.
He used my name to gain access to the hearts of people with whom I
had a friendship. He made a false claim about our relationship. That
was stealing my identity and using my name for his own purposes. He
was a con artist. He disappeared after that.
We see many forms of this when we call upon God to justify our
sinning. As an example, early in my Christian life, there was a
couple had mentored me as we sang together in a singing group.
They were very friendly and kind and gracious. They took me aside one
day and calmly told me that God was telling them to get a
divorce. This was such a blow, and frankly, to this day I
believe they co-opted God's endorsement. I have a hard time
believing that divorce is God's will, even when it is necessary (and
there are those times) - but this is a subject we will cover when we
come to the Seventh Commandment.
Another example, a few years ago: I was at a Presbytery meeting when
a moderator of General Assembly came to visit in the midst of one of
the big furors that we annually experience. What he said was,
"Dissension in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is a sign that
the Holy Spirit is at work." Now I don't know what Bible he's
reading, but my Bible says that the Holy Spirit fosters peace and
unity and care and mutual accountability; that dissension, in fact,
is in all the New Testament lists regarding what the evil one
perpetrates (Galatians 5:20, Romans 13:13). The name of the Holy
Spirit was misused in that talk that day.
Those are examples of misuse of God's name to declare God's
endorsement for something God would not support.
2. cursing in God's name. We have biblical examples of
this in the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17. Goliath is
said to have cursed David by his gods. We don't know if it is by
Goliath's gods or by David's God, but he was trying to goad him into
action. When we damn someone in God's name, or we tell a person where
to go (you know what I mean), we steal God's identity for evil
purposes. It is not our right or privilege to send anyone anywhere in
God's name, except to commission them for missionary service, which
we do with joy. But cussing in God's name is a misuse of what is holy
and good.
3. swearing, or what I call oath supporting, "taking an
oath" or "swearing an oath" are various phrases used
in the Scriptures. This thought requires a little bit of homework,
because there is a change in the path of history on swearing. Early
on in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) it seems as
though God encouraged swearing in God's name as a sign of spiritual
vitality and a committed life. So for example, in Deuteronomy 10 we
have this word, "Fear the Lord your God and serve him. Hold fast
to him and take your oaths in his name." This carried the sense
that when you promised something in God's name, you would not break
your promise; that God, in fact, will help you to fulfill it, and you
are accountable to God for fulfilling it. That was seen as good. If
one uses the name in a promise with that in mind, it is, I think, an
okay thing. Therefore, in a court of law, when you swear to tell the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, "so help me
God," you as a Christian can do that with a clear conscience
because you have no intention of lying, whether or not you give the
oath. You recognize you are accountable to God and given the
power by him to tell the truth.
But later on, rabbis got into the middle of this and started thinking
about ways in which persons could remove their responsibility for
truth-telling by "fudging" with certain oaths. The rabbis
of Jesus' time were teaching that an oath was not binding if it
omitted God's name or did not imply God's name. So if you swore by
your own life or the life of the king, for instance, like Abner did
at the end of that David and Goliath story in First Samuel 17, Abner
made a promise saying, "As surely as you live, O King, I will do
such and so," That was considered okay. You were not bound
actually because that was not an oath that invoked God's name. One
rabbi taught that if you swore by Jerusalem you were not bound to
your oath, but if you swore toward Jerusalem (where God dwells), then
you were bound by that oath. Basically what the rabbis were doing was
teaching people how to cross their fingers when they made promises.
Do you remember that scene in The Truman Show where
Truman finally figured out that his whole life was a television
program. He took a closer look at his wedding picture and
discovered his wife had her fingers crossed! Do you remember that? If
you cross your fingers, you have no intention of keeping your word!
My nephew, a few years ago, as a mischievous adolescent, carried with
him an aura of suspicious evasion. It was a known fact that he could
stretch the truth or fabricate a story to protect his reputation.
When he really wanted us to believe him, he would say something like,
"I swear to God, this is what happened." Even with that
declaration, we still didn't believe him, because by that time we
expected to be lied to. If you feel the need to say, "I swear to
God," you might also feel the need to look to your own heart for
the consistency of your truth-telling.
Jesus said in Matthew 5 in the Sermon on the Mount, "But I tell
you, do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is God's throne,
or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is
the city of the great King." In other words, God is behind
everything in existence, and if one were to take an oath using any of
those as the object or the accountability, they all lead back to God
anyway and are therefore binding. Jesus said, "Don't even do
that," and we'll come back to that later. So that's the idea of
using God's name to support your promises. It isn't necessary, and
it's a misuse of God's name.
