“Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God, because the Lord will not leave anyone punished who misuses his name.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I’ve never been a big fan of nicknames that weren’t mere terms of endearment. On the last day of a spring break trip in college, after playing on the beach for several hours with lots of sunscreen everywhere but on the top of my feet, I burnt them to a crisp. They were bright red and I couldn’t wear shoes for days. It was a good thing most people were used to my going barefoot around campus. Some friends tried to give me the nickname “Chief Red Foot” as a joke. I gently, but sincerely spoiled their fun. As a credit to their own character, they accepted that I really didn’t want a nickname and stopped their efforts immediately. I like my name. I’m proud of it. I didn’t want to be known by any other appellation. God feels the same way, but even more passionately. He’s so passionate about it that He made getting it right part of His foundational commands to Israel.e Let’s talk about what He means here and why this mattered so much.

As the people of Israel would later wrestle with how they could be sure they were living comfortably within these boundaries, they would ask a pretty natural question here: What exactly does it mean to misuse the name of the Lord? The direction they eventually started going was to not say His name at all. They began to find various other ways to refer to Him. Eventually, they forgot how to pronounce it. Let me explain what I mean.

If you take what scholars understand is the personal name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures (which appears in many translations as the word “Lord” with the initial “L” capitalized normally and the “ord” as small capital letters…I’d demonstrate that here except I can’t figure out how to do it) and translate each letter into English you get YHWH. That W represents the letter waw which looks really awkward to pronounce until you know that the w’s get pronounced like v’s. Why they don’t spell it vav I’ve never really understood, but it’s probably the fault of German translators from centuries ago.

We don’t actually know how to pronounce that word. The ancient Israelites quit pronouncing it for so long that they forgot. They still don’t know for sure today that I’m aware of. Instead of trying to pronounce it, whenever you hear a Jewish person read the Hebrew Scriptures, when they come to that word, they will say “Adonai” instead of however you actually pronounce it. They do this in reverence to this third command. Still today, when English speaking Jews write down the word God, they will often spell it G-d, dropping the o in reverence to the ancient custom of not ever actually saying God’s name.

We do have some guesses on how to pronounce YHWH. Because y’s in German get pronounced like j’s in English, some German translators from ages ago started pronouncing the word “Jehovah.” If you look closely you can see why. They just stuck in some vowels that seemed to make sense. If you’ve ever wondered where “Jehovah” as a name for God originated, it was from German translators trying to figure out how to pronounce YHWH. Today we use the pronunciation “Yahweh” (pronounced yah-way…why translators don’t spell words like they sound is again beyond me). But we still aren’t sure that’s correct. We’re just making educated guesses.

Is this all what God had in mind here? Almost assuredly not. Neither, I think, is it limited to merely not using God’s name as a curse word. So then, what’s this about? This third commandment is about getting God’s character right. Names in ancient Hebrew were considered far more than simply monikers or things to call people in order to get their attention. Names conveyed character. We see this throughout the Hebrew Scriptures when a child’s name was often given in connection to the circumstances of their birth or else the vision their parents had for them. Abraham and Sarah’s son, Isaac, was so named because Isaac means “laughter” and Sarah laughed (albeit for different reasons) both when she was told about his birth and when finally held him in her arms.

God wanted the people to get His name right as a reflection that they understood who He was. He was not like all the other gods of the people around them. That was a point He made to them fairly frequently. I’m not like all those other guys. He wanted them to take His name seriously because if they didn’t, they would start thinking about Him as less than He was. That was going to make their staying in a relationship with Him difficult.

This concern for getting God’s character right helps to point us to what this command means for us today. As we have talked about before, this command wasn’t for us and we aren’t liable to keep it as it appears here. The legalism of later Hebrew legal scholars like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day is particularly unhelpful for our understanding of what we should do with this command. Simply avoiding using a particular word (to the point that we forget how to pronounce it!) doesn’t mean we know anything particularly meaningful about God. Patting ourselves on the back for being so faithful because of what we do or don’t say doesn’t offer us much in the way of insight on where we stand with Him relationally.

Rather, our focus in light of God’s concern for His character here must be on getting His character right. We need to know who He is. Culturally slogans and Christian banners won’t do. We need to know who He is in order that we can engage with Him on His own terms. How do we do that? The same way we do it with the other people in our lives. We have to spend time listening to Him. This happens mostly by prayer and by our engaging with the Scriptures. Through the Scriptures God reveals Himself to us. He helps us to see who He is. We can’t take any part all by itself to gain this understanding either. It takes a robust engagement with the whole thing in order to have a properly formed picture of who God is. We pay attention to the things He says He cares about and consider what that says about His character. We look at how He describes Himself. We look at how He interacts with various situations for clues as well. Then, as we start to gain a clearer picture, we relate to Him accordingly.

Okay, but what about this punishment part at the end? If we screw this up, is He going to get us for it? Yes and no. No, in the sense that if we don’t get His character right or mispronounce His name He is going to smite us out of some kind of a petulant rage for offending Him. He doesn’t carry our insecurities. We don’t have to worry that if we slip up here He’s going to get in our faces and start screaming, “What did you call me?!?” Yes, though, in the sense that if we don’t get His name right, we won’t be able to get to Him. And if we can’t get to Him, there is no recourse for our sin. The judgment we have coming for it will eventually come indeed.

The only way we can get to God is to get His name right. He’s not willing to be called by somebody else’s name. Thinking about this from another angle, if we associate a whole bunch of things with His character that aren’t right, when we use His name, we won’t really be talking about Him at all. My youngest has a friend named Johnathan. He and I aren’t the same person. The reason for that isn’t simply because we don’t spell our names the same way. It also isn’t because I’m literally old enough to be His dad. (In fact, I’m older than his dad.) Our characters are different. On occasion and just for fun, when Micah asks if Johnathan can come up to play, I’ll tell him I’m already here. I’ll usually get an exasperated “Dad!” in reply. The point is valid here, though. He was saying my name, but he wasn’t referring to me because he had someone else in mind.

In the same way, we can say God’s name, but have someone entirely different from Him in mind. If we do that, we shouldn’t expect Him to answer us. We shouldn’t expect to be able to gain any of the benefits of a relationship with Him if we are seeking someone else, some other god, but calling this other god by His name. If we aren’t willing to take Him as He really is, we aren’t going to get to Him. And the way to take Him as He is, is to go through Jesus. It is to take Jesus as He really is since Jesus is God’s final and full self-revelation to us. If you really want to get to God, get to know Jesus. Get His name right.