Name-calling

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. Exodus 20:7 (NRSV)
Margaret Killingray (LICC) writes:
When I taught in East Africa in the 1960s I discovered that names meant a lot. Looking down the register, I could tell who were Gujarati speakers, who were local east coast Swahili speaking Muslims, or who were Catholic or Protestant. Sometimes you could spot when they were born, like the elderly man we knew whose middle name was Verdun. In the UK names have ceased to mean so much.

God's revelation of his name involves a revelation of his character and his heart. It is possible for us to know him - this one God, in Trinity, because he has told us who he is and what he is like. In revealing himself he has made himself vulnerable - vulnerable to misinterpretation, to blasphemy, to careless expletive, to endless representation in the art and literature of the world, to speculation and reinvention and to wayward imaginative reconstruction.

'Don't swear,' was the simple Sunday school version of this commandment, but it is not just about casual blasphemy by non-believers. It's the people of the covenant who are being addressed from Mount Sinai, who might misuse his name, distort the truth about him, and trivialise him: by corrupt or trivial worship; by judicial courtroom oaths before perjury; by the commercialisation of religious ideas and symbols; by using his name to pressurise the faithful to give money; by easy adaptation of God's truth to please more liberal ears.

We carry the name of the Lord; he makes us his children and we are called 'Christians'. If people know we are Christians and we deny his character in our lives, ignore him Monday to Friday, and trivialise both sin and its forgiveness, for example, then we misuse his name.

We need to take this commandment seriously and ask whether our lives, our evangelism, our communal worship, or simply our silent denial among irreligious colleagues, involves the misuse of his name. But if we are seeking to love him, with heart, mind and strength, he is always ready to forgive the stumbling lapses of our inadequate understanding of the name that is above all names.