Entry 45

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain—The first commandment teaches us that Jehovah is God alone: He has no equal and no rival. The second commandment goes on to instruct us that God is a spirit, and that we are not to set up any supposed similitude of God before our eyes. He has no shape or similitude, but He has a Name. That is to say, He has taken a name to Himself under which He wills that we know Him, think of Him, speak of Him, and address ourselves to Him. And accordingly He issued through Moses this warning commandment, the third. “The literal meaning of this command is doubtful. It may mean, Thou shalt not utter the name of God in a vain and irreverent manner; or, Thou shalt not utter the name of God to a lie, thou shalt not swear falsely. It is urged as an objection to the second interpretation, that perjury is an offence against our neighbour, and therefore belongs to the second table of the law: and that it is in fact included in the ninth commandment, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. Bearing false testimony and false swearing are, however, different offences” (Hodge).

in vain. “I suppose the primary meaning of the phrase points to indifferentism at least as obviously as to antagonism. ‘In vain’ suggests not irreverence only, but voidness, nothingness, the bringing in for no cause but to round a sentence or fill up a gap, of that Name which was proclaimed before Moses in majesty and mercy; to utter simply for the sake of saying something, that Name which Isaiah foresaw as coming from far burning with divine anger. It is to pronounce that Name as though it were a mere word, not standing for any person, to bring it in when another word would actually serve our purpose as well” (Christina Rossetti).

Note.—Oaths.—An oath is a solemn appeal taken from the weakness, untruthfulness, and mistrust of men to the omniscience, truth, and power of God. At bottom all oaths are of the same nature and design, and they come into use in this way. If I am forming any important engagement, and my self-interest leans against the likelihood of my performing it: or if I am called to bear witness or give judgment in a matter that tests my integrity, and if my neighbour doubts my will, my ability, my sincerity, then, conscious of all these in myself, I am permitted to swear by the name of God that I am true in my words, and just in my judgments, and sincere in my purposes. In taking an oath for his assurance, I as good as say to my neighbour: Were this matter between you and me only, the temptation to me rising out of it might be too strong for me; but since this transaction is so important for you, to give you the best possible security I can supply, I hereby carry this transaction into the presence of God: I hereby open my whole mind and heart in this matter to Him, and I solemnly affirm that as He is just and true in all His ways, so am I in this thing; and that as He will bring every secret thing to judgment, so I protest to you against that day that there is nothing false or unjust in my mind or heart toward you. I know that of every word I speak now I shall have to give an account at last; and I swear to you that I am speaking nothing now that I will repent of when I meet you before God in judgment.

Now all this, instead of being doubtful or wrong, is both most rational and indeed religious. It is most rational in that it accepts the facts and conditions of human life, as these facts and conditions are found in ourselves, and in our fellows around us. For an oath enables a weak, self-seeking, self-sheltering creature to take up a firm, open, and honourable stand both toward himself and toward his neighbour. It enables a man to meet the most difficult duties and most searching demands of this life with his mind girt about with a strongly-wrought girdle of truth.

Nor does the Confession of Faith go any too far when it teaches that “a lawful oath is a part of religious worship.” The Confession indeed but borrows Calvin’s very words. “An oath,” he says, “when duly taken, is a species of divine worship.” Which it surely is, in so far as it is a most solemn acknowledgment of God as our lawgiver and our judge. It openly acknowledges His omnipresence, omniscience, justice, and power. It connects the second table of His law most closely with the first. It confesses also, that my neighbour has but too good reason to fear that I do not love him as I love myself; it is a confession that my heart and lip are not necessarily above suspicion, and that I do not rebel against giving any legitimate guarantee that may help to secure my just and honourable treatment of my neighbour, and my jealous and conscientious watchfulness over myself. And the oath rises above both of us in that it binds fast the engagements of moral and social life to the throne of divine righteousness and truth. When a man takes an oath in the name of God, he at once humbles and ennobles himself thereby. He humbles himself, in that he takes his place among a race of fallen and false-hearted men; among men hateful and hating one another; deceitful and deceiving one another. And he ennobles himself, in that he acknowledges his evil nature and kinship, and at the same time seeks divine help, and promises, with God’s help, to speak only what is true, and to do only what is right. An oath accordingly, in the mouth of a devout juror, is nothing less than an act of divine worship. It turns a court of justice for the time into a church, and elevates its solemn procedure into an earthly figure and forecast of the day of judgment.

