“You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Ex20v7
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognise them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Mt7v15-23
[Dekalog - The second commandment is about sanctity of speech, where names are fundamental to identity and moral choice, and the importance of one's word in human life.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekalog
INTRO
[1] NAME - What is God’s name? How do we take it / carry it?
[2] VAIN - How do we do that in vain?
[3] PAIN - What is at stake?
[4] GAIN - What is the Solution?
Talking about talking
I don’t think of this interaction as preaching, it is an invitation to conversation. I have no mandate to preach,
How you introduce the idea, progressively/incrementally
What do you want to learn?
Where do you want to lead
OT as
OT as law
A frame work of absolutes
A checklist of do nots ~ leads to religiosity
OT as wisdom
Difficult because it is unattainable
Which touched on with Abigail’s ‘wisdom’ Tragic again
OT as a grace
offering a good Pattern vs OT as Impossible prompting to seek a saviour
Prototype leads to Despair points us to Christ A reverent fear, harrowing
OT as an impossible code, Vs a sliding scale of recommended
OT’s law as marriage covenant
Law as gift after slavery ~ by contrast with the life in Egypt, this is a life they get to live, one of service and not slavery, clarifying their freedom-for, vs just freedom-from
Law as a marriage covenant
Law as promise of a future
Law as permission not to
[1] NAME
[1.1] Using the name - daring to speak it “God is …”
Argument over against what?
What is it to carry God’s name, not-in-vain?
SAYING GOD’S NAME - hallowed be your name
What is the right and proper use of God’s name, his brand, his reputation, his power in the world?
How does the law bring freedom?
God has a name Over against no mere defacto relativity, but
Thinghood, anchored Vs real randomness and instability - eg. Dogma film swopping naming
Name vs no name
Temple to an unknown God.
So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. Ac17v22
Over against nameless dread.
Vs the God hypothesis, an arbitrary transcendental, merely the divine spark in all things - yes he is infinite but he is also personal he is also a this, which is not a that do not trivialise the weirdness of God
Gods: I’m a divine spark in all things
YHWH: I’m in her DMs. We are not the same.
Ferocious personalism of Christianity bears repeating
What is in a name?
God by any other name would smell as sweet?
Naming and personhood, God and idiosyncracy
It is not nothing that God has revealed his personal person’s personality to us.
Mention my name in your tweets
Name dropping - the power of association (like bus adverts)
Brand - Branding and signification
This and not that
Name above all names
God Bloggs
The need for words
Preach the gospel, use words if you have to. You have to.
Naming conventions, disambiguation
How do we agree what words mean - semiotics of signifiers. You are imaging God. You are what God means. You are the enfleshment acting as conduit for the meaning of the word God
Words create worlds
Language and order - the need for naming in structure and hierarchy
Let your yes be yes - synthesis and antithesis - the need for naming in linguistic integrity
God is this, and not-that - Doxxing the Doxological - the need for naming in Authenticate utterances of “God” ~ You have to use words, you have to name God. Coining terminology with which to speak of the divine.
God is not-that, he is this - Don’t call a thing which is not-God, God. Keeping the outside out and Keeping the inside in. Purity vs muddying the signal. Stewards of language, of iconography.
Naming no names - the need for naming anon. It is not nothing to bespeak the personhood of a personal universe
Let your words be few - Over against banter - How terrible language is - How serious a business we are in
Doing things and saying things in God’s name
God told me this
I sense God’s call for this
I’m going to seek God’s will for this
[1.2] Publishing the name
DOING GOD’S WORK
Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. 2Cor3
You are a living word. You are my epistles
Optics of image bearing - Operating under it “A man of God, a people of God, visibly”
Roles individually as Ambassadors
Role of the Church collectively - we are a word to the world
Professional People of God
Preaching, explaining, defining, making explicit claims.
Thus sayeth the lord,
[1.3] Being given the name - you are branded by God
BEING GOD’S PEOPLE
Ambassador of his name
“the invisible branding of his people, the ultimate identity under it all”
Identity - who you are
Non-professional people of God
Baptisms in vain / Benedictions in vain
He gave us his name. Like a bag with a name in it - Don't leave it unattended
Aaron branded with the name of the people
[2] VAIN
take up (viz. upon the lips, as Exodus 23:1, Psalm 15:3; Psalm 16:4) … for unreality (Di. ‘zur Nichtigkeit’)—i.e. make use of it for any idle, trivial, or insincere purpose.
