Summary 

The third commandment - not taking God's name in vain - reveals profound truths about God's nature and our relationship with Him. Far from being merely a prohibition against swearing, this commandment teaches us to fear and reverence God's holy name. Unlike human names which are simply labels, God's name represents His very essence and divine being. To use it carelessly is to empty it of significance, treating the almighty Creator as if He were just another person.

Transcript

Oh Lord God, we thank you for you are good. Your mercy is over all that you have made. Here we are on this beautiful morning as spring is getting into gear and yet many of us feel a weight of sin in our hearts. Please meet with us here today. Please enliven our hearts and our spirits.
Meet with us in word and in sacrament. Please change us to be people who desire your glory above all things. We pray, O Lord, that you would open our hearts even now. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
Well, hello. It's good to be with you this morning up here. I'm Jed Stalker. I am a pastoral intern here at Second City. So if you've just been attending this church for a couple of weeks and you are expecting Peter, you are allowed to be disappointed at this time.
If you are a regular attender here, you'll know that I've preached here half a dozen or so times over the past year and I wanted to reveal a part of my process for writing sermons to you all. So the first thing that I do before I even study the text intently, is I ask my children, who range in age from 2 to 11, what I should preach about. And sometimes they even have good things to say. But more than anything else, my daughters have consistently suggested that I preach from Harry Potter. And there are many good reasons for me to ignore them in this matter.
So I will not be preaching from children's fantasy literature this morning. But for my girls, I do want to begin our discussion of the third Commandment. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, as it says in the King James, by thinking about a profound quote from the headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore. One of the things that he says to Harry in the first book of the series is this. He says, fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
Fear of a name increases fear of a thing itself. This is surprisingly profound. Right, so in the context of the book, the character Dumbledore is talking about the character Voldemort, who's, you know, the devil. And one of the plot points in this whole series is that the majority of the people in this world, they won't even mention the guy's name. They're too afraid of him.
So they'll refer to him as he who Must not be named or even, you know, who. So what Dumbledore is saying is, yeah, he's a bad guy, but you can say his name. You don't need to venerate him. So get your fears out in the Open, call them by their name, and then they'll be less scary. And I think this is good advice for most things that we should not be afraid of.
Right. But then the question is, what about for those things that we should be afraid of those things that in a good and godly way we should tremble before. So remember, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Right? So in that case, well, the advice should be opposite.
So if we want to train ourselves to fear something, Dumbledore's logic would say, one way to do that would be to train ourselves in the fear. Fear of the thing. Sorry, the name. The fear of the name. Right.
That will increase our fear of the thing itself. So I feel like that's sort of a practical, psychological introduction to the theory of the third commandment. Joy Davidman, who is the woman who married C.S. lewis late in his life. There's a movie about it.
It's pretty good. Lewis is played by Anthony Hopkins. She says the Third Commandment is not just a nice, Nelly ish warning against profanity. It's much more like the sort of warning you see around power plants. Danger, high voltage.
The implied moral seems to be, be careful how you touch God. He is dangerous. So the point of the Third Commandment, I think one of the points perhaps is that God is utterly different than us. He is the Creator, we are the creatures. He is infinite.
We are limited. He is holy. We are sinners. He is other than us. He's good.
But he is very much other in a separate realm than ourselves. And we need to be trained in that truth, even to the extent of our language, even to the extent of the things that we say about Him. Let's think about what the Commandment says. It doesn't say, don't talk about God at all. No, we should be talking about God.
A bunch of the psalms, for instance, say that we're supposed to extol his name, we're supposed to shout his name, we're supposed to sing his name.
But what the commandment says is, don't take his name in vain. Don't misuse it. So the question then is, how do you misuse the name of God? In the small group that meets at my house, we started looking at Ecclesiastes recently. And many of you know that Ecclesiastes begins with the line vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
It repeats this many times. One interesting thing is that the word for vanity in Ecclesiastes is a different word from the word vain that we see in Exodus. Right. The Ecclesiastes, vanity is a Hebrew word that means vanishing, vapor, smoke, something that is here and then it goes away and there's no trace of it. So the message of Ecclesiastes is that everything can feel meaningless because it passes.
