Honoring God with Our Words

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in Exodus chapter 20 tonight, and we’re looking at the Ten Commandments and what they mean for us, how we apply them today. And tonight we’re going to look at the Third Commandment, which just says simply, if you look at Exodus chapter 20, verse 7, 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. So we’re going to look at that tonight, what that means, how we apply that.

We’re going to bring in some other verses that help shed some light on what he’s talking about here. Because the first thing we usually think of when we talk about that commandment, not taking the Lord’s name in vain, what we think of is cursing. As a matter of fact, when Benjamin and I went over the Ten Commandments in our Bible class at home, I drew him some little pictures that were used with me in children’s church when I was probably his age.

or maybe a little younger to help memorize the Ten Commandments and which commandment went with which number. And just for examples, you know, the number eight was two cookies stacked on top of each other because the idea of stealing from the cookie jar, thou shalt not steal. The number seven was made to look like a finger with a wedding ring on it, thou shalt not commit adultery, that sort of thing. The number three was made to look like a little person, eyes on top of the number three.

And there were some of these I couldn’t remember, and I had to make up my own. But three I very vividly remember. Put little eyes on top of the number three and made it look like the side of the three was a mouth.

And out of it’s coming a speech bubble with not such nice things. And no, my children’s church teacher didn’t write bad words on the board. It was just, you know, dollar sign, and sign, that sort of thing, like in comics.

Because the idea that we so often have of this idea of taking God’s name in vain, we often think about cursing, and that’s what it means. When somebody hits their thumb with a hammer and words come out, that’s what we think of. But that’s not exactly what God is talking about here.

I think that might be part of it, but that’s not what he specifically means here. because when you look at the Old Testament, you see that in ancient Israel, they used to swear oaths by God’s name as a way of showing their sincerity because you see, there was no.. .

You’ll hear people today say, I swear on my mother’s grave. I don’t know what that means and your mother’s not dead anyway, but I swear on my mother’s grave because they want to have something of some importance to swear by just to show how sincere they’re being. And there’s nothing greater that we could swear by than the God who made everything else.

And so in ancient Israel, they would swear by God as a way to show their sincerity when they’re taking an oath, when they’re making a promise. And that’s not necessarily, I know some of you are sitting there looking a little scandalized by that, but it’s not necessarily an evil thing because they were even told in Deuteronomy 6, verse 13, you shall fear the Lord your God and serve him and shall take oaths in his name. At one point, God said, this is what needs to happen.

And it wasn’t just, you know, use my name flippantly. It was a way of showing also that I can be trusted because I’m calling myself accountable to God for this promise. You know, it’s not just you I’m promising this to.

It’s also God. I’m involving God in the transaction. If it’s a promise, if it’s an oath that I’m going to pay you X number of silver coins for this goat, but it’s going to come at a later date, I’m not just promising you.

I’m invoking the name of God and making myself accountable to Him and saying I’m promising Him that I’m going to do this as well. And when you think about it, we kind of do this to an extent in some of our promises. You know, I know that often when I’m performing a wedding, I’ll say something to the effect of, you know, we’re gathered here in the presence of God and these witnesses.

That when you make that oath, that vow to your spouse, you’re not just promising them, You’re promising them and you’re promising to God and in front of God and in front of all these other witnesses. The community is there to hold you accountable. I know you promised that.

I saw it with my own eyes. I was there. That’s why we have witnesses.

And God is the ultimate witness to all these things. So when we make a vow, when we make an oath in his name as he encouraged the ancient Israelites in Deuteronomy chapter 6, what we’re really doing is saying, I am accountable to God for fulfilling this promise. So it’s not necessarily, it hasn’t always been the scandalous thing that we would think of now.

And there are numerous accounts of this, numerous examples of this throughout the Old Testament. I pulled a couple of them out for us to look at. In 2 Samuel chapter 19, Joab, who’s one of David’s military commanders, said to David, Now therefore arise, go out and speak comfort to your servants, for I swear by the Lord, he says, if you do not go out, not one will stay with you this night, and that will be worse for you than all the evil that has befallen you from your youth until now.

This is right after David’s family has just sort of fallen apart. We know the, most of you know the story of David and Bathsheba. He committed adultery, and he was told by the prophet Nathan that there was going to be trouble in his family from here on out.

Well, it didn’t take very long for that to be fulfilled, because one of his sons, Amnon, sexually assaulted his half-sister Tamar. And his other son, Absalom, was so incensed by this, and rightfully so, he was so infuriated by this, that he decided Amnon needed to be punished. So he makes a plan to kill Amnon.

