Breaking the Third Commandment

Nobody does it better than Christians: taking the LORD’s name in vain. Not the corrosive cursing, imprecatory use of God or Jesus Christ as expletives, nothing so obvious and odious to the ear, but rather ascribing to God things he may or may not have done. 

Conversation with a friend who continued to insist that her search for a house ended when she made a list of everything she wanted, prayed about it and then the very next day walked into a house that she and her husband subsequently bought.

Nobody does it better than Christians: taking the LORD’s name in vain. Not the corrosive cursing, imprecatory use of God or Jesus Christ as expletives, nothing so obvious and odious to the ear, but rather ascribing to God things he may or may not have done. 

Conversation with a friend who continued to insist that her search for a house ended when she made a list of everything she wanted, prayed about it and then the very next day walked into a house that she and her husband subsequently bought.

“I knew this was it," she said. "The LORD led me to this house because I prayed."

There. Challenge that. Forget theology.

Well, I bit my tongue the first ten times she repeated the story, wondering whether she sought to convince me or herself. Wary of the mine field of theological questions, rational implications and searching for biblical basis I sought an answer to my own question: How does such belief make God look?

I said it was one thing to thank God for the house that she and her husband had decided to buy but entirely different to say that God provided that specific house in answer to her prayers. Then I reminded her where her older, widowed sister has lived for 30 years, the neighborhood disintegrating around her, her health failing as she lives amidst crushing poverty.

“Why doesn’t God answer your sister’s prayers?” I asked.

Believing that God means for Christians to be happy, people feel authorized to use God’s name to support their decisions.

“It doesn’t work that way,” I told her. “God is not waiting for you to figure out what you want and then give it to you, like so many items on a Christmas wish list."

I told her that Frederick Buechner says, ‘A Christian has a dim idea Who to thank’ for all the good he is given to enjoy. It’s always appropriate to say, ‘Thank you, God,’ yet we have to stop short of using his name to validate our choices.

People may appear to receive what they ask and fail to see their own complicity in results that smack of self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s hard to admit sometimes that I got what I wanted anyway or I decided to do what I wanted to do all along.

A mutation that takes God’s name in vain comes by saying,“God told me to do this.” I got the house, or car or job or husband I asked for because God told me. Such thinking only diminishes God, casting him as a white-bearded Santa.

Any time we use God’s name to endorse personal preferences may signal caution that we are in danger of misusing his name, that is, breaking The Second Commandment.

Why don’t we tremble?