It goes away from us, right? But the name of the Lord surely does not pass. This is a different word that's used in Exodus. The word that's used in Exodus is a word that means worthless. It's a word that means nothingness.
It means actually in context, to take something that's full of meaning and to empty it of meaning to make it worthless. Right? That's the sense of the Exodus word. So how do we empty the name of God of its significance so that we know not to do it? Right.
Well, it seems to me to empty God's name of significance, you act as though he's not alive and interested and capable of intervening in the world, right? You talk as though God, who is wholly other and wholly powerful, was just some other thing in the world. So this commandment, I think, is saying, don't think you can be casual about God, the God of heaven, right? Like he was just another guy that you happen to know. Don't think you can be casual about God, like a politician who can vote out in four years if you don't like what he's doing.
This is God. He created heaven and earth. He dwells in unapproachable light. So the Ten Commandments are given in Exodus 20, in Exodus 19, right before the commandments are given, when Moses is going to go up onto Mount Sinai to receive the Lord's words, God. This is a quote says set.
God tells Moses to, quote, set limits for the people all around, saying, take care not to go up into the mountain or touch the edge of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death. That's verse 12 of Exodus 19. The whole mountain became holy. The whole mountain became dangerous to get near because God, the living presence of God, was there on the mountain.
And that's what this prohibition about using his name casually is there for. That's the kind of reverence that we're supposed to give to the name of God. So if you're a lot of people think about, why do we need to fear God? Well, if you're a parent, right, you're well aware that you need to teach your children to have a healthy fear of many dangerous things. Fire going in the road, animals that growl at them, right?
We need to be taught to have a healthy respect, not just for the name of God, but for God himself. He's not an idea, he's not a theory. He's not just a mysterious energy. He's a living person who is so holy that to see him would kill you. Philip Riken says this.
He says God's name quote, is much more than a name. It is God's identity. For us, a name is a label. It's something we have, not something we are. But when we use the name of God, we're referring to the essence of his divine being.
So the name of God is a big deal precisely because God is a big deal, and we need to be trained in that. Anyway, with all that said, I want to talk about this third commandment that we read this morning. I don't exactly have three points today. I sort of have three lenses through which we can view it. So I want to talk about it in terms of law, the implications of the law, and then gospel.
So first off, law. We're not supposed to take the name of the Lord in vain. John Calvin puts it really simply when he says this quote in sum, we must not profane God's name by using it irreverently or contemptuously. So if we use the name of God in any other way than as referring to God, and in fact doing so in a manner befitting creatures talking about their creator, we're breaking the commandment. That's the sort of bare minimum, right, of the third commandment.
So here's the takeaway from that first point. Don't do it. It's actually pretty simple. And I think for most of us in here, this is actually somewhat easy for us, right? We need to remember the holiness of God and the respect and reverence that he's due.
Right? If you're here this morning at the gathered worship service of Second City Church of the Presbyterian Church in America, you're probably one who does not routinely use the name of God as a curse word. Probably. You do not say I swear to God unless you're making a very, very serious vow. And you mean it, Right?
You are probably not an intentional blasphemer, right? And this is good. We should keep the commandment at this level, lowest level. However, if you are here this morning, you probably also know that our surrounding culture is remarkably bad at keeping this commandment. People curse using God's name all the time.
People who don't believe in God swear to God without thinking much about it. Right there. For a while, the kids in school were all saying, by God all the time just in order to Prove that they felt strongly about anything. I want to tell you a brief story about how little some people in our culture think about reverence to God and his name. It's just an anecdote.
So I worked at a library for a few years, and there was one young guy who came in. He was very angry because the library had fined him because he had lost several of their DVDs.
So we had a lengthy conversation about this. And in the course of this conversation, he called me G a few times. Listen, G. Yo, G, this is a white guy. I calmed this guy down, and he started feeling nicer to me eventually. And he said, know some people find G offensive as a term, but really, it's not meant to be offensive.
