V.

THE THIRD WORD.

LECT, V,

The claim.

Personal
Name.

THE HOLY NAME.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that ta name in vain.-ExOD. xx. 7.

IN

the first commandment, Jehovah ass absolute right over our hearts. brook no rival. In the second, He ref submit to the human intellect. Human tions can only be degradations; He has Himself. What then remains to be c In this third commandment, He claims ence both in spirit and form, a rever cording to His Name. "Holy and rev His Name."

A name indicates personality. Ta Concordances and you will find that stands for all the revealed things of G will, His character, His power, His glory. always refers to one special Name, "J

the name in which He revealed Himself to LECT, V. Moses. "Whose Name alone is Jehovah."

The name Jehovah is of wonderful signifi- Its force. cance. "He who exists alone," or the SelfExistent, the God of all flesh, the Father of all Spirits. Observe that the one thing it forces home is the thought of personality. Jehovah

is the one All-embracing life from whom and by whom are all things. It is meant to penetrate the human mind with a sense of living will, and of a perfect Intelligence conscious of all things, and ordering all things.

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Jehovah was to have no external symbol, but yet He must be realized. His was a Presence which was not to be put by." That name proclaimed at Sinai to trembling Israel stood over the nation like the Shekinah over the tabernacle, a shapeless sign of a real Invisible Presence, and it was to be recognized by the spirit in thought and acknowledged by the body in word and deed.

There is even an anxiety, if I may so speak, on the part of God to penetrate the mind of Israel and fill it with the conviction of His hovering Presence. He lays down a law that the name of a false god should not even be mentioned. False gods were no gods, and they were to have no name as they had no reality. Jehovah alone

Jehovah

anxious to

be known.

LECT, V.

had the right to a name. Then in the administration of public affairs He so acts that even the greatest leaders of Israel, Moses and Samuel, Saul and David, are evidently only the agents of His enduring purpose. It is Jehovah who is King. Further, His court, which is the centre of national life and rights and privileges, is that One Temple "which He had chosen to put His Name there," and whose worship, though compulsory, was yet guarded by every kind of restriction suggestive of unworthiness on the part of the worshipper, and of holiness inexpressible on the part of Him who condescended thus to dwell between the cherubim of the mercy-seat. Divisions of persons and things into clean and unclean, linen which must be white, and washings to make pure; priests who were mediatorial, a hedge of divinity," and sacrifices minutely and exhaustively varied; prayers that must be purified by incense, and a holy of holies whose sacred floor could only be trodden by human feet once in the year, in which the national sins were confessed, and the national forgiveness receivedsuch were some of the processes, full of ideas and habits, by which Jehovah sought to penetrate Israel with a familiar consciousness of Himself, whilst yet he surrounded and guarded His Name with majesty and awe.

It

The con

trast of the

Creed of

All this anxiety is indeed most suggestive of LECT. V. the vital importance of the subject which calls it forth. Evidently Jehovah, for His own sake and for the world's sake, longs to be known and reverenced as the "Holy One of Israel." But this very fact forces on us a contrast. reminds us of that creed, born in this nineteenth century, which has for its formula, "God is unknown and unknowable." Never mind that it is a formula essentially self-contradictory, seeing that whilst it proclaims God to be unknowable it yet professes to know that He is such an one as cannot be known! Let that pass; we know what it aims at. Realize the contrast.

On the one hand, there is a Name filled with self-manifestations before which men are to bow in deepest worship, which indeed was to be a Name growing from less to more in human knowledge through those manifestations, developing at last into that sum of all Divine knowledge, the "Name" of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with the Incarnate One as its human expression.

On the other hand, there is an "Unknowable" God, the exact negation of Jehovah from every point of view, refusing all relationships, claiming no reverence, exercising no influence, of whom nothing can be, nothing ever will be, known.

Agnosti

cism.