Lent
is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of
life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the third:
You
shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will
not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
Exodus
20:7
We
might no longer believe in Baal and Yamm and Mot, in Zeus and Poseidon and
Hades, even in Yahweh, but we all still invoke our gods. If you don’t believe
me, pick up a newspaper, listen to a politician speak, scroll through social
media. We all invoke our Great Liberators and our Demonic Forces — and, viewed from
different sides, one man’s hope is another woman’s enemy.
Recently,
US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke out against the weaponizing of
the Bible to push bigotry and discrimination. And at the heart of the matter,
don’t make wrongful use of Yahweh’s name, in many ways shorthand for his
character. Don’t claim that God is on the side of everyone who agrees with you,
and opposed to everyone with whom you disagree. Don’t withhold the hope of
freedom to others, not on the terms of your understanding but on the terms of
Yahweh’s enduring record of setting people free.
Yahweh
will set free whoever calls on his name. And he’ll set them free from the thing
they need to be set free from, not the thing I think they need to be set free
from.
In
what way might you be misrepresenting God?
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