What Does It Mean to Take the Lord's Name In Vain? A Conversation with Carmen Joy Imes

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian Podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm James Spencer, and I'm joined again, a second time, by Carmen Joy Iams. Dr. Iams is an associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University. She's written a couple of different books, one being God's Image, and the one we're going to talk more about today, though, is actually Bearing God's Name, Why Sinai Still Matters. And so this is the second time she's going to be on the podcast. We're going to be talking about a little bit about the Old Testament command to not take the Lord's name in vain and her understanding of that, and then just how the Old Testament is important for the Christian life today. So welcome back. It's great to have you. Thank you, James. Glad to be back. Yeah. Maybe just start out. Talk a little bit about what motivated you to write this particular book or what got you interested in this particular topic. Sure. So I did my PhD at Wheaton College, and my dissertation topic was this command not to take the Lord's name in vain. So as I studied it, I kept thinking, wow, these concepts are so important. Everybody needs to hear this. Like every Christian needs to hear this. But I was told in no uncertain terms that would people, like normal people, read my dissertation. And that's true. Most normal people haven't. So the dissertation was published by Penn State University Press, Bearing Yahweh's Name at Sinai, a re-examination of the name command of the Decalogue. You can already tell it's very technical. My husband's grandmother bought a copy of it because she was so proud of me. And then she was very angry. She said, Carmen, I knew I wouldn't be able to understand the Hebrew in here, but you didn't tell me I wouldn't be able to understand the English. So my top priority. So it's a typical dissertation. Yes, it's a dissertation. And so my top priority after this was finished was to rewrite it, to take this message and repackage it for a wider audience. And that's what you have in Bearing God's Name, Why Sinai Still Matters. It's not the same book. It's not like I just took my dissertation and made it easier to understand. The dissertation is taking a deep dive on one verse, Exodus 20, verse 7, that says you shall not take, most of us have heard it as you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. And I examined that verse from every possible angle in my dissertation. So there's chapters on the historical context, on the history of interpretation, on metaphor theory, on the literary context, theological themes, and just trying to figure out what is really going on here. The newer book, Bearing God's Name, is then taking that concept that I discovered at Sinai and tracing that concept through the whole Bible. So it really does go from Exodus all the way to the end of the Bible and tries to help people understand this concept of bearing God's name. So I would argue that the command is not about our speech primarily. This is not telling us how or when we should or shouldn't say the divine name, but rather that it is expressing this concept that at Sinai, Yahweh was claiming the Israelites as his own people, and in effect, he was placing his name on them. So it's kind of a moment of branding at Sinai. And so he's telling them, now that you bear my name, now that you're wearing it, don't wear it in vain or don't carry it in vain. And so he's saying, if you're going to be my covenant people, then your lives need to look like you are. So all the rest of the commandments in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy are really a fleshing out of what does it look like to be a people who bear God's name. And so the book is tracing that theme through the whole Bible as the covenant people bear God's name, our behavior matters, the way we live testifies to the world of what God is like. And this is an area where our translations don't really help us out, right? Because even in the more, like, let's say in NASB or something like that, I think it reads misused the name of God or misused the name of the Lord. I'm pretty sure the NIV has something very similar. Yeah, right. And so it's not really conveying this concept that you're talking about. But if we think about it from a biblical and theological perspective, I mean, you can go back, I don't know, as early as I'm thinking, you could go back to something like Genesis 12, where God is going to make Abraham's name great. That kind of idea is embedded within a lot of where we sort of see it in the Old Testament. So how would you sort of translate, how would you suggest we read that if you had your preferred English translation of that verse? What would you say it was? I'll do an on-the-fly modification of the NIV here. Yes, there we go. You shall not bear the name of Yahweh your God in vain, for Yahweh will not hold anyone guiltless who bears his name in vain. Then you have to talk about, okay, what does it mean to bear it in vain? Actually, if we wanted to be a little more colloquial with it, more NLT sounding, you could just say you shall not misrepresent Yahweh your God. Because it really is a representative role. The only reason I'd hesitate to say misrepresent as the translation is then you lose the connection with name, and then you might miss all of the other places where this theme kind of pops up again. And pulls in. Yeah, fair enough. And how do you see that playing? I mean, obviously, the first couple commands here in the Decalogue, you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make an image. And now you shall not bear my name in vain. Yeah. Almost sort of hang together before you get into the Sabbath. They do. They do. Would you see those not as one command out of three, you know, but how do you see those sort of fitting together and flowing together as we move into them, the Sabbath command and then the other commandments? I'll be honest. One of the parts of my work that's been the least appreciated, and I think the fewest people have really taken it on board, but I still feel like this is the right way to do it, is the way that I count the Ten Commandments. Many people are surprised to hear that there's a