Sunday Sermon Snippet Nov 02
“Do not lift up the name of Yahweh, your God, in respect of something empty…” Exodus 20:7a
This week’s posting of the Sunday Sermon Snippet comes from yesterday’s sermon on Exodus 20:7, entitled, “The Very Best Name In All The Earth.”
In our series on The Ten, we’ve made it to the third commandment, which is, in brief, “Do not misuse the name of Yahweh.” Most people are probably familiar with the less clear translation of this text, “Do not take the name of God in vain.” But I believe this is a case of one of those things we’ve always heard, but haven’t really known the fullness of what it means, for this command is about so much more than the mere using of God’s name as a curse-word (as horrific as that is).
See the sermon snippet below where I offer what I think is the most clear translation of Exodus 20:7, and begin to unpack all that God is communicating in this brief commandment.
And if you’d like to check out the whole sermon, just click here.
Lifting Up His Name
Exodus 20:7, my translation
“Do not lift up the name of Yahweh, your God, in respect of something empty, Yahweh will not leave anyone free of a guilty verdict who lifts up the Name in respect of something empty.”
We all know what name dropping is: associating yourself to someone as a way to use the power of their name. It may be to get you approval, recognition, access, power, or any number of benefits. This is analogous to what “lift up” means here in the third commandment.
It is you holding up the name of God, you saying it in a way to mobilize his power and presence. It’s not unlike how we are directed in the Scriptures to pray in the name of Jesus, yes?
And God wants us to do this. He wants us to use his name. But the first thing he must address is its misuse. We must not make wrongful use of this name. We must not invoke the name for mischief, for something empty and valueless and worthless. We must not call on the power and purpose of Yahweh — through the use of his name — for something that is “extraneous to Yahweh’s own person.” (Brueggemann)
Here’s what I think God is getting at when he describes what this violation is. It is using his name in such a way that makes God a means to some other end.
That’s so important, and so fundamental, and so critical to the intimate relationship that God invites us into by giving us his Name, brothers and sisters. This gets to the very heart of the gift of his name. To violate this command, to use his name towards something else that is not central to who he is and what he is about, is to use God. It is to turn him into some kind of ideological tool. It is to diminish and trivialize God.
In the same way we might feel used by someone else who drops our name and association merely to get themselves something, this is the very thing God is protecting against. Because he is jealous for his name. He said as much in Exodus already, explaining that what he’s been doing to save his people from evil and slavery was to show his power and make his name known on the whole earth (Ex9:16); he saved them for his name’s sake and to make his mighty power known (Ps106:8). His name deserves reverence and respect, it must be hallowed, just as Jesus taught us to pray.
And so, beloved, because how we use his name has a direct impact on his glory, and on his purposes and mission in this world, he will, therefore, not jeopardize that, and he will fiercely protect his name.
From what? Misuse. A lifting up to what is empty.
And what does that look like?
Well, at a minimum, it means not using his name as a curse. This is the height of lifting up his name to nothingness and emptiness. Profanity.
What makes a word profane? What makes it obscene? Which is to say, what makes it offensive or disgusting by acceptable standards of morality and decency? Well, we do. We’ve decided — in an arbitrary way, really — that certain constructions of innocent-by-themselves letters, usually put into a four-letter variety — these words are offensive. You see, it isn’t the coming together of random letters that magically make a word profane, it’s because we’ve assigned a negative value to them in all their bluntness and sharpness.And then, tragically, what people do is they take an exclamation of “God” or “Jesus” or “Christ” and mix it into that menu of profane words.
And what we’ve lost — at times doing so ourselves, and at other times in our acceptance in other people doing so in our presence, without us raising an objection — what we’ve lost sight of is that this is the worst kind of profanity possible. Because it is to use the FULLEST word in all the cosmos in the most EMPTY way. In a weird way, it’s what makes this profanity so powerful, why people probably do it. The power of his name — to take a word full of value and weight as defined by God, this intimate moniker from which proceeds presence and purpose — and to use it in an empty way, well, that is the most profane of all.
But that profanity is present in more than just a “I hit my thumb with a hammer” kind of exclamation of the name. That profanity is present in the use of OMG in a text message or on Instagram, it’s present when we say “Goooooodddd” in that long drawn out way, it’s there when we use the all caps GD in a message, or say it out loud, in a way that isn’t truly asking God to justifiably damn something or someone — which can actually be a biblically valid thing, as there are damnable things in this broken world.
If you’d like to check out the whole sermon, just click here.
