Deuteronomy 5.11; Romans 2.17–24; John 17.1–12
The third sermon on the Ten Commandments preached at Nedlands Anglican Church 20th August 2023
We come this morning to the third of the ten commandments.
“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.”
Deuteronomy 5. 11
That seems straightforward. Don’t blaspheme! Is that all?
Last Sunday we learned that we only know about God what he has revealed to us. He hasn’t revealed himself visually, so we must not use images or objects to focus our thoughts on God. So how do we focus our thoughts? We learned that we see the glory of God in the “face” of Christ, and this “face” emerges from the Gospels and the rest of the Bible, not his physical appearance, but his person. But there is something else: the Name of God.
When Moses met God at the burning bush and God sent him back to Egypt to tell the Israelites he was about to go into action for their salvation, Moses spotted a problem. Egypt was full of gods. If he was to say God had sent him, people would ask, “Which god?” He asked God, “Who am I to say sent me?” And God told Moses his name.
This is not so strange. When we want to talk about someone, or think about them, we don’t necessarily try to visualize them. We think of their name. “Albo” stands for everything we know about our prime minister. There’s lots we don’t know, but his name stands for all he is, even when we don’t know it all.
So, before God told Moses his name, he said something strange, but important: “I am who I am.” “Tell them ‘I Am’ has sent you.” God is who he is; he cannot be known in his fulness. We cannot see him, we cannot imagine him, we can never know everything about him, we cannot decide what will be his name. He is himself, and what he is in himself is for him alone.
But then God tells Moses his name, and this is a big moment. “Tell the Israelites my name; tell them they can address me by name.” That is the way we focus our worship, our prayers, our complaints—we speak to God by name. And that will distinguish him from Osiris and Zeus and Aphrodite and all the gods of the modern world. More importantly, if God says, “Call me so-and-so,” he is inviting us into relationship with himself. What sort of relationship? It used to be you would not call a person by their Christian name unless they invited you; it indicated a deepening relationship.
Moses returns to Egypt armed with a Name. What is it? The Name was not “God.” There are thousands of gods. Nor was it a name like “Creator,” “the Lord Almighty,” or “El Elyon” (God Most High)—titles of honour, which are fine, but the name God gave Israel was a personal name, like Jack or John. It was as though God were saying to Israel, “Please call me Jack.”
The name is—and here we have a problem. In the Hebrew Bible the name has four letters: YHWH. And that’s the name that should not be taken in vain. But no one is sure how to say it.
This is because the Hebrew language doesn’t bother with vowels. “Cat” is spelt “ct”, and David, is Dvd. You would need to tell from the context whether it was me or a DVD you were talking about. If you know the language, you know how to say the word. But when they no longer said the word Yhwh, they forget how to say it. We think Yhwh must have been pronounced something like Yahweh, but we don’t really know. It is strange that one of the commonest words in the Old Testament is never spoken, because no one knows how.
The first lecture I gave in South Africa, the students wanted to know how to address me. I told them my name was David, and that was what everyone at home called me; even the kids at St Matthew’s called me David. I told the students to call me David. But they couldn’t. South Africa is much more formal than Australia. They wanted a title. In the end we agreed on “Doc,” and that was my name for the rest of my time in South Africa.
Similarly, after a while the Israelites just could not bring themselves to address God by his personal name, even though he invited them to. It was too holy, so they called him “Lord,” a titel—that’s Adonai in Hebrew: “Lord,” “my Lord,” “the Lord.”
We need to spend a bit of time on this if we are to understand what is going on in the Bible.
If you look at the Shema’, you will see that the word “LORD” is spelt with capitals. This is to show that the word in the Hebrew Bible is Yhwh, the personal name God gave Moses.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
Deuteronomy 6.4
What it actually says is
Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one. You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart …
When this passage is recited by Jewish people, as it is every day, they say “Adonai (the Lord) is our God; Adonai is one.” Once they stopped addressing God as Yahweh, they forgot how to say the word; in any case they came to regard any attempt to say “the Name” as blasphemy. Sometimes they refer to God simply as “the Name”—name spelt with a capital letter. There is an old Jewish story that Jesus got his powers by going into the temple and stealing the Name. There were lions at the exit that roared and made you forget the Name if you had heard it when you were in the temple—so the story goes—but Jesus was cunning. He wrote the Name on a piece of leather, and sowed it into a cut in his leg. When he came out and recovered the Name, he had magical powers.
Look at Psalm 30, and you will see that David is actually addressing God by his personal name.
I will extol you, O LORD (Yhwh), for you have drawn me up and have not let my foes rejoice over me.O LORD (Yhwh) my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me … Sing praises to the LORD (Yhwh), O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy Name.
This is important to understand. It means that God is establishing a close personal relationship with his people. If I ever got to shake hands with the Prime Minister, I would not dream of calling him Anthony, but that is what God invites his people to do.
This raises the question, why we don’t do it today? First because of tradition. Our Bible translations continue to treat the word as the Jews did. It was a forbidden word, though they read it every time they opened their Bibles. The exception today is that Jehovah’s Witnesses now use the personal name and pronounce it as Jehovah. An incorrect pronunciation which they get from the King James Bible. The second reason we don’t use it is because Jesus didn’t. Nowhere in the New Testament is there any example of God’s holy name being used.
