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POSTED 15 SEPTEMBER, 2007

Days of Awe: Day Three

by Mark Huey
mhuey@outreachisrael.net

Psalm 145; Job 15-21; Exodus 20:7

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain” (Exodus 20:7).

As I have examined various Scriptures for parallel verses where the Hebrew word shav (awv) is used, note that it has a variety of possible applications in the Biblical text, including: “worthless,” meaning “to utter a name in vain, unnecessarily to abuse a name in an evil way (in a magic ritual or an oath)”; “worthless, unrestrained” (HALOT).[1] “It designates anything that is unsubstantial, unreal, worthless, either materially or morally” (TWOT).[2] Another Hebrew word for “vanity,” hevel (lbh), meaning “Vapor, breath, vanity,” also appears in the Scriptures (although not here in Exodus). It “is translated almost exclusively by the KJV as ‘vanity.’ Except for passages in Eccl, where the RSV concurs with the KJV, the RSV generally leans to the translation ‘breath’ or ‘worthless’” (TWOT).[3]

What is the Father trying to communicate about the prohibition of taking His name in vain? As Believers, we can turn to the Teacher or Holy Spirit who Yeshua has promised will lead us into all righteousness and help us understand what He has for us today. But before addressing some of those thoughts, let us consider the heartfelt psalm of King David, as he extols the greatness of our Heavenly Father:

“A Psalm of Praise, of David. I will extol You, my God, O King, and I will bless Your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless You, and I will praise Your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts. On the glorious splendor of Your majesty and on Your wonderful works, I will meditate. Men shall speak of the power of Your awesome acts, and I will tell of Your greatness. They shall eagerly utter the memory of Your abundant goodness and will shout joyfully of Your righteousness. The Lord is gracious and merciful; slow to anger and great in lovingkindness. The Lord is good to all, and His mercies are over all His works. All Your works shall give thanks to You, O Lord, and Your godly ones shall bless You. They shall speak of the glory of Your kingdom and talk of Your power; to make known to the sons of men Your mighty acts and the glory of the majesty of Your kingdom. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and Your dominion endures throughout all generations. The Lord sustains all who fall and raises up all who are bowed down. The eyes of all look to You, and You give them their food in due time. You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing. The Lord is righteous in all His ways and kind in all His deeds. The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of those who fear Him; He will also hear their cry and will save them. The Lord keeps all who love Him, but all the wicked He will destroy. My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless His holy name forever and ever” (Psalm 145:1-21).

The Third Commandment

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain” (Exodus 20:7).

The Third Commandment is one that has growing significance in these days, as it has received a substantial amount of discussion among Believers. How we are to properly interpret the Third Commandment is debated among many in the independent Messianic community. Historically, Judaism has viewed the Third Commandment as a prohibition on speaking the Divine Name. The awe that the Jewish people have for God’s name and its proper usage has led to terms such as HaShem (~vh) or Adonai (ynda) being used in its stead.

The name of our Creator is an awesome display of His completeness as the One who was, and is, and is to come—or in essence, “I am who I am.” Many studies have been written about this name throughout the centuries, and even today the proliferation of its usage and pronunciation is becoming somewhat commonplace in certain circles. I have been involved with the Messianic movement since 1995, but can remember the first time I heard the name of God, or at least the Hebrew letters that spelled it. Back when I was first a Believer in 1978, an Old Testament scholar was giving our church group a teaching about some of the passages in Exodus. When this graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary got to the place where the Divine Name is first uttered to Moses in Exodus 4:14, he simply listed the Hebrew letters yod, heh, vav, heh (hwhy), often represented in scholastic works as YHWH (or Yahweh).

I remember distinctly how he went on to describe how historically the Jews did not even try to pronounce the Divine Name, and instead used other terms of endearment out of respect. It was not until years later as I began to study the Torah that I began to have a fuller appreciation for what the name of our Creator meant, and how it was first declared to Moses shortly after his call to be a spokesman for the Hebrews before Pharaoh. This is found in Exodus 3:13-15:

“Then Moses said to God, ‘Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I shall 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?’ And God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM’; and He said, ‘Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, “I AM has sent me to you.”’ And God, 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’” (Exodus 3:13-15).

