Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: The Third Commandment is one place where older translations serve us badly. Who knows what “in vain” means? It is not a term we use or understand today. The Voice does a good job of translating this — imprecisely, but in a way that gives us fuller impact: “You are not to use My name for your own idle purposes, for the Eternal will punish anyone who treats His name as anything less than sacred.” Every language had words or expressions that are considered coarse, vulgar, and/or unmentionable in polite speech; they are reserved for sailors and criminals. (And, it seems, college students.) But this is just a cultural convention; it is basically a means of distinguishing tone, class, the speaker’s emotional state, etc. Abusing God’s name — blasphemy — is an entirely different matter. If we believe in God and fear Him, we do not speak His name idly. The implications of “name” have changed over the millennia; certainly to the Hebrews, it meant something more than a word used to describe or identify God. Most of us do not even have a special word to use for the name of God today (other than Jesus Christ); we simply capitalize common nouns, e.g., “god,” “father,” and “lord.” Nevertheless, depending on context, these have become the “name of God” to us. Jesus Himself used the name “The Father,” rather than the Jewish word Yahweh, to refer God in Heaven. So we must conclude that to abuse the name by which we refer to God is forbidden by this commandment. A word representing God is a symbol. Think of it as a statue; it signifies God Himself. Its proper use is only to address the deity or to discuss, to teach and learn, about Him. swearing an oath on the Bible What practices does this proscribe? First, certainly, the use of God as part of a curse. We don’t want to say “Holy Jesus!” as an indication of shock, or “Goddamn you” as a light curse. Do we really expect that God is going to take our wishes into account when He decides the eternal fate of another person’s soul? No. What these expressions do is to cheapen the name of God. We might say “I’ll kill you if you take my cookie,” and we know it is a joke, because the person does not fear that we will kill him. But do we live in fear of God? Or is eternal life, and the possibility of eternal judgment, a joke? There is a use of God’s name even more serious, and that is using God’s name to assist in fraud: that is, swearing a false oath and invoking God to strengthen the fraud. God has never offered to act as the guarantor of our truthfulness. Christ taught us that we should not swear an oath at all, much less using God’s name, for we do not have dominion over God to make Him our guarantor. (Matthew 5:33-37) To swear an oath is a presumption that we have dominion over that which we swear upon. If we swear an oath on God’s name, we arrogate God’s righteousness to ourselves, which is an enormous sin of pride. We do not somehow magically become righteous in our lives by Christ’s mercy; rather, we are made righteous by forgiveness. Shall we presume to have God’s righteousness in what we say?