Learning Not to Blaspheme
August 2, 2006
Pastor Matt Black
Midweek Service
Leviticus 24:10-23
Discipleship: What are the Ten Commandments of God’s moral law?
(Quote them.)
Introduction: Open your Bible tonight to Leviticus 24. Tonight we are going to be taking about Blasphemy. We come once again this evening to a passage of Scripture that ought to be a great rebuke to all of us. Many of God’s people own blaspheme God’s name daily. We claim to love God and honor His Name, but what we are going to learn tonight will I think open your eyes to the fact that most of God’s people indeed are blasphemers. They use God’s name in vain. This is the second part of the message entitled: “Learning Not to Blaspheme”
Let’s
read Leviticus 24:10-23, “10And the son of an Israelitish woman, whose father was an Egyptian,
went out among the children of
We come to this passage in Leviticus 24, and we ask ourselves, why is this relevant to us today? This is the Law of God, and all mankind is under God’s moral Law because it is a reflection of God’s character. No man can be saved by keeping the Law, but the Law is given to us to condemn us, and to show us our need of Christ and of hearing the Gospel. That’s exactly what Romans 3 tells us. Turn over there to verse 19. Paul says, “Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. 20 Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.”
This passage tells us several things:
i. Stop people from boasting about their goodness.
ii. Show all the world their guilt
iii. And to show people who think they are without sin that they have plenty, they are just not aware of it. So they need the Law to pinpoint their sin, “for by the law is the knowledge of sin.”
i. The Law is given for “every mouth” to be stopped.
ii. The Law is given that “all the world may become guilty before God”.
iii. The cannot justify any one: “no flesh” will be justified by the Law in his sight, which is the same thing as saying that every human being on the earth is under the Law and condemned by the Law.
Whatever the Law says, it says to all of us. Whenever we stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ, every single mouth will be silent.
Guilt is Objective
The point is, you cannot deny the reality of your guiltiness before God in this area of blasphemy. Guilt before God is objective. It does not matter if you feel guilty, you are guilty the moment you break God’s Law, or the moment you leave undone what God tells you to do. Let’s say you break God’s holy Sabbath. You stay home from church because you’ve had a hard week. You don’t feel guilty, but before God you are a guilty man.
Guilty before a Holy God
Let’s bring this understanding around to our text tonight. Perhaps all of your life, before and after your salvation, you have been a blasphemer. You have not felt guilty up until this point. But you have been guilty before a holy God all this time. Tonight it is my goal to present to you your guilt. By God’s grace you mind, will, and emotions, will all be joined together in condemning you of your guilt. You say, I don’t want to feel guilty. I don’t like it. It is important that you do understand that you are guilty, that you feel that you are guilty, and that you believe that you are guilty, being convinced by the Word of God through the Holy Spirit. Why is this so important? Because if you don’t think blasphemy or breaking any other of God’s Laws is sin, then you will never change. Without repentance—seeing your sin as God sees it, there is no change. Period.
Though the man’s mother’s first name (Shelomith),
her family’s name (Debri), and the Israelite tribe
she belonged to (Dan) are clearly delineated, it is made clear that this man
was not fully Jewish. His father was from
The Responsibility of the Parents
It is interesting to note the responsibility of the parents in the account.
The Son
The mother is named, but the perpetrating son is not. One commentator has said “that one who has the audacity to curse the name of God is not worthy of having his own name in the [Bible].”[2]
The Father
Neither is the father mentioned, which may mean that the father
remained in
The Mother
What is significant is the detailed ancestry of the
mother. One commentator said this, “The mention of the mother’s name and
pedigree would identify her for future generations, and remind the mothers of
Application: Mothers, do you realize that most of us in this congregation because we heard our mothers blaspheming God? How many of you say “O my” and use one of God’s attributes to express surprise?
Parents are Responsible
The mother in this passage then, bears an enormous responsibility and therefore not only lost her son, but the irrevocable loss to her reputation. Sadly in this case, the warning of Exodus 34:7 finds fulfillment: God “will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” This doesn’t mean that the parents’ iniquity caused the son to sin; it simply states the obvious: the sins of the parents bring horrible consequences and generational habits of sin. Children are sinful on their own—they don’t need Mom and Dad to teach them, but Mom and Dad do teach them many sinful things.
Each Child is Ultimately Responsible
Though many times God as a form of justice (you reap what you sow) simply allows sin to bread from parents to children as a just recompense for sin. The parents are then certainly guilty for providing an environment for iniquity, but the children bear ultimate responsibility for their own sin. “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16). Therefore, God does not impute iniquity to children for the sins of the parents. Children are born with the propensity to sin, and by nature are sinners. If a child did not in and of himself have the ability to sin, he would not sin, no matter how various the enticements were. God justly delineates that each person is responsible for his own sin, regardless of parentage.
Perhaps this young man used this as an excuse.
