Devotional 114: The Lawfulness of Oaths: Calling God to Witness

The Confession Read

A lawful oath is a part of religious worship, wherein, upon just occasion, the person swearing solemnly calleth God to witness what he asserteth, or promiseth, and to judge him according to the truth or falsehood of what he sweareth.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 22, Section 1

Introduction

When a man lifts his right hand in a courtroom and swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, he is doing something far weightier than he perhaps knows. He is not merely promising to be honest, nor merely acknowledging that the law will punish him if he lies. He is calling the God of heaven and earth into that room as a witness, and he is inviting that same God to sit as his judge. The words may have grown thin from repetition, but the act itself is as old as the patriarchs and as serious as the judgment seat of Christ. The confession we take up this morning does not let us forget it. An oath, it declares, is a part of religious worship. We leave behind now our long study of the twenty-first chapter, of religious worship and the Sabbath day, and we enter a new chapter of the Confession, the twenty-second, which treats of lawful oaths and vows. The two chapters are not strangers to one another; they belong together, for an oath is itself an act of worship, and that is the very first thing the Divines teach us about it. When we surveyed the parts of worship in the fifth section of the last chapter, oaths and vows appeared at the end of the list, tucked in almost as an afterthought among fasting and thanksgiving. Now they receive a chapter of their own, and we are summoned to consider how a man may swear, and how he may bind himself, without sinning against the God he invokes. The doctrine is anything but remote. We live in a world saturated with oaths: the courtroom, the wedding altar, the oath of office, the membership vow before a congregation. The question is not whether we shall meet with oaths, but whether we shall understand what we are doing when we do, and whether we shall do it as worship rather than as mere form. The Confession answers that question in a single tightly drawn sentence. Notice first the claim with which the sentence opens: an oath is a part of religious worship. Not a legal device, not a civic custom, not a relic of a credulous age, but worship, an act by which the creature renders homage to the Creator. For to swear is to acknowledge, in the most solemn way open to a man, that God is, that He knows all things, that He is present in that very place, that He is the God of truth, and that He is the Judge who will not hold the liar guiltless. The man who swears confesses with his lips the omniscience, the omnipresence, the veracity, and the justice of the Almighty, and a confession like that is worship in its purest form. The profane man may rattle off an oath without a thought, but the thing itself remains what it is, and God is not mocked by the thoughtlessness of the man who invokes Him. Then the sentence lays out the two great kinds of oaths. There is the oath by which a man asserts something, declaring what is true about a past fact or a present state of affairs, the witness who swears that he saw what he saw. And there is the oath by which a man promises something, binding his future conduct to his word, the bridegroom who swears to be faithful, the officer who swears to defend the constitution. The Confession's single word asserteth covers the first, and its single word promiseth covers the second. Both are lawful, both are solemn, and both bring a man into the very presence of God, which now demands our careful attention.