False
untrue, unreal
Poison masquerading as medicine
Phoney
insincere
Placebo masquerading as medicine ~ Diluted medicine
Frivolous
trivial
Popcorn masquerading as medicine
Fruitless
unproductive, Nothingy and inconsequential, wasteful, embezzled, misrepresentative
The pill masquerading as medicine
[2.1] Vainly SPEAKING the naming God - generic vanity of de-godding language at large in God’s world.
[2.2] Vainly BEING Christian - the individual corruption of your own personal de-godded faith as one of God’s people.
[2.3] Vainly DOING Church - the formal and organised vanity of unserious church cultures manifesting distortions collectively in Gods church.
[2.1] Vainly SPEAKING the naming God
Language Misuse
Weighty as shallow
Yes be yes
copyright lawyer Flip flops with an apple logo and a nike logo on it
False, phony, frivolous Christianese
Good words for good things
Bad words for bad things
Trivialisation
Progressively diluted and we are complicit in watering it down - most of us received such a weak squash version.
Yes there is pagan world making images and worshipping idols. But more so, the deracinated church offering thin gruel of mere palliative when there is a cure
Naming
God’s name is for something - the notion that God is actively involved in the world. There is an urgent purpose to his self-revelation
Everyone believes in God of some sort, everyone has a placeholder answer to those questions which you answer “god”
~ what caused the world to come into being ~ time+chance+matter
~ where do our values comes from, - teleological utilitarianism?
We’re fumbling about in general revelation, believing that we can keep the idea of God and its benefits, without the name of God.
[2.2] Vainly BEING Christian
This is less a call that Christians be generically more Christian, and it doesn’t intend to be a blunt critique of a half-formed thing as we are all yet in progress. But rather, an admission of my own specific brand of name-in-vain vanity, that allows a such an unfinished presentation to be credited prematurely as the real deal, as sufficient.
Infantilisation as a grave danger in buffered, privileged, subsidised faith contexts - the sentimentalisation of undisciplined disorder, the spiritualisation of lacadaisicality, the rash of timid, translucent, androgynous, cyborg christians tangled up in intramural spats waiting for heaven cozy charmless compassion’s toxic positivity and empathic excess venerated over difficult truth-in-truths of a world beyond.
Ascribing things to God which aren’t
Aren’t his character
Aren’t his blessing
Aren’t his word / calling
Aren’t the whole story
Not many of you should be teachers
A church is not functioning as a body because its leaders are content to take his name in vain, to draw a salary for mere maintenance of a church bureaucracy but offer no suffering hope for the world. Be angry at those Christians before us who missold unfatherly fathers, unpastoral pastors, an unjust judiciary who desecrated by disenchanting and disordering the world with self-serving ministries of therapeutic moralistic deism, valorising mere busy-ness and managerialism, church bureaucracy maintenance while the world burns. Abominate the joyless joy, hopeless hope, faithless faith, loveless love that lampoons a surrogate of the pastorate with loveless love. Not many of you should be teachers, that is, give up, go home, salt the earth’s scorched ground. Mediocre teachers hope only that no one got hurt, no one noticed, as dealer diluting the product, cutting grams of purest gospel white, with the splenda/aspartame of middle class propriety.
Teachers can achieve this by passive default, embodying the notion
Christianity is not more than just the teacher’s gifting - tempted to worship men as angels, tempted to build the model of a whole body around the temperament of the platformed individual
Christianity is not more than just your depravity - tempted to define against the shadow instance of one toxic individual
Middle class imports into Christianity that augment the product - the great danger that lackluster Christianing is not diluted Christianity, it is a lie. See Monmouth coffee vets the espresso setup of those coffee shops who serve their coffee. God is jealous for God’s name, God’s glory. What is interesting, and unclear to me, is regulating principles for the shepherds of that brand, the stewards of the naming conventions of a given multi-personal body.