But we are not left to our own reasonings to guide and vindicate our practice in this matter of oaths. The Scriptures afford us endless examples, and some of them examples of the most solemn kind, of this method of ascertaining and reassuring the doubtful and anxious mind. At the very opening of the Hebrew history, Jehovah Himself swears by His own awful Name that He will perform to His people such and such things that confessedly lie beyond the pale of past experience and future likelihood. And when the things so promised were actually accomplished, they were thus celebrated in a psalm: “O ye seed of Abraham His servant; ye children of Jacob His children: remember the covenant made with Abraham, and His oath unto Israel; He confirmed the same to Jacob for a law, and to Israel for an everlasting covenant.” Again: “Jehovah hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever, after the order of Melchizedek.” And again: “For men verily swear by the greater, and an oath for confirmation is an end of all strife. Wherefore God, willing more abundantly to show unto the heirs of salvation the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath.” And our Lord also, when put on oath before the high priest, took the adjuration as made under the law, and thus both recognized and established the lawfulness and propriety of the judicial custom. All which is surely sufficient to disprove the somewhat fanatical position that oaths are unlawful; that judicial swearing is a breach of the third commandment.

But it will to a certainty occur to some readers to say at this point, What then is to be made of our Lord’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, “I say unto you, Swear not at all: neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne: nor by the earth; for it is His footstool: but let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil”? That is a most instructive example of our Lord’s popular teaching, but it has little or nothing to do with the matter in hand. He is here dealing with one of the most common vices among His fellow-countrymen. The whole sermon, and eminently this part of it, is directed against the perversions and exaggerations, the glosses and refinements under which it may almost be said the moral law lay buried in our Lord’s day; and hence the paradoxical and startling words He sometimes makes use of, as if just to set men to think what the law of God really is, and what obedience to it really implies. And accordingly our Lord is not so much dealing in the passage quoted with the legal practice of courts of justice, or even with the solemn assurances exchanged between man and man among the important concerns of daily life, as with the too familiar and irreverent use of God’s name and attributes in their common conversation. And besides, the casuistical teaching of the ecclesiastical schools had laid down a mass of entangling, vexatious, and demoralizing rules, measuring out the degrees of responsibility and solemnity that attached to this and that form of oath. Swearing by heaven meant so much; swearing by the temple meant so much; swearing by one thing you were not absolutely bound to keep your word; while swearing by another kept you firm,—all this was sapping the foundations of truth and reverence in the land, and it was against all such rabbinical glosses and popular abuses of the third commandment that our Lord thus emphatically protested.

The third commandment requireth the holy and reverent use of God’s names, etc.—“Men do not begin by intending to dishonour God; but they are afraid of the ridicule of others; they are ashamed of appearing religious, and thus they are led to pretend that they are worse than they really are. . . . They think contemptuously of God’s ministers, sacraments, and worship; they slight His word, rarely looking into it, and never studying it. Thus they are in heart infidels; though they may not formally be such, and may attempt to disguise their own unbelief under pretence of objecting to one or other of the doctrines or ordinances of religion. And should a time of temptation come, when it would be safe to show themselves as they really are, they will almost unawares throw off their profession of Christianity, and join themselves to the scoffing world” (Newman).