debate about how to count them and that the Hebrew Bible actually preserves two different ways of counting them side by side with the accent system. So I would take no other gods and no images or no idols as one command. Single command. Okay. That's a single command because in the ancient world, if you're going to worship another god, you need an idol of that deity to give worship to. And if you have an idol, the only reason you'd have it is so that you could worship it. So I think the two are one and the same. And there's grammatical reasons for connecting them. When it says, you shall not bow down to them or worship them, that's plural, but the sentence right before it is not to make an image, singular. So to find a plural antecedent, we have to go back up to, you shall have no other gods, plural, before me. So I think they hang together as one command, which then makes this the second command. And I think that these two are forming sort of the heading for the entire list of commands as a way of sort of encapsulating the covenant formula. Sometimes scholars call it the covenant formula, which is, I will be your God and you will be my people. This sense of mutual loyalty, mutual obligation that is put into effect by the covenant is true if you're only worshiping Yahweh and you are representing him well, you're living as his people. Those are the two parts of the covenant formula. Everything else flows from that. Now, if you take this command in its traditionally understood sense, this hasn't been the only view of the command through history, but many people through history have thought that it's a prohibition of taking false oaths. And if you take it that way, then we've got another command later on the list. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor, which is like a remarkable amount of overlap with this. Isn't that sort of the same thing? And so why do you have one way up at the top of the list and one way at the bottom of the list that are so similar in God's top 10 list? And so I would say this is much broader. To bear God's name in vain is, this encompasses everything we do, everything about the way that we live. And so it belongs at the top of the list with having no other gods. So it's essentially, maybe just to summarize and see if I get it, see if I understand what you're saying. Essentially, what it is, is it'd almost be like, and I don't mean to trivialize it, but a lawyer who decides to break the law. It's sort of like this, you have this identity, you've committed your life to the law and serving the law and, you know,

You know, fighting for justice, but on the side, you've decided to manipulate the system, to break the law, to do whatever it is that you want. And so now you have this almost contradictory identity where you're saying, yes, I'm committed to the law and I'm a lawyer, but not in these instances, I'm going to do my own thing. And what God is calling his people to do is not that. What he's saying is, look, you're mine. You bear my name. Your identity is as my people. And now the whole of your life needs to be consistent with that identity. Is that a... Yeah, I like that illustration. I haven't thought of that before. You could translate it into other spheres as well. A doctor who takes the Hippocratic oath, but then poisons people. Like that's what they end up using their training to do. That would be bearing that identity in vain. So there's both a sense of identity and vocation here. Israel becomes the people who belong to God, their covenant partners with Yahweh, but that entails a certain way of life. And so this points to both of those dimensions. Fantastic. Yeah, and I love the way you talk through the first two commands. My tendency is to see that myself, although it's awkward to say the nine commandments, you know, there's still 10. There's still 10 because we know that Exodus refers to it as the 10 words consistently. So we have to have 10. There are two possible ways of getting to 10, even with the combined first two that I just said. So one is to take verse 2 as its own command or its own word. The Bible doesn't call them the 10 commandments. It calls them the 10 words. And so the first word could be, I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, which then is the grounding for everything else that God commands. So that's one way. The other way is to see the coveting command as two. So 17 is usually taken as one command. You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, male or female servant, ox or donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor. You could take that as two because the coveting is repeated. And in Deuteronomy, it's more, it's clearer that it's considered two because the second word for coveting is changed. It's a different word. And the wife becomes, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife and then you shall not desire what belongs to your neighbor. So there's a reordering and a different verb that makes a kind of separation in that command. So that's how we still have 10. I'm more familiar with the Sabbath command. That's what I did my dissertation on. And so I'm not recalling any major differences between the, so just for the listeners that may not know, the 10 commandments occur in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. Yes. And so, but I'm not aware that there are any major differences that, you know, are striking differences between Exodus 27 and what would it be Deuteronomy 5, 3 or 4, somewhere in there, I think maybe, well, probably a little later than that. But either way, the in vain passage. Yes, it's 11. I think they're identical. Okay, that's kind of what I remembered. Yeah. But what is true is that the Deuteronomy Decalogue or 10 commandments, there are some tweaks throughout it that create a kind of new structure that highlight, that I think highlight the name command. And it's been a while since I wrote my dissertation, so I'd have to look it up. There's someone who did some really good work on these additions like ox, your ox and your donkey is added to the Sabbath command. Yeah. Is that right? There's also, you know, obviously the change from creation grounding to the remembrance of the Exodus. Right. And then there's a line in there that talks about that they may rest like you