David is grieved by this, and ultimately, through a series of events, it leads to Absalom leading a rebellion against David. Absalom decides, you know, David is weak. David is not the godly leader of his household, is not the godly leader of his country.

Not that Absalom was the portrait of godliness either. But he decides, you know what, maybe it’s all Absalom’s time to be king of Israel. And so he launches a rebellion and he fights against David.

He tries to kill David. They end up going to war. And David’s men are very loyal. David’s soldiers are very loyal. They follow him into battle.

Even when it looks like Absalom may be on the verge of victory, they follow David into battle anyway. And they win. And Absalom, this rebel, ends up being killed.

Absalom had long hair. He got tangled in a tree, got stuck there, and they came and they found him stuck in the tree and they killed him. And I’ve heard, I didn’t hear it firsthand, but I’ve heard somebody who was there that a preacher preached one time a message on this about the evils of long hair and called it when God hanged a hippie.

And that’s exactly the wrong lesson to take from that. That’s not what that story’s about. All right, that’s an example of teaching that says, I have a point I want to make, and let’s find a Bible verse to go with it.

That’s right. So Absalom has killed David, even though this guy is a rebel who tried to take his kingdom. David is distraught over this because it’s his son.

And so David, on the evening after this great victory, is in mourning, and his soldiers are saying, wait a minute, they’re out there in the camp. David’s acting like they’ve done something horrible in killing his son when they did it out of loyalty to him to preserve his kingdom. And they’re saying, wait a minute.

You know, we stuck our necks out for you. If Absalom had become king of Israel, we’d all be dead right now. We sacrificed for you.

We followed you. And the men were ready to mutiny because they felt like David was ungrateful. And so Joab comes to David and says, what I read to you, I swear by the Lord.

I swear by the Lord that if you don’t go out and show some gratefulness to your men, not one of them will be here for you in the morning. And all this horrible upheaval that you’ve gone through in the last few years of your life, you’re going to look on those as the good old days if you don’t get it together. And Joab made this oath in God’s name.

He’s saying, I am as certain of this as I am of God that this is what’s going to happen. There’s another instance where David, where King Saul, is talking to Jonathan, 1 Samuel 19. So Saul heeded the voice of Jonathan.

This is where Saul wants to kill David. This is before David becomes king. Saul wants to kill David.

Jonathan, Saul’s son and David’s friend, intervenes. And Saul is willing, at least for a moment, to listen. So Saul heeded the voice of Jonathan.

And Saul swore, as the Lord lives, he shall not be killed. Okay, as sure as there is, what he’s saying basically is as sure as there is a God in heaven, as sure as there is a living God, David’s life is secure. Okay, he was taking an oath before God, and here he really is making himself accountable to God.

Now, Saul was also a lunatic there toward the end, and it didn’t stop him from later on going after David yet again. But that’s the point, he was making himself accountable to God, saying as sure. And you’ll see this throughout the Old Testament, phrases like this.

as the Lord lives. As the Lord lives. And what they’re saying is, as sure as I am that God is alive, I’m also sure that this thing is going to happen.

So it’s a mark of their sincerity. It’s a mark of their confidence in what they’re saying. And not always was it a bad thing because God told them to do it.

But there was a problem with people swearing rashly or falsely because this dishonored God. If you were to say, you know, God is my witness that this is true, and it wasn’t true, you’re dishonoring God. Because you’re invoking the name of God as a witness to something that’s false.

And the Bible tells us there are some things God can’t do, and one of those at the top of the list is lie. God cannot lie. And what you’re doing is you’re making God a witness to a lying statement.

They were dishonoring God if they would invoke his name rashly. If they said, as the Lord lives, I will do this, with no intention of doing this, they’re saying, as certainly as God lives, I’m going to do this. And you don’t intend to do what you promised, then what you’re basically saying is, I don’t believe God lives.

I don’t believe God exists. I don’t know that that’s what they really thought, but that’s how they were living. And many times we’ll see people in the Old Testament, you’d be hard-pressed.

I know the Bible says, the fool has said in his heart there’s no God. that’s not necessarily talking about atheists as we view them today because you’d be hard pressed in the ancient world to find somebody who didn’t believe in the existence of any gods what they were talking about and what we’re looking at here are people who live like God doesn’t exist and I think that’s even more foolish than not believing that God exists is to believe he exists and live like he doesn’t and when you’d say as the Lord lives this will happen with no intention of following through that’s what you were basically saying You were living and speaking in a way as though God didn’t exist, and you were dishonoring God. And he said in Leviticus chapter 19, Leviticus chapter 19, verses 11 and 12, You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another, and you shall not swear by my name falsely.

