TEN COMMANDMENTS
THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN
DR. JIM DIXON
EXODUS 20:1 -20
FEBRUARY 2, 1992, 0
A lot of people are kind Of surprised to learn that God has a name, that God has a very personal name. God revealed that name to Moses over 3,000 years ago as recorded in the book. of Exodus, the third chapter, verses 14 and 15. Theologians refer to this name of God as the tetragrammaton, a compound Greek word. meaning “four letters,” and indeed the name. of God, this personal name of God as given to Moses contains four letters. When these four letters are transliterated from the Hebrew to the English, the four letters are YHWH. Obviously, those. four letters. are four consonants because the ancient Hebrews., in their writings, used no vowels or vowel points. But when the vowel sounds are added to the four consonants, the name of God almost certainly is to be pronounced in this way, “Yahweh.” That is the name of God as revealed to Moses more than 3,000 years ago. “My name is Yahweh.” That name means “I Am..” More completely, it means “I Am He Who Is I Am He Who Causes To Be.” This name Yahweh is used in the Bible 8,648 times.
This name, the Bible tells us, is holy and the Jewish people knew that They knew the name of God was holy, so much so that they would not speak the name of Geri—only once a year, on the day of atonement, and then only by the high priest and he spoke the name Yahweh with great fear. Whenever the Jewish people would read the Torah, whenever they would read the Old Testament and they would come to the name Yahweh, as they spoke, they would substitute the word Eloheim, the Hebrew word meaning “God” or the word “Adonye,” the Hebrew word meaning “Lord” or even “Shekinah ,” the Hebrew word meaning “the one who dwells with us.” But they would not speak aloud the name “Yahweh” and so it remains for the Jewish people to this day. I suppose in a world where, so little is held sacred, it is kind of comforting to know that there is a group of people who hold the name of God in such reverence. And yet biblically, God does not counsel us to never speak His name. God does not counsel us to keep His name unspoken. God does not counsel us to keep His name unmentioned but rather, biblically, God counsels us to keep His name honored. Honor the name of God, That’s the real point of this third commandment. Honor the name of God. Not just the tetragrammaton, not just the name Yahweh but all the names of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit all the names of God, all the titles o0f God honor His name.
I have two teachings this morning and the first is this Honor His name in your speech. Honor the name of God in all that we say. Watergate (485 the name given to perhaps the greatest political scandal in the history of our nation. And of course, through the Watergate scandal, the phrase “expletive deleted” became famous. An expletive is, of course, a profane or obscene expression for the transcript handed to Leon Jaworski who was the Special Prosecutor in Watergate. That transcript contained, in written form, a conversation between Richard Nixon and Bob Haldeman and John Dean. The transcript was said to be able to provide evidence particularly damning to Richard Nixon. The transcript recorded Nixon’s conversation with Haldeman and Dean where Nixon asked them to guarantee Howard Hunt clemency and also to offer Howard Hunt $120,000 to buy his silence. When this transcript was given to Leon Jaworski the Special -Prosecutor, he could not read it. He could not read it because all of the expletives had been deleted, and because there were so many expletives and they had all been deleted, the conversation did not hold together, and the sentences were kind of half-sentences. Leon Jaworski said that it was hard for him to tell what Nixon had said to Haldeman and Dean. He had to actually go back and listen to the original tapes where the expletives were included in order to understand what Nixon had really said. I do not think any of us certainly no person in their right mind would suggest that the greatest crime of Richard Nixon was obscenity or profanity and yet, I think, sometimes we fail to recognize how important obscenity and profanity is in the sight of a holy God and particularly, I must say, profanity. It is one thing to use obscene speech. Certainly, that is unbecoming of a Christian and the Bible warns us regarding the use of any language that in any culture, is deemed to be filthy. But it is something far graver to use profane speech because profane speech, by definition, involves the use of God’s name in an expletive. God does not want us to use His name in an expletive, whether it is the name of the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit, whether it is any of His names or any of His titles. He warns us. Most of us do not have tape recorders recording our conversations. If a tape recorder recorded your conversation this past month, how many expletives involving profane speech would need to be deleted?
