Two matters of huge importance are wrapped up in the third commandment: the honour of God and the integrity of man. In the last chapter we pondered the honour of God, in this we consider the integrity of man.
You have to come to terms with the fact that in the Old Testament it is required of us that we swear by the Name of God, whereas in the New it is forbidden to us.
Moses wrote, "You shall reverence the LORD
your God; you shall serve him, and swear by His name." Deuteronomy
6:13
Jesus said, "You have heard that it was said to the men of old, 'You
shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have
sworn.' But I say to you, Swear not at all ... Let what you say be
simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil."
Matthew 5:33
"You're to do it," said Moses; "You're not to," said
Jesus!
They appear on the surface to be in flat contradiction to each other. In fact they are not: both were making an identical thrust, urging truthfulness upon us. To understand how they could do so, making apparently contradictory statements, we need to think about our use of language, and in particular, explore our experience of knowing and using names.
It used to be the custom that you didn't call a person by their Christian name until you had been 'introduced.' It does not hold good like it used to, more's the pity. Its disappearance marks a decline in the level of respect we have for one another. We all feel it, however liberated or modern we fancy ourselves to be. Have you never recoiled when you heard someone address you by name who you felt had no business to know it? ... like a total stranger coming up to you at a party, say, greeting you by name and saying, "And what did I see you doing last Thursday night?"
The way people use our name shows the sort of regard they have for us. If someone addresses me as 'Harrison' - no handle to it, just 'You ... Harrison' I don't feel they're kindly disposed toward me. Would you?
Again, if a child of eight I have never met before calls me 'Paul,' I feel (though I may not say it) that they're taking a liberty.
The way we use each other's names is an indicator of attitude - of respect, or the lack of it.
When I write a letter in reply to someone who has addressed me as 'Rev. Harrison' and say, "Please call me Paul," I am extending a hand of friendship to them. I am saying in effect, "I would like our relationship to be on a more intimate level. Let's be friends." People who are on a first name level with each other have a rapport.
In a sense you trust people with your name. I do not expect a person to whom I have said that to use my name to pay his bills! I expect him to respect me. Knowing someone's name is a sort of key to intimacy with them.
Now God has trusted us that way with His Name. And He expects us to respect Him. To have been given God's Name, above all to use His Name, places a heavy responsibility on us. It is a highly sensitive thing.
So gravely did the Jews of old regard it that they shied away from using God's true Name at all. They preferred to refer to Him with substitute phrases like "Him up there," or "The Old One," or "You Know Who." Elaborate precautions had to be observed by a scribe who might, when he was copying the Law, encounter the Name. He had to be dressed in the full dress uniform of his office, and to disregard any interruption while he was copying the Name - or whatever substitute for it he preferred. It was as though to use God's Name, even by writing it, was to 'call Him up' ... as though God of old had said what Jesus later said, "Where two or three are gathered in My Name, there am I in the midst of them."
If to use God's Name is to 'call Him up,' what an offence it is to do so for a purpose He Himself would condemn ... as if you supplied His Credit Card number to pay for a crooked deal.
You see what is involved in our use of names? It is trust. Trust between man and man, trust between man and God, and personal integrity in a man himself. "A man," we say, "is as good as his word." And it is true. Where you cannot trust peoples' word, life degenerates into uncertainty, suspicion and fear. We simply do not know where we stand. It is paralysing.
A man in the London Church I pastored worked for Lloyd's Underwriters, the global shipping insurance brokers. He told me that when he started his career with them, a word-of-mouth agreement was absolutely binding. If fire broke out on a ship at sea five minutes after a policy had been agreed on the floor in London, Lloyd's would honour it and pay. Twenty years on, all that had gone by the board. Nothing was honoured that wasn't in writing, signed by all parties at least 24 hours before the event. People could not trust each other any more, with the result that business was uncertain, suspicion and fear were rife, and bitter (and costly) litigation multiplied.
Where people cannot trust each other, the world becomes a jungle.
Now the degree to which we can trust each other depends, when you think about it, on the degree to which we acknowledge ourselves to be responsible to someone outside ourselves and greater than ourselves.
