Sermons from Lone
Rock Bible Church Honoring His Name (Part I) While the magnificent Name of God is
lost on the unbelieving world, His people should see the Name in light of the Bible, and
so should honor Him! The following exercises should help us: 1. Revisit the Name 2. Review the problem Exodus
20:7 One of my favorite Christian people,
of the past, is Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a physician. Somewhere mid-career the Lord turned
him and he landed in perhaps the most famous of all pulpits, that of the Metropolitan
Tabernacle in London, where he preached for many years. It took Dr. Lloyd-Jones 13 years to
preach from Romans 1 to about Romans 10. He was known as the last of the Puritan
preachers. There was a time, during the height of his ministry, when he was invited to
take the platform, at Oxford University, to engage in debate with one of the noted,
atheistic professors of the day. Of course, the promoters, of the debate, had no problem
arranging for the agnostic or the atheist, whichever he was, to be on the platform and
they thought what would be better than to get Lloyd-Jones up there and have the debate. Dr. Lloyd-Jones responded to them that
he would absolutely have nothing to do with an event of that sort. Was he afraid? Did he
doubt? Was he just uncomfortable? Not in the least. The reason Lloyd-Jones refused to take
the platform was because you do not debate the existence of God. God is not a commodity to
be lowered, to a talking point, among mortals, who are comparing their intellects before a
crowd. That would be disrespectful in the least to do and Dr. Lloyd-Jones would have none
of it. This Commandment, the Third, takes us
into a different world in a sense. We have read it for years, “You shall not take the
Name of the Lord your God in vain,” and oh-oh, He’s going to come down on
potty-mouth today. As though taking the Name of the Lord in vain is something that is
limited to something we might say or slip up or whatever. It is not. The words are
interesting. The word “to take” does not mean to speak. It means to pick up, to
lift, to carry, or to bear, the Name of the Lord to no purpose. It includes certainly, speech, but it goes much,
much further than that. To take up or to carry the name is more than just speaking. It
reflects an attitude of reverence and respect for God from the whole person. “In vain”
means to no purpose. To take, then, the Name of the Lord in vain means that God has been
reduced and He has been trivialized. He has been disrespected. There is much here. That’s why we are going to do it in two parts. What we have in these verses, I would suggest, are four exercises, or reminders, that ought to enhance our respect for the God of the Bible and certainly our respect ought to be reflected in the way we talk, particularly in the way we use the Name of God. 1. Revisiting the Name You shall not take the Name of the
Lord your God in vain. When our friend, Glen Earnest, builds a saddle, he stamps it with
his name and with a number of the series. When he does that, he is saying that this
saddle, that he has taken so much time and effort to build, is considerably more than
leather and glue attached to a tree designed to hold a rider. When Glen stamps his name on a saddle,
he is making a statement about his workmanship, about his creativity, about his integrity,
and about his relationship as a businessman and as a person with the customer for whom he
built the saddle. His name means something on a saddle.
It means you are getting a good saddle, built by a good saddle-maker, who
has integrity. After all, his name is on it. God is similar with regard to His own
Name. We are talking about more than the label that parents attach to a child. God’s
Name reflects considerably more than that because God’s Name is connected to His
character. In Exodus 3, God appears to Moses. God
has heard the cries of His people, who are in bondage in Egypt and He is determined that
He is going to deliver them through the hand of Moses, His appointed prophet. Moses has
his doubts. Moses, if nothing else, is pretty human. He said, Lord, this is new to me. I
have never delivered a nation before. There are bound to be questions. One of them is
going to be, “Who is the Lord? Who is this God who has sent you to deliver us?” 13Then Moses said to God, "Behold, I am going to the sons of
Israel, and I will say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you.' Now they may
say to me, 'What is His name?' What shall I say to them?" 14God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; God’s Name takes the form of a
Hebrew verb, the verb “to be,” the verb “I AM.” He goes on to explain: and He
said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" 15God, furthermore, said to Moses, "Thus you shall say to the
sons of Israel, 'The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you ' This is My name forever, and this is My
memorial-name to all generations. I AM the eternally existing One. I AM
the God of Commandment number One, beyond whom there are no additional gods. I AM the God,
who has always been. I AM the God of now. I
AM the God, who always will be. The eternally existing One who is in a promised,
contracted, covenant-relationship with your people through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I AM the God, who is committed to My
program involving taking you people and making you into a great nation. I AM going to keep
My promise. I AM going to be with you. I always have been. I always will be. That is God’s
Name -- I AM. The word is Yahweh, that is His Name. We will talk more about the mechanics
of the Name in a bit, but that is the Name as He has given it. God speaks to Moses in Exodus 6:2, and
sheds a bit of interesting light on this business of His Name. 2God spoke further to Moses and said to him, "I am the LORD; [that
is, I am Yahweh] In other words, I gave them (Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob) My title. They did not know Me by the Name which you, Moses, now know
me. but by My
name, LORD, I did not make Myself known to them. I would suggest that God’s Name,
as it is delivered to Moses, as he has been given His covenant Name (always have been,
always will be, eternally committed to My promise), has to do with His character. Once God
gave His Name to Moses He shortly thereafter supplied him with the truth about His own
character. That truth, we call the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are more than
what God wants. They are what God wants because they reflect who God is. The reason, for
instance, we are to have no other gods in addition to Him is because there are no other
gods in addition to Him. God’s name is connected with His character. It’s who He
is. When He puts His name on someone, or when someone bears His name, it is a big deal. Proverbs 18, speaking of His Name, His
nature, His Person: 10The name of the LORD is a strong tower; Runs into what? A Person. The name
represents the Person in His depth, in His being. It is more than a label. Psalm 20, is
another reference that is helpful for us. 1May the LORD [Yahweh] answer you in the day of trouble! After all, He eternally is with you.