4. The fourth example of identity theft is the one
probably most commonly in use, and that is trivializing God's name
by throwing it around as if it had no content or power. We hear the
name of Christ used as an exclamation point in conversation. We hear
it in swears and curses at the ballgame. We hear it as an empty,
unimaginative phrase of anger or rage on the road or at home. In
fact, one of the meanings of the Hebrew word "to misuse"
there is "to empty, to remove of its weight, to gut it so it has
no content." And this in fact is one of the most rampant
problems we witness: using God's name this way, in profane
ways. It surrounds us at work and out in the public square. The fact
is, we find those words deliciously attractive when we do something
or someone else does something to anger us. But as Garrison Keillor,
in his monologue about Pastor Inquist in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota,
said, "Those delicious and satisfying words are never available
to a pastor when he hits his thumb with a hammer." "They're
not available to me, and they're not available to you," the Lord
says. It trivializes God's name and disassociates God's name with his person.
5. But the last one I want to mention is a more current
trend we've seen in the last 20 years or so, and that is avoiding
the use of God's name altogether. Many (and I hear this in the
debates, for instance, in our denomination) avoid using the names of
God that have been revealed to us in Scripture, studiously avoiding
the name of God, Yahweh, Lord, Christ, King, heavenly Father,
refusing to use those names because they don't like them, and
substituting for those names other names which God has not revealed
as identifying him clearly, names like Sofia or The First Cause, or
other depersonalized names. When we do that, when we avoid the names
God has given us and use other names of our own design, this
immediately puts us in danger of creating a new reality to replace
the true one. Remember, the name carries the character, and when we
refuse to call God what he has called himself, we are turning our
back on his character revealed to us. This is in essence what the Re-Imagining
debacle of 1993 was all about. Those are ways in which we steal
God's identity.
But what are ways that we could implement today, if we choose today
to do so, to make use of God's name properly? We can't just say,
"Don't do it." We've got to think of something more
positive and creative here in order to change our language habits.
The Scripture is very clear that our tongue has to be tamed. It has
to be reigned in and brought under discipline. As you know, it's
appalling - when you hear stuff around you - how easily it embeds in
your mind and when you least expect it, comes out in your speech. Am
I right? And so we want to look at this issue now, in the calm of
Sunday morning worship, and think about what we might do instead.
Joy Davidman, in her book on the Ten Commandments called Smoke on
the Mountain, said, "The positive way to state the Third
Commandment is this: Thou shalt take the name of the Lord thy God in
earnest." Namely, when you use the name of God, or the name of
the Lord, the name of Jesus Christ, you do so intentionally and with
proper reverence for God himself. When you speak the name of Jesus,
you are intending to represent the person of Christ.
1. So it's not just a word. It's not a harmless word. It
represents a person. It represents your God, your Lord, and is used
then with that appropriate reverence. That means be aware every
time you say the Lord's name. I am sure that those who use the
name of Jesus or Christ as an expletive would never even imagine how
many times they've done so. Studies have shown that some of our
movies these days use the name of the Lord 200 times in a two-hour
movie, all in expletives. Most of those occurrences happen without
even thinking.
In my first grade, the Catholic nuns there at the school taught us
something that remains with me to this day. We were taught that when
we heard or spoke the name of Jesus that we should nod our head, just
a little tip of the head, to acknowledge the holiness of God. To this
day, I still find myself doing that; not every time, but sometimes,
and always when I hear the name of the Lord taken in vain. When
someone uses it as a swear word, I find myself wanting to reclaim the
holiness of God's name. Just a little nod of the head showing
deference to God does that for me. You might think about that and
teach that to your children.
2. A second idea is to grasp and retain a proper
sense of God's character and personhood. What I mean by that is,
get to know the real God. Study the Scripture. Know what God has done
for you, and who God is, and what Jesus did and what the Holy Spirit
is about. Find out and get to know and become conversant in prayer
with the one who created you, and when you do that, it's a whole lot
harder to misuse the name of someone you know and appreciate
personally. You wouldn't use your husband's or wife's or child's name
in a derogatory way because that's your flesh or blood or your
beloved, your mom or your dad. Same thing with God. The more we get
to know God, the more we carry the meaning of his name with us, and
would never even think to misuse it other than calling upon him in
prayer and in worship.
3. A third idea is to address this issue of using
profanity when you get angry or upset or frustrated. The antidote to
that is to find good and clean ways to say what we really mean and
deciding ahead of time to use this more creative and accurate
vocabulary. You have to decide this in advance, because the moment
you strike your thumb with the hammer is not the time to go looking
for good vocabulary in the dictionary. Lord Byron, who himself was a
pretty good swearer, observed this of a friend. "He knew not
what to say, and so he swore."