Now remember, he told them in Deuteronomy 6, swear oaths by my name. But he told him in Leviticus 19, you shall not swear by my name falsely, nor shall you profane the name of your God, I am the Lord. And he invokes his name, the Lord, there, which I told you about the last couple of weeks on Sunday nights when we see the Lord in all caps.

That’s referring to God’s name in Hebrew, which we translate as Yahweh or Jehovah, you may have seen it. It’s God’s name, and it means the self-existent. It means that God, it talks about his character, it describes him, that his existence isn’t conditional, it’s not dependent on any man.

And your name in the Old Testament world meant something. And it described who you were. You know, Charlie and I were talking about this last week.

Charlie was born during a thunderstorm. and as we were driving to the hospital for her to have the c-section I could see the lightning back off toward Ada and I said I can’t remember there’s there’s a superstition about children born during thunderstorms and I can’t remember what it is and I’ve looked since on Google and I still can’t figure out what the superstition was that I heard years ago if some of you remember you’ll have to tell me after church but I said I can’t remember what it is they say about kids born during thunderstorms but It’s not good. And he came out, you know, his first cry when he was born, he sounded like a dinosaur.

I even looked over at the anesthesiologist. I said, it sounds like a scene from Jurassic Park in here. And shortly after that, we, you know, we gave him his Choctaw name, which is Thundering Eagle. And for the first year, he was, I don’t know if you all remember this, he was a quiet baby.

Didn’t make much noise. and then he turned a year old and I said, Charlie, I think we gave him the wrong name. I think we’ve messed up here.

And I don’t know if the name fits him or he grew into the name. But never before have I seen a name that fits somebody so well as the idea of him thundering and screeching like an eagle because that’s what he does. In the Old Testament, your name said something about who you are.

It described who you are. And for God to say, this is my name you’re swearing by. They’re not just swearing by, I swear by God.

They were swearing by the name Yahweh. And they were using his name, his holy name that said so much about who he is. The name that says he’s higher above anybody else.

That he doesn’t depend on us, he doesn’t need us. That he exists by and for himself. And that we are all dependent on him.

the name that says so much about the nature and character of God. They were taking this name that described him and throwing it around like it was garbage. And he said, You shall not swear by my name falsely, nor shall you profane the name of your God, for I am the Lord.

I am Yahweh. And for them to profane his name was to treat it like a common thing. As a matter of fact, I’ve told you before, We are actually, I’m approximating what the pronunciation probably was because we don’t know for sure.

Hebrew at that time was not written with vowels. And one of the things that I’m having to wrap my brain around in this Hebrew class I’m taking is they only wrote in consonants. And then later on, somebody said, you know, we can’t change the letters because they believed even the letters were sacred.

So what we’ll do is we’ll add a system of dots and dashes around the letters in different spots that tell you what the vowel pronunciation is, and I cannot keep those straight to save my life. Okay, I’m good at looking at the consonants, and I know exactly what those are, but I can’t keep the vowel sounds straight to save my life. And one of the things that they did is they weren’t even sure when they went in to add the vowel sounds back, they weren’t even entirely sure what vowel sounds to put there, because the Jews had a history of not pronouncing the name of God at all, not pronouncing that yod-he-vav-he, the spelling, of not pronouncing that word because they didn’t want to accidentally say it with the wrong condition of the heart and profane the name of God.

It was considered so holy. And if you’ve got a word that is that holy, that you’ve got this, I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way, but I’ll say a superstition, because it’s not something God said, don’t speak my name at all. But if you’ve got this taboo about speaking God’s name because it’s such a holy thing, then to take it and use it like it’s any other common word, to treat it like any other common thing, is a mistake.

So they had this problem that arose with swearing rashly or falsely and it dishonored God. We see the same thing in our world today, where people have a problem with swearing rashly or falsely. A lot of people in our world are dishonest, and they ruin it for the rest of us.

Right? If you don’t think there’s a problem with dishonesty that hurts the rest of us, go try to write a check somewhere and look at all the hoops you have to jump through to write a check. As a matter of fact, there was a man, when we went down to Ada for one of the doctor visits, he was selling native flutes by the side of the road across from there, and I wanted one of these.

I don’t carry cash with me, but I happen to have my checkbook. So I asked him if he’d take a check, and he really stood there and looked me up and down and said, well, I guess. It was an $80 check.