rest or as you, which is a change from Exodus. But yeah, there is definitely an expansion of that. The Deuteronomy command is a little longer and it does include some other things, which, yeah, was just fascinating to look at and try to think through what is all this doing and how is it working and why the switch over to the Exodus and all that kind of fun stuff is always really interesting. I love that. I tell my students, there is no such thing as a second generation covenant member. And so Deuteronomy makes clear that you were at Sinai and you were redeemed from Egypt, not your parents. It was you, even though this is actually the second generation. He re-situates them theologically as if they were at Sinai, which is, I think how we get the pattern and the justification for seeing believers in Jesus as members of the Sinai covenant and also people who bear God's name. Peter takes his cue, I think from Moses and Deuteronomy when he applies the covenant titles from Exodus 19 to a mixed audience of Jewish and Gentile believers, calling them a kingdom of priests and a holy nation and God's treasured possession. Yeah, and I think there's a lot of confusion around that. Now, we don't have to go into this, but just by way of an aside, I think there is a lot of confusion about this when we talk about Israel and the church and the relationship between the two. How is it that Peter can apply those terms to the church and still have Israel as a separate entity? You know, as if the church has sort of replaced Israel in that setting. But when you really look at the Old Testament and you understand what's happening generationally and what's really going on there, you don't necessarily have to move in that direction. It's just a different way of conceptualizing the unity of this group and understanding how deeply the ownership runs when you enter into your new covenant with Christ. Yes. Yeah, I would describe it not that the church has replaced Israel, but that we've been incorporated into the covenant people through faith in Jesus. And I think that's how Peter sees it. I tend to think so too. Well, getting back to these commands, I think, you know, a couple of things from your book kind of stand out. But one of the things is, you know, when you first talk about it and introduce the law, right, you say people are not usually excited. Oh, good. Let's talk about commands and legislation. How would you sort of frame out the Ten Commandments and the laws more generally as important for Christians? Because this is something and I had my, so my dissertation mentor was Dick Averbeck out at Trinity. He was my outside reader on mine. So he also, yeah. So he, he wrote a book on this and I had him on and we talked a little bit about this. But what's your perspective on why is the law still important? Why, what does it really matter for Christians and why should we slog through, you know, big portions of Numbers, Exodus and Leviticus? Yeah, this is a surprisingly hot topic. I'm finding. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. 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So there are people who feel very strongly about the law having been a bad thing that has been put away with because of Christ, that Christ has done away with the law and we're free from it and we don't have to think about it anymore. So I think we need to think very carefully about this because Jesus said himself in the Sermon on the Mount that he did not come to abolish the law. And so what did he do with the law? What is our relationship with the law? So I think our first problem is a misdiagnosis of what the law was for in the first place. And we act as though the law was given at the border of Egypt. Like that Moses showed up to Egypt to set the people free with the Ten Commandments and said, hey guys, guess what? I can get you out of here if you just agree to obey these stipulations, then God will set you free as if it's a way of earning their redemption. And because we think of the law in these terms that this is how Jews got saved. They worked their way to heaven. That mischaracterization of the law, it obviously leads us.

to say, well, we're not going to do that anymore because we have Jesus who died for our sins, so we don't need to work our way. But you can't find a Jewish scholar who would tell you that that's what's going on in the book of Exodus. This is not how Jews think about the law. The law was a gift given to a people already redeemed. God brings them out of Egypt without first doing an audit of their morality, making sure they have no idols. He redeems them, brings them to Mount Sinai, and there he gives them the law after they've been set free. The law then is not the means of salvation, but rather their means of carrying out the mission he gave them to do. And that, I think, if we get that right, that helps prepare us. Okay, if the law's a matter of mission, it's the covenant people living on mission to represent God to the nations, then it's a little harder to get to the New Testament and just get rid of it, because aren't the covenant people still on mission? And Peter using these titles from Sinai to describe believers indicates to me that he thinks the law is still in effect and that the law is, again, the means of demonstrating the character of God to a watching world. So I think the law still matters. I wanna hasten to add that the cultural context has changed between the Old and New Testament, so you already see things like Paul telling his congregations that they should pay their pastors because of the law of not muzzling an ox while it's treading the grain. And so Paul is reading the law in a sense of deriving the principle behind the law and then applying that to a new cultural setting. So we're not just slapping the laws on a modern context. Most of them would be unintelligible in our context if we tried to just do them as they're written. Yeah, I think the, you know, do not muzzle your ox while it's treading grain. I think that's a really helpful reference to point people to. This is Paul actually saying this law was not written for oxen. It was written for us. And so it's a very difficult, I think, position to hold that the Old Testament law is not in some way, shape or form helpful to and still authoritative for