When I read that quote, it made me think of a dorm-mate in my
freshman dorm. I grew up in a pretty sheltered environment - I was
telling Andy at breakfast this morning, I don't really remember a lot
of bad language in high school, and he thinks "memory has been
merciful" in my case - so I definitely remember the earsplitting
effects of a college dorm. Coming into a freshman dorm at
Stanford University, you would expect people to have a very good
vocabulary. But Lyssa, across the hall from my room, had
absolutely the vilest, dirtiest mouth of anybody I have ever, ever
heard in my entire life, including the thirty years since. Every
other word was an expletive of some sort. That was her normal
conversation. It gets boring after awhile. When she got really upset,
her decibel level would rise, and that was the only way you'd know
that she was really upset: the same words, but just really loud.
Well, I was taking a calculus class, and there was a Catholic nun in
the class who needed some extra help. And so I said, "Well, come
on over to my room, Sister, and I'll be happy to help you with
whatever you need." So here she is, sitting at my desk; she's in
her full black-and-white dress habit here, sitting at my desk; we're
pouring over the calculus textbook and trying to do the homework, and
of all of a sudden in the middle of this quiet afternoon, Lyssa comes
bombing through my door, and literally stops in her tracks. I could
just see the words get pulled back before she said them. I'm
thinking, "Oh man, this is going to be bad." But to my
surprise, she carried on the most delightful conversation. She asked
me her question, and she greeted the sister and engaged her in a very
lovely conversation. "So nice to meet you, Sister. See you
later. Goodbye." She closed the door and left. Of course, the
sister had no clue how significant the last few minutes had just
been. So we finished the homework; she took off. And I went across
the hall to Lyssa's room, and I said, "Lyssa, I was astounded at
how well you did when Sister So-and-So was in my room!" Like a
pent-up avalanche, all the words started tumbling out again. She just
had to get them out. And I said, "No, no, no. Wait. Just look at
what you just did. You actually found words, good words to say what
you needed to say without using any of the profanity."
Now it seems to me that we as Christians have at our disposal God's
creativity to find the really good words to describe how we really
feel without using the Lord's name to do that. So think about it
while you're not upset. "What would I say if such-and-so
happened?" and prepare for it so that when that moment comes,
instead of the Lord's name coming out of your mouth, it will be
something else that truly describes how you feel. Your kids will
remember what you say in anger. You might as well build up good
vocabulary in them as well. They're listening.
4. The last idea I want to give to you has to do with
the concept of swearing to bolster your truth-telling. It seems to
me, then, that the real issue here is whether or not you are telling
the truth on a general basis. And so I recommend that you develop
confidence and a commitment to truth-telling that does not require
bolstering your promises with God's backup. If you feel the need
to say, "I swear to God, this is what happened," perhaps
you have already created the impression among your peers, workmates
and family members that your truth-telling is not reliable. In that
case, start telling the truth. Start saying what really happened.
Start presenting yourself the way you really are. Start committing
yourself to telling the truth, and your reputation for truth-telling
will grow. You won't have to bolster your statements with any kind of
oath. You won't have to go beyond telling it as it is because people
will believe you. If they don't believe you now, that's a real issue,
and we're going to address that, actually, when we talk about the
ninth commandment later. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount,
"Simply let your 'yes' be 'yes' and your 'no' be 'no.'" Say
it like it is. Say what's true. Leave it there. Do not swear. You
don't need to. To do so would be misusing God's name.
Those are the ways that we can give back to God what is rightfully
his, the honor due his name, a good reputation that God deserves
should remain with him. Our own reputation can only be repaired by
the work of Christ on the cross which has been accomplished for us.
We need not and must not steal God's identity to make ourselves look
or sound better, but rather give God what is due him. I know that's a
struggle for some of us. I know that we're surrounded in the world
and workplace by bad language and dishonoring terminology. But some
day, we will be part of the throng of those who are lifting God's
name up, Jesus' name, and honoring him.
The apostle Paul wrote this wonderful poem about Christ emptying
himself and pouring himself out for us, and then he says this,
"God exalted Christ Jesus to the highest place and gave him the
name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee
should bow, in heaven and on earth and even under the earth, and
every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God
the Father" (Philippians 2:9-11). There will come a time when
every person who utters the name of the Lord is doing so in reverence
and awe, recognizing his power. Let us be among those even now. Let
us read together a confirmation of our belief.
Q. What is the Third Commandment?
A. The Third Commandment is you shall not take the name of the
Lord your God in vain. For the Lord will not hold him guiltless who
takes his name in vain.
Q. What is required in the Third Commandment?
A. The Third Commandment requires the holy and reverent use of
God's names, titles, attributes, ordinances, word, and works.
Q. What is forbidden in the Third Commandment?
A. The Third Commandment forbids all profaning or abusing of
anything whereby God makes himself known.
Q. What do you learn from this Commandment?
A. I should use God's name with reverence and awe. God's name
is taken in vain when used to support wrong. It is insulted when used
carelessly as in a curse or a pious cliché.
Amen!