If you look into it, you'll see that G means God. And I thought, what? And I said to him, were you. Do you mean that you were intending to call me God when we were speaking just a little bit ago? Why were you doing that?
And he looked confused about this. As confused, I think, as I felt. And then he just asked if he could borrow some more DVDs. And so, I don't know. I mean, I enjoyed that interaction more in retrospect than in the moment.
But. So even though that was kind of funny, this issue is not exactly low stakes if you think about the rest of the Bible. So in Leviticus, in one of the few narrative sections of that book, there's a story in chapter 24 of A Man who, quote, blasphemed the name. And Moses goes to the Lord to ask for instructions about what to do with this guy.
And the answer is, the people of God are supposed to stone him. No mercy, Quote, whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death. This is something the Lord feels strongly about. And yet we're in a society in which reverence as such is at a remarkably low level. And verbal reverence for God is at a remarkably, even lower level than sort of the normal.
And I think that this is offensive to God. However, I also think that a lot of the people who do routinely take the names, take the Lord's name in vain are totally unthinking about it. In a. In a very real sense, they know not what they do, as Jesus says on the cross. So I think we should feel pity and pray for people's forgiveness, right?
We should not fall into the trap of feeling better than other people because of our verbal habits or theirs, right? Because if we do that, if we start feeling holier than others, we might be guilty of taking the Lord's name in vain in a different way. So this is one of my points. I suppose my first mini point was don't take the Lord's name in vain in a simple sense. My second point related to it is you probably do take the Lord's name in vain all the time in a deeper sense.
Look out. Right, we'll come back to this one more little mini point again while we're still in this law section. And that's a New Testament consideration of this Third Testament. So the apostle Luke says that Jesus is suffering right before he was crucified. So the men who came and arrested him, they were holding him in custody and quote in it, said they said many things against him, blaspheming him.
They said things, and this was blasphemy. This means that Jesus is capable of being verbally blasphemed. Right. And that, according to the logic of the Bible, means that he has a name which is equal to that of God the Father. Therefore, I think for us practically in this law section of things to think about, the name of Jesus needs to be handled with the same respect and reverence with which we handle the name God for obvious theological orthodox reasons.
Right? Okay, so let's move on to our next lens. That was law flat. That's the prohibition. Don't do it.
And again, we should just agree, right? Don't do it. It's like Nike, but in reverse. But as Calvin, John Calvin is good to point out, the negatives of the law actually mean a good deal more than just don't. We need to think about the negatives of the law as a bare minimum.
But we are expected to go above and beyond those negatives. So Calvin says this quote, the prohibition of the third commandment implies a corresponding precept, which is that it be our study and our care to to treat his name with religious veneration. End quote. That is to say, we're supposed to worship God whenever we talk about him in Jesus's terms. We're supposed to hallow the name of God, our Father who art in heaven.
Right. So that's my second lens. This is the implication of the law. I want to give you a hypothetical scenario to illustrate kind of what I'm talking about here. Right?
So picture this setting. It's lunch break at work. A bunch of people have gone out to get a sandwich. They're walking back to the job. It's been a hard day already.
Consider two theoretical people and their speaking roles in the same situation. Okay? Here's person A. He's an atheist. He's speaking to his work buddies.
And first he speaks the holy name of the Lord Jesus Christ. But he is not praying. He is not making a theological observation. He's using it as a curse word. And then he says, the boss is such an idiot.
This is a believable scenario, is it not? Right. Maybe you could put in a couple of sprinkling of adjectives to make it more believable to you, but these conversations are real. But now picture a hypothetical different person A churchgoer in exactly that same situation. So now person B, he says this.
He does not say the name Jesus Christ. Instead, he says, golly gee whiz. And then what he says is, the boss is such an idiot. And what I want to ask you is this, is person B doing better in this scenario morally than person A? This is a real question, right?