Christians. But what that means is not that we have to, you know, wear clothes of only one sort of thread or, you know, not eat, you know, certain foods or what have you. It means that we are recontextualizing that law for our time and space. And this doesn't mean we can just set aside any of the ones that don't make sense to us or that we don't like anymore or that are kind of, you know, sometimes people hear me talk about the law and they jump to this conclusion that, oh, Carmen just keeps the ones that still work in our culture, that aren't countercultural. It's like, no, that's not what I'm saying. Our cultural context changes and that means we need to think about how can I express this truth or this principle in this context. So one example that I like to use is the command from Deuteronomy that when you're building a new house, you should put a parapet around the roof. Now I've never heard the word parapet in real life, so I looked it up. This is another place where our translators have failed us. And it's like a low fence or kind of a railing around the edge of the roof. Well, most of us live in the West in houses with peaked roofs and we don't do anything up there except put new shingles on when the time comes. Maybe we climb up there to watch fireworks once a year. So for us to put a railing around the edge of our roof doesn't make any sense. It wouldn't spare anyone's life. This is coming out of a cultural context where the roofs were flat and there were lots of things that happened up there. You could dry fruits or winnow grain, or you could put your laundry out there to dry or you could do some cooking or you could take a nap. Like lots of things happened up there. And so it was important to, and this is the principle, when you're building a house, think about the safety of the people who will be using the house, whether they live there or whether they're guests. So for us to put that into practice today might mean putting a railing on our stairs or shoveling the sidewalks if we live in the Midwest or in Canada where it snows a lot, making sure that our sidewalks are even and if the tree roots have started to push a square of sidewalk up and there's now a lip where somebody could trip, that it's our responsibility to shave that down and make sure nobody is getting hurt on our property. Those are all practical ways of living out a command that at first glance seems irrelevant. Yeah. And I think we see that, you know, in modern day society, I mean, I work with a historic property and so, you know, you watch the codes change over time so that, you know, when you're redoing a historic property, you usually don't have to bring it up to code until you make major renovations. And then you're talking about things like handicap accessibility, which in an earlier era were not thought through. There was just no call for it, but today we have different standards and so the laws have changed and if you do major renovations, you're now putting those things in. And so you can not only see that these things are there in the spirit of our laws too. We have zoning codes and all those kinds of things, but we also see, yeah, we also see a revision of those laws to fit within a cultural context. And I just think that a lot of people don't necessarily recognize that. That we are stuck with the laws we've got and we don't really think about how those laws change. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. So when you, you know, 10 commandments are sort of a big deal in American culture, even just, you know, when we think about the standards of morality and the basic, you know, I think there was at least an era in which a lot of people would have said, well, what do you, what do you need to do to be a good person? And they would have pointed to the 10 commandments or something very similar like it. Did you see the news this week? Louisiana, the Louisiana governor two days ago signed into law that every public school classroom must display the 10 commandments and they have to be, the paper has to be at least 11 by 14 and it has to be a certain point font and it has to be the commands have to be central. They can't be peripheral to this. And this includes college classrooms of public universities. Every classroom, preschool on up through college has to have the 10 commandments. So when you say there was a time, I'm saying this is in that time in the South and Texas, the governor of Texas tried to do this last September, tried to put it into law, this exact same law and, or the same, I've seen the same summary of the law. Every classroom, certain size, certain font, every student needs to be able to see the poster from sitting in any seat in the classroom, et cetera. Like you can't put it behind the door. Yeah. That's crazy. So there is a definite, there's a definite minority in our country that thinks that if we could just reinstitute the 10 commandments, then our country would be back on track. Yeah. And I find it interesting just given the way you treat the 10 commandments, even just the way we've talked about those first three, right? And especially this idea of the third commandment being bearing the name. And I know I'm using the one, two, three, but I think people have more context for it that way. So when we think about, you know, the third commandment as bearing the name appropriately or bearing the name not in vain, do you find that as you're talking about this, that people's preconceived notions about the 10 commandments are a hindrance to them getting what you're really trying to convey and what the 10 commandments I think contextually really are trying to convey. Yes, I do. And I think we see evidence of it in the Louisiana governor trying to make this in every classroom, because what that presumes is that every single person should be obeying this law, that it's a universal moral prohibition, that it's timeless and placeless. And we clip it out of its context of deliverance of the Hebrews from Egypt and this particular covenant relationship. And this really works itself out with the name command. If you, if you, if you think of the command as prohibiting us from swearing, using God's name as a swear word, which is most how most people think of this, then anybody could do that no matter what their religious background is. And you might overhear some trucker use God's name in vain in that sense and think, Oh, he's breaking the 10 commandments. But I'm here to say that if that trucker is not a believer in Jesus or a, or Jewish person, then that trucker can't break this command because the way, as I understand it, this is telling the covenant people, you belong to me. So don't misrepresent me. So unless you are a follower of Jesus, you can't do it. It's

