You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. (Exodus 20:7)
But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. (Matthew 15:18)
Since the purpose of this
review of the Ten Commandments is to explore their reasonableness and rationality,
we should begin there, but there’s more that I hope to address afterwards. How
does this commandment make perfect sense? First, there is the fact that if God
is God, and if we are to be called by His name or otherwise associated with Him
and His name, is it really wise to drag that name through the mud? What does
that say of us or our relationship with Him? If you are employed by a company,
and publicly trash talk them, you’re not likely to be employed there for long. The
commandment makes perfect sense.
But let me move on to
another issue with this idea. I suppose I should begin by noting that people
have used language in my presence to which I have responded (or wanted to) with
“Do I have to? Right here? Right now? In public?” And they looked at me in
confusion, trying to remember what they said that would have provoked such a
strange response. The problem is that we say things without realizing what it
is we’re saying. When I was a Toastmaster, I learned that certain of these
utterances were the sign of a bad speaker: um, uh, ah, eh, hm, etc. I college,
I had a professor who said, “ya know” so often that I stopped listening to his
lecture and counted: 30 in 15 minutes, two of those with nothing between. So I
understand that some of what we say that we shouldn’t say is said because we’re
used to hearing that sequence of sounds, not because we mean them.
But the King James
version of this commandment is that we not use the Lord’s name “in vain” – or emptily,
and what could be emptier than to use His name as verbal filler? Without even
intending to?
But as much as we tend to
point fingers when someone uses God’s name in anger or in some other
inappropriately emotional setting, what does it say of us if we use His name without
faith? We’re praying – we think – but we don’t really believe God will act on
our behalf, and when we don’t get what we want, we blame God. Could the reality
be that we didn’t really ask Him? That we prayed an empty (faithless) prayer and
signed in “In Jesus’ name, Amen” but the words we thought or even said were
nothing more than lukewarm air? Isn’t that just as disrespectful as “OMG!” used
as an expression of everything?
And who is to blame when
we don’t receive the answer we claim we want when we can’t be bothered to fill
our prayers with our faith or our selves?
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