People who believe in nothing and nobody but themselves are simply not to be trusted. They may not think so, but it is true. You and I know that they will obey whatever impulse happens to be dominant in them at any one time - and we are all of us a chaos of conflicting and contradictory impulses; if we do not know that, then we are blind as bats. If we are to maintain any sort of dependable consistency, we all need a standard, a norm, outside and above ourselves to which we acknowledge an obligation to conform. To the extent that we are serious about that and bind ourselves to it, we become trustworthy. But the person who either acknowledges no such norm, or professes one and uses it cunningly to deceive, is a person not whole, a person broken and fragmented, a person the core of whose inner being is a lie. Of course you can lie under oath; but when you do your integrity is shattered - probably beyond repair.
The only final safeguard of honesty and integrity - of justice, in fact - is to believe and know that even if we can hide things from each other, we cannot hide them from God.
That is not to say that our view of God must be childish. While we are content with a child's eye view of God as a snooping policeman watching our every move and ready to pounce, we shall never grow above the level of frightened children. But to have a conscience is a different thing altogether. A person with a conscience is mature.
For what is conscience? How do you explain it? Is it a mere hangover from parental dominance ... as some psychiatrists would have us believe? There may be an element of that in conscience as it operates in most of us. But we know intuitively that there is more to conscience than that. Conscience is where the pressure of God's Spirit of Truth registers in our consciousness. To ignore that is, in a very real sense, to disdain His Name ... to make it vain. Where people do, where they totally disregard the inner voice of conscience, any evil becomes possible, from petty immoralities to monstrous wickednesses.
"You shall not swear by My Name falsely, neither shall you profane the Name of your God" says Leviticus 19:11, and significantly it lies in between an admonition against stealing and lying, and one against fraudulent dealing.
The third commandment says, "Your word is to be trusted. As God is your witness, you are to speak truth." It is the guarantee of integrity. To obey it is to guarantee our freedom to trust each other.
Now you can see why Moses required of his people that they swear by the Name of their God. He expected them to stand in such awe of God that to lie under oath would be unthinkable.
You get a clue to this in a passage like Exodus 22:10-11, "If a man gives a donkey, an ox, a sheep or any other animal to his neighbour for safekeeping and it dies or is injured or is taken away while no one is looking, the issue between them will be settled by the taking of an oath before the Lord that the neighbour did not lay hands on the other person's property. The owner is to accept this, and no restitution is required."
Moses expected men to fear God. When they do they can be trusted; when they don't they can't.
Your integrity as a person is related directly to the regard you have for God. If the fear of Him is before your eyes, you won't lie. If you lie, you hold Him in contempt. That is the simple truth.
God has trusted you with His name, the way friends may trust us with a name they do not make known to strangers. Invoke it to cover your lies with a cloak of credibility and you commit a wickedness - a serious wickedness - against God Himself; a wickedness for which He will book you, depend upon it. "The Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His Name in vain."
It stands written. God could not say it plainer. You've been warned.
• When the ancient Law said, "You shall fear God; you shall serve him, and swear by his name," it was bidding us remember that we are never out of His presence, that He is witness to our every word and deed, and it is to Him we must answer for them all. You are in God's presence every time you open your mouth, whether you know it or not. God is party to every word you say and every deed you do. You do not greet your wife in the morning without Him and you do not bed her at night without Him; you do not quote a price to your customer over the counter without Him and you do not fill out your tax return without Him; you do not think your secret thoughts without Him and you do not do your most public acts without Him.
Nor do you sing hymns in church without Him. To sing piously,
Thy Kingdom come O God, Thy rule O Christ begin;
Break with Thine iron rod the tyrannies of sin.
and have not the least intention of doing anything about it is an empty use of big words, a hypocrisy; it is to take God's Name in vain.
• When Jesus said, "I say to you, Do not swear at all ... Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil," He was not contradicting what Moses said; He was pushing a stage further the same point Moses had made. He was saying, "You're to have such a lively sense of God in everything you do that you don't have to invoke His Name to convince people that you're being truthful."
When you have to invoke God's Name to prove your integrity you are really saying, "When I don't invoke His Name, you don't have to believe me." But then you have reached a state of mind ruled by dishonesty and deceit. Jesus was right when He said, "Anything more than that comes from evil."