Like, yeah, I think because we've universalized it in our heads, we've missed the particularity of these instructions. And so by putting them on display in every public school classroom, I think we're actually missing the point. We've taken the mission of the people of God and we've put it on public display without telling people how to become part of the people of God. Right? Like God redeems them first, and then these are their missional orders. So I think it's backwards and misleading. Yeah. Whenever I hear people say, you know, oh, if only we could get back to the Ten Commandments, I usually say, but what you're really talking about is the back seven. Yeah. It's not the first three. The first three are extreme. That's the particularization of it. Now, arguably, they're all particular, but you get what I'm saying. I think most people are fine, maybe not with Sabbath. But, you know, thou shalt not kill. Yeah, we can all agree to that one. Right. Let's not steal. OK. But when we get to, but this is all under the auspices that we're all convinced that Jesus Christ is Lord and that God is triune, right? And then everybody's like, well, you know, Right. Yeah, probably not. Actually, seven of the Ten Commands, and with the traditional counting, are unconstitutional. So you just named two of them that we could all agree on and that our law supports. But but to tell someone that they have to honor their parents violates their personal freedoms. To tell people that they have to change their speech or only worship one God, that's unconstitutional. We have we have freedom of religion that this violates. So I find it really fascinating that public school classrooms in a in a country that is, by definition, multi multinational, multiethnic, multireligious, would even allow the posting of the Ten Commandments. Yeah, and it really doesn't do us any favors. I think it continually confuses what what the distinction between Christianity and maybe morality, something around that, you know, certainly the church and state distinction that we might make. But it it is rather confusing. It's not that I don't think anyone could learn anything from the Ten Commandments. Right. But at the same time, you know, being inspired by the Ten Commandments is different than recognizing the Ten Commandments as inspired and authoritative. I would far rather if there was going to be a law about something like this, I would far rather them be required to post a picture of the Israelites crossing the Sea of Reeds in every classroom. Like show them what sort of God this is. This is the kind the kind of God of the Bible is that is God is the the kind of God who will set oppressed people free and bring them to be in relationship with him. Like he doesn't tolerate oppression. I'd I'd rather that. And I feel like it might work better at least before telling people, OK, here are all the things you can't do, because the things you can't do is a very strange list without that context that it comes in. And we live in an age where people's biblical literacy is so low. They don't know the context. They don't know where the Ten Commandments are in the Bible, what's happened before and what happens after. And, yeah, so it's it's not as though I I am not in favor of evangelism. I'm very much in favor of evangelism and I want people to to learn scripture and to find out what it teaches. But I don't think posting the Ten Commandments in public actually does us a service in that regard. Right. It's like asking people who don't know Christ to bear the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Sure. It's just not going to happen. Yep. Something else has to happen prior to that. They can't work their way toward that. And so, yeah, it is sort of a cart before the horse sort of idea. I could imagine someone arguing that we should have Galatians five on the walls of every classroom. You know, the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience. And I could see kids just being like, OK, I'm going to really try to be loving and patient. But the whole point of the passage is that this is a naturally occurring fruit of of having a life that's given over to the Holy Spirit. That's right. Yeah. I want to clarify something because I think it's a really important clarification. I'd like to get your perspective on it. So when you were talking about the Ten Commandments, you said, you know, if a trucker is going to take the Lord's name in vain, right, and unless he's Jewish or a follower of Christ, it really couldn't happen. You said something like that. And so what it raises the question of, and I think this is a point of confusion that a lot of people have is, what's the difference between being a member of the covenant and part of God's covenant people versus being what we would usually refer to as saved? Is there a difference? You know, if you look at, and I'm thinking, you know, I'm kind of trying to channel Paul here, like Genesis 15, 6 is really central for Paul, right? But in the Old Testament, you didn't enter the covenant through faith. That's a New Testament thing. New Testament, you come in through faith. In the Old Testament, you come in by birth and circumcision if you're male. And if you're female by being the daughter of a circumcised male or the wife of a circumcised male or by having your son circumcised. So yes. Exactly. Yeah. Someone said to me recently that evangelical, the problem with evangelicals is they think everything is so teriological. Right. Like we use the word saved really freely. Yes. And we think everything is about salvation. And I realized that that had colored the way that I describe what's happening at Mount Sinai. God was, they're not obeying the law so that they could get saved. They're already saved. So I was being so teriological in focusing on that. And I do think that salvation is a real