Teacher’s to be judged on what they teach and don’t teach - what surrogate Christianity they allow to proliferate unconfronted. Terrible the con evo culture of performative earnestness, terrible more that a culture of its teachers would solidify a conviction that the culture unable to change, unwilling to risk, because the teaching culture is only grift, only PMC, permeated throughout by a self-fulfilling insecurity conflating genuine concern with mere self sabotage, conflating humility with a lack of ambition, permitting presenteeism’s fruitless feckless portraits of vain vanity. I speak for myself.
[2.3] Vainly DOING church
There is something distinct about the civic call to the church to be God’s infrastructure - not merely as a coagulation of incidental Christians, but as a organised collective, an all-things-in-common counter culture, sufficiently organised to make the name of God legible and sufficiently organised to plausibly function as an economy over-against empires, etc.
There is something in the teacher’s role in not-vain churching, with a big enough vision for churching, that it would allow and require a hugely more serious seriousness about the civic function of teaching
Vs a call to
Holiness / purity
Energy / zeal
Set apartness / distinction
[3] PAIN
“for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.”
A law with a veiled threat - Why did this need to be said?
You can passively take God’s name in vain
You can invisibly take God’s name in vain
And, we will tend to hold that him (him being myself, or indeed others in an enabling codependent permissive conspiracy) guiltless on a no harm no foul basis.
Over against accommodating name-in-vain by passive default, this conclusion / rejoinder that states consequences is a call to severity. The answer to severity is despair. The answer to despair, surely a drive relentless repentance and thanksgiving?That to say, not to make an excuse for it, but to seek grace for it, to seek the resource to heal and be other. The world needs God and so needs contrite Christians daily needing God vs smug Christians.
You have been missold so further missold by reselling guiltlesslessness. There is pain in not-taking the name not-in-vain - there is a doing to do. Sometimes i consider the peace of I didn’t do nothing wrong.. but I failed at basic integrity and stewardship. I didn’t crash the ambulance because I didn’t drive the ambulance.
Unforgivable sins
Matthew 12:31-32, Mark 3:28-29, and Luke 12:10.
[4] GAIN
What motivates you to take God’s name in vain, and what would motivate not-in-vain taking of God’s name?
Healing, security, purpose, freedom
Naming is world making, but the world is already made. There is freedom in being called to exercise not-ultimate power. There is freedom in being given not-ultimate responsibility
God has gifted us himself,
God has already given us his name.
/End
15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. 18 A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.
21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
Matthew 7:15-23
VANITY measured by FRUIT
Mt7v17-18 If ever there was a picture of the natural overflow of the essence of an organism, fruit is it. Trees can't plan a marketing campaign, they can't exam cram, there's no voting amongst the leaves, can't hire substitutes, there's no mental striving in this fruitfulness, they cannot but make like a tree. but. There are preconditions to fruitfulness ps1v3 being planted by living water, Mt13v8 in good soil, from good seed. Are you? Am I? Not naturally, we ate bad fruit from a bad tree and put bad seed into a heart of stone, and accordingly death reigned in us from Adam and how can a tree change its nature? 1Cor15v22 It can. And this makes Mt7v18 awesome. 'We are the firstfruits..' 'We are the light of the world..' 'He who began a good work in you will complete it..' 'He will give you the desires of your heart..' Ridiculous. Now, 'You are a good tree, you cannot bear bad fruit!' .. Love God, do what you want.
HOW TO REGULATE VANITY
Mt7v21-22 What is the secret to defeating my terrifying ability to simulate faith, to imitate Christianity, even to manufacture mighty works in my own strength? First, what is the incentive to such self-deception? What is its reward? (1) There is an externally rewarded false-disciplehood: people-pleasing, motivated by the praise of man in rice-christian rituals of performing to Richborne Terrace's tenancy agreement. So, nip that in the bud and ensure that certain faith practices are ninja. For the sake of your own soul find ways to meet God in a secret secret place, don't close your curtains for your quiet time, go underground and leave no trace. (2) Is there also an entirely internal force for self-deception, so to avoid the reality of total-christianity and a holy God, I try to construct categories of 'semi-christian' as if it were valid to be half-married or half-pregnant.. Christianity is not a pick-n-mix moral code, nor merely a subjectively dependent experience of temperamental warm fuzzies, Christianity is not a static state, the image of a thing, a retrospectively projected veneer. Christianity is deeply and actively the difference between 'I never knew you' and Jn21v17 'you know that I love you' Know and Love, be Known and Beloved.