The thrust of what we have been saying may be illustrated by a thing that happens every day in our courts of law - the taking of an oath.
The witness is called to the box where the
clerk of the court hands him a card from which he is required to
read:
"I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I shall give shall be the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
From that moment on the witness is legally "under oath." A special
importance is given to what he says under oath, and a special penalty
- the penalty for perjury - is incurred if he says what he knows to
be false.
What do courts think they're doing when they require this of witnesses? They are trying to guarantee truth. They are trying to make certain that any judgments they bring down will be based on facts, not falsehoods. And they try to do that by requiring a witness to "swear by Almighty God." To swear an oath by God has for centuries been regarded as the highest guarantee of truthfulness. Is it still?
The answer obviously depends on the regard the witness has for God.
You can lie under oath. People do it every day. Which raises the question: "Whom can you trust?" How do you assess anyone's integrity?
Politicians lie every day. Everybody knows it. They've made a science of distorting the truth. You hide the facts that damage your case; you highlight the facts that show it to advantage. If there aren't any, you make them up. It does not apply to all politicians all the time - of course not. I'd be distorting the truth myself if I said so! The problem is, how do you know when they're lying, and when they're not?
The same with business people. Crooked business men keep people like Ray Martin and Jana Wendt in business!
Who is to be trusted?
Are you? Always? Well ... most of the time!
Is that good enough? P. G. Wodehouse (the creator of Jeeves) has a cautionary little tale about a man playing golf with his solicitor. He caught him stealthily lifting his ball out of a bunker when he thought no-one was looking. He took all his business away from him the very next day. He reasoned, "A man who cannot be trusted to keep the rules in private cannot be trusted to keep them in public either." Reasonable?
Then why should you be trusted?
You've never lied ... never cheated?
Why do you lie? Why do you cheat ... even sometimes?
To get yourself out of trouble or to get yourself something you cannot see how to get fair and square.
And when you did, were you afraid? And if you were, what was it you feared? Discovery? Or judgment? And if judgment, whose? Your opponent's, your family's, the court's ... or God's?
You got away with it, didn't you? Nobody has ever found out. They are not likely to, either.
Wrong! It is going to come out. I tell you, my friend, it is going to be known. You are going to be exposed. Everybody, but everybody is going to know.
"Says you," you say? No, my friend, "... Says God."
"I tell you, on the day of judgment men will
render account for every careless word they utter; for by your words
you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned."
Jesus, Matthew 12:36
"Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will
not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be
heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private shall be
shouted from the housetops," said Jesus. Luke 12:2
You think it's all been forgotten (though you haven't forgotten!)?
Wrong! It is written down ... in a book you cannot get at. And one day the book is going to be read.
Revelation 20:11: "Then I saw a great white throne and him who sat upon it; from his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead in them, and all were judged by what they had done." It is going to be appallingly public.
"It is," said Paul, "according to my Gospel, that God will judge men's secrets by Christ Jesus." Romans 2:16
If you haven't confessed the lies you've told and received forgiveness for them, you are going to have to answer for them, my friend, I care not who you are - Christian or not.
In the Bible there is no forgiveness without a reckoning. You have to be faced with what you've done to be forgiven it.
When you falsified the truth ... when you told that lie, was God in your mind? He should have been. "I'm sorry," you say? You will be.
"And you, son of man, say to your people, 'The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him when he transgresses ... the righteous shall not be able to live by his righteousness when he sins.' Though I say to the righteous that he shall surely live, yet if he trusts in his righteousness and commits iniquity, none of his righteous deeds shall be remembered; but in the iniquity he has committed he shall die. Know the truth: I will judge each of you according to his ways." Ezekiel 33:12-20
If there is no fear of God before your eyes, you will lie and cheat when the chips are down.
And if you invoke God's name to give your lies credibility, you "take His Name in vain" - and "the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His Name in vain."
It won't matter how cleverly you did it. In hell, it won't matter whether you got there stupidly or cleverly - it'll still be hell.
Let's give the apostle Paul the last word:
"No more bad temper; no more bad thoughts or words about each other; no more bad words or thoughts about God either, and no more dirty talk. Don't tell each other lies any more ... Whatever you do, do it all in the Name of the Lord Jesus."
What will you say to each other as you leave church?
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