thing. But I think that the Bible gives broader emphasis to this idea of belonging to God's family. Yes. I would say that God redeems the people from Egypt. He collects or gathers this community around himself at Sinai. And then over time, we discover that not everyone who's part of this community is actually faithful to the covenant. Many people just cast aside these laws and go and do whatever is right in their own eyes, as it says in Judges. So I think Paul picks up on this in Romans 9 to 11 when he says not all Israel is Israel. This is kind of his point is that not everyone who's of Jewish descent is actually walking in a covenantally faithful way. And so he describes this remnant of faithful people who are the core of the believing community. And then he describes Gentiles being included in that core through faith in Jesus. So the reason I said Jewish or believing trucker is because I want to recognize that when we're reading the Old Testament, we're reading the Hebrew scriptures, which are the heir of the Jewish people. And so I think that they're still supposed to obey the covenant. But I don't think there's any way to be saved in the ultimate sense outside of faith in Jesus. And that's what I wanted to clarify. I think there's a difference between covenant belonging and salvation. There's a difference between the redemption at the Exodus and the forming of the covenant with the nation of Israel and with the descendants of Abraham who are by the flesh, let's say. Those can still be covenant people, but being covenant people didn't get you in, let's say, to heaven. Right. It didn't mean that you had this sort of, you know, you weren't saved in the way we normally think of it. It's hard to, it's hard to talk about. It's hard to talk about because they didn't even have a concept of an afterlife. Right. In the Old Testament. And so they weren't talking. This wasn't a question they were asking. It wasn't something that ever came up with. Generally, the framework seems to have been was if you're in the covenant, you're either faithful to the covenant or you're not faithful to the covenant. But you're still in the covenant. Right. And then you're cut off from the community. Yeah. Right. And so, and then even then you have like Ezekiel 36 where, you know, you're talking about the sort of gesturing toward the new covenant. Well, what does that involve? It involves a transformation of the heart. It's going to turn your heart of stone to a heart of flesh. It's going to write the laws on your heart so that you can keep them. And so it's, you know, you have this sort of very covenantal conceptualization of what this new thing is going to be. And there's a sealing aspect to it that I think we see worked out in the New Testament. But oftentimes I think we conflate covenant people with saved people. And I just think that's a sort of problematic that also comes into play when we're interpreting these Ten Commandments, especially today. Yeah. And I guess I would say we have the problem in evangelical circles of thinking only about personal individual salvation and completely neglecting the idea that I have become part of the covenant people. And so that's why I chose that language because I want us, I want to help recover the concept of belonging to God's family because that's so, it's so much a part of our identity and our vocation that we're in this together. Agreed.

And I think we see this, just for the folks who are listening, I actually think we see this, and you can please feel free to chime in, I think we see this very clearly in like 1 John. 1 John really does offer a series of marks that are going to demonstrate that you are part of the people of God. And those who did not love us have now gone out from us, and if they had loved us, they wouldn't have. You know, he's got this sort of idea of, there's still a proving out of who we are as the people of God that is conditioned on the way we live and the manner of life we display. And so, I don't think this is a foreign concept, even in the New Testament, that this covenant people that you're talking about have a set of characteristics, a certain manner of life that distinguishes them. James is all over this. Paul is all over this. And there are so many people... Let me ask you a serious question. 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Christians out there who are eager to get rid of the Old Testament law and come into grace, and I want to say, have you read Paul? Because every one of Paul's letters is, the first half is, now here's what's true about you. And the second half is, now here's how you should live as a result. And he gives very specific parameters for how our lives ought to reflect our identity as the people of God. And so I don't see the New Testament authors moving away from obedience in the least, but they have contextualized it. Yeah, very good. I want to get back to sort of bearing the name conversation, and I'm interested to hear, and maybe just give our listeners a sense of how you see bearing the name playing itself out throughout Scripture. You know, the Ten Commandments, some of them I think people, and obviously we have Jesus' statement in summary, you know, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself is the broad summary. But, you know, bearing the Lord's name in that command doesn't generally, people don't generally think of it as expanding beyond Exodus-Deuteronomy. So talk a little bit about where you, yeah, talk a little bit about that. It's really interesting. Yeah, okay, so let me say first that I was really inspired by Chris Wright's book, The Mission of God. I think he really gets this concept of bearing God's name. Ironically, he had not connected it with this command until he was asked to write the foreword for my book, Bearing God's Name, and then the two came together for him, and he's like, oh, it's right here, and I hadn't made that connection. So I'm working on a commentary on Exodus right now for Baker, and it'll be a couple years before it's out, but Chris Wright just came out with a commentary on Exodus for Zondervan, and he has a really great paragraph I'd love to read because I think it just sets up, it just helps lay a foundation for this theme. So he's talking about Exodus 19, verses 4 through 6. These