Honor God's Name

Scripture Reading

You may be seated. Well, you meet me at your Bibles at Exodus chapter 20. We'll continue our series on the Ten Commandments. This is kind of an excursus away from what we had been looking at, what we just started looking at, Joshua chapter 1. I promise we'll get there as soon as we're done with the Ten Commandments. But as we continue to think about what does it mean to meditate on God's law day and night that we might not depart from it, we look at Exodus chapter 20 at the summary of God's moral law.

And this morning we are specifically at the third commandment. Exodus chapter 20, verse seven. If you're using your pew Bibles, that's on page 68. You know God's perfect and holy word. 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.

Prayer for Illumination

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this short commandment, but a telling and piercing one. Lord, we pray that you would, by your spirit, be our teacher this morning. We pray that you would turn our hearts away from distractions and that we might sit at your feet to learn from you. In Jesus's name, amen.

Sermon

I remember when I was a first Christian and I came to Christ and I was studying and studying and studying, and one of the things I studied was I came, I needed to know what the Ten Commandments were. I devoted them to memorization, thinking and wrestling through them, but I remember thinking, have I sinned an unpardonable sin? Because Jesus says that all other sins will be forgiven against you, but one, if you blaspheme the Holy Spirit, and I thought, well, The third commandment says, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes the Lord's name in vain.

So maybe I had committed the unpardonable sin. Maybe I was doomed to hell forever. I mean, this was a serious concern of mine. I went to Pastor Snap's office, and his deep, baritone voice and southern accent, he just said, oh, Brian, the fact that you are concerned about it means you haven't done it. Now, taking the Lord's name in vain is a serious sin, and he will punish for it. It's not the unpardonable sin. Unpardonable sin, if you're lingering with that question, is denying Jesus Christ until your dying breath.

Have you ever used God's name lightly? Have you ever in your life used Jesus' name as a curse word? Maybe for some of you on your phone, text messaging, OMG. Do we take the Lord's name lightly? That is the point of the passage here is we are not to take the Lord's name lightly, but we're to honor him. We're gonna honor him by honoring his name. But that leads to a question, right? What is God's name? We'll get to how do we honor God's name. What is God's name? If you look here at verse seven with me, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

Okay, but what is his name? Well, if you look at verse seven, look how the word Lord is spelled. Capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D. Lord is actually, there's a history, and we'll get there for this, but this is actually the fancy theological word for this is the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name. Yod-Hev-Av-Hev, Y-H-V or W-H. Jehovah, Jehovah, Yahweh. This name God uses for himself, every time we see in our Bibles where the English translates capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, 6,898 times in the Old Testament, that is the name, the covenant name for God. This is a name that just a few chapters before, look with me there, Exodus chapter three, this is the name that Moses wanted to know.

You want to know someone, don't you? I mean, if you're just meeting someone for the first time, you want to find out a few things about them. Where they work, how many kids they have, where are they from, but what's always another question? Hi, I'm Brian. What's your I don't think I've met you before." Because a name is something important. This is what Moses was worried about. As he has this encounter with God, he goes to the burning bush, he sees this weird thing. It's a bush, it's on fire, but it's not consumed. He draws near and God says, take off your sandals for the ground that you are standing upon is holy ground.

He says he's going to send him to the people and in Exodus chapter 3, verses 14 and 15, Moses is asked, who shall I say will sent me? And God said to Moses, I am who I am, he said, thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I am has sent me to you. Moreover, God said to Moses, thus you shall say to the children of Israel, the capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, the Lord, Yod-Heh, Vav-Heh, Yehovah, Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob has sent me to you.

This is my name forever, and this is my memorial to all generations. And then when Moses later has an encounter with God, he tells God, he says, I want to see your glory. And I want to know who you are, I want to see your glory, and God says, I can't show you all my glory, because if I did, I'm going to paraphrase the passage here, you'd melt down and die. You can't see all of me, but I'll hide you in the cleft of the rock, and I'll make my name pass before you.

And in Exodus chapter 34, verse 6, the Lord passed, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, Yahweh passed before him and proclaimed, Yahweh, Yahweh, God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abounding in goodness and truth. This is God's covenant name. This is a name he revealed to his people. So why do we translate it capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D? Why do we do this, right?

Well, the Jews had this, read this commandment in Exodus chapter 20, verse seven, and they had a bad history with this. And there were false prophets who would prophesy in his name, and there were people who would treat his name all superstitiously. They would do all this stuff.