He said, I guess. He said, I just have so much trouble with these things coming back to me. He was so nice about being willing to take it that I actually got out one of my business cards that said Trinity Baptist Church and said, here, I tell you what, if the check’s no good, now you know where to come find me.

And he said, well, I guess I can probably trust you. Wow, you have had some problems, haven’t you? I went into Walmart to buy some of these silicone rings.

I saw where Shelly had posted on Facebook about it. And people falling out of their tree stands and getting caught by their ring. And even though I was using a ground blind for hunting, I thought, I don’t want to take any chances.

I’ll wear a silicone ring to go out hunting. So she had posted those. I went to Walmart to get some.

$2. 88 for a package of four. I think everybody could pay for one of those.

And yet even those $2. 88 package of four silicone wedding rings had an anti-theft tag on the back. And I said, why would they tag this?

Who would need to steal this? And Charles said, why do you think people only steal because they need to? I don’t know.

But we live in a world where people’s word doesn’t seem to make, you know, it used to be trust but verify. Now it’s not even trust. You verify, verify, verify. by.

Social conditions may have changed, but human nature really hasn’t changed. And there was a problem with that even in the Old Testament, where people would make vows. And they really had no intention of keeping it, but I’m going to invoke God’s name because it makes me sound more credible.

And I break the vow. I have no intention of keeping it. And they do that, and so what we end up is having to try harder and harder to show that we’re trustworthy.

But if you’re not trustworthy invoking God’s name, where do you go from there? If you’re not going to be accountable to God, where do you go from there improving your trustworthiness? So by the time we get to New Testament times, Jesus expands on this idea of the oaths a little bit.

Instead of saying, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Jesus says, just be honest. Well, there’s a revolutionary concept, right? Just be honest. When we get to Matthew chapter 5, Matthew chapter 5, one of the things that Jesus says during the Sermon on the Mount, if you do turn there with me, it’s Matthew 5, verses 33 through 37. He says, again, you have heard it said to those of old, you shall not swear falsely, but shall perform your oaths to the Lord.

Okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. And he’s not saying that’s not true. He’s not saying that what the Old Testament says about swearing falsely and keeping your oaths.

He’s not saying that those are incorrect. What he’s saying is let me add a little something to that. Let me clarify that for you.

He says, but I say to you, don’t swear at all, neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne, nor by the earth, for it is his footstool, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king, nor shall you swear by your head, because you cannot make one hair white or black, but let your yes be yes, and your no be no, for whatever is more than these is from the evil one. Now, I don’t believe he’s saying here that if you swear an oath, it literally comes from the devil. What he’s saying here is, for a Christian, there should not be two classes of speech.

There should not be two classes of truth-telling. That in my everyday life, in my everyday speech, that it’s easy for me to make promises, make vows to people, and then just break them, so that I’m not a person of my word. but then when I come to show somebody that I really am serious and when I really am being honest, then we have to invoke something else.

We have to swear by God. We have to swear by his throne. We have to swear by the whole earth.

I swear on my own head. I’ve never heard that phrase before, but apparently they did it. Don’t even swear by your own head because you can’t make one hair, you know, stop being gray.

That’s what he’s talking about when he says you can’t make one hair black on your own. white or black. It’s going to do what it wants to do.

So we’re told don’t be dishonest in your everyday speech so that when you want people to know your sincerity that you have to go to all these oaths and you have to. He said just make your yes yes and your no no. In other words, say what you mean. Tell the truth.

When I was growing up in the youth group, we were taught an acronym, swim with the pig. And it stands for, you’re looking at me like I’m crazy. It stands for say what you mean, mean what you say, and don’t play games.

That’s a pretty good way of looking at life. I think that’s a pretty good application of this verse here. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Don’t say to people, yeah, I’ll do it, with no intention of doing it.

Just tell them no right then. If you make a promise, do everything you can to keep it. If you’re absolutely unable to keep it, don’t lie about it.

Be honest with people. But let your yes be yes and your no be no. It is a bad testimony of my faith in God. It’s a bad testimony of my relationship with Christ. If I walk around and I’m so fast and loose with the truth, that when the day comes that I want you to believe me, I have to figure out what configuration of words I have to put together as a vow just to get you to believe me.

One night a week, cops comes on after the kids go to bed. And Charla and I will sit there and watch it. And I’m always amused a little bit.

You shouldn’t laugh at other people’s misery. I’m not laughing at their misery. I’m laughing at the thought process, I think, that goes on.

I’m laughing at the thought that if I just swear enough, the police will believe that the heroin in my wallet wasn’t mine. I don’t know how I got there. Okay, whatever.