Perhaps he felt like a foreigner in his own country. He was probably
treated like those Samaritans who inhabited northern
This man really had no reason to blaspheme God. He
was treated fairly under the Mosaic Law. In various places of the Old
Testament, God makes special provision for foreigners in
The Lord’s instructions were clear, but the question must be asked: why would the Israelites need to put the man in custody in the first place since they already possessed the law’s prohibition against blasphemy? Moses gave the Lord’s command concerning this to the people back in Exodus 22:28, “Thou shalt not revile [God], nor curse the ruler of thy people”. It seems clear then, that by the time of Leviticus 24, no one had yet offended in the way of blaspheming God, and therefore the man was put in custody. So this guy is so much like us—we have always known we shouldn’t take God’s name in vain, but we do it anyway!
Regardless of knowing the Law, God says his law is written on our hearts. We call this the “conscience”. The word conscience is broken down like this: con means “with” and science means “knowledge”. There for conscience means “with knowledge”. We do not sin against God ignorantly but knowingly, “with knowledge”!
Turn over to Romans 2:14-15. Here we read that every person ever created has had God’s Law written on their heart. Let’s look at it, “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: 15 Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another)…”
So we’ve seen the setting of blasphemy…
Whatever brought about the hostilities this day, the man’s guilt was clear; the witnesses were to “lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him” (verse 14), and the sentence was to be carried out corporately: “all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the LORD, shall be put to death” (verse 16).
Verse 15 tells us that God’s way of dealing with blasphemy was without respect of persons: “Whosoever [DOESN’T MATTER WHO YOU ARE] curseth his God shall bear his sin”. God’s name is so holy, that it must be revered among all people regardless of stature or pedigree. Therefore if either an Israelite or foreigner were to blaspheme the Name, the punishment was capital punishment—death by stoning. [7]
This young man’s death was a warning to the nation of
What was the Crime?
Regardless of the man’s Egyptian heritage, his Israelite mother would have know that the Third Commandment forbids the taking of God’s name in vain: “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain” (Exodus 20:7, cf. Deuteronomy 5:11). This commandment has two areas of meaning:
1. A person may not swear falsely by an oath taken in the name of God.
2. It also may mean that a person may not lightly use the
name of Yahweh under any circumstance.”[8]
The entire context of Leviticus affirms this commandment; God’s name represents
all that God is, and on that basis What does Leviticus
22:32 say? “Neither shall ye profane my holy name; but I will be
hallowed among the children of
The Jews practice
It was not at all common to invoke the name of Jehovah among the Jews for fear of violating the Lord’s name, but to instead use a euphemism for His name. This was a value assessment on the very name of God; the Name was so infinitely precious that they dreaded even to pronounce it. So guarded was the name of God that some of the ancient scribes, when coming upon the name YHWH in the copying of the Old Testament writings, would purify themselves through bathing, change their clothes, and then inscribe the personal name of God. Then after they had written it, they would take another bath and change their clothes again. The recording of the Name is what is called a Tetragrammation (the four letters YHWH). No one knows the exact pronunciation of God’s covenant name. As Rooker states:
The Jews were fearful of violating this very passage. They made it impossible to take God’s name in vain by never uttering the name of God. They simply avoided usage of God’s name altogether. Thus Jewish avoidance of uttering God’s name is based on this passage.[10]
The Jews took a legalistic approach. A lost person could have fulfilled their practice. What we need to do is understand who God is, and what blasphemy is, and then we will stop blaspheming because we know and love God.
So the Sentence was Severe, it was Universal, it was Just. It was also reasonable.
To Blaspheme is to Use God as Our Puppet
To blaspheme is to usurp the authority of heaven as our own. To use the name of God for our one’s own purposes is to use God as a puppet—to seize the authority in His name for our own end. When God made the promise of a son to Abraham, he swore by Himself, since there was no higher authority (Hebrews 6:13). So to use God’s name is to usurp the highest authority that there is. To blaspheme is to say as Satan did, “I will be like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:14).
To Blaspheme is to Refuse to Bow your Knee to Jesus Christ.
In Isaiah 45:23, God reiterates His authority by an oath to Himself: “I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear [allegiance].” The Apostle Paul repeats this for the churches in applying the authority of “the Name” specifically to Jesus: “God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: 10That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; 11And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9b-11). It is important to note that the “me” of Isaiah 45 (the Person of God) is replaced with “the name” of Philippians 2, and it is here clear that the person and name of God are one and the same, both instances encompassing the very authority of Almighty God. To bow at the Name of Christ is to bow before God.
So to use God’s name for our own purposes, mindlessly or blatantly is using the Almighty God as our puppet. It is rebellion, high treason against heaven. It is selling out God for your own lusts.
Application: You might say, well, I don’t mean to use God’s name in vain. What you are actually saying is that you’ve never thought it through. God’s name has been of very little value to you, so it never shocked or surprised you to blaspheme. Perhaps God is even awakening you right now to the shame of your sin. You have defiled the Holy Name of God. In the OT time, that would have been a capital offense.