Scripture Foundation

The foundation of the doctrine is laid with a command. As Moses pressed the law upon Israel in the plains of Moab, he charged them, "Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name" (Deuteronomy 6:13), and again in the same book, "Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God; him shalt thou serve, and to him shalt thou cleave, and swear by his name" (Deuteronomy 10:20). Here is the striking thing: swearing by the name of God is not permitted merely, it is commanded, standing in the same verse as fearing and serving and cleaving, as though the oath were of a piece with the deepest duties of the covenant. The Hebrew phrase behind "swear by his name" is yishava bishmo, and the verb shava, to swear, belongs to a family of words that clusters around the number seven. To swear was, in the vivid idiom of the Hebrews, to seven oneself, to bind oneself with a sevenfold completeness before God. The oath is not a light thing; it is a man's whole self, gathered up and pledged, in the name of the God whose truth is the ground of every promise that can be trusted. And the manner of the oath is spelled out by Jeremiah: "And thou shalt swear, The LORD liveth, in truth, in judgment, and in righteousness; and the nations shall bless themselves in him, and in him shall they glory" (Jeremiah 4:2). The formula is the ancient one, "the LORD liveth," for to swear by the living God is to place one's word under the guarantee of the God who is life itself. But observe the three adverbs, for they are the soul of the matter. The oath is to be sworn in truth, for the God invoked is the God who cannot lie, and the man who calls upon Him must speak what is so and not what is convenient. It is to be sworn in judgment, with a considered mind, understanding the gravity of what he is doing, not rashly, not in heat, not before he has weighed his words. And it is to be sworn in righteousness, in a matter that is itself good and just, for a man may not call God to witness a wicked design. These three adverbs are the very qualities the Confession folds into its phrase "upon just occasion" and its closing reference to "the truth or falsehood" of what is sworn. The oath, rightly taken, is an evangel; it testifies to the watching world that there is a God of truth. The New Testament does not silence this teaching; it deepens it. The author of Hebrews lays bare the inner logic of every oath: "For men verily swear by the greater: and an oath for confirmation is to them an end of all strife" (Hebrews 6:16). The Greek word is horkos, and the argument is as clean as a geometric proof. When two men contend and no human witness can settle the matter, they appeal to one greater than both, they call upon God. An oath, therefore, is a confession that God is above all men, that He sees all, and that He will judge all; that is why it is the end of strife, the point beyond which there is nothing more to be said. And then the writer turns from the oaths of men to the oath of God. God, when He made His promise to Abraham, "because he could swear by no greater, sware by himself" (Hebrews 6:13). The Almighty had no higher name to invoke, and so He swore by His own being, pledging His own Godhead as the guarantee of His word. And He did it, the writer says, "that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us" (Hebrews 6:18). Here is the gospel of the oath: the God who commands men to swear by His name has Himself condescended to swear, and to swear by Himself, so that trembling sinners might have a strong consolation. The doctrine of the oath, rightly understood, runs straight to the mercy seat. But the command to swear by God's name has a shadow side, and Scripture guards it with a prohibition. The third commandment is the hedge around the oath: "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). The Hebrew shav means emptiness, vanity, the name of God carried as an empty thing upon the lips, the sacred name flung into idle speech as a mere exclamation. The same God who commands the oath forbids the vain oath, and the two must be held together. A man who would tremble to be careless with a king's signet ring tosses about the name of the King of kings as though it were nothing, and the commandment warns that God will not hold him guiltless. The oath is lawful when it is worship; it becomes profanation the moment it is anything less. There is, however, a passage in our Lord's own preaching that has troubled many a tender conscience, and it must be faced squarely. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, "Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths: But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil" (Matthew 5:33-37). And James echoes the Master: "But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath: but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation" (James 5:12). What are we to make of these words? The Anabaptists of the Reformation read them as an absolute prohibition of every oath, and refused to swear before magistrates at all, and the Quakers after them followed the same path. But the Confession, with the whole Reformed tradition, reads them differently, and the reading is the only one that does justice to the whole of Scripture. Our Lord is not forbidding the lawful oath; He is unmasking the casuistry by which the rabbis had made oaths cheap. They had taught that an oath sworn by heaven or by the earth or by Jerusalem or by one's own head was not truly binding, because it did not invoke the sacred name. Against this, Jesus declares that every oath is an oath, for heaven is God's throne and earth is His footstool and Jerusalem is His city and even the hair of a man's head is under His governance. You cannot swear a cheap oath, He says; you cannot evade the presence of God by the choice of your formula. Therefore let your plain speech be so truthful that you need no oath at all. The words are a rebuke to the frivolous, evasive swearing that had infected Israel, not a repeal of the oath that God Himself commanded and Himself swore. The oath remains; only its abuse is swept away.