The Second Commandment; Thou shalt not take the name of the
Lord your God in vain.
When I was in about the second grade my mother made me take
some strong lye-
filled homemade soap and wash out my mouth until it really foamed ! She had heard me use
the expression “son-of-a gun”. This , to her was cursing. So it is not too
likely that I would break the Second Commandment with expressions like “God
damn you” or “Go to hell!” And I guess that focusing on that kind of misuse of
God’s name or even questioning
“omg” in texting is really not the most serious aspect of what God is here
forbidding.
It gets much closer to home when people of my Christian
faith act and speak in ways that seem to be in every way contradictory to the
command to speak kindly, pray, share words of love and comfort in the Lord’s
name.
Bit what disturbs me most about the current world scene is
to hear people make statements or do acts “in the Lord’s name” which are
entirely contradictory to anything that the Lord would ever approve of. I am
thinking of using God’s name to deny women and children their rights, to
kill and torture in God’s name, to
start wars or commit acts of terror in God’s name. It will take more than a few bars of home-made soap to stop
these horrors, so I will just use my very small voice to call for a halt to
these abominations aand to pledge myself to using God’s name to call upon God
for forgiveness and hope.
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1 comment:
Hi Mel, enjoying your memories. One of the things I used to do when teaching the 10 commandments was the insight that the 1st 3 are about our relationship to God, the next 3 to our relationship to people and the last 4 our relationship to property, at least in the OT sense. Seems to me there is a heirarchy of importance. Most people I think worry most about the middle 3. That seems strange to me.
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