Amen. Turn in your copy of the scriptures to first Matthew five and then also James chapter five. Matthew five and James chapter five. And as always, you may want to keep a finger or something in the hymn book where the shorter catechism or the Heidelberg catechisms are. Okay, Matthew chapter five is the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, and we wanna read from verses 33 to 37.
The Lord says, again, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn. But I say to you, do not take an oath at all either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply yes or no. Anything more than this comes from evil. And then James chapter five, just one verse, verse 12.
James, the half brother of our Lord says, but above all my brothers do not swear either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your yes be yes and your no be no so that you may not fall under condemnation. Let’s pause for a second to pray. Lord, we ask that by your word tonight, you would water the hearts of those who hear your word. and that you would do the work of grace necessary in each of our hearts to call your people to yourself, to seal us unto you for eternity and to give us everlasting blessings on our soul. We pray that tonight we would behold you in the light of faith, that we would no longer exalt ourselves, but we pray that you would humble sinners and so that your mighty will would be done. This we ask in Christ’s name, amen. All right, so the third commandment, you shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord, your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
You probably have seen the redneck joke guy. Is it Foxworthy, Jeff Foxworthy? He’s been on TV lately. He’s on his sort of goodbye tour, his retirement tour, I guess. And way back in the 1990s when he got going, remember he had that joke, set of jokes, you might be a redneck if. And there was the one if someone asked you your name and you point to your belt buckle, you might be a redneck. The joke in Texas, you know, with all the voter ID laws that if in Texas you’re voting a valid form of ID is indeed your belt buckle.
Those are funnies. You can laugh. There you go. Don’t hold back. Our names are really important. Names are identifiers of who we are. They often mean something or at least they used to. Now people just make up stuff. They jam a few syllables together, I think, and call it a name. But our name is our reputation. Our name is our character. Our name is all that we are. And so tonight, as we think about the name of God, not taking it in vain, using his name, his title, his attributes, his words, and his works properly, we want to think about the importance of names.
Remember when Moses was minding his own business, he had left Egypt. After 40 years, he went into the wilderness of Sinai for another 40, where he became a shepherd in his father-in-law Jethro’s farming community. And one day he was out tending the flock and there was the burning bush. And the Lord met him there.
Yahweh met him there and said, you’re going to go to Pharaoh and you’re going to tell him, let my people, your people, Moses, let them go. And, you know, Moses, remember hymns and halls and makes up every excuse in the book. But he does ask God an important question. When I go to Pharaoh and when I tell him Yahweh says, let my people go, let Israel go, his entire workforce, let them go. Whom shall I say has sent me? And God simply says to him, tell them that I am or in our minds, our translations tell him that Yahweh or Jehovah has sent me.
And so we have there in that story in Exodus chapter three, a vivid picture, a vivid description of the name, the reputation, the weightiness of the name of God. We have a wonderful example there of how God’s name is to be used, how it is to be reverenced. Remember Moses, God says, take off your sandals where you are standing on holy ground. Um, there are all kinds of names of God in the Bible.
I think I remember telling y’all one time, uh, way back in my first church, the other pastor and I went to visit a young fella in the hospital. He had gotten extremely sick. It was very scary. Had a young wife, young children, maybe a baby on the way. And he was in some kind of medical coma for something.
And the wife was in one of those Bible study, groups where they had been studying the names of God. And the pastor and I went in to visit and pray and whatever. And the Bible study leader was there. And she proceeded, and I don’t poke fun at it, it’s just very interesting. She proceeded to pray over this man every name of God. Well, if you’ve been to one of those names of God Bible studies, they got a bunch of them, right?
And this went on for, I mean, eternity is what I thought of it. But it just points out an interesting curiosity. People love to study. They love to study the names of God. They love to study. uh, the attributes of God. They love to study the virtues of God.
And she probably could have done with maybe just praying two or three. Uh, but she did go through the whole list and I kid you not, it went on for a pretty good while. But in the area of the names of God, we have a couple categories. We have the proper names of God, like God, Lord, God, almighty father, Jehovah. Uh, and then we have what we call his essential names. These are his attributes. God is love. God is grace. God is glorious. Those sorts of things. And then we have the personal titles or names of God. He is father. He is son. He is Holy Spirit. Those sorts of things.