are the first words that God says to the Israelites when they get to Mount Sinai. He calls them a treasured possession, kingdom of priests, holy nation. But he says verse 5 is expressed as a condition, if you obey me fully and keep my covenant. But it's very important to see what is not conditioned on Israel's obedience. This is not a condition of salvation, as if God had said to the Israelites in Egypt, if you obey my laws, then I will save you, and you can be my people. No, he had already saved them because they were already his people. Furthermore, obedience is not, in this context, a condition of blessing. For example, as it was in chapter 15, verse 26. Later, he cites Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. God will spell out some of the blessings that Israel could continue to enjoy if they remain within the boundaries of covenant loyalty and obedience. But in this specific text, God does not say, as I have sometimes heard it preached, if you obey my laws, then I will pour out lots of wonderful blessings on you. No, the emphasis here is not on Israel getting blessed, but Israel being a blessing by fulfilling their Abrahamic calling through priestly and holy presence in the midst of the nations. If you will obey, then you will be for me a kingdom of priests and holy nation. I came across this this week because I'm working in chapter 19 right now, and I just loved how he put it. In fact, I had to change what I had written for my commentary. I was like, oh, whoops, I just did that. I just said if they obey, they'll be blessed, and that's not what the text says. Yeah, it's such an easy connection to make, though, because we think of it in those terms. But once you get into it and really deeply understand what's going on, I mean, it sort of activates for me what you just read, reminds me of Deuteronomy 4, you know, that the keeping of the law is going to be their wisdom in the eyes of the nations. It doesn't speak to blessing of Israel. It speaks to, oh, my gosh, the nations are going to notice this wisdom, and they're going to come running. It's a very, yeah, Chris Wright, mission of God approach to this. So, fantastic. Yeah, so keep going. Where do you see this? You asked me where the theme is. So, when I was working on my dissertation, I sat down and read through the entire Bible. Okay, I didn't do it in one sitting, but I read through the entire Bible just looking for any echoes of this theme, and I found it in almost every book of the canon, Old and New Testament. So, there are lots of places we could look, but I'll just pick out a few passages that I think are really well loved or commonly heard. So, one would be Numbers chapter 6, where Moses prescribes the priestly blessing that Aaron will pronounce over the people. And it's the one we've heard in church, no matter what denomination you've heard this in some sense. The Lord bless you and keep you and make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. That blessing. We don't usually hear the context of it. And in verse 27, it says, And so you shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them. So, there's the actual moment of branding where the name is being put on them. And it's being conferred. We don't hear it in our English translations because it says Lord, but it's Yahweh. May Yahweh bless you and keep you. May Yahweh make his face shine on you. So, the divine name is pronounced three times over them, and it's this moment of verbal branding, basically, that leads to everything else. So, hop, skip, and a jump to Psalm 23, which is such a well-loved psalm. But I don't know how many people stop to think about what they're saying or what they're hearing. In Psalm 23, verse 4, nope, not verse 4, sorry, verse 3, He guides me along the right paths for his name's sake. So, have you ever stopped to think, wait, what does his name's sake have to do with me being on the right paths? So, these paths of righteousness, the doing the right thing, is for the sake of God's reputation. His reputation is at stake based on how I live. And we could, I don't know when this episode is going to come out, but in the week that we're recording this, there have been three major pastors who've had to step down from their ministries because of egregious sexual sin. And that is national news, and that's an example of God's namesake, God's reputation being tarnished. I'm seeing memes created by people who are not believers who are warning people about going to church because that's where pedophilia happens. It's so heartbreaking when the people who bear God's name fail to bear it well and instead harm people who are under their care. So, that's one example. I think it's 2 Chronicles 7, 14. Is it second or first? 2 Chronicles 7, 14 is the people who are called by my name, right? Yeah, yeah, yep. So, 2 Chronicles 7, 14, if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, then I will hear from heaven and heal their land. And I had never really stopped to say, what do you mean called by my name? Nobody calls me Yahweh. I don't call anybody Yahweh. Like, what does that mean? And in Hebrew, it's if my people over whom my name has been proclaimed will pray, then I will hear them. Because there's this covenant relationship. If the people of God pray to God, God

with the exile is that it profaned God's name, that the people who bore God's name went into exile, signaled to the nations that Yahweh was unable to protect them, that he was impotent. And so although they had to leave the land of Israel as a consequence of covenant unfaithfulness, that's not what it looked like to the nations. And the nations were making wrong conclusions about Yahweh, oh, these are the people of Yahweh, and yet they had to go out of his land. That says something about Yahweh being a minor deity who can't hold his own against Marduk of the Babylonians. And so God says that he will wash them and bring them back to the land. He's going to sanctify them so that his name will be re-consecrated. And I think this is what Jesus is talking about when he teaches his disciples how to pray. And he says, hallowed be your name. And when I was a kid learning the Lord's Prayer, I think that part of the prayer seemed kind of redundant to me. Like, well, of course, God's name is holy. Like, why would