God wants us to know He hears everything and before Him, not one idle word is spoken. Truly I must say to you today, if any of you use the name of Jesus or any form of the name. of God in profanity, let this be the day you stop. We have a holy God with a holy name. He wants that name honored by Christians in every generation. I think sometimes we fail to understand how important holiness is to our Father in heaven. You know, the Bible tells us of an episode that took place in the year 539 BC involving Belshazzar who was King of the Babylonian Empire. In truth, his father, Nabonidus, was King of the Babylonian Empire but Nabonidus was often away, and he had not been around for ten years. So his eldest son, Belshazzar, was functioning King and co-regent. Belshazzar, on an evening in that year 539 BC, was gathered in his banquet hall with 1 ,000 of his lords and concubines. He was having a great party and there was lots of wine and the wine flowed. There came a point when Belshazzar was more than a little intoxicated. Suddenly he saw, on a wall of the banquet hall, a hand just a hand no body, just a hand, and the hand writing on the wall. He was startled. He had never seen a hand moving all by itself. Obviously, the ancient Babylonians had never seen the Adams Family. This hand wrote three different words on the wall Those three different words were “mene, tekel, upharsin .” Those words were in a different language than Belshazzar’s native language. And yet, perhaps, he understood their meaning. The first word meant ‘numbered,” the second word meant “weighed,” and the third word meant “divided” but he certainly did not understand how those words applied to his life. He assumed this to be some kind of message from God written by the divine hand, so he called for the prophet of God, Daniel. Daniel came in and he told the Babylonian king that he had blasphemed the holy God, that in taking the sacred vessels of gold and silver which had previously been confiscated from the Jerusalem Temple and which had been used in the worship of Yahweh Eloheim, the one true God, that this Babylonian king was guilty of blasphemous behavior. He had taken these holy and sacred objects and he had used them in drunkenness and now the judgement of God had come upon him. Daniel said “Divided, weighed, numbered” your days are numbered. You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting and your kingdom shall be divided and given into the hands of the Medes and the Persians.
That very night, as history itself tells us, the Medo Persian armies, under the leadership of Cyrus the Great, swept over the Babylonian Empire and Belshazzar himself was slain, desecrating that which was holy in the sight of God. I hope you understand that however holy those sacred vessels of silver and gold were in the sight of god, their holiness pales, absolutely pales, when compared to the holiness of God’s name. God wants you to remember that God wants you to honor His name wherever you go, in whatever you say, in all of your speech, honor His name. Of course profanity, profanity was not a real problem for the ancient Hebrews. Profanity Was not a problem for them because, as we have said, they did not utter the name of Yahweh and they held all the names and titles of God in reverence. Their biggest problem in abusing the name of God in speech had to do with swearing falsely. It had to do with in appropriate oaths. The ancient Hebrews took oaths, and they took those oaths in the name of God. If the oaths were foolhardy, if they were stupid, then that was degrading to God’s name by way of association. If those oaths were reasonable but not honored if those oaths were taken in the name of God but then not fulfilled, God’s holy name was somehow discredited by way of association. We still take oaths today. We take oaths in marriage. We promise in covenant before God and many witnesses to be loving and faithful until death do us part. We take that oath in the name of God in Christian marriage. We take oaths in the courtrooms of our nation. We take oaths in Christian baptism, infant baptism, where we promise to rear our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord believer baptism where we promise to be His disciple and, to the best of our ability, to follow Him and to obey His word and to show forth His love. God wants us to understand, He does not want His name violated in our speech in any way, whether it has to do with profanity or whether it has to do with oath taking. He wants His name honored. He wants you to remember in all that you say that you have a holy God who died for you. He wants your speech to bring glory to Him and He wants your speech to be such that others would come to love Him and believe in Him too.
Now there is a second teaching this morning related to this third commandment, and I think it is the more important of these two teachings. The second teaching is honor God’s name in your actions. Honor God’s name in our behavior. You know, Henry Ward Beecher was a preacher who preached in the days prior to the Civil War and in the days immediately after the Civil War. Beecher was called the “greatest preacher in the world” which covers a lot of space. He was called the “greatest preacher since the Apostle Paul” which covers a lot of time. It was true that thousands of people came from all over the world to hear Henry Ward Beecher preach. They came to Brooklyn where Beecher’s church was Incredibly, Henry Ward Beecher, from the time of the Civil War, received a salary of $40,000 a year, a princely sum incomprehensible in those days. Abraham Lincoln, at that time, President of the United States, only received $25,000 a year By way of equivalency, it would be like making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in income today. Henry Ward Beecher would carry uncut diamonds in his pockets. He would love to show them to people. He endorsed products from cereal to soap. He was a handsome man, and he had an eye for beautiful women. There were a lot of rumors. People wondered whether he was as faithful as the faithful ought to be Then finally, in the year 1874, Henry Ward Beecher’s friend and protege, Theodore Tilton, accused Beecher of seducing his wife. It came to trial and the eyes of the nation were focused on that trial. The trial was so big they sold admission tickets to the public. The trial, ‘ the jury, could not reach a verdict. They could not reach a verdict. Though they all believed him guilty, they did not think the evidence was absolutely conclusive, so Henry Ward Beecher continued in the ministry until death.