It is a strange thing, isn’t it, that Jesus would not have gone back and resurrected God’s personal name, as the JW’s have? There is a very simple reason. I never called my father “Mr Seccombe,” or even “Peter.” To me he was always “Dad.” Not too many people could call him that—only four of us—but that was our privilege as his sons and daughters. Jesus called God “Father”—Abba even, which is a child’s way of addressing their father—even today. When his disciples asked him to teach them to pray, he said to them, “when you pray, say “Father …” We don’t use God’s personal name because we call him Father. That is one of the glories of being a Christian. Paul says we can even call him Abba. (Romans 8)
Come back then to the commandment. “You shall not use the name of Yahweh in vain.” It means a whole lot more than not blaspheming.
A good name is something worth having. My Dad didn’t have much money, but he had a good name. One of his business friends had heaps of money, but he didn’t have a good name. He wanted one, desperately. He even created a lake and named it after himself, but he never really got what he wanted. A good name is precious.
Lose your name, and you are in big trouble. I wonder if any of you have ever gone through the nightmare of having your name attacked. I don’t know how they found me, but an organization on the internet keeps sending me posts attacking the leader of the Opposition. I have never met him and probably never will, but they seem to think that if they can destroy his name, that will destroy him. And, of course, it is true. If you destroy a politician’s name you can end their prospects of ever ruling the country. Politicians these days don’t bother murdering their opponents, they just attack their name.
And what happens if the name of God is destroyed? We don’t have to speculate, because for many God is a dirty word—“Jesus” even more so. How can God be God, if his name is trashed? He can’t—not in the way he would wish to.
This is why the Old Testament looks forward to a time when the Lord’s name will be a name of honour: “From the west men will fear the name of the LORD, and from the rising of the sun they will revere his glory.” (Isaiah 59) Isaiah looks forward to a world where the name of the Lord is honoured. If his name is honoured, he is honoured. That is the power of a name.
The first thing Jesus asked his disciples to pray, when they wanted him to teach them, is that God’s name be honoured: “Father, hallowed be your name.” Jesus wants God’s name to be honoured. It is the prayer of a Son who longs above all things that people would know his Father for the wonderful person he is, especially when his Father is blamed for everything, his name used for a swear word, and his honour trashed. It is the prayer of a Son who knows that every good thing that humans have is a gift of his Father, and that until we know him for who he is, we will forever walk in confusion, frustration, and darkness. He teaches his disciples to pray for the coming of the kingdom when “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, God will be known for who he is, his name be honoured.
How do we avoid taking the name of the Lord in vain? This is a command to those who wear God’s name, to Israel, to whom God said, “I am Yahweh, your God, you shall have no other gods but me.” Carry it as an honourable name. Live up to your identifying with that name. Though the day would come when God would be forced to say, “Because of you, my name is blasphemed among the nations.” (Isaiah 59) But it will not always be so. Isaiah also says, “The redeemer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob.” (Isaiah 59, Romans 11) That is what lies in the future for Israel. And for us today …?
God has revealed himself as the Saviour of the world. He has become a man in the person of Jesus. “We have seen his glory, glory as the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth,” says John. (John 1) Paul tells us that God has given his name “the LORD” (Yahweh) to Jesus: “God has given him the Name that is above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is LORD, to the glory of God the Father.” We hallow God’s name by carrying the name of Jesus as a badge of honour, by refusing to deny his name, to death should it be necessary, by bringing honour to his name in the way we live, and by seeking to make him known.
What motivates us—for we cannot work it up— is knowing him, and knowing more of him. The more you know, the more you will be in awe of his name, the more you will love his name, and the more you will long that his name be known.
In 1993, when I took over the leadership of George Whitefield College in Cape Town people were saying theological education was obsolete. Studies coming out of America were saying that people graduating from theological colleges were ill-equipped for ministry and lacking in enthusiasm for the job. There was a reason for that. Theology is the knowledge of God, but it had become a study of scholar’s ideas about God—not the word of God about himself. Jesus, on the other hand, says that his teaching would be the seed which, when it grew, would result in the new world of the kingdom of God. So, we devoted ourselves as a college to knowing God, which meant studying the Bible, because that is our main source for knowing God. And I can only say, the results were as Jesus said. As students discovered more about God and his great plan to save the world, the more excited they became, the more committed to livιng a life which brings honour to God’s name, and the more eager to go back to their countries and communities and make him known to others. One of the graduates called me this week from England. We used to call him Mr Justification-by-Faith, because when he came to college, all he talked about was justification by faith. Get him to give a talk and that’s what it would be. That God forgives us through faith alone is a wonderful truth, but when you get it pushed down your throat every day, it takes the shine off it. I remember him coming into my office in his second year, and saying, “I have been thinking, the resurrection is very important.” “Wonderful,” I thought. In his third year he told me how important the kingdom of God is, and I realized we were really getting somewhere. He has been sharing his knowledge of God with congregations ever since.
When I visited South Africa in May I caught up with another former graduate. When Inocencio completed four years of study and returned home to Mozambique, he was told to leave his church. They did not trust his new knowledge. They told him to go and plant his own church, so he started from the beginning, sharing about Jesus with individuals, then teaching them the Bible, then encouraging them to teach others, then build a church, and so on. He has now planted over forty churches through the length of Mozambique, and is zealous to start a Bible college and a school. I hope to go to Mozambique next year when our bishop in Johannesburg will consecrate him as bishop to his churches.
This week, I attended part of a conference here in Perth, where nearly two hundred people came together to learn more about God and Jesus and salvation. I joined a small group where we were asked to share one exciting experience we had had this year. There was a medical doctor in the group who works in a country hospital spending much of his time patching up people from a very violent community. He was discouraged, he said, until he decided to join some people who were going out into the streets at night talking to people about God, and praying with them. The acceptance, the responses, the changed lives, have been so unexpectedly positive, that he rates it easily the most exciting experience of his year.
Do not take the name of the LORD in vain. Father, hallowed be your NAME.