After all, He is permanently committed to you. Flee to Him. Let the name of the God of
Jacob set you securely on high. We cannot separate the name of God from the nature of God,
from the person of God, nor certainly from His will; that is, His design, His desire. We
know who He is. We know what His name is called. What does He want? Isaiah 45:21 - last part: And there
is no other God besides Me, This is who He is. 22"Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth; The reason God swears by Himself is
because we always swear by that which is more significant and higher than we are. The book
of Hebrew says there is no one more significant nor higher than God so He must swear by
Himself. The word
has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness 24"They will say of Me, 'Only in the LORD are righteousness
and strength ' His name cannot be separated from who
He is and what He wants and what He is going to do. It is His will and His plan that every
knee will bow to Him. “Turn to Me, all the ends of the earth.” He is not just a
God afar off who sits in abject holiness and isolation all by Himself. He is engaged with
this world, with His plan, with His creation. By
His grace He is taking it from a designated beginning to a certain end. That is who I am, God is saying, it is
what I am doing. His plan is connected with what we know to be the gospel. He says every knee will bow to Me, and every
tongue will confess. We hear Paul say in Philippians 2:10, “At the name of Jesus
every knee will bow and every tongue confess.” That is why the eighth chapter, of John’s gospel, is an emotionally charged passage. Jesus is having it
out with the Pharisees and they are challenging Him at every turn. He is answering them
and flummoxing them as they go. They talk about how old He is. He said, “Abraham
rejoiced to see My day.” Abraham, your father, the paragon of your faith and the
founder of your religion rejoiced to see My day. 57So the Jews said to Him, "You are not yet fifty years old,
and have You seen Abraham?" That is a deliberate use, on the part
of the Son of God, of the proper name of God Almighty and linking Himself without any
mistake to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus is the great I AM and when we get
to Jesus, we get to the gospel. I am so glad that Jesus, the great I AM, has provided us
with a way to come to God and be saved. There is an interesting passage with
regard to Jesus near the end of Matthew. We call it the Great Commission, but please think
of it in terms of the name of God. In a couple places this morning we will be saying
things about language. It has to be done from time to time in studying God’s Word. At
the very end of His earthly ministry, just prior to His ascension, Jesus greeted the
disciples and said to them in Matthew 28:18 18And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, "All authority
has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name
of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit The word “baptize” is one of
the few words, in the Bible, that was never translated. It is a Greek word, and was left
alone. They did not change it when they translated in New Testament all the other Greek
words into English. This one they left alone because it was theologically and politically
a hot potato back in church history. Rather than translate it with its equivalent meaning
either in Latin or German or English. They just left it alone, played it safe. The word
“baptize” means “to place into.” Let’s revisit verse 19 and
translate it this time, instead of leaving it alone: Go
therefore and make disciples of all the nations, placing them into the name of the Father
and the Son and the Holy Spirit. 20 teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am
with you always, even to the end of the age." “I am with you,” just like
in Moses’ day. “I am with you until the end of the age of the age.” It makes such perfect sense. What is
Jesus saying? Make disciples -- how do you do that? Step one is to get them converted.