And this one guy this week, we were watching, he’s sitting there on the curb. I swear to God, I swear to God. He said that probably seven times.

I swear on my mama’s life. That officer doesn’t know your mama. I swear on this.

I swear on that. He was swearing on everything he could think of, and the police weren’t even buying that because he’d lied to him about everything he’d said up to that point. I don’t ever want to be in that situation.

I won’t have heroin in my wallet, but about anything. I don’t want to be in that situation where I’m going, how do I get you to believe me? And that’s not what God wants for us either.

And in trying to teach my children honesty, we’ve probably gone a little extreme. We’ve told them the truth about all the things, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, they get to play along but they know what adults know about that and my thought, and I’m not knocking any of you who your kids or your grandkids have participated in that, I’m just saying for myself, I thought because we talk so much about God who they can’t see but who sees them at all times and knows their behavior and all this I don’t want them to find out I haven’t been square with them about Santa Claus and have there be any questions You know, I didn’t think my parents lied to me about God for that reason, but I could see Benjamin having those questions. So I just decided we’re going to be honest. We’re going to be honest. And the kids ask questions about death.

We’re honest. As I said, we try to keep it age-appropriate, but we’re honest. You can’t help but watch the news. As a matter of fact, we were in prayer meeting a couple weeks ago, and I asked if anybody had any prayer requests. And Benjamin said that boys will stop turning into girls.

And I looked at Greg and I said, I hate 2019 already. I don’t hate transgender people, I hate 2019. Because we’ve not been able to listen to a news program, one in the truck, all year that hasn’t featured that and brought up questions and a conversation that I wasn’t ready to have yet.

And then I got to thinking, well, I’d rather have the conversation, me and him, and the questions, me and him, rather than him and Lord knows who out in the world. So I, as age appropriately as I could, began to answer questions about that. We try to be radically honest about everything at our home.

And it’s gotten to the point where even when I tell him something that’s a little hard to believe, Benjamin doesn’t doubt that I’m telling him the truth. He doesn’t doubt that Daddy’s being honest with him.

Somebody else says this, Daddy says this, he automatically believes what I’m telling him because he knows we shoot straight and he knows we’re honest. now I’m not holding myself up as the paragon of virtue here because I’ve got lots of other areas where God’s still working on me but when it comes to our speech I think this is what Jesus is talking about I think this is what he wants his followers to cultivate as a kind of speech where people don’t doubt what we’re saying we don’t have to go to I swear to God I swear on the heavens I swear on the earth I swear on my own head I swear on my mother’s life that we don’t have to go to all these things if we say yes, the world knows we mean it, and if we say no, the world knows we mean it. The world knows that we’re telling the truth because we’ve cultivated that kind of reputation.

And so they were told, not just don’t use God’s name flippantly, watch your words. Watch your words all together because they matter. And that’s really at the heart of what he’s saying here when he says, don’t take my name in vain.

It wasn’t that in the Old Testament they could never invoke him in an both. He said, watch your words carefully and mean what you say, especially when you’re using God’s name. Just watch what you say.

Watch your words. And in the New Testament, we’re told in the same way to treat God’s name with respect. If we look at Matthew 6, 9, you’ll be familiar with this verse.

It’s the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus said, in this manner, therefore, pray you, Our Father, pray, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Holy is your name.

And we’ve talked about that name in Hebrew in the Old Testament. Even God’s name is holy. Why is God’s name worthy of respect?

Because God’s name reflects who God is. And God is infinitely holy and infinitely worthy of respect. So that name that reflects who he is deserves to be treated with respect.

And the reverence that we show God and his name by extension matters because he says at the end of verse 7, the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Now does that mean that taking God’s name in vain, using God’s name in a flippant way, being dishonest about the way we use it, does that mean that that’s some kind of special sin and it’s up here above all the others? Not necessarily.

When God says, I will not hold him guiltless, what I understand that to mean is that God is looking at that from a different perspective than we do. And where all these other commandments, you know, building idols, obviously, big deal. Going out and murdering people, big deal. Stealing things, obviously, big deal. In their culture, in our culture, I just said a word. It’s not a big deal. God looks at it and says it is a big deal. It’s right on par with all these others.

You may think, oh, I’m fine. I haven’t stolen anything. I haven’t built idols.

I just said a few words. God says, I will not hold him guiltless who takes my name in vain. Why are those words a big deal?

Because the way we treat his name, the way we use our words, say a whole lot. They say a whole lot about the reverence that we have for him. How we use his name and how we use our words reflecting his name says a lot about the reverence that we have for him.

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