Should Christians say, “oh my God”? and what does it mean to take the name of the Lord in vain (the fourth commandment)
Audio Transcript
So, I want to be careful here. I personally don’t believe Christians are obligated to obey the ten commandments. Let me explain.
In Exodus 19, God tells the Israelites who they are, you are my treasured possession. Then Exodus 20 is where we have the ten commandments. In chapters 21-24, you have some further instructions. Chapter 24 is where the book of the law, the Torah first appears and there is blood spilled on the book and the people. What’s happening there? A covenant is being established.
The law is the stipulations of the old covenant. It’s like a binding document for a contract. When I got married to my wife, I signed a document because a marriage covenant was being established. Now that I’m in this relationship, these are the regulations we need to follow to enable this relationship work well. So, God delivers, establishes a covenant, and then tells the people within the covenant this is how you are meant to behave.
When you look at the ten commandments, you cannot just take a part of it and apply it to yourself as a Christian, no, it’s part of the book of the law. This is why Paul always says I am not under the law. He is saying, I am not under the old covenant because the relationship we have established with God is not under the old covenant, it’s now with the new covenant.
Here’s the danger of thinking about “The Law” as laws; when people then say, “since we are not under the law”, they almost make the new covenant seem lawless. Paul says I am not under the law, but I am not lawless because I am under the law of Christ. The old covenant is not established by keeping laws and the new covenant is not established by keeping laws. The old and the new covenant are established by God’s grace and within those gracious covenants, both have laws. The New Testament has laws. The New Testament has commandments but it’s a different package than the old one.
Now, there are some of the commandments that you find in the Old Testament that you won’t find in the New Testament. For instance, we don’t always wear 100% cotton and we should be condemned for that because under the law you are not meant to mix fabrics. Some of us have tattoos, but we don’t see this as sin. Why? Because we are not under the law.
A lot of those commandments had to do with the time and the day. So, they applied to certain things in that generation and are now are obsolete. However, there are certain things that always apply. So, some of the commandments you see in the old covenant repeat themselves in the new. This doesn’t mean that we took some part of the old covenant and then applied it ourselves, it just means that there are certain characters of God and certain characters of people of God that should happen irrespective of the time. Like the laws on homosexuality and adultery, we see them in the New Testament as well. So, there are some aspects of the ten commandments that repeat themselves in the new covenant.
Now to the issue of using the name of the Lord in vain, that’s a little bit complicated because it was really the name Yahweh, the covenant name. This is why in almost all of our Bibles, you don’t see Yahweh written. You see, LORD because it’s like we don’t want to say it because we don’t want to use it in vain. Even me sometimes I question myself when I say “Jesu”, or “Jesus”, because Jesus is God.
But I think when it says don’t use the Lord’s name in vain, it means don’t use it in a sacrilegious way. Don’t use it in a profane way. Don’t use it in a common way. Revere God’s name. Now what’s God’s name? God’s name is not God. God is deity. God’s covenant name is Yahweh. But I think how we talk about God, how we refer to him is important. We shouldn’t refer to him as common. Should we say, “Oh my God”? I’m not sure and I don’t want to be legalistic about it. I think we want to be careful how we tell people don’t call Jesus’ name except when you’re praying. Yet, at the same time whenever you are invoking God, think about it, did you invoke God in a common way?
Femi Osunnuyi is lead pastor of City Church, a gospel-centred urban church in the city of Lagos. Because of his passion for church planting and leadership development he also serves on the Lead Team of Acts29 and the Advisory Team of City to City Africa. He is happily married to Tosin and is father to Tofunmi and Timilehin.