we have to pray to have it made holy? God's name would be the holiest thing there is. But this is tapping into this biblical theme of the people of God bear his name and they have profaned his name by being unfaithful to the covenant. So Jesus, by praying this, is actually committing himself to living in a covenantally faithful way. That's how God's name is going to be hallowed. It's the only way it can be hallowed is when the people who bear it bear it well. And so this isn't just a throwaway phrase. This is actually the heart of Jesus' own approach to his life. When you think about it, so I'm working on a book right now on Christian discernment, and this is one of the areas that I'm really looking at, trying to find these narratives where biblical characters make decisions and why they make the decisions the way that they do. One of the ones I've been looking at, Genesis 14, Abram comes back from battling the kings and the king of Sodom is going to give him these rewards. And what does he say? He says, no, I'm not going to do that because I swore to the Lord that I would not take anything from you so that you could not claim that I'm the one who made Abram rich. Now, it doesn't, as I recall, it doesn't mention the name. It doesn't have that specific language, but very similar concept. Abraham is in that moment, I'd hesitate to say protecting God's reputation, but in some way, shape, or form, he's leaning into it and saying, no, no, no, I can't allow you to even have the opportunity to suggest that God did not establish me in all that I do. This has to be of the Lord and I can't take anything. And you see a very similar situation, although not exactly the same in the rejection of God as king when the Israelites ask for a king over them. You know, you have these dynamics in which God is the, again, I hesitate to say victim, but he is the one who takes the injury in some way, shape, or form and then has to go about rehabbing all of that. You know, so he rolls through Saul. He comes to David. Like this is how that sort of cycle seems to work as the Israelites reject God or refuse to honor his name in an appropriate fashion, the name that they bear. Now God ultimately has to act to reestablish that reputation that he's had. And so it's a really fantastic framework, I think, for understanding what's going on in the Old Testament and in the New. This idea of bearing God's name and doing it well and faithfully is just crucial for the way we understand scripture. Yeah. And there, you know, we could then cross into later in the New Testament. We see it pop up so many times when when Saul has his experience on the road to Damascus with the risen Lord. Ananias is told to pray for him. And he's like, wait, what? I'm not going to go touch this guy. He's a persecutor of the of the church. And the Lord tells Ananias, Paul is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. So there is, again, this sort of name bearing idea in Peter. We have the statement, if you suffer for being a Christian, praise God that you bear that name. There's this sense of representation. There's a representative role for believers. We are the people who bear God's name. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really fascinating concept. I mean, I love the idea of it. And I really appreciate just your treatment of the Old Testament as a whole. I think you're in this book. What you do is you make Old Testament theology extremely accessible for people. It's really fantastically and easily written and a really fantastic book. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Before I before we end up here, I'd like to ask my guests one final question. And so be interested to see how you answer it. What topic do you think that Christians should be thinking about today so that they can be and make disciples more faithfully? The first thing that comes to my mind is that we need to break out of our thought bubbles that the algorithms put us in and that our neighborhoods put us in and our institutions put us in. And we need to listen to a wider range of voices and learn from the global church. I have been so blessed to learn from brothers and sisters in Christ around the world who have a way of of being able to see past my blind spots and show me things that I've missed in the scriptures because because their cultural context is asking different questions and having different hang ups. And if all I got was from Twitter, I would think the whole world is on fire about this one issue. And so by reading the global church, I'm like, oh, good. The whole thing isn't crazy. There's sanity out there, at least a different kind of crazy. That's good. So one of the resources that I've come to appreciate is called EveryVoiceKingdomDiversity.org. It's a database of biblical studies resources from around the world. So if you're studying Exodus and you want to know what is the global church saying about Exodus, you can type in Exodus and it'll show you African resources, Latin American, Asian, Eastern European, whatever resources. So I'm excited about that because I want to keep keep trying to step outside of the bubble that I live in. Gotcha. Very cool. I love that answer. Yeah, really good. Well, Carmen, I really appreciate you being back on the show. Obviously, I love your work and resonate with everything you're doing in Old Testament theology. And just thanks for doing it. I think it's a noble work and necessary work and will benefit the church greatly as we continue to look back at the Old Testament and understand it so that we can better understand the New Testament, really. So, yeah, thanks for having me back. Absolutely. Good to be here. Everyone, we will catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to LifeAudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. No matter what you're going through, you are not alone. Sis, if you've experienced pain in your father-daughter relationship, I want you to know that you are loved and seen. I'm Kia Stevens, host of the Hope for Women with Father Wounds podcast. And I created my show to help you exchange your father wounds for the love of God the Father. Join me for encouragement, wisdom, and scripture. Just search Hope for Women with Father Wounds on LifeAudio.com or wherever you get your podcasts.