1But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. 2For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, 4treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. 6For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, 7always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. 8Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith. 9But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of those two men.
2Tim3v5 https://biblehub.com/2_timothy/3-5.htm
1Now I would remind you, brothers,a of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, 2and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
1Cor15v2 https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/15-2.htm
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. 2For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body. 3If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. 4Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. 5So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things.
How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! 6And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life,a and set on fire by hell.b 7For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, 8but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. 10From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers,c these things ought not to be so. 11Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? 12Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.
Jm3v1 https://biblehub.com/james/3-1.htm
7But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. 9And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. 10Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
Mt3v8 https://biblehub.com/matthew/3-8.htm
~ also Lk3v8 https://biblehub.com/luke/3-8.htm
HOW TO HEAR CRITIQUE OF BAD FRUIT
Mt3v7-8 Harsh? It is possible to become hung up on the eternal destination of characters like, eg Judas, and miss the cautionary tale that is urgently relevant to our own lives. Becoming Pharisaical is so easily done, indulging my own bad character, comforting myself with religion, measuring my own works and ultimately plotting against Jesus.. If you catch me in the act of any of these, I will not consider it simplistic or judgemental if you 'you-brood-of-vipers!' me. This Word, profitable for rebuking 2Ti3v16, is needed to correct bad brooding. And who is my brood, my gaggle, my parliament, my pride? What pathological modes of fellowship do I adopt to hear what I want to hear from well-educated, well-intentioned sympathisers? As the Judas discussion, the aim is no mere remorse, but fruitful repentance, which looks like Jn21v17 feeding his sheep.
13“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.d 15Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of helle as yourselves.
Mt23v15
HOW TO REGULATE FAUX FAITH
Mt23v15-16 'Ye compass land and sea' has less to do with internationality per se, rather, it denotes any energetic intentionality producing the export of your kingdom's worldview. What Resolutions am I making? What will I thus export? 'Sons of Hell' There's nothing like misdirected missionary zeal to innoculate children from the kingdom of heaven.. so, be less zealous? Seek less evangelism? Risk less, speak less, travel less? By. No. Means. What then?
In v14 the Pharisees lock people out the Kingdom of Heaven, this is because in v15 they lock people into a Kingdom of self-relation. Belockedness is found in self-relation of the for-itself. First, in v15's critique of missionaryism - when 'crossing land and sea' becomes honorific it is an idol exporting idols.
Second, in v16, when language becomes self-related, it becomes but nuanced nonsense: the export of superstitious powerplay. Oh Phil, beware christianese, beware the small talk that leads to destruction. .. I want to be zealous against my pride - to be drawn out of my self-relation, by Jesus, through prayer, especially prayer with others and for others.
42“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,g it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.
Mk9v42 https://biblehub.com/mark/9-42.htm
Mk9v43-44 Serious, like 127 Hours serious. So visceral is this image of savage self-surgery it is apt to obscure the worldview Jesus is lampooning. While it is true that Jesus' hyperbole functions at the level: sin-is-grave, like amputation-is-grave;~ I would argue he is being more targeted than that: sin-involves-detachment, precisely like amputation-involves-detachment. "If your body causes you to sin.." is only utterable if your you is alienated from your body. Canet's Little White Lies, a many layered meditation on a community of total dishonesty and disengenuity, includes the encouragement to adultery by one character with the expression 'your body will thank you for it..' A whole world of sin follows from the duplicity of the dichotomy of body+soul. There are manifold other ways I achieve a form of cyborg sinlessness, compartmentalising sin-causes: my genes caused me to sin, my upbringing caused me to sin, some secondary or circumstantial scapegoat is surely to blame for the mess I have made with my depraved heart and corrupted will. Cut it out, Phil.