Place them into the name of God. Identify them with the true God of the Bible. I
Corinthians 12:13, says the Holy Spirit baptizes us all into the body of Christ. It is not
translated there, but if it was, it would say, “By one Spirit are we all placed into
the body of Christ.” That’s what is going on. I believe in water baptism, but I
do not believe that this verse teaches water baptism. I believe it teaches evangelism and
conversion. That’s what it means when you translate it, which we have just done. Is that not an interesting
implication, if in fact what we are to do as Christians is to encourage people to place
their trust in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, trusting that Jesus shed
His blood on the cross for their sins. This includes the gospel. God proved His love for
us (Romans 5:8) in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That is part of the
plan of the God whose name is I AM. The gospel and heaven and the streets
of gold and that wonderful reunion to which we all look forward, all of this is connected
with the name of God. All we, who trust Him, hold Him dear. It is a huge plan, a huge
program. He gave us no image to see. He never provided an image to see, but He gave us a
name to hear and to embrace and to declare. It is His name, not just a label, but a Person
and a plan. The plan, happily, includes you and me, includes the gospel. As the Jewish people surveyed the Ten
Commandments and realized that these were things that God took seriously, they figured
they better take them seriously too. This is one Commandment the Jews figured they could
keep. They had a fairly simple formula for it. This reflected their view of the Ten
Commandments as a checklist to getting right with God. Paul says there is no such thing.
He says you cannot get right with God by keeping the Law, but they figured maybe they
could. It was not going to be easy, but they estimated that the Third Commandment was one
they could handle. How were they going to avoid taking the name of the Lord their God in
vain? Simple. They simply would not say it, figuring if they did not say it, they could
not be culpable of violating it. It is very interesting, that early on,
they substitute the name of God with a different name. Another Hebrew word, it means
“Lord,” is Adonai. If you have ever been around Jewish Scripture-reading by
Jewish people, you will hear that word “Adonai” frequently. It is because they
have trained themselves in the reading of the Hebrew text, if they come to the name of
God, Yahweh, they simply say Adonai. They are trained to read “Yahweh” and say
“Adonai.” You will hear that any time Jewish people, who take the Scriptures
seriously, read the Scriptures. Something interesting happened with
that word. Somewhere way back, fifteen hundred or so years ago, among the Jewish scribes
in Israel a word was invented -- the word “Jehovah.” Because the Jewish people
did not want to say the Name, they read “Adonai.” They felt that there was
perhaps a more fitting way to cover all the bases. So one of the Masoretic scribes, and
this was later co-opted by the Catholic church in the 1500’s, has found its way into
many English Bibles since. They took the consonants of Yahweh, Y-h-w-h, and lifted the
vowels from Adonai and combined the two to get Y (or J) e--h-o-w (or v)-a-h. Hence, a
hybrid term was deliberately coined to represent, or should we say, misrepresent, the name
of God. The upshot of that is we find it in
our hymns and in our Bible translations sometimes, but it is not a word. So sometimes we
feel a little confusion. Someone of the Jehovah Witnesses persuasion, is witnessing to a
hybrid term. The point I AM is getting at is that God gave us His name. I wonder how we
would feel if someone took our name and changed it around and ignored, basically, the
implications of the giving of it. The eternally-existing, ever-present, promise-making,
promise-keeping, sovereign God who sent His Son. That is a loaded name. God was pretty
clear that it was not to be taken up emptily. Psalm 83:18, speaks of the enemies of
God. Many times in the Psalms we see the Psalmist praying what they call imprecatory
prayers. That is a word that means “God, bless them with a brick.” Psalm 83:18 - Let God’s enemies
be ashamed, dismayed, annihilated, and perish: 18That they may know that You alone, whose name is the LORD
[Yahweh] If the Bible prays that God’s
enemies will know and honor His name, how about His own people? Something has gone wrong. 2. Review the problem The problem is how God’s people
tend to drop the ball, forget, fail and come up empty. The Commandments lead from one to
the next. They are not particularly, mutually exclusive, stand-alone commandments. They
contribute to one another. The First Commandment, You shall have no other Gods in addition
to Me, indicates that we are dealing with just one, sovereign, God over all, in complete
control. One sovereign, holy, utterly set apart, completely removed, perfectly in a class
by Himself, untouchable. He is one sovereign, holy, unseen, God, with whom we have to do. That is the foundational commandment
of all of them. He needs nothing. He needs no one He is in complete control of all that He
has designed, created, sustained and is bringing to His predetermined end. God stands
alone. That is by His nature. That will never change. That is His character. This is the
God with whom we have to do. If that is true, that takes us to the
second Commandment. If we have a God like that, and the Bible is quite clear that we do,
then this God cannot be reduced to an image. You shall not make any visual, graphic
representations to worship because we are dealing with a God who is holy and unseen.
Therefore, the Second Commandment comes perfectly in line. Don’t try to represent Him
because any attempt to represent God by an image means that that image, whatever it is and
whatever it is made of and whoever makes it, whenever they do it, that image has to be,
first of all, inadequate. No image can ever represent the beauty
of the God of heaven. It will be inadequate and therefore it will be inaccurate. God then
is misrepresented by the image, no matter what it is. If that is true, what has been done
many times over and over in history, any time God has sought to be represented by
anything, He has been reduced and the creature has modified the creator and God’s
design has been adulterated. That is not good because any attempt,
to create God in any sort of image at all, always reduces God and always exalts people.