As I studied these words, the significance of God’s name became more understandable. Since I had always referred to the Holy One as “Lord,” just as it had been rendered in most of the Bibles I used, I now began to better understand how the Jewish people had come to their conclusions about not pronouncing or speaking the Divine Name. Since the prohibition about using it vainly was a part of the Ten Commandments, and it was to be a memorial to all generations, some of these conclusions made logical sense and I certainly did not want to offend my Jewish brethren with prolific use of it.

Years later, the next time I heard any significant usage of the Divine Name came when I participated in a Messianic conference in 1999. At this event, I was introduced to a cadre of individuals who went around the various conference activities punctuating many of their statements with “Baruch Hashem Yahweh!” Ironically, many of these people were Jewish by birth. At the time, in the Spirit, I felt that the over usage of the Divine Name was somewhat trite. I could not understand how this expression of the revered name of our Creator could be used so flippantly. These “Sacred Name Only” people wanted everyone to know that the name of our God was one that can and should be used without much regard for the people who were listening to their utterances. Nominal, if any regard, was expressed to the mixed company of attendees who had come from a variety of backgrounds. Many of the people in attendance were Jewish, and occasionally you would detect some cringes from the audience as the revered name was being uttered indiscriminately. As I think back on that experience, I am curious as to whether the Holy One thought His name was being used vainly, because it was certainly being used prolifically.

The challenge for the Messianic community today is that we must determine how Yeshua and the Apostles handled the Third Commandment. What they did in their application should be how we handle this issue.

Objectively examining the Apostolic Scriptures, there is not a single instance of the Messiah ever once verbalizing the name YHWH, either directly, or with Him quoting from the Tanakh. Consider Luke 4:17-19, which includes a direct quotation from Isaiah 61:1 and 58:6:

“And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and found the place where it was written, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.’”

In the Greek source text, Isaiah 61:1 is quoted directly from the Septuagint, the Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible from approximately three centuries before the Apostolic era. The LXX rendered the name YHWH as kurios (kurioß) or “Lord,” the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Adonai. In the synagogue at Capernaum, Yeshua would have read this text with Adonai. While the following verses in Luke 4:28-32 indicate that most in the synagogue thought He was blaspheming, they do not indicate that He was blaspheming because He verbalized the name YHWH. On the contrary, they were dismayed because of Yeshua’s words “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). EJ indicates that “The prohibition against the pronunciation of the name of God applies only to the Tetragrammaton, which could be pronounced by the high priest only once a year on the Day of Atonement in the Holy of Holies...and in the Temple by the priests when they recited the Priestly Blessing.”[4] The Mishnah reflects these traditions that existed in the Judaism of Yeshua’s day:

“And the priests and people standing in the courtyard, when they would hear the Expressed Name [of the Lord] come out of the mouth of the high priest, would kneel and bow down and fall on their faces and say, ‘Blessed be the name of the glory of his kingdom forever and ever’” (m.Yoma 6:2).[5]

There was a protocol for using the proper name of God, and it is clear that Yeshua adhered to it during His Earthly ministry. In the Gospels Yeshua actually spends more time calling His Father, “Father” or “Abba,” than referring to Him as God or Lord. If Yeshua considered not speaking the name YHWH aloud to be an error of the Second Temple Judaism that His ministry existed in, then there would be plenty of evidence in the Apostolic Scriptures supporting this, including charges of blasphemy against Him for verbalizing the name YHWH. But these things do not appear. As Messianic Believers who are trying to return to the theology of the First Century Believers, who operated within the context of Second Temple Judaism, we must recognize that while our Heavenly Father has a proper name, it was not used by Yeshua or the Apostles. We must have the same kind of respect for the holiness of the name YHWH that they had.

Many in the independent Messianic community today fail to realize that by speaking the name YHWH, our Jewish and Messianic Jewish brethren have wanted nothing to do with the message of Israel’s end-time restoration.