1And he said to his disciples, “Temptations to sina are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! 2It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.b 3Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, 4and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”
Lk17v2 https://biblehub.com/luke/17-2.htm
REPENT/REBUKE as antidote to false teaching
Lk17v3-4 https://ifttt.com
This is your API for the moral universe.
If they sin, rebuke. [awkward]
If they repent, forgive. [costly]
If they repeat, repeat. [relentless]
👀 "Pay attention to yourselves!" ~ this links the millstone-for-temptation-indictment with mulberry-tree-uprooting faith. It starts with you. You are the node of faith which upside-downs what the world would otherwise do. You are the point of friction. This verse is the pivot: The money mismanagement approbation of prior verses is easily deflected towards the richer-thans. Pay attention to yourselves! And this feels like a crescendo. v10 "to Jerusalem" looms imminent. As D-Day bears down on you, pay attention to your critical and gracious capacity to be brothers: rebuking, forgiving and repeating. Rebuking, forgiving and repeating.
5“Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, 6but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,a it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
Mt 18v6 https://biblehub.com/matthew/18-6.htm
COME AS CHILDREN as antidote to false teaching
Mt18v3-4 What is a child? A 'turning', a 'becoming', an 'entering'. Turn: as orientation you choose, same (Gk) as Ac7v39 'turned back to Egypt' or Jn12v40 'turn to me and be healed'. To turn is to repent Ac3v16, repent and re-turn. .. Become: an ontology you receive, childlikeness is an unselfconscious subtraction, that is, children don't humble themselves, they are humble. But childlikeness here cannot mean innocence/goodness Ps51v5, and should not mean naivete Eph4v14, nor immaturity Hb6v1. What then is a child? I forget. I held a baby on Sunday and I'm already forgetting those tiniest of tiny fingers, the eminently dropable fragility, the simple utter dependence. Oh, have kids, seek them our, beg borrow and steal them, lest you forget, the irreducible quality of child-being. .. Enter: a domain you have access to. 'Child' here is a 'child-of', a begotteness. When I know I'm beloved-by the King, I can do all things.
Mt18v7-8 Woe to the world because of dem tings: repentable things. Woe to the man by whom the offence comes: culpable persons. There is a reason that Things and Persons are philosophically unpopular. Real things have consequences, real persons have responsibilities. You! Phil! Get your things in order! .. Amputees. I ought to walk with a limp. Leaving facebook is as nailclipping by comparison to the real work needed to cut me from the sources of pride, lust, procrastination, jealousy, self-pity in my life and lifestyle choices. .. N serves St Marks by forbidding that we be vague in metaphors untethered from the horror of amputation. .. the difference in gravity here is between euphemising with Di Franco's Both Hands and Piper calling us to Make War: “..there is a mean streak to authentic self-control..” So be guerilla metaphysicians, desperate, willing to forego 1Ti2v8 and Ec9v10, if only we might see Jesus.
14If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of gloryb and of God rests upon you. 15But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler. 16Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name. 17For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? 18And
“If the righteous is scarcely saved,
what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?”c
19Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.
1Pt4v17 https://biblehub.com/1_peter/4-17.htm
Peace peace when there is no peace
33“Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ 34But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 35or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. 37Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.
Mt5v37 https://biblehub.com/matthew/5-37.htm
9Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing at the door. 10As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. 11Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful. 12But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.
Jm5v12 https://biblehub.com/james/5-12.htm
Mt5v35-36 I've got a world-wide warrantee, satisfaction guarantee, if you ain't happy, then just send it right back to me.. .. Oaths, guarantees, promises, are a curious phenomenon. And, at a certain level their 'evil' is unrelated to the truth value of that which is promised (v37). Anything trying to leverage more truth than truth into a “Yes” is trying too hard, is taking power-over, is necessarily introducing dishonesty? .. Of 'swearing by the city', does this apply to branding? Eg. Rimmel vs Rimmel London.. Reasons why we are in London include gaining the power to have our CV 'swear' by London? Beloved, know that you are sufficient, your portfolio can speak for itself, you don't need Babel's seal of approval. .. Of swearing by you head. Your are not your own to offer as collateral, risking your head to 'guarantee' your word, risking your family to show commitment to your job is dangerous and dishonest.
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