And so as the years went on, the Jews thought, you know, God's name is just so holy, we don't even want to say it. So instead of saying it, we're going to just say the Lord instead, Adonai. my God, or my Lord. And when that moved from, when the Jews dispersed from Jerusalem after the captivity to Babylon, and they went different places, one of the places they went was down into Egypt, where they started writing in Greek, and the word in Greek is Kyrios, which means Lord. So my Lord or Lord, so we say Lord because of this tradition that we've received from the Jews, but Jews even today, some of them won't say Adonai, they'll just say Hashem, the name. They won't even say my Lord anymore, because they just want to remove themselves as far as they can. If the name is Jehovah, they want to say, okay, hold on, we don't want to say his name, so we'll say Adonai. Well, maybe that's a little bit too close, so we'll move even further and we'll just say Hashem.

And so even in a lot of conservative Jewish circles today, if you read some of their writings, when they write in English the word God, they'll write capital G hyphen D. Because they don't want to actually write the word God. Because they don't want to take his name in vain.

Now I appreciate the sentiment behind it. But brothers and sisters, God himself declared his name and he gives it, he spoke it out in his scriptures over 6,900 times to his people. And time and time and time again he tells them to praise his name. He's given us his name. We say his name because his name is important. I mean, names are really important.

How many of you have seen, or maybe you experience this yourself, maybe you've had children who stress out about this, or friends who stress out about this, they find out they're pregnant, and then all of a sudden they have to have 17,000 baby naming books, and they go through list after list after list after list after list, and trying to figure out, okay, what name means what, and what fits best, and what's going to go best, Well, we don't want to name a kid, you know, this name because, well, it used to be okay, but now it sounds old-fashioned or maybe it's got bad connotations to it. And so you want to be careful because you want this name to fit this child.

This is true in the Old Testament. Hebrews, Hebrew people worried about this all the time. They actually incorporated God's name into their names all the time. Have you ever noticed how many of, when you read through the genealogies, how many of them start with the letter J? Joshua, Jehoshaphat, Jehu, Jonathan, over and over and over, because the first part is that Yah.

This is... They're incorporating God's name into their children's name. This is why our children, three of them, have God's name incorporated into it. Nathan, right? Nathan means gift. Some of you might even have siblings, friends, children named Nathaniel. My gift from God. Our son Daniel. God is my judge. El means judge. Or our daughter Eli. My God. Right, because names have significance. So we want to tie somebody's name to something.

God says, this is my name. And it says something about me that, by the way, if you wanna actually see the Hebrew and stuff like that, that's what Chalk and Talk is for, please come back after lunch and we'll get into some fun, I'll nerd out and actually show you what these things look like and so it'll be fun.

But when God reveals himself to Moses in Exodus chapter three, verse 14, and he says, and God said to Moses, I am who I am, I am has sent me to you. God is revealing something about himself. He always was and he always will be. He's self-existent. I remember hearing a conversation between kids one time and somebody said, one of them said to the other, who made God? And the other kid kind of sat there for a second and said, I think God made God. No, no, no, no, God just was. He just is.

I am who I am, always was, always is, always will be, perfect being, not comparable to anyone else. God's not going to say, well, I'm kind of like the sun, or I'm kind of like the clouds, I'm kind of like the thunderstorm. No, no, I am. I am. I am who I am, the supreme being, the one who created all of heavens and earth. I am is the one who is sending you. Okay, so we know his name, Jehovah or Yahweh.

We know why he takes his name seriously, but what does it mean to take his name in vain? One better, maybe not better, but just another translation of this would be, it's actually, the Hebrew goes more along the lines of, do not use, or do not raise up God's name for no good. Don't use it empty. Don't use it for nothingness.

And this law was tested pretty quickly in the Israelite camp. If we turned in our Bibles to Leviticus chapter 14 verses 10 through 16, you can turn there if you want, but I'm just going to summarize the story of those six verses for you. There is two men fighting. Both of them are Israelites. One of them, his dad was an Egyptian, his mom's an Israelite. The other one is a full-blooded Israelite. And they're arguing between themselves, and one of them curses the name of God, uses God's name in a derogative way.

And so they, whoa, nobody's done this before. So they bind him up, they take him to Moses and they say, what are we supposed to do? Moses goes before the Lord. And it was there that they told him that he had used God's name in vain and he was going to be put to death for it. That's how serious it was in the camp of Israel.