Fifty years later, Aimee Semple McPherson was holding church in her multimillion-dollar Angeles Temple in Los Angeles. Aimee Semple McPherson was flamboyant, and she was beautiful and attractive. She had multiple choirs, and she had an 80-piece band. It was perfect for a charismatic church in the roaring twenties. But one evening in May, in 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson went for a swim in the Pacific Ocean. She just disappeared. She disappeared. They found her 36 days later in a Mexican border town. She said she had been kidnapped and she had journeyed for days in the desert. But the authorities were suspicious because, when they examined her shoes, there was no evidence that they had ever touched the sand. They found plenty of evidence, however, that she had actually spent the time in a cottage in Carmel, California with one of her staff a man who was himself married. Aimee Semple McPherson was discredited and yet she continued in the ministry. She died at the age of fifty-three of an overdose of barbiturates.
Of course, in more recent times, we have seen Jim Baker’s resignation in disgrace, acknowledging his own sexual misconduct. Subsequent investigations have revealed the man, addicted to opulence, so much so that he misappropriated millions of dollars in donations, brought his ministry to ruin, and himself to trail and ultimately to incarceration.
Only one year after Baker’s resignation, Jimmy Swaggart was seen in a hotel with a prostitute. Those closest to him revealed. that Swaggart had struggled for years with sexual addictions. His tearful confession to his congregation and to a television audience allowed him to remain in the ministry, and yet, by all recent accounts, his addictions remain, and it is tragic. It is tragic that there are people in the ministry who participate in gross sin, and it is tragic that such people do not resign until they are exposed, and some do not resign even when exposed. It is tragic that there are congregations so willing to be shepherded by seemingly false shepherds.
But I think it is most tragic of all that through these kinds of things, the name of God, the name of God, is dragged through the gutter and the mud. The ancient Hebrews, when a priest or a rabbi used his office for personal gain, they said that he had taken the name of the Lord in vain. When a priest or a rabbi, while practicing his office, lived a private life of sin and godlessness, they said he had taken the name of the Lord in vain. I hope you understand, God wants every person on this earth to take his name. The word for take in this commandment is the Hebrew word “naysaw.” That word literally means to “lift up” or “to carry” or even “to wear.” It is an incredible thing that God allows people to wear His name. God allows the ancient Jews to wear His name. “My people,” God said, “called by My name” and God allows Christians to wear His name and to carry it, to lift it up what a privilege. “In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” we are baptized. We call ourselves Christians. We bear the very name Christ. But this warning is given. “Do not bear My name in vain.” Everyone who has confessed Christ. as Lord and Savior has taken up the name of God. Do not bear that name in vain. You know, many of us have children, and of course we give our name to our children. Barb and I, as most of you know, have two children. We have given them our name. We want them to wear it well. We want them to honor that name for our family’s sake but for our sake as well. If we feel that way at all, if you feel that way at all, how much more does God want us to honor His name? You see, God has a family. God has children. I must tell YOU in light of scripture, that not all the people of the world are children of God, not in the true sense. We must enter the family of God. We must become children of God through faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior through regeneration and rebirth. But when we enter the family of God through Christ and God becomes our Father and we become His children, He gives us His name, but He says, “Honor it.”
He wants us to understand that His family’s not like our earthly families. You see, He’s inviting everyone to enter His family. Barb and I are not like that We’ve got two kids and we are happy. We are not inviting all the kids in the world to come into our family and take our name. But God’s inviting everyone in the world to come into His family and take His name. He wants you to know that once you enter that family and you take His name, honor it for His sake, for your sake, for His family’s sake, as you discredit His name… You see, God is trying to reach to unreached. He is trying to grow a kingdom. It is His will that, of His kingdom and of its increase, there be no end, and as we do dishonor to His name, His kingdom suffers, his family suffers, and it ceases to grow, so the responsibility upon us is great. The responsibility upon you is great. It is not simply preachers who bear His name. If you belong to Him, you bear His name. Honor it in all you say. Honor it in all you do. His name is holy. In Hebrews, Chapter 11-5 are listed all the heroes of the faith, one of my favorite passages. I do not know how any of us could read that chapter in Hebrews, Chapter 11-5 and not be moved as we see men and women who gave their lives in faithful service to the name of God.
In that chapter, God says a beautiful thing. God said of all those people who were so faithful, God said ‘He is not ashamed to be called their God,” “not ashamed to be called their God.” That is my desire for you, 0and it is God’s desire for all of us, that He would have no shame in having us bear His name. God was not ashamed to be called their God and He “prepared for them an eternal city,” the Bible says. The Bible tells us in Revelation that “All who enter that city will bear forever His name.” For those of you who believe in your heart you bear that name already, bear it well Honor Him in your speech and in your behavior. Let us close with a word of prayer.