Thoughts on Exodus 20 and 2 Corinthians 11

Today’s reading: Exodus 20; 2 Corinthians 11

There is a TON to pick from in today’s reading, between the 10 commandments, God’s presence on the mountain, and with Paul’s words to the Corinthians… But my goal is to keep these readably short each day, so I’m just picking one shorter thing from each chapter to talk about, and if I am able to keep doing this for years to come, maybe God will put something else on my heart next time I hit Exodus or 2 Cor.

Thoughts on Exodus 20

From Exodus 20 this morning, I want to challenge any follower of Jesus who is reading this not to bear the Lord’s name in vain.

We, in the Western church, have dramatically dumbed this command down to something like, “Don’t use ‘God’ as an expletive,” as though it is the three-letter English word “God” which Yahweh is really concerned about here. Before I go on, let me clarify, that I do think this is good and respectful to treat God with enough respect and reverence that we don’t use Him or references to Him as expletives, but that’s not what Exodus 20 has anything to do with.

In the ancient world, your name was important because it spoke to the essence of who you were. In the spiritual world, they believed (as many animistic practitioners still do today) that knowing the name of a spirit or deity gave you some level of power over that deity. So when God talks about taking the “name of God” in vain, He is not talking about vocalized syllables, but He is talking about who He is in essence.

On top of that, “take” here is not a reference to speaking, but to carrying or bearing, and given that God has just led them out of Egypt to be his people, a nation who will bear His name, this makes a lot of sense as a command.

So what God is commanding here is not that we remove a word from our vocabulary in certain situations, but that we do not let our identification with the Lord be for nothing. He called Israel to be different from the other nations, to reflect His holiness and glory out into the world, and we, in Christ, are called to do the same. We are not to bear the name of Christ for nothing. Our lives should look different as they reflect the reality of the power with which we are aligned and to whom we belong.

So if you consider yourself a follower of Jesus, let’s take this command seriously and not bear the title of Christian to no effect, but live it out in word and deed as conduits of God’s love and grace to a lost and hurting world.

Thoughts on 2 Corinthians 11

Paul says something here that too many people today, including way too many Christians, seem to have forgotten,

“for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”

A lot of modern Christians, especially in the West, seem to have lost touch with the fact that there is a very real spiritual world around us, and it is not a place of all rainbows and butterflies. The Bible describes a spiritual war waging around us, a war specifically of truth, and humanity is the field of battle.

God desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4). Truth is an integral part of saving faith because Jesus Himself is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one can get to the Father except through Him (John 14:6).

We live in a time and culture where truth is under attack. Truth is becoming more about perception or desire than about reality, and we would be foolish to turn a blind eye to the spiritual implications of that.

We picture God’s enemy as a scary, evil-looking creature that utters obvious lies and tries to get people to murder each other, so when a deception comes along dressed a little more subtly than that, we accept it easily enough. We neglect the incredibly important fact that even the satan disguises himself as an angel of light, not to scare, but to deceive; not to frighten, but to just lead ever so slightly astray. And this should scare us enough to pay attention to Paul’s warning and keep alert.

Truth is the bedrock of our faith, and each smooth-talking lie we buy into leads us, individually, and as a church, just a little further off the mark, and if he can deceive us little by little, like a frog in a pot of boiling water, until we have veered from the path entirely, he has no need to scare us by possession or get us playing with the occult. In that case, he has already won the battle without us even realizing.

We cannot neglect this truth, that truth itself is what is at stake in this fight, and Paul says that the deceiver does not work so obviously as you might assume, but disguises himself as an angel of light. So no matter how “good” a person may seem, no matter how interesting or charismatic they may be, no matter how many instagram, YouTube, or TikTok followers they may have, their words and their “truths” have to be weighed against the truth of God’s word, or we are just giving ground to the enemy in the most important battle that has ever been fought.