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly sat down to write this chapter, they wrote with a double adversary before their eyes, and we must know them both if we are to understand the sentence. On the one side stood the Anabaptists, and their descendants the Quakers, who held that no Christian may swear an oath under any circumstances, on the strength of a literal reading of our Lord's words in the Sermon on the Mount. On the other side stood the Roman church, with its multiplied oaths and vows, its swearing by saints and relics, its religious orders bound by oaths of poverty and celibacy, and its insistence that a man's sworn word may be evaded by mental reservation. Between these two errors the Divines walked a narrow and scriptural path, and the first section of the chapter stakes out the ground: the oath is lawful, it is worship, and it is to be taken only upon just occasion and with truth. The opening words are the answer to the Anabaptist. "A lawful oath is a part of religious worship." The Assembly will not surrender the oath to the world, as though it were a merely civil thing that a Christian may avoid. Nor will it surrender the oath to Rome, as though it were a ladder of extra merit by which the superstitious might climb toward God. Instead it claims the oath for God, and for His worship. The proof was plain in the Old Testament, where swearing by the name of the Lord is commanded, and in the New, where the author of Hebrews describes it as an act in which men "swear by the greater." The Anabaptists had quoted one text and ignored twenty; the Divines, as Robert Shaw observes in his Exposition of the Confession, understood that the passages in the Sermon on the Mount are directed not against oaths but against the false and evasive swearing that the scribes had authorized. To refuse all oaths, Shaw notes, would be to condemn Abraham, who made his servant swear; and Jacob, and David, and the apostle Paul himself, who wrote to the Corinthians, "I call God for a record upon my soul." The Scripture cannot contradict itself, and it is the Anabaptist, not the Confession, who has misread it. Then the sentence defines the oath with a precision that repays the closest reading. The one who swears "calleth God to witness." Here is the essence of the thing. In an oath, God is summoned as the witness of what a man declares or promises, and as the judge who will settle the account if the word is false. The Divines deliberately use the two verbs together, to witness and to judge, because an oath involves both of God's offices at once. He is called to be present as the all-seeing witness, the one before whom no secret is hidden; and He is called to act as the all-righteous judge, the one who will not hold the false swearer guiltless. A.A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, presses this point with his usual clarity: an oath, he explains, is essentially an act of worship because it is a solemn invocation of God, an appeal to His omniscience as a witness, and to His justice as an avenger of falsehood. The man who swears confesses, whether he will or no, that there is a God who knows and a God who judges, and that confession is adoration. The two branches of the oath are then distinguished, and Hodge is again the surest guide. The first is the assertory oath, by which a man declares what he knows to be true, "what he asserteth." The witness in court, the man who clears his neighbor's name by testifying to what he saw: these are assertory oaths. The second is the promissory oath, by which a man binds himself to do something in the future, "what he promiseth." The marriage vow, the oath of office, the covenant of church membership: these are promissory. The Confession embraces both, and the reason is plain. Truth is of two kinds, corresponding to the two directions of time. There is the truth of what has been and what is, which a man asserts; and there is the truth of what shall be, which a man promises. God is the God of truth in both directions, the witness of the past and the guarantor of the future, and so His name may be invoked upon either. The man who asserts a falsehood under oath lies against God as surely as the man who promises what he will not perform. And the sentence is hedged about with a condition that must not be overlooked: the oath is lawful only "upon just occasion." The Divines were not licensing promiscuous swearing. The oath is reserved for matters of weight and moment: for the ends of justice, for the confirmation of a disputed fact, for the solemn binding of a covenant, for the ending of strife between men. It is not for every trifle, not for the embellishment of everyday speech, not for the satisfying of a temper or the winning of an argument. The very word "just" carries Jeremiah's "in judgment": the oath must be taken with a considered mind in a matter that warrants it. To swear upon a trifle is to take the name of God in vain; to swear in a grave matter, with truth and righteousness, is to render God the worship He is owed. The just occasion, the solemn manner, and the truth of the thing sworn: these three are the tests of a lawful oath, and the man who honors them honors God. One further word the Divines left for us, hidden in the smallest phrase of all: "the person swearing solemnly calleth God to witness." The word is solemnly. An oath is not to be rattled off. The man who swears must do so with the gravity that befits an act of worship, with a sense of the divine presence, with a fear of the God he invokes. The Reformers had seen how lightly Rome treated the oath, and how the Anabaptists had fled from it altogether; the Confession calls the Christian back to the middle path of reverence: to swear when called, but to swear as in the sight of God, with awe and with truth.