Using his name in vain looks like defaming it. It looks like Jeremiah 29, 21 with the prophets saying, I'm prophesying in Jehovah's name. But in all reality, they're just saying whatever in the world they want to say. Isaiah 29, 21, thus says Yahweh of Hosts, the God of Israel, concerning Ahab, the son of Koaliah, and Zedekiah, the son of Maaseah, who prophesy a lie in my name. Behold, I will not deliver them out of the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, and he shall slay them before your eyes. They're saying they're prophesying in my name, but I'm telling you it's not going to come true and I'm going to show you they're liars because you're going to see them die by the hands of the king of Babylon. We can take God's name in vain by using God's name as an oath.

It used to be a bygone time and age that when the seriousness of what you're going to say and to show your seriousness of it, you would go into a courtroom and they needed to know, are you going to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

How's that finish? So help you God. Will you invoke the name of God upon your mouth with your hand upon his word saying, what I am saying is true and the Lord strike me down if it's not. To do that lightly is what this passage is condemning. Jesus, this wasn't something new. I mean, this was something that people did, you know. Well, God swear by this, or the Lord, I swear by the Lord this or that. But again, Jewish people, by the time of Jesus, had kind of become really sensitive to this, right?

And so they thought, well, we don't want to take the name of the Lord in vain. We don't want to take his name lightly or misuse his name. So instead of saying, I swear by the Lord that I'm telling the truth, what would they do? They could say, well, I'm not going to swear upon God's name, but I'll swear upon the temple. Because then I'm not swearing on God's name, I'm just swearing on the temple. Or, I don't want to swear on the whole temple, that might be too holy. So, I'll swear on the altar. Oh, that might not be too much. I'll swear on the money that goes into the offering box. I swear, I'm telling the truth, on money that goes into the offering box in the temple that belongs to God.

And trying to remove themselves from the commandment, Jesus says, Just tell the truth, let your yes be yes and your no be no. This is what he says in Matthew chapter 5, 33-37. Again, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not swear falsely, but shall perform your oaths to Yahweh. But I say to you, do not swear at all, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor by the earth, for it is his futzl, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. He goes on and says, just let your yes be yes and your no be no. don't take God's name lightly, nor does that mean we just start removing ourselves so far away from God's name.

Acting like that just gets rid of our guilt. So there's all these, but then there's just also general misuses of God's name where we can make light of the name of the Lord. We can mock the name of the Lord. We can just speak of it lightly. I don't really like watching Christian television or Christian movies or kind of sometimes give us too much false hope, you know, these rosy pictures of what life is really like, but we were watching this one, it had a comedian hosting it, and it was this quiz show, and it was like Bible funny stuff, and we're like, okay, sure, we'll do that on a Sunday. And as we were watching this, they had all these different Christian groups come on and compete one another. And there was one that, all of a sudden they played the very last game. Who was gonna win the $15,000 prize? And it was true statements or not true statements. And you had to figure out which one was true or not. And if it was not true, you said, no way. And if it was true, you were supposed to say, Yahweh.

And I remember watching as these Catholic nuns visibly got disturbed. I can't treat God's name like that. It's not a joke. It's not something to play with. That's the triune, holy God's name. The one that said, you shall not misuse my name. The one who said, you shall not raise it up empty. I watched these women struggle and fight and get visibly uncomfortable. This is what it's saying. We don't use God's name in a trifling way. Why? Because he's the triune God of the universe. He's not something to be trifled with. He's the king.

As our kids and I are, I really like, what I don't like is Christian movies, what I do like is action hero movies, surprise, surprise, but when we're watching these movies, quarantine was wonderful, mom was in bed and we got to watch, she said, it sounded like you guys just watched movies all day.

Was sermon done, were the kids fed, and was family worship done? Okay, and homeschool work was done, okay. So as long as those four things were done, we could watch movies. Which meant we watched a whole bunch of DC and Marvel movies. It was wonderful.

But the kids became more and more concerned. Every time someone would say a word, they'd say, bad word, bad word. But I was amazed how often they would say bad word, bad word, when people would use Jesus Christ's name as a blasphemy. They're just saying it. Just throwing it out there as if it's nothing. And it brought up these conversations between the kids and I, because sometimes it would be said in a way that you would sit there and go, no, I actually think at that time they were actually saying it wisely.

When someone was dead and there was a horrible tragedy and they were saying, oh my God, that is so wrong. They're crying out for justice. That is a right way in which we invoke God's name. We cry out to him. But we don't just cast around God's name as if it's nothing. We take his name seriously because he's holy.