But what we are called to do in this commandment is to take care in how we speak of the name of God. Blasphemy is the word that is commonly used. Blasphemy simply means speaking against something. It means, um, sometimes in the Bible speaking against man, uh, Peter uses it that way. Paul does a time or two, but most often in the scripture, blasphemy is held to the use of the names of, of our God. It is considered a high crime. against the most high God to speak evil against his name. Well, what does it mean in the third commandment to take God’s name in vain? It’s to use his name frivolously or insincerely or thoughtlessly or to treat that name not as consequential, perhaps in rashness or even in scorn.
How often do we leave this room and throughout the week we hear the name of God casually used, and that can even be by Christians, or blasphemously used by unbelievers. It’s pretty common. It’s in movies. We hear it all the places we go during the week. The other place where we should be careful with the name of God is when we take lawful oaths and vows. I want to remind you of something that Jesus teaches in the gospels.
There’s a story in the gospels where a demon oppressed man. uh, was blind and mute. He was brought to Jesus and Jesus healed him. In fact, the man not only could see, but he could also speak. So he was a blind and mute man by demon oppression, but Jesus drove out those demons so that he could see.
And so that he could speak in the crowds, uh, began to say over and over, can this be Messiah? Can this be the son of David? And then of course the Pharisees were hanging around the fringes and they said, no, it’s by Beelzebul. It’s by the devil. It’s by the prince of demons that this man cast out demons.
Well, Jesus, knowing what was in their hearts, uh, he knew what was in their thoughts. He said to them, every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste. No city divided itself against itself. No house divided against itself will stand. And so if it is by Satan, that Satan is cast out of this man, then Satan is divided against himself. And so then how can his kingdom stand?
He pointed out to them the absurdity of their assumption, their assertion that Jesus had cast out the demons of this man that made him mute and made him blind only by demons. And he says, if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast out demons? And they, your sons will be your judges. But then he goes on to say, if it is by the spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.
Or how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man, then indeed he may plunder the house. Jesus says, whoever is not with me is against me and whoever does not gather with me scatters. And then he unloads the sin, the one we all ask questions about. He says, therefore, I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit or against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. And he goes on to say, whoever speaks a word against the son of man, he will be forgiven. But whoever speaks against the Holy spirit will not be forgiven either.
Uh, not even in this age or the age that is to come. And everybody wants to know the $10,000 questions answer what is blasphemy of the Holy spirit and have I committed it. And generally and theologically, we believe that if the Holy spirit, uh, is the one that calls us out of darkness, into the marvelous kingdom of light, it’s by the Spirit we are raised up to new life. To reject that gospel call would be to reject salvation. There are sins that in this life we commit that God will forgive, but if we reject the work of the Spirit, if we blaspheme the Holy Spirit, then we are in big trouble.
So the third commandment here speaks of blasphemy against God’s name, speaking evil against God’s name, taking God’s name in vain, treating it frivolously, speaking of it rashly or insincerely or not as consequential or rash and with scorn. And we also want to be careful not to lift up the name of God in an oath or a vow. So we’ve talked a bit about God’s name, his reputation, those things.
But what about taking oaths and vows? And we’ll look at the catechisms kind of at the tail end as sort of an application. But oaths and vows are really important. In fact, so important that our confession of faith has a chapter on lawful oaths and vows. And we speak of oaths as part of a religious worship service where on the right occasion, the person may swear solemnly Calling God as his witness, and he may promise or give a pledge that he will do something. And it’s by the name of God. uh, that we ought to swear. And it is by the name of God that we often enter into lawful oaths and vows. And so we should not swear vainly. We should not swear rashly, uh, by that glorious and dreadful name.
That’s why at the beginning of a wedding, uh, if the minister uses the traditional wedding service of the book of common prayer, um, the minister generally says, dearly beloved, we have gathered today in the sight of God. and in the company of men to wed these two in holy matrimony. Marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly. And so the preamble to a wedding service is this is serious business. Now, generally not treated that way. It’s usually about the bride and the flowers and the photographer and, you know, who got to sit where and those sorts of things.
But at least in premarital counseling, the minister ought to impress upon the young couple what they are about to get into. Generally, when we do premarital counseling here, we do about six or eight sessions. One of my pastor mentors about midway through ministry gave me this interesting phrase. He said, the job of a minister is to prepare people to make and keep their vows.
So we take vows of membership. We take vows in our weddings. We take vows when we baptize our little ones. Uh, the congregation takes a vow when someone presents their child for covenant baptism, those sorts of things. And so we, we take oaths, we take vows.