Let's do ethics. Here's my answer. You can tell me if you think I'm wrong later. I think person B, the guy who says golly, is strictly speaking doing better morally than the other guy. He has not broken the letter of the law in terms of the third commandment.
However, it's a very shallow victory, isn't it? Right. While he has not profaned the name of the Lord by using it irreverently or contemptuously, he's certainly not bringing honor to God because the rest of his speech is entirely like this other guy, right? He speaks like an atheist, except for not honoring the bear or, excuse me, not breaking the bear commandment itself. Right?
The rest of his speech does not hallow the name, grumbling about people, insulting them behind their back. This is not Christlike behavior. Yes, Calvin says, quote, we must not detract from or throw insult upon God's works as miserable men often insultingly do. But we must laud praise. Every action which we attribute to him is wise, just and good.
This is to sanctify the name of the Lord. And do you know what's included in the scope of God's works? It's literally everything, right? Science. So if we are praising God for literally everything, we're doing well according to the implication of the third commandment.
Do you praise God for literally everything? I'm not saying that we can't be sad or angry about unjust things or even that we can't complain sometimes in a way that acknowledges our own faults and maintains God's sovereignty. But if we usually or even often take the position of judging and grumbling, we're insulting the providence of God and that is taking his name lightly. And friend, if you are like me, I'm a person who feels things very strongly. I feel like I should just probably be in charge of the world.
If everybody would listen to me, we would do better. Right? This implication should make you pause. Right? Are your habitual words, are your habitual thoughts giving glory to God's name?
What about when you're driving? What about when you're watching sports? What about when you're scrolling through your news feed? Right. If your words are not giving positive glory to God, you're not making it to this implication of the law.
Right. Quote, whatever our mind conceives of him, whatever our tongue utters must bespeak his excellence and correspond to the greatness of of his sacred name. Do you live up to that standard? I do not.
So, friend, here's the thing. I think that even if we're really good at keeping the third commandment and it's prohibition, we don't actively misuse God's name. I think we probably fail much of the time at keeping the implications of the same law honoring God's name and all that we think as well as we say. I'm guessing we keep the letter but break the spirit of the law.
Well, what should we do with this? I don't think we should just stop trying, right? It's better to be a flailing sinner who's trying to get things right than a Pharisee.
So that's what I meant earlier when I said that we better not be judgmental when we hear others, especially in ignorance, misuse God's name. Because if we do that, if we put ourselves in the seat of judgment against them, we are judging them on part of the law, while we ourselves are breaking other parts of the law. And you remember what Paul says about that, Romans 2. He says, you who boast in the law dishonor God by breaking the law. For as it is written, the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.
Do you hear? If we don't live up to what God's holiness deserves, we're causing the third commandment to be broken.
So if we think in these terms, I think we will say, like Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, we cannot concentrate. We cannot hallow. We are not good enough to bring glory to God's name like we should. It's beyond our power. We cannot keep the positive implications of the law.
This is bad news. But there is good news. So the law is as Paul says, a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. So let's move to my third lens here today. What does the Gospel have to say about the third commandment?
Here it is, I think God will do the work that we can't. You remember the Gospel reading this morning from John 12? Jesus prays, Father, glorify your name. And God the Father answers audibly from heaven, as he did at Sinai. And he says, I have glorified it and I will glorify it again.
So bad news. We can't glorify God's name the way that he deserves good news. He will do it himself. Praise God. God's name will be honored because God will honor it.
And that's kind of the picture of scripture, the pattern, isn't it? We are lawbreakers, but God in Christ keeps the law on our behalf and we get the benefit of his obedience. This is gospel. The John 12 reading, you remember is in the context of Jesus talking about the crucifixion. The way that God makes sure his name will be glorified is by the willing sacrifice of the innocent Jesus, who's the only person who perfectly kept the third commandment in the law and the implications of the law.
Right.
This is the logic of the cross. So I gave us a lot of mini takeaways earlier, right? Right. Don't use God's name as profanity. Don't swear by God unless you really mean it.