When they lived in Egypt, this land that they had just come out of, people had used the gods' names, you know, the pagan gods of the Egyptians, they'd use them superstitiously and just would throw them around. And God says, no, no, you're not gonna act like that as my people. And when they were about to go into the land of Canaan, this is exactly the way that people threw around Dagon's name and Baal's name and Asherah's name, and God says, no, no, no, you're not gonna treat me like that. You're not gonna use me as some superstitious little name.

Because there's a promise connected with verse seven. What does he say in verse seven? You shall not take the name of Jehovah your God in vain. For Jehovah will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. God will not, this should stop us in our tracks. This is a negative promise. I promise I will not hold someone guiltless who misuses my name. Have you? Have you ever misused the name of Jesus? Have you ever misused the name of the Lord?

What hope is there for the Apostle Paul, who had blasphemed Jesus and tried to rip apart the church? Because every single one of these commandments, when we break them, it's Jesus Christ who paid the cost for that. I want you to think about that. Paul was actively blaspheming against God, and it was God who took the punishment for that.

Jesus lived the perfect life in which he never mistook the name of his father. He never used his father's name lightly, but always lived reverentially underneath that, and Jesus himself took the punishment for us when we sin against this. It is Jesus Christ who suffered for our transgression of this law. But Jesus is the one who said, if you love me, keep my commandments.

He hasn't left us as orphans, but he's given us his Holy Spirit. So how do we now honor his name? How do we now live in light of the grace that he has shown us, even though we are lawbreakers? We show it by turning away from sin and turning to righteousness.

Jesus's name is the one that we extol now. We have faith in Jesus's name. I'm gonna go through a whole bunch of verses, feel free to write them down, buckle up, sit tight, we're gonna go through these real fast. But I want you to see how important Jesus's name is and how it ties to this commandment in the last three minutes we have left.

We have faith in Jesus's name, John chapter 1 verse 12, but as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in his name. First John 5 13, these things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God.

We are saved through Jesus's name, Acts chapter 2, 21, and it shall come to pass that whosoever calls on the name of the Lord Jesus will be saved. We have forgiveness in Jesus's name, Acts chapter 10, verse 43, and it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. John chapter two, verse 12, and it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord Jesus will be saved.

We are baptized into that triune name. When Jesus commands his disciples, what does he tell them? Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We are baptized into that name when the apostles go out and they start their ministry.

This is what they say in Acts chapter two, verse 38. Peter is preaching and he's talking to the Jews and he says, repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. He's telling the Jews, you need to be baptized in the name of Joshua. When we think of Jesus as the name Jesus, you need to be baptized in the name of Yahshua. when Peter goes into Cornelius' house in Acts chapter 10, verse 48, and he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord, and they asked him to stay a few days. Paul did this in Acts chapter 19 when he's there with the Ephesians. He baptized them in the name of the Lord Jesus.

Now we find our life in the name of Jesus, John chapter 3, 31, but these are written that you may believe in that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, in that believing you may have life in his name. We have life in the name of Jesus. We have removal of our sin in the name and by the blood of Jesus. We find joy in the name of Jesus Christ. Have you ever wondered why you're called a Christian? because you bear his name. You bear the name of the triune God. You've been baptized into the name of Jesus. You are to live your life in the light of the king and savior of your heart, Jesus Christ.

We are believers who glorify in the name of Jesus. Ephesians chapter five, verse 20 says, giving thanks always for all things the God and Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Colossians chapter three says, whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, we do all unto the glory of God the Father through him. We do it all in the name of Jesus Christ.

You follow Jesus' law, his commandments, by the Spirit. And the Spirit teaches you that you do His will in the name of Jesus. You eat, thanking Jesus for providing for you. You confess your sins, knowing that Jesus forgives you of your sins. You go about your work, talking about Jesus. Be zealous for Jesus.

Closing Prayer

Be zealous for his name. Don't take the name of the Lord your God lightly. Thank him. Praise his great and marvelous name. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you. That you are not some mysterious God that we cannot know, but you have told us your name. And that we can praise you by name, we can know you by name, we have a relationship with you. Father, I pray that your Holy Spirit would take this weak sermon and use it. Lord, I pray that you would teach us to honor you, to reverence you. Father, it's only you who could do this. So I pray that you would do it. In Jesus's name, amen. Let's turn in our Psalters now and we'll sing Psalm 29, Selection A.