Uh, we promise, uh, something to someone before the name of God. We don’t make these vows to creatures. We don’t make them to saints and all the rest. And we never vow to do anything forbidden in God’s word. We always take an oath or make a vow to do something that is biblical. One other little, I don’t know, handful of things to think about with taking God’s name in vain. perhaps is the use of profanity.
We are made in God’s image. He’s given us a mouth. He’s given us lips. He’s given us a vocabulary. We are rational beings. We’re the only thing that he made that can think and talk. And we can do so quite well, but we reduce our impression of our intelligence level when we use profanity. And when we use profanity, particularly with the name of the Lord, we reduce the name of God to an exclamation point. Uh, we reduce his name to an emphasis, but perhaps the more common, maybe you say, I don’t, I don’t drink smoke and cuss, right.
And chew and dance and all the rest. So maybe you’re not a cusser. Uh, but I think an area where we should be very careful is in our lip service. Uh, if it’s the job of a minister to prepare people to make and keep vows, Marriage is a pretty serious one. Church membership is rather serious. We don’t want to make empty vows or keep or not keep promises. We don’t want to refuse to take the things of God seriously.
And of course, like Jesus says, we don’t want to say, Lord, Lord. And then he says, I never knew you. I have no clue who you are. Um, we also need to be careful, you know, in a modern evangelical, uh, days, you, you, you hear people pray and it’s Lord God, this and Lord God, that father got this. And by the time, um, you know, the prayer is over, they, they’ve said God, Lord, and father, and the word just generally about a hundred times. And the content of their prayer is rather empty.
Um, so we gotta be careful, I think how we invoke the name of God, how we use the name of God, but we also want to be careful to. keep from failing to use God’s name earnestly. We should pray. We should sing. We should keep our duties that we have promised in oaths and in vows. The shorter catechism on this, of course, says, what is the commandment? What does it forbid? What does it require? And we are to use God’s name appropriately, his name, his titles, his attributes, his words and his works. When I was first learning the shorter catechism way back to do the requirement to graduate school, you know, it was a little bit servitude because we had to do it to graduate, but it actually changed my heart a pretty good bit.
And I remember coming to the third commandment and thinking back to when we, as kids used to stand in the back of church on Sunday night, For some reason, the kids could all sit on the back row and we would make fun of the hymns at night and then we’d slam the book shut.
And I don’t know how we got away with it because my dad usually saw everything. But it made me think, you know, fooling around in church. I mean, it’s one thing to fool around somewhere else, but to fool around in church. especially when it came to singing the praises of God. That was something that I caught, at least myself in a younger day, thinking of.
But do we come to church prepared? Do we come to church with reverence? You know, from time to time, we’ll mention that, you know, if you go to one of the grand cathedrals or chapels, they’ll usually have a sign at the entrance that says, please observe silence. Now, Our tradition, especially Sunday morning, is we come in here and do our visiting.
Churches in the old days, you did your visiting outside. You came in and there was a hushed silence in the sanctuary. You go to places like Duke Chapel, on the campus of Duke University, and if you whisper inside that church, it will echo through the hall and you will hear it. And then you hear the shh, and that echoes as well.
But we want to enter God’s presence intelligently. We want to enter God’s presence reverently. We want to enter God’s presence ready to say the things that we will say and sing from our hearts. It’s an encouraging thing for us when we get more out of the service than we otherwise would. Okay, so just by way of application, question 99 asks, what is God’s will for us in the third commandment?
And it is simply this, that we neither blaspheme or misuse the name of God. Well, how does God make himself known? He makes himself known in the works of creation, but he makes himself known on the pages of scripture. And so everything in a sense in this world points or describes God in some way. Psalm 19 says the heavens above declare the glory of God. Paul says in Romans chapter one that people misuse the knowledge of God that is plain in creation or natural revelation.
And so you don’t even have to get to the names and titles and attributes and even the word of God. Just the world we live in proclaims Him. And we should not take any of it in vain. We should not speak ill of all that God has made, but especially all that He has revealed. So we don’t want to blaspheme or misuse the name of God. We don’t want to do that in areas of cursing and perjury and unnecessary oaths. And we don’t want to share in the horrible sins of being silent bystanders.