forbiddeth all profaning—This commandment among other things denounces the sinful and degrading habit of profane cursing and swearing. It is distressing to think of the hold this coarse and vulgar habit has taken of certain classes of the people. You can scarcely pass a field in seed-time or harvest, you will not walk far along any frequented highway without hearing men uttering savage bursts of cursing at the mute creatures God has given them to assist them in their work, and even at the very implements they hold in their hands. In every knot of workmen there are usually some whose mother-tongue is blasphemy, whose mouth is filled with cursing and bitterness. And sometimes seriously-minded men, such is the strength of example, or of an early bad habit, will be surprised into this lamentable language, and that long after they have begun to set a watch on the door of their lips. Peter’s explosion in the palace of the high priest is no doubt an example of the long survival of an early evil habit. “Once,” says Bunyan, in his Grace Abounding, “when I was in the height of vanity, yet hearing one to swear that was reckoned for a religious man, it had so great a stroke upon my spirit that it made my heart to ake.” We have reason to be thankful that this sinful and indecent habit has almost entirely disappeared from among educated men. For there are certain kinds of historical and social literature that survive to show us how common and almost universal this abominable practice was at one time even among the more cultivated classes of society. Addressing working men in the twentieth letter of Fors Clavigera, Mr. Ruskin says: “I wish you to think over the meaning of this habit of yours very carefully with me. I call it a habit of yours, observe, only with reference to your recent adoption of it. You have learned it from your superiors; but they, partly in consequence of your too eager imitation of them, are beginning to mend their manners. . . . And first, it is necessary you should understand the difference between swearing and cursing, vulgarly so often confounded. They are entirely different things; the first is invoking the witness of a spirit to an assertion you make, the second is invoking the assistance of a spirit to a mischief you wish to inflict. When ill-educated and ill-tempered people clamorously confound the two invocations, they are not, in reality, either cursing or swearing, but merely vomiting empty words indecently. True cursing and swearing must always be distinct and solemn.” And Dr. Newman calls all this kind of language “a sort of vocal worship of the evil one, to which he listens with especial satisfaction. He is a master who allows himself to be served without trembling. He goes to and fro upon the earth, and walks up and down in it, hearing and rejoicing in that light and profane talk which is his worship.”

or abusing of anything whereby God maketh himself known. The Bible word blasphemy is just Greek for this which is forbidden in this commandment. And Bengel excellently defines blasphemy thus: “Blasphemy is committed when (1) anything unworthy of God is attributed to Him; (2) when things worthy of God are denied to Him; (3) when the incommunicable attributes of God are attributed to others.”

God will not suffer them to escape his righteous judgment. “Jehovah alone, according to the ancient constitution, was King in Israel, so that the crime of high treason could only be committed in respect of Him, and as the ten commandments would lead us to expect, the penalty for blaspheming His name was death. The book of Leviticus (xxiv.) relates how on one occasion a semi-Israelite in a brawl reviled and cursed His Name, and how the community, shocked at the unlooked-for event, sought counsel of the oracle, and how this commanded the man to be stoned” (Ewald, Antiquities).

Uses

1. The holy and reverent use of God’s name “implies right faith to call upon Him as He Is; right trust in Him, leaning upon Him; right devotion, calling upon Him as He has appointed; right life, ourselves who call upon Him being, or becoming by His grace, what He wills” (Pusey on Joel ii. 32).
2. “Whenever you hear the name of God mentioned, accustom yourselves to make a reverential pause, and form within yourselves an inward act of adoration, whereby you will be less apt to profane that venerable name in your more solemn addresses” (A Father’s Advice to his Children).
3. Certain classes of men have already been named whose transgression of this commandment is notorious and scandalous. But this commandment, like all God’s commandments, is very broad and very spiritual. And those who are farthest from the profane habits of speech referred to may fall into another profanity not less displeasing to God and injurious to themselves. There is a professional, a familiar, a conventional way of addressing God in prayer and praise, as also in speaking of Him in preaching and writing and debating, that is a grievous breach of this holy commandment. “We are apt to act toward God and the things of God as toward a mere system, a law, a name, a religion, a principle; not as against a Person, a living, watchful, present, prompt and powerful Eye and Arm. That all this is a great error is plain to all who study Scripture” (Newman).

Questions

1. Comment on and illustrate Eccles. v. 1, 2, Draw out and justify the first clause of Confession xxii. 1.
2. And, indeed, oath-taking seems to imply, in its principle and origin, that other simple assertions are less sacred and binding, and thus indirectly to exercise an injurious influence upon the moral and religious notions of the people (Kalisch). Compare with the teaching in the Commentary, and judge.
3. Explain, in view of the comments on this and on the first and second commandments, Matthew Henry’s words: God is known by His name only, not by His nature or any similitude.
4. The formula, which embodies a dogma for the theologian, readily suggests an object for the worshipper. Ponder and explain.