You Shall Not Misuse the Name of the Lord Your God

10 Aug

Exodus 20:7, Matthew 7:15-23

When most of us read the third commandment, we assume it's about language. Don't say OMG. Don't throw God's name around as a swear word or a throwaway expression. And that's genuinely part of it. But the commandment goes somewhere most of us don't expect, straight into the question of who we are.

Names matter more than we usually think. Not just as labels, but as symbols of relationship. I started calling my mum Louise — her actual name — until she sat me down once and said, “Ethan, you are one of only two people in the whole world who gets to call me mum”. It wasn't just a word, it was a marker of the relationship we shared.

In the Old Testament, God gives his name to his people. In Exodus 3, he tells Moses: I am who I am. From that verb, to be, we get the name Yahweh, the ancient Hebrew name for God. And the word Israel, pulled apart, means Yahweh's people. The name itself encodes the relationship. They are his, and they are to represent him.

We bear God's name. The question is what we do with it.

The Name We Carry

When we fast-forward to John 1, Jesus is in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him. But to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.

In Jesus' name, we are given the right to be part of God's people. That's not a small thing. It's an identity. I call God my God because in Jesus' name I am part of his people. Philip Jensen puts it plainly: people who simply use his name without living as his people are tragic examples of using his name in vain.

The name without the relationship is just a word. And the relationship, to be real, has to show up in how we live.

The Warning

This is where Matthew 7 gets uncomfortable. Jesus describes false prophets who come in sheep's clothing and then, more confrontingly, people who will come to him on the final day saying “Lord, Lord”, claiming to have prophesied and driven out demons and performed miracles in his name. And he will say plainly: “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers”.

They have emotional engagement, “Lord, Lord” is the biblical equivalent of an exclamation mark, genuine feeling. They have intellectual credibility, they know the name, they know what it means, they've done the theological work. They even have an active faith, prophesying, healing, ministry. They're doing the things that look like Christianity from the outside.

But Jesus says he never knew them.

The thing they're missing is the one thing that matters most: submission to God as King. It's not enough to feel the right things about Jesus, or know the right things about Jesus, or even do impressive things in Jesus' name. The relationship requires recognising that he is King, and that being his people means living under his authority, not just claiming his name.

This is uncomfortably relevant. There's something genuinely appealing about Christianity in 21st-century Sydney — the emotional depth, the intellectual credibility, the social purpose it provides. People want that. But what we resist is the part where God gets to define what’s right and wrong. Where his will takes precedence over our preferences. Where following him means giving up the independence to live entirely on our own terms.

Jesus' response to that version of Christianity is not gentle. He says: “I never knew you”.

Living the Name

The good news is the commandment itself. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, which implies that the name has already been given. We have it. The question is whether we'll live up to it.

The call is straightforward: be who you say you are. You say you're a Christian? That's a name that carries weight, it means belonging to Christ, bearing his name into the world. And belonging to him means living as his people, according to his will. Not perfectly, Calvin is honestly describes that most of us stagger, limp, and crawl rather than run. But the direction matters. Daily progress, even slow progress, in the right direction, matters.

Who are you when you pour that extra glass or alcohol? When you're at the pokies, when you lose your temper, when you're considering something small like respecting your parents or something as serious as fidelity? The answer the third commandment gives is: you have a new name. And that name comes with a call to live in a certain direction, in alignment with the holy name of the God you belong to.

Maybe that means forgiving more. Wanting less. Loving more. Being mean less.

There will be a day when God turns to Jesus and asks about you. And if you are his — if you have received his name, believed in him, and however imperfectly tried to live as his person — Jesus will not say I never knew you. He will say: “this one's mine”.

That's the confidence the commandment is pointing us toward. Not confidence in our own performance, but in the name we've been given and the King who gave it.