I don’t know if you caught that. I think it was in that third question we did tonight. It is our duty as believers to stand up for the name of God. Now, I’m just going to go ahead and flat out say it. That does not give you the right to be obnoxious and to walk up to every Joe Blow who takes God’s name because you’re probably going to get punched. You are probably going to, but I think within our close relations and in general, we should insist that people either be silent or reverently use the name of God. There’s someone in my circle during the week that says the OMG quite a bit. And they also use the name of Jesus. Now they are not doing it I’m pretty sure, I’m very sure the intent of their heart is not to speak ill of God, but some of it I think is from their culture and some of it I think is just not thinking and probably gotta quit being a chicken and say something.
Maybe gently and at the right person, maybe I should pray over it and of course ask God to give grace to do it in wisdom, but we cannot be silent bystanders. And then it says, in summary, we must use the holy name of God only with reverence and all that would be in worship, but also in lawful oaths and vows. But it says we should properly confess him. We should properly call upon him and we should properly praise him.
Now, in the men’s confession of faith class, we’ve been studying the attributes of God pretty closely the last several months because we’re in that chapter two of the confession about the triune God. And one of the things we’ll chat about periodically is how people attribute certain things to God that are not true. Now, the perennial joke is it’s not true that God says somewhere in the Bible, God helps those who help themselves. Okay, we should not say that it’s not biblically true, but that’s not confessing God properly.
Sometimes we say, oh, that’s a little nitpicky. Well, what happens when you are out and about and somebody says, did you hear what so-and-so said about you? And we bristle up, don’t we? They said, what? And we take umbrance with it. We get upset. How much more should we be careful how we speak about God?
You know, there’s always those little things when God closes a door, he opens a window. Well, sometimes he closes the door and Jesus says, and nobody’s going to be able to open it. Okay. You’re not going to be able to sneak out back and climb in a window like a thief. Um, if he shut the door, he shut the door. So we have to be careful not to speak of God and to speak of his actions in ways that aren’t there.
Those are kind of simple little examples, but in everything we do and in everything we say, uh, we should represent God. Well, blasphemy, of God’s name, swearing and cursing is indeed a serious sin. That’s what question 100 speaks of. There is no greater sin that provokes God’s wrath more than blaspheming his name. And in the old covenant in Israel, it was punishable with death.
I was reading somewhere this week where in the 1600s in what is today Maryland, Think of 1600s, 1700s, if you took God’s name in vain, you got 20 lashes, and then they would bore your tongue. That sounds really painful, both. And then if you were a committer of that crime a second time, I think it got worse. Third time, guess what? Public execution. That was in one of our colonies. That was in one of our early states.
Um, now you can go to court and swear on a Bible or not swear on a Bible and you can, you can, you know, you can lie, get away with whatever. There’s lots of injustice all around. Well, then question 101, may we swear an oath in God’s name if we do it reverently? Yes. There are some times where our catechism says the government demands that if you get jury duty, you’re going to have to take an oath. Uh, to do your job as a juror, uh, you’re going to have to, uh, put your hand on a Bible. I think they give you an option of not doing that. Um, I see John about what, three years ago, you put your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the law as an officer of the law. Sure. Your dad did it at some point.
Um, you see like, was it Lindsey Graham’s sister got sworn in and she put her hand on a Bible. So there are times where we swear on something greater than ourselves. And then question 102, may we swear by saints or other created things? Uh, you know, the famous story of Martin Luther, he was out in a thunderstorm and got struck by lightning and said, Lord, if you heal me, I’ll become a monk, something like that. Um, but he, he swore by some saint. Of course, I’m sure he repented of that later, but, but we hear people say, you know, I swear on my mother’s grave. I, you know, a pinky swear, you know, and it goes on and on. Perhaps that’s a Roman Catholic thing as well.
So how do we ultimately think of this crime against God with our lips? What does Jesus say? Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. And so if we think ill of God, we will speak ill of him. If we think too little of God, we will speak too little of him. And so I think at the end of the day, we have a heart issue. We have an issue where we need to know our God and to know him well enough that our heart trembles at his majesty.
Our heart stands in awe of who he is and what he’s able to do, what he has done. We also embrace his promises. We also run to him as father, but our God, is to be feared and that is to be shown with not only our lips, but our lives. Let’s ask now for his help and grace. Lord bless us. As we think on these things tonight, write these everlasting truths on our hearts and in our minds so that not only do we speak well of you in worship and in public, but also Our hearts feel and think biblically. And may we defend your name in wisdom in this culture. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen. We have Psalm 8C as our closing song and we want to give praise to the Lord.