The Name of the Lord
/“You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”
A couple of weeks back I had the privilege of preaching on this passage. It is the third of the Ten Commandments, and it is one that I believe the church in North America could do with reflecting on just about now.
In a name, there are many things. Most obviously, a name is an identifier. I am Russell. However, also in a name, you find belonging and order. I belong to the Doerksen family, to the family branch headed by my parents who named me. Also, in a name you can find authority as well. While being a Doerksen may not open all doors, I suspect members of the Bezos clan don’t have to wait long to be seated when they go out to a restaurant to eat due to the authority found in their name, earned or not.
These are just some of the roles that a name serves and when we look at the name of God we can see these functions hard at work, as well. For starters, apart from just being an identifier, we read in Exodus 6 that it is God who names himself. It takes authority in a relationship to name something. A parent names their child, an inventor their invention, a scientist their discovery. So that God names himself means there is no one in a place of authority over Him. And what is more is that in Genesis 5, we read that it is God that names human beings in the first place, meaning that if you trace the long line of generations naming generations all the way to the beginning, we are to understand that it was God who is at the very top of that chain.
So what does this say to us about what is in the name of God? In short, there is found in His name the ultimate source from which all power and authority flow. So when you use the name of God in any way - such as relaying something from the Bible, telling others something God has taught you, or invoking his name as a guarantee that you will do something - you are to keep in mind just how much power and authority there is to be understood in what you are about to say. Using the name of God, as such, is not something to be done lightly.
Knowing this, think about the last time you heard the name of the Lord invoked. Maybe you asked someone to lend you money and instead of some kind of collateral, you “swore to God” that you would pay them back. Now think about what just happened in that exchange. By invoking the name of God, you essentially called on the supreme source of power and authority over all creation to do something so mundane as to act as a guarantor on a personal loan. Likely you didn’t think of it in those terms when you said “I swear to God”, but that is what you did. So I ask you, what would happen if you acted as a guarantor for someone like this, to which that person broke the terms of the agreement. How would that cause people in the world around you to view your word as a guarantor? It would impact it poorly, wouldn’t it? And so it is in this way that before you know it, by invoking the name above all names for mundane things, the magnificent name of God becomes synonymous with broken promises and lying people best not to be involved with.
How do you think that impacts the ability of the church to preach the gospel this same God brings? If the name of God maintains the power and authority it is meant to in the world around us, I suspect the job of preaching the gospel is eased significantly because it is readily obvious to those listening that in this good news there is something worthwhile to listen to. After all, it comes from the one whose name carries real weight. But if the name of this same God is worthless in the ears of the world around us, I daresay the job of bringing the gospel to our community becomes exponentially more difficult, because who would care to hear from a God whose name holds either no or negative value to them?
Now let’s think for a moment about how the church in North America is increasingly being thought of by the greater world around us as of late. Increasingly, the church is being viewed as inward-focused and more concerned with its own goings-on than the wellbeing of the people around them. Increasingly the church is being viewed as backward, anti-science, anti-intellectual and anti-truth, all stances that have very little place in the discourse of the information-based society we live in today. Increasingly, the church is being viewed as hate-filled, racist and misogynistic, odd things to be known for, considering how vocal Jesus was about the importance of being loving, making God the head of your life, and to the extent he placed women in positions of authority around him in a society where that simply was not done. So I ask you, what do you think each of these reputations the church is garnering for itself do to the opinion the world outside the church doors holds for the name of God? The church claims to act on God’s behalf, so that this is what we are becoming known for certainly reflects on how the world sees the value of the name of the Lord.
Are each of these reputations that the church is garnering for itself wholly deserved? I don’t think entirely so, no. But each comes from somewhere, and the world around us can’t be expected to be able to differentiate our branch of the church from those who hammer on about things we find abhorrent. To most of the world outside our faith Christians are Christians, and so that some groups are lowering the name of God while others are desperately trying to lift it higher tragically matters very little. It is always easier to see the bad, and so the opinion of the world for our God has lowered accordingly.
But there are things we can do, or more, there are things we need to do to address this problem. While on the grand scale it may be hard to be seen working to restore the name of God while others desperately throw themselves at the cause of raking it through the mud, on the local level - the level I would argue all churches should be functioning on anyway - it is much easier to have an impact. This makes sense, because it is on the local level, on the personal level, where you can get to know your neighbours as people and in turn they can see the love that God has for them actually play out through your life.
So if the church is beginning to become known as inward-focused and more concerned with itself than the wellbeing of its neighbours, I say we do the following. We get involved in the community around us. We host events. We fundraise for community projects that benefit everyone, not just ourselves. We work to identify and address the needs that our local community has. Don’t know what those are? Talk to the teachers in the school. Talk to the people working in the municipal office. Talk to your neighbours. Before long you will have a list that it would take a lifetime to tackle. In our community, there is a real shortage of childcare options for working parents. The property values are high enough to force out low-income and many young families. These are problems that we can work to address together. And on an even smaller scale, make friends with your neighbours and the people around you. Be open with them, share with them, listen to them. Make their lives better for having known you. Do that and it will raise the power of the name of God in the community around you.
And if the church is beginning to become known for being backward, anti-science, anti-intellectual and anti-truth, I say we do the following. For those young people inclined, we encourage them to go on to post-secondary education of all sorts; university, college and the trades. We provide them with bursaries to make that a possibility. We work to make the idea of coming back to our communities after graduation an appealing one and in every way we can, we help them to make an impact in their chosen fields. Beyond this, we work to encourage all our members to have a hunger for learning and help them to develop the skills needed to answer the questions they may have. We host educational events open to the entire community for which we check, double-check and even triple-check if the speakers we bring in are credible in the eyes of their peers. Also, we make it a habit to not pretend to be experts in all things ourselves, but to instead look at what the majority opinion in a field is saying before we label something as “the truth” and act on it, realizing that we do not know everything about every field and as such the majority consensus of the experts is likely the best way to go. This might seem like a lot, but it will address these opinions the world has for the church today. Do this, and slowly but surely, the opinion of the world for the name of God will increase.
And finally, if the world thinks of the church as hate-filled, racist and misogynistic, I say we do the following. We work to become the voice of those who need a voice in our community. This means not just speaking up for what we think these people need, but instead bringing them into our governing structures themselves. If this proves impossible, then we need to work to help these people find the voice they need to speak up for themselves. Beyond this, we also need to be quick to work for reconciliation, even if it was not us who wronged others in the first place.
In all this, I am not for a moment saying that as a church we need to compromise our convictions and beliefs for the sake of becoming more appealing to the world around us. Instead, I firmly believe that the truths we hold most dear as Christians are plenty appealing to the world, especially just now and that the main reason it has become so difficult to evangelize to the unsaved has more to do now with the bad name the church has been giving itself particularly over the past 20 years or so. But if we do these things, I do believe that with our Lord’s help the name of God will be raised in the world around us. And while these things may be small actions for a problem so large, I take comfort in remembering that our God is someone who can do a lot with a little. So let’s get out there and work to show our community the power in his name.