Right. Don't look down your nose about people who get this stuff wrong too easily. Right. But the real takeaway here, as always, is this. Cling to the cross of Christ.
Don't trust in your own righteousness, even in the smallest and apparently easiest things. Right. Think about this. Just do a mental check. Right.
The third command is probably the easiest of all of the ten Commandments, isn't it? Right. Don't lie. Well, that's difficult. Don't covet.
Oh, boy. Don't lust. Okay. Right. Don't have any other gods before God.
That's really difficult. Right. When we consider the large scope. Right. The third commandment is the easiest of them all, I think.
And you can't do it. So don't trust in your ability. Trust in Christ.
I think the real heart of this message is that we need to have a renewed sense of our own insufficiency to keep even the smallest parts of the law and a heightened desire to go to Christ for forgiveness and grace and justification before God. And then having done that. Right. We will want to praise his name. We will want our conversation to bring him great glory.
There'll be no temptation to misuse his name because we will desire to praise Him. Right? That's what this sermon series is called. You know, the resurrection life. Here we are in the season of Easter, right?
Being new, being newborn in Christ, is to want to praise his name always. So that's the good news. God keeps his name holy. It's not up to you. But wait, there's more.
There always is. What's the greater good news with the third commandment? What's the great gospel truth? Here it is. Think about the Great Commission.
What does Jesus say when he's risen from the dead and all authority in heaven and earth has been given unto him? He says his disciples are supposed to go therefore into all the world, making disciples and baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Right? Friend, think about it. If you are a baptized Christian, if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus and a member of his church, you were baptized in the name of the Trinity, right?
The Name that God was so concerned in, the third commandment that didn't get misused and didn't get taken in vain, didn't get dirty. He lets you and me and every forgiven sinner into that name. He puts that name upon us.
In Leviticus 24, we have that story of the person who misused the name of the Lord in anger, and he got stoned for it. He got rocks thrown at him until he died. That is how serious, how intense the Lord feels about the misuse of his name, and how apparently intense we should feel about the name of the Lord. And then in the New Testament, God says that you and me and our children and all who are far off can be baptized into that name because of the mediatorial work of Jesus. This is very nearly unbelievable.
God goes to great lengths all throughout the Bible to show how drastically holy how other he is, how you can't approach him without the proper ceremony or you will get zapped. And then Jesus comes among us and dies on our behalf. And then what happens to the holiness of the Name? It doesn't lessen. It does not become less holy.
But God sloshes that holiness out in full measure upon all his baptized people. In Exodus 19, that same chapter where God is roping off the bottom of Mount Sinai to make sure nobody stumbles up into his holiness and dies. This is what God tells Moses to tell the people. He says, you shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. That is Every one of God's people will be like Moses.
They will all be holy. They'll all be able to stand in his presence. And that's what happens to us. Because of the blood of Christ shed on our behalf. We're not holy in our own right.
We don't earn our position, but instead we bear his very name. It's part of our new identity. We become other than what we were. That's what it means to be a Christian, right? It means that you're called by the name of Christ, the Holy Name.
Think about Ephesians we read this morning. The whole family in heaven and earth is named in Christ. Revelation says that believers will have the Holy Name written upon them. Chapter 22. They shall see his face and his name shall be in their foreheads.
To be a saved person means that the Holy Name is attached to you. It's more important to your true identity than your personal name is. So all of this to say we vain people are welcomed into the very name we're told not to take in vain by the holiness, by the plan of God. Okay, so fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself. We should fear God.
We should reverence his name and Christian. We should know that we are marked, body and soul, by that very name, that we are told to reverence to the glory of God in Jesus Christ. Amen. Let's pray. Oh, Lord God, we pray now in the name of Jesus, as you have made available for us in this great economy of salvation.
We pray that your name would be holy. We pray that you would glorify that Name. And we pray that you would glorify even in us. Help us to live holy lives, to do those things that please you. Help us to desire what is right above all things, above our own glory.
Lord God, we pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.

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