The Transfer of Guilt from the Hearers to the Blasphemer
In this instance, all who heard the blasphemy were to “lay their hands upon his head” (Leviticus 24:14). By doing so “the hearers or witnesses were to throw off from themselves the blasphemy which they had heard, and return it upon the head of the blasphemer”[11] so that they might be cleansed. They were in essence saying, Your “blood be upon [your] own head; we hereby clear ourselves of all participation in [your] guilt.”[12] Remarkably, the only record of the laying on of hands in a death penalty case is of the blasphemer only.
After this symbolic shunning of the man and his sin and the transfer of guilt from the hearers to the blasphemer, the stoning would take place. It is not clear exactly the manner and process used in this type of execution, however “some manner of keeping the condemned individual from escaping was used (as documented by witnesses, and participants, over the centuries), ranging from being thrown before the stoning from an elevation of some sort that caused incapacitating injury, to being tied to a post (or simply tied hand and foot), to being buried with just the head and shoulders left above ground, to just being surrounded by a large crowd of stone throwers in an enclosed area. Unlike most other forms of capital punishment, stoning had no specific executioner, “all the congregation shall stone.”[13]
If the stoning fell short of death for the offender, his sentence was to be completed by hanging, and his body taken down by sunset (Deuteronomy 21:21-23). Most of the time though, the criminal was buried beneath the stones, which served as a graphic reminder of the consequence of blasphemy.
So we have seen the Setting of Blasphemy, the Sentence of Blasphemy, and now we see…
Turn over to Matthew 12. This passage makes it clear that the heart will show whether or not you know the Lord. “Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit. 34O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. 35A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things. 36But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. 37For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned” (Matthew 12:33-37; cf. Luke 6:43-45). Christ pinpoints the root of blasphemy: the heart is bad; it is unregenerate. Christ expands the law of blasphemy here and broadens it not only to careless or derogatory words concerning God, but “every idle word that men shall speak” will come under the judgment, not of Moses or the people of God, but God Himself “in the day of judgment.”
Turn over to Colossians 2:8. Paul further illumines this truth echoing the Lord’s teaching that words reveal the condition of the soul: “But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. 9Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; 10And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Colossians 3:8-10). In other words, a regenerate person will not attack the beauty of God, but reflect it.
Paul also explains in Ephesians 4, that the believer must “That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; 23And be renewed in the spirit of your mind” (verses 22-23). Paul goes on to say, “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth” (v.29). Paul is not simply arguing that we cease from wickedness of speech; he is repeating what Christ first said, that foul speech is an issue of the heart.
Foul Speech Reveals the Kingdom to Which We Belong
Foul speech reveals which Kingdom one belongs to, for
Jesus said, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see
the
Examples of 21st Century Blasphemy
That being said, taking God’s name in vain is quite a common occurrence among the inhabitants of the earth in the twenty-first century. As has already been established, Christ is set to judge every idle and careless word. Those words certainly include the taking of His name in vain. Certainly various phrases have been brought into almost every language on the earth.
1. Interjections of God’s Name.
The interjection “Oh my _____” is quite universal. In the blank people will fill in either one of the names of the Almighty (Jesus, God, Lord, Christ), or since some are shocked by this, the Name is changed to a euphemism (Gee or Jeepers—for Jesus, Gosh or Golly—for God, etc.).
2. Interjections of God’s Attributes.
To try to soften this blasphemy even further, God’s attributes and works are taken in vain. It is important to note that God cannot be separated from His attributes, neither can He be separated from His works: both reveal Who He is. If one defames God’s attributes or works, he defames God. In the same blank many, including Christians will fill in an attribute or work of God such as “heavens” (the place of God’s throne), “word” (the revelation of God, also the Logos), stars (God’s creation), mercy (an attribute of God), darn (for damnation), and heck (for the place of eternal punishment). One of the most used attributes of God in cursing is His holiness. Often heard is “holy ____.” In the blank might be: cow, mackerel, smoke, and a number of other objects.
These expressions are blasphemous to God, and the unbeliever or Christian who uses these expressions is “forgetting God” (“The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God” Psalm 9:17).
Conclusion: So tonight we’ve seen the setting of blasphemy. Is your life the setting of blasphemy? We’ve seen the Sentence of blasphemy—it is severe! Do you take it as seriously as God does? We then saw the Solution for blasphemy. Are you a believer? Is Christ the Name above all names in your life?
Closing Hymn: 619 There is Joy, Joy, Joy
[1] C.F. Keil and F. Delitzsh. Biblical
Commentary of the Old Testament (trans. James Martin;
[3] George Bush. Notes, Critical and Practical of the Book of Leviticus (Minneapolis: James and Klock Publishing Co., 1976), 245.
[5] R. K. Harrison. Leviticus: An Introduction and Commentary, The Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1980), 221.
[6] Harold M. Wiener. “Stranger and Sojourner (in the Old Testament)” in International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, 2003 ed.