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of the oath was a favorite of the Reformers, and we may learn its depths from three or four of them in turn. Calvin, in the Institutes, treats the oath under the third commandment, and his reasoning displays deep spiritual insight. The oath, he argues, is an act of worship precisely because it is a confession of God's glory, an appeal to Him as the sole witness of the heart and the sole avenger of falsehood. When a man swears by the name of God, he "ascribes to him the glory of omniscience and of truth, and of an infinite power," and this ascription is worship in its purest form. It was for this reason that God commanded men to swear by His name, that He might train His people in the reverent use of it and drive from their lips every trace of the false gods by whose names the nations swore. And against the Anabaptist error Calvin is firm: they who forbid all oaths deprive God of a part of His honor, refusing to confess with the lips what the heart must believe, that God is the knower of secrets and the judge of the world. To swear by God is to honor God; the refusal to swear at all is, in its own way, a refusal of worship. Turretin, in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, gives the doctrine its most careful scholastic form, and his analysis undergirds every clause of our Confession. He asks what an oath essentially is, and answers that it is an act of worship by which God is invoked as witness and judge. From this essence he draws the three properties that must meet in every lawful oath: truth, judgment, and righteousness, the very three adverbs of Jeremiah 4:2. Where any of the three is lacking, the oath is not worship but sacrilege, an invocation of the holy name of God upon a lie, a trifle, or a wickedness. And why is the oath worship rather than mere speech? The reason lies in the divine attributes the oath confesses: omniscience, by which God witnesses; veracity, by which He guarantees truth; omnipotence and justice, by which He avenges. The man who swears professes all of these at once, a compact creed spoken in a single sentence. Thomas Watson, in his treatment of the third commandment, brings the doctrine down to the conscience with the warmth that marks all his writing. An oath, he says, is a calling of God to witness, and because it is such, it is one of the most solemn acts a creature can perform. The name of God is sacred, and to take that name upon the lips is to take the highest thing in the universe into one's mouth. Hence the oath must be attended with fear and reverence, and hence the sin of the false swearer is of the first magnitude, for he has made the God of truth the patron of a lie. Watson presses the application with a searching question: if you would not profane the name of God in an oath, will you profane it in your ordinary speech? The name of God is no less sacred on a Tuesday morning than in a courtroom, and the tongue that tosses it about in jest has already learned the habit that will betray it in earnest. Watson's genius is to show that the doctrine of the oath is finally a doctrine about the whole of a man's speech, and about the God whose name sanctifies every word a believer utters. William Ames, in The Marrow of Theology, supplies the definitional rigor that ties the tradition together. The oath, he writes, is "an act of religious worship, in which God is called upon as witness." Notice how exactly his words anticipate the Confession: the Divines were his heirs, and their sentence is but Ames's definition expanded into pastoral counsel. Ames distinguishes the two offices God bears in the oath, as witness and as judge, and he insists upon the "just occasion" that alone makes the oath lawful, for an oath sworn without due cause is a taking of God's name in vain. He also makes the vital point that the oath is grounded in the natural knowledge of God: the very heathen swear by their gods, for the instinct that a higher power witnesses and avenges is written on the human heart. The oath is no invention of church or magistrate, but a dictate of natural conscience, purified and directed aright by the word. There is one more voice we should hear, for it carries the doctrine to its most tender conclusion. The author of Hebrews, whose words the Puritans never tired of, tells us that God swore, and swore by Himself, that His promise to Abraham might be certain. Owen, in his great exposition of the epistle, dwells upon this with overflowing comfort. God, he writes, condescended to the custom of men in swearing, not because His bare word needed any confirmation, but because our weak faith needs every prop that infinite mercy can devise. The oath of God is the creature's strong consolation: when a trembling sinner flees to Christ, he may lay hold upon a promise confirmed by the oath of the Almighty, and there is nothing in heaven or earth more sure. So the doctrine of the oath, which began as a command to swear by God's name, ends as a promise sealed by God's own oath, and the man who has learned to swear lawfully upon earth has learned also to rest upon the oath by which God has sworn to save him.

