Hey, everybody.
Welcome back.
Thanks for ending the week with us.
If you’re with us,
otherwise, whenever you watch this, glad you are.
Thank you for being a part of it.
We are in Exodus today.
We started yesterday the Ten Commandments,
that sort of centralized
expression of what it means to be obedient,
of what it means to follow the core of the path that
God lays out for the people of Israel.
We did not make it very far.
We only made it through
two commandments.
I don’t know how many we’ll get through today,
but we continue to look at
these expectations that God has for the people.
We’re in verse 7 today.
“You will not make
wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God,
for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses
His name.” You know,
Michael, you and I just recently did a series on the Ten Commandments
with the other podcasts we’re doing, the Westminster Catechism.
And I think most of
the commandments, but certainly this one,
are often bigger than people think they are.
We hear wrongful use and we think of swearing.
We think of,
you know,
G.D.
We think of, you know,
God this and God that,
misusing God’s name, which that certainly is.
But there is a bigger context here,
the idea of wrongful use,
of commonizing God’s name,
of misrepresenting God’s name,
of not honoring God’s name.
And it has, I think, more to do with the relationship to God than it does with the name itself.
And I think that that
can be easily missed.
There’s a sense in which all of these commandments have a
superficial checklist that we might say,
“Well, I don’t do that.” But if you really understand them,
I think they’re likely to convict you and you’re likely to think,
“Oh, no, that does speak to me as
well.” That’s 100% fair.
And I think that one of the temptations with this command in particular
is to relegate it to a list of common,
everyday sins that we just say grace over for ourselves.
We say, “Well, yeah, I’ve got a salty tongue and I’ve always have,
or my mom did, or whatever.”
And to take a very sacred,
identifying type command,
a thing that
roots you within a family,
establishes a relationship between you and God,
and essentially commodifies it and says, “Well,
be nice and don’t
be disrespectful.” And I think that’s the frame that many of us bring to this,
is the idea that
this command is telling us,
“Don’t disrespect God.” Just like,
“Don’t disrespect your parents.” And
is we say, “Don’t get caught
by people using God’s name in vain.” But I don’t even think that’s
really barely touching this command.
And some of that is a misunderstanding of history and culture.
In our modern, present day,
where atheism is a thing that we kind of take for granted,
that there are people who don’t believe in God,
we come to a text like this and as we look at it,
we can’t envision a day in which everyone believed that there was a God.
And in fact,
the real debate was whose God is bigger,
whose God is better,
whose God is victorious.
And Clint,
I think one thing that we miss is misusing the name of a God is tantamount to trying to use
that God’s power for yourself,
or using that God’s power against another person,
or in some way,
trying to bend that God to your own devices.
And if we know anything in Exodus about the God of Israel,
we know God will not be used.
God’s name will not be abused because God is greatest.
God is highest.
God is most powerful.
Yeah, I think there’s also a sense in which,
Michael, this has to do with
treating something sacred as if it is common,
to take the name of God and simply
use that as one would use any other non-sacred or even profane thing.
In fact,
some translations read to profane the name of God,
and profane means to
take something which is good and treat it as something that is bad.
So to call down curses on God’s behalf,
or to
literally damn others in God’s name.
I mean, there are myriads of ways we could talk about what this commandment doesn’t mean,
but it means more than we often think that it does,
and it has to do with
our relationship with the Holy One.
Yeah, maybe if you’re going to summarize this command for
yourself, I’d just point out that exact wording that we have here in the NIV.
Make wrongful use
of the name.
I think both of those matter.
Wrongful,
a way that is inappropriate,
a way that is
non-relational, a way that are calls to oneself,
and then the use of a name is to try to bend it
to your own purposes,
to try to find a way to misuse God’s name is a tantamount to finding a way
to use God for yourself.
The name of God and the action of God here are linked in a really deep
theological way, and so we’re not going to spend the whole session here on just verse 7,
but I some deep spiritual wisdom in the call to treat our relationship with God with honor and respect,
and that’s not just in the simple,
casual, one-off stuff that you might say in a day.
If that’s been your understanding of this commandment,
I would encourage you,
take a listen to the Westminster
Catechism talk, because even that catechism,
which is designed for children,
can lead us into a much
deeper understanding of what was intended here.
Yeah, and given that this is a thing that we might even fuss at kids for doing,
at least doing part of,
I think it is worth pointing out that the end of this verse is scary.
The Lord will not
acquit anyone who misuses His name.
If there’s any thought that this isn’t a real commandment,
or that this isn’t serious business,
this is how God feels about it.
The Lord will not acquit
someone who misuses the name.
That is a significant threat.
That’s a significant evidence
of how serious the one giving these commandments feels this one is.
Yeah, right, and it’s so easy to relativize it based upon the assumptions we’ve made about it,
but I think you just make the point to emphasize,
if you find yourself downplaying this as opposed
to the commandments that follow,
you said in yesterday’s study,
and I think it’s helpful,
that in many ways,
this commandment begins with the direct relationship with God,
and then it makes its way down into the communal relationships,
and make no mistake,
God is first on the list.
And so the fact that we’re only three in,
and this one is there,
we should not be relegating
this to the bottom of our own list.
This matters, and I hope that we see it as such.
Yeah, no other commandment includes words like this,
that you will not be acquitted.
That says something, and we should take that seriously.
Then we move on.
Remember the Sabbath day, keep it holy.
Six days you shall labor and do your work.
The seventh is a Sabbath day to the
Lord your God, you shall not do work.