That is our bent. We will do it naturally. That takes us to the scenario described by the
apostle Paul in the 1st chapter of Romans. Romans 1 Idolatry is any time a man creates a
god in his own image. Then the individual will proceed to self-destruct. The god we create
we attach our own values to his character and that will tend to let us get away with what
we really want to do. We have one God, sovereign and exalted and cannot be reduced to an
image. That takes us to the Third
Commandment, You shall not lift up the name of the Lord, your God, to no purpose, or
emptily, or in vain. The name of God is not to be treated with disrespect, which is easy
enough to do once He has been reduced to an image. The Third Commandment has to do with
treating God with disrespect, making the name trivialized, and that is rampant among
people today. God is just a panacea for what ails you any more. You can try God just like
you might want to try medication. He has been reduced in our day to an abysmal level. We
are not the first. We are going to review this problem as
it occurred in Jeremiah’s day. Jeremiah preached just about 600 or so B.C. We call
Jeremiah “the prophet of the circling of the drain,” because he preached as the
southern kingdom of Judea was just about to be overrun by the Babylonians. The northern
kingdom had been overrun a little more than a hundred years prior for the very same reason
that we are about to discover in Jeremiah 7. Let’s watch this trend unfold. Jeremiah 7 The house is the temple, of Solomon,
that had been dedicated some 350 years earlier where the Shekinah glory had filled the
temple. and
proclaim there this word and say, 'Hear the word of the LORD, all you of Judah, who enter
by these gates to worship the LORD!” [Yahweh] 3Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, "Amend your
ways and your deeds, and I will let you dwell in this place. In other words, there is sin in the
camp, in a large scale. 4"Do not trust in deceptive words, saying, 'This is the
temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.' That is to say, “If we have God’s
temple, all will be well.” God says don’t kid yourself. 5"For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you
truly practice justice between a man and his neighbor, He is saying all these things because
this is what they are doing. This is their life. 7then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave
to your fathers forever and ever. You are wrong. You are on a slippery
slope to destruction. Count the offenses. Which Commandments
are in view here? 9"Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery and swear
falsely, and offer sacrifices to Baal and walk after other gods that you have not known, That is where the verse comes from
that Jesus would use later on. 11"Has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of
robbers in your sight? Behold, I, even I, have seen it," declares the LORD. What is a den of robbers? It’s
the place where the bad guys go after they have been out being bad. They go into their
hideout and there they divvy up the loot and plan their next crime. He is saying look what
you have done. My name has been on this house and you are out there doing all of this sin
and in violation of just about any commandment and then you come back here and plot to do
it again. 12"But go now to My place which was in Shiloh, where I made My
name dwell at the first, and see what I did to it because of the wickedness of My people
Israel. Shiloh is the place where God’s
tabernacle was first set up when they came into the Promised Land. The word “Shiloh”
means “peace.” You have heard “shalom.” Shiloh. It is the same thing
in Jerusalem, where the temple was built. Jerusalem was a place of peace, both places.
What do we get? In the case of Shiloh, we know what
happened there. Archaeologists have dug there. The Bible doesn’t record the event. We
know that in about 1050 B.C. the Philistines ruined the place and it was never rebuilt.
That was the battle in which Hophni and Phinehas, the sons of Eli, the priest, were
killed. What were they trusting in? “Let’s just take the ark of God.” They weren’t trusting in God.
They were worshipping the Baals. They were ripping off the people. They had taken the
First Commandment and disavowed it, adding gods to the only true God. From there they had
their image, their icon, and it was a slam-dunk to move from violation of Commandment Two
on into disrespecting or trivializing the name of God, Commandment Three. Beyond that, it
is just a time for sin. God is saying, “That’s it. You know what I did to
Shiloh. Go on up there and see what you find. There is nothing there because I dealt with
them as their deeds deserved. And you people in this house of peace -- you are done too.
If you do not amend your ways, your party is over. The progression of events from one
Commandment to the next is obvious. One leads to the next. Exodus 20:7 says, “I will
not leave unpunished him who lifts up My name emptily.” They found out about that in
Shiloh. They found out about that in Jerusalem and the Law has yet to change. We do not
have the time today to take it any further. But the Commandment stands because it
represents God’s character, which does not change. Lifting up or bearing His name to no
purpose, emptily or in vain, misrepresenting or disrespecting God is a serious issue. I
will close with verses from Psalm 78, which will be food for thought. Psalm 78 is a Psalm
of the history of the people. 56Yet they tempted and rebelled against the Most High God [First
Commandment] He will not leave him unpunished, who
bears His name emptily. He gave us not an image, but a Name. It was a Name to hear, a Name
to embrace, a Name to declare. Let us love Him for it. "Scripture
taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Jim Carlson 2006, Lone Rock Bible Church, Stevensville Montana, USA |