Puritan Application

Let us bring the truth home, then, to the conscience, for a doctrine like this was never meant to remain in the head. First, tremble at the name of God in your ordinary speech. The oath is worship, and the third commandment is its hedge. If the oath is the most solemn use of God's name, then the careless use of that name in everyday talk is a kind of oath profaned, a worship turned into mockery. Examine the words that pass your lips in a single day. How often does the name of the Lord rise to them, not in prayer or praise, but in exclamation, in irritation, in the thoughtless filler of idle conversation? The habit of reverence is learned in secret, in the thousand small moments of daily speech, and the man who cannot keep the name of God holy at his own table will not keep it holy at the bar of justice. Let your speech be seasoned with such awe of God that an oath, when the lawful occasion comes, will be the crown of a lifelong habit rather than a strange and sudden solemnity. Second, make your word so true that you need no oath. This is the plain teaching of our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus bids us let our yea be yea and our nay nay, because the man whose ordinary word is trustworthy has no need to reinforce it with a formula. The Anabaptists turned this into a prohibition of the oath; our Lord meant it as an exaltation of plain truth. Ask yourself whether your simple word is bond. Do you say yes and mean no? Do you promise and then forget? Do you shade the truth with a convenient silence, or color it with a favorable exaggeration? The man who must always protest "I swear I'm telling the truth" has confessed, by that very protest, that his unsworn word is not believed. Cultivate the truthfulness that makes oaths unnecessary, and then the oath you are lawfully called to take will be no burden, but a glad confirmation of a word already sure. Third, when you are lawfully called to swear, swear as in the sight of God. There will be occasions when duty summons you to take an oath: the witness box, the marriage altar, the oath of office, the covenant of church membership. You may take it with a good conscience, for the oath is worship and God commands it. But take it solemnly, as the Confession says. Do not rattle through the formula as though it were a tiresome formality. In that moment, God is present; He is the witness of your words, and He will be the judge of them. Consider, before you lift your hand, whether what you are about to assert is true, and whether what you are about to promise is something you intend and are able to perform. Jeremiah's three adverbs are the test: is it true? is it judged, that is, considered and deliberate? is it righteous, that is, good and just in itself? If the thing you are asked to swear is false, or rash, or wicked, you must refuse, whatever it costs; if it is true and deliberate and good, you may swear with the fear of God upon you, and He will accept it as worship. Fourth, keep the oaths and promises you have already made, even when it hurts. The promissory oath binds to performance, and the Scripture's own measure of the godly man is not that he swears only when it is easy, but that he "sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not" (Psalm 15:4). Think of the promises now resting upon your conscience: vows spoken at an altar, covenants entered into before a congregation, undertakings given to employers and friends and, above all, the promises made to God. Have you kept them? Or have you allowed the passing of time, the cooling of affection, the pressure of circumstance, to dissolve what you once bound upon your soul? The world treats promises as negotiable; the Christian may not, for his promise is made before God, who heard it and who will judge it. If you have made a vow and find its keeping costly, remember the words of the Psalmist, and stand to your word. Faithfulness is never more beautiful than when it costs us something, and the God who is faithful to His own oath will honor the man who keeps his word to his own hurt. Fifth, and above all, flee to the oath of God and find your rest in it. We have seen that God Himself has sworn, and sworn by Himself, to bless all who come to Him through His Son. Here the doctrine of the oath bends down to the trembling sinner with a tenderness that is almost too much to bear. You, whose conscience accuses you of a thousand broken promises and a thousand idle words, may look away from your own failed oaths to the oath that cannot fail. "By two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie," God has bound Himself to save all who trust in Christ. There is your strong consolation. When Satan taunts you with your false words and your rash vows, answer him with the oath of God. When your own heart condemns you, flee for refuge to the promise that is confirmed by an oath. The God who commands you to swear by His name has sworn by that same name to receive you, and the same attributes which make your false oath so terrible, His truth, His justice, His presence, make His oath to you sure and steadfast forever. Rest there, and rest there today.

Prayer

O Lord God Almighty, whose name is holy and dreadful, who art the God of truth and the Judge of all the earth, we bow before Thee, for we have invoked Thy name and have not always honored it as we ought. We confess that our speech has been careless where it should have been reverent, that we have taken Thy holy name upon our lips in thoughtlessness and in vain, and that we have sworn and promised and not performed. We have made our word light, and in making it light we have profaned the name of the God who cannot lie. Forgive us, we beseech Thee, for the sake of Christ, in whom all Thy promises are yea and amen. Give us, O Lord, a tongue that fears Thee. Teach us to guard the door of our lips, that no idle or empty word concerning Thee may ever pass them. Make our yea to be yea and our nay nay, and root in our hearts such a love of the truth that we may need no oath to make our word believed. And when duty calls us to swear, grant us grace to do it solemnly, in truth, in judgment, and in righteousness, as in Thy very presence, remembering that Thou art witness and that Thou wilt judge. Keep us faithful to every promise we have made, that we may keep our word even to our own hurt, as those who are children of a faithful God. And when our hearts condemn us for words we have broken, lift our eyes to the oath which Thou didst swear by Thyself, that by two immutable things we might have a strong consolation. We flee for refuge to that promise, and we rest upon it now. For Thou art not a man, that Thou shouldst lie; hast Thou said, and shalt Thou not do it? hast Thou spoken, and shalt Thou not make it good? Upon Thy word and Thy oath we cast ourselves, and there we are safe. In the name of Jesus Christ, our great High Priest and surety, Amen.