The 4th Commandment

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

Exodus 20:7

I've been thinking about this commandment and its meaning for a while now, and I’d like to share some thoughts about it with you.

Now if you were anything like me growing up, you were probably told that it meant not to say the word 'God' or misuse the name 'God' loosely!

But here’s my first problem,

the word ‘God’ isn’t God’s name as such, because the word ‘God’ is a noun, a naming word, which we know is used to identify a group or class of people or things. Just like we can be called ‘human!’ outside of our personal names!

If the commandment had read, thou shalt not take the name of ‘YHWH’ in vain, (‘Tetragrammaton’ Hebrew name for God, meaning ‘I Am’), then clearly misuse of this name for God would make more sense, especially if we broke this commandment; would you agree?

Now the Jewish people were so concerned about breaking this commandment that they completely removed God's name, the four-letter tetragrammaton, from the scriptures substituting it with, ‘the Lord’. (You’ll still see this in your Bible today!)

The next problem concerns ‘in vain’. Looking up its meaning confirms that to do something in vain’ means that we don’t achieve anything, no result, or no effect. All our efforts are futile, they are in vain!

So, summing up this commandment as it stands is something like 'saying the word God loosely will achieve nothing!'

Surely there has to be more meaning to this commandment than this!

Pondering this, into my head pops the old adage ‘keep it simple, stupid’

‘Keep it simple, stupid’, or go back to the original Hebrew, after all, the Jewish wrote the scriptures!

Here I find that the Hebrew word that is translated into English as “take” comes from the Hebrew verb that’s pronounced ‘na-Sa’ which when you look up its meaning  you'll see that take is the fourth of four possible meanings:

‘The Hebrew verb נשׂא

(naśaʾ, pronounced na-SA) means

"to lift, carry, bear, or take”

Now the original translators of the Bible had their reasons for choosing take, and I don’t know why they did, but when I replace take with to ‘lift, carry or bear’ this commandment makes a lot more sense!

Thou shalt not ‘lift up, carry or bear’ the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

By ‘lifting up’, ‘carrying’, or ‘bearing’ the name of the Lord, what we are actually doing and saying is that we are His ‘image bearers’ to the world around us.

When we ‘lift up’ the name Christian,

when we ‘carry’ the name Christian,

when we ‘bear’ the name Christian,

or when we ‘take’ the name Christian,

we become Christ's image bearers, for we have taken his name!

If we do this lightly, or if we misuse the name Christian that we bear then we achieve nothing, as we don’t truly represent our Lord and Saviour. And in doing so we will be deemed guilty of taking His name in vain!

(Perhaps I now understand why the translators choose the word 'take')

Have a great week, and God bless,

Trev.