However, as we all contemplate the Third Commandment, I am not sure that repetitious usage of the Divine Name as a mantra captures all of what the Third Commandment is all about. The Apostle Paul tells us that calling upon the name of the Son of God is absolutely imperative in the salvation experience:

“But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart’—that is, the word of faith which we are preaching, that if you confess with your mouth Yeshua as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation” (Romans 10:8-10).

Here the specific statement regards the name of our Savior, which in the Hebrew Tanakh would be the word that means salvation, or yeshuah (h[Wvy). But when Paul wrote the Romans, he used the Greek transliteration of Yeshua, Iēsous (Ihsouß), which is also the title of the Book of Joshua in the Septuagint. It is not a name which comes from “Zeus,” as you so errantly hear among many in the Sacred Name sector today, but is the transliteration into Greek of the Hebrew name Yeshua, which appears 300 years before the Messiah’s birth. Iēsous has been transliterated into English as “Jesus.” It is a transliteration of Jewish origin. Our God is much bigger than anyone who would require us to speak the Messiah’s name their way for salvation. But, He is also leading us to a time where He is returning us to the origins of our faith, where we understand that the Messiah was called Yeshua by His original Disciples.[6]

Simply speaking the name of the Lord for salvation purposes must be accompanied with belief in the heart, and this perhaps is where the vain aspect of the Third Commandment comes into major play. We know from the recorded words of our Messiah Himself, that in the future there will be a number of people who will claim to have used His name for a variety of spiritual activities—but never had a true salvation experience with Him. Although they might have called on His name and somehow called out to Him, the fact remains that Yeshua never knew them. This includes people who call the Messiah “Jesus,” but probably also includes many who call on “Yeshua.”

In the context of describing the proliferation of false prophets and how you can judge them by the fruit of their lives and activities, Yeshua utters some of the most frightening words that I hope no one will ever have echoing in their spirits for eternity:

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits. Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness’” (Matthew 7:15-23).

This passage describes the ultimate in vanity as one who thinks he or she is a Believer, actually turns out to be one who has taken Yeshua’s name in vain. Even though there might have been some spiritual results that may have occurred since the name of the Messiah was declared, the fact of the matter is that Yeshua never knew these poor souls. They might have declared Him with their mouths, but they never truly believed in their hearts. The relationship that is likened to the “oneness” that one experiences in marriage, or a bonding of souls, was never truly accomplished in the hearts of these ravenous wolves. Is it possible that the “lawlessness” they committed was using the name of the Holy One in vain? Consider the severity of the Third Commandment:

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain” (Exodus 20:7).

I do not believe that those “workers of lawlessness” quite understood what Job declared when he experienced his trials. When calamity struck, he acknowledged, “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him. Nevertheless I will argue my ways before Him. This also will be my salvation, for a godless man may not come before His presence…As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God; whom I myself shall behold, and whom my eyes will see and not another. My heart faints within me!” (Job 13:15-16; 19:25-27).

From these statements, you can discern that Job truly knew the Holy One, and that he made his decisions about life with total trust from the heart in not only the saving power of the Almighty, but also in His resurrection power. Love and trust like this come only from an intimate relationship with our Creator, even if we do not necessarily know His revealed name, but instead refer to Him as our Redeemer. Obviously, for the edification of the saints who have followed and taken comfort in his words, Job was someone who would never take the name of His God and Redeemer for granted or in vain.

Finally, we can read from the words of Psalm 145 that blessing the Lord is something that all of us should be doing:

“My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless His holy name forever and ever” (Psalm 145:21).

For those of us who are learning more and more about the awesomeness of the Divine Name, I suggest that we approach it with great reference and praise. After all, many of our forefathers in the faith who had very intimate relationships with the Holy One have set some concrete examples. Qohelet leaves us with this final admonition from the sum of his conclusions:

“The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14).

May we all remain circumspect when we consider how we use God’s name, so that all the honor and glory would be given to Him!

Mark Huey (B.A., Vanderbilt University in History and Graduate Studies at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University) is the Director of Outreach Israel Ministries (www.outreachisrael.net). He is the author of several books, including: TorahScope, Volumes I & II, and Counting the Omer: A Daily Devotional Toward Shavuot. He is also co-author of Hebraic Roots: An Introductory Study.

NOTES