You, your son, your daughter, your male, your female slave, your livestock, your alien resident in your towns.
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
but rested on the seventh.
Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath
and consecrated it.
We’ve seen that word consecrated before,
make holy or set apart.
The same could be said,
and I thought Westminster actually did a very nice job
with this commandment, Michael.
The same thing could be said about this.
This means more than don’t mow your yard on Sunday,
you know,
whether or not you go out to eat.
Whenever we’re tempted to reduce these things to kind of legalistic rules and do’s and don’ts,
we’ve missed the point.
This is about a cycle of living,
a way of living that regularly and
consistently reflects God’s own work.
God worked and God rested,
and therefore we are invited
to take a day.
And as people who live in a place of leisure and who live in a time of leisure,
Michael, maybe this doesn’t carry the same force,
but in its day it was to say to people,
trust God with a day of no work.
Trust God with a day of no gathering, of no planting,
of no
preparation,
that every week, that once every seven days,
the people took their hands off the wheel
and said, “We trust God to provide and we are going to back off and allow God to be God in these
moments without thinking we need to do something.” And again,
it’s easy to read this and say, “Well,
keep,
take it easy on Sundays,
go play golf or fish or whatever.” But that’s not what this is about.
Yeah, in fact, Clint,
remember, we’ve had the Sabbath instituted before this command.
God has already with the manna and with this command,
you know, you will pick up only enough for the day,
for the first six days of the week,
and then on that last day you’ll gather a double portion,
and then that will be enough for the next day.
So the people have already been functionally
doing this.
Now we see the commandment given to the people as a pattern for their entire lives.
And you make a really important point,
Clint. We make this assumption as people who have Netflix
at literally the edge of our fingertips.
If you want to go and entertain yourselves,
you can do that without any work.
These folks are subsistence living in the midst of the wilderness.
It is exactly the work that they put in each day which will determine whether or not that day they have
the food, the water, the shelter,
the care that they need.
That day’s work defines that day’s output.
And Clint, what is being said here is that the servant’s not greater than the master,
that the master created everything in six days.
This is a tieback to Genesis.
We did a study of
that, so if that’d be interesting for you,
jump back there and look at Genesis chapter one and chapter two.
But definitely we want to recognize that here God is saying it’s enough for God to
rest on the sixth day.
And if you trust God,
then you can trust that God will provide what you need
for the seventh day when you practice living like the God who made in six days.
So this is a relational command, Clint.
This is to say you should pattern your life in this way because this is how
God has patterned, God’s own work.
And so if you’re going to have work,
your work should look like God’s work.
And if you see it that way,
bear with me, if you see it that way,
then there’s a sense
of this commandment where you’re invited to be like someone who you look up to or you respect.
It’s more than that,
but it’s like a child might look to a parent and say,
“This is a thing that
they do.
I’m going to do that myself,” except the difference here is the one who created all things
and says, “You’re invited into relationship with me.” That God is saying to the people,
“If you’re going to be like me,
you’re going to structure your life so that it by definition has to trust me.”
And if we’re honest, Clint,
this Sabbath rule,
I think we quite frankly minimize it when we say
you shouldn’t go mow your lawn on Sunday because in making that statement,
we make it about the
lawn mowing and not about the pattern of our life.
And the lawn mowing is something that you can
easily see and judge someone else for.
Patterning your life after God is an entirely different
matter.
I think that this commandment calls us to a higher order of living that reflects God’s way and God’s plan,
and we find ourselves afoul of it far more often than I think just Sunday.
I think it matters,
Michael, that the commandment starts with the word “remember.”
The idea is we are called to be people of work.
We are called to be people who give effort to our
life, but there is to be a season of rest.
There is to be a time of holding back.
There is to be a
time of renewal and of relationship.
And if all we do is produce,
then we’ve missed that pattern.
We’ve missed that God-initiated pattern in life,
which is to say that there is a time to nurture
the things that aren’t effort.
There’s a time to step back from that and to grow and to rest and
to recover and to renew,
and that is a vital pattern not only of life,
which we kind of get,
but of faith,
and it really makes a difference.
It matters.
Yeah, and we should just quickly point out this isn’t just about our own personal benefit or
entertainment.
Look here in verse 10,
Clint,
“Your son, your daughter,” we might get that,
“your male or female slave,
your livestock, the alien resident in your towns.” I mean,
the clear point here is everybody,
and in a country that has stores open 24/7,
seven days a week, maybe this is a little different after the last couple of years,
but has a place that’s
generally valued everything being available at all times.
There’s some universality here,
which I think should challenge us because the whole idea is that the Israelite society will
make space for this,
not just for you and your family,
but as a people,
they will recognize the
importance that they are a resident alien.
They’re not even part of the people.
They’re not even in
the family circle, but you should make accommodation and possibility so that they will not work on the seventh day either.
It has a kind of dangerous generosity in it,
to be honest with you,
because it demands that the people look for Sabbath even beyond their own household and circle
to the lives of those around them.
Yeah, it’s communal.
Again,
sometimes we can easily read the Ten Commandments and forget that
they weren’t given as just individual rules,
but to govern a community that had a relationship with
God.
And so, Sabbath, the idea of rest is not just something that we do individually.
It is a commandment that offers an opportunity to families,
to churches,
to communities.
There is a bigger picture there.
I think that’s well said, Michael.
Thanks for being with us.
Friends, I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
If you’re in the area,
definitely stay warm if we do get snowmageddon,
and we will see you all next week,
Mondays.
We continue on with the next of our commandments.
Thanks, everybody.