Devotional 115: The Manner of Oaths: In Truth, Judgment, and Righteousness

The Confession Read

The name of God only is that by which men ought to swear, and therein it is to be used with all holy fear and reverence. Therefore, to swear vainly, or rashly, by that glorious and dreadful Name; or, to swear at all by any other thing, is sinful, and to be abhorred. Yet, as in matters of weight and moment, an oath is warranted by the Word of God, under the new testament as well as under the old; so a lawful oath, being imposed by lawful authority, in such matters, ought to be taken.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 22, Section 2

Introduction

It happens a dozen times a day, and we scarcely notice it anymore. A man stubs his toe and the name of the Almighty falls from his lips. A woman, surprised, gasps out the sacred title as a mere exclamation. A child, eager to be believed, seals his boast with "I swear to God," meaning nothing by it. The most holy Name in all the universe has become, in our careless mouths, a comma, a filler, a noise to punctuate our feelings. We have lost the shudder those syllables ought to carry. Yet there was a moment, three and a half thousand years ago, when that same Name was spoken from a bush that burned and was not consumed, and a shepherd hid his face, and the voice said, "Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Exodus 3:5). There is the distance between what the Name of God is and what we have made of it. The Confession we take up this morning is, in the deepest sense, an attempt to lead us back to that holy ground, and to teach our tongues to take off their shoes. In our last study we learned what an oath is. We saw that a lawful oath is a part of religious worship, an act by which a man, upon just occasion, solemnly calls God to witness what he asserts or promises, and to judge him according to the truth or falsehood of his word. The oath, we discovered, is not a relic of a credulous age but a confession of God's omniscience, His veracity, His omnipresence, and His justice, all spoken in a single sentence. But if the oath is worship, everything turns upon the name invoked in it, for worship is never indifferent to its object, and a man who swears by the wrong thing worships wrongly, however solemn his manner. This second section therefore narrows our attention to the question the last section left unanswered: by what name, and in what manner, may a man lawfully swear? The section unfolds in four tight movements, and we shall do well to mark them at the outset. First, the great positive rule: the name of God only is that by which men ought to swear, and that name is to be used with all holy fear and reverence. Second, the two great negatives: to swear vainly or rashly by that glorious and dreadful Name is sinful and to be abhorred, and to swear by any other thing whatsoever is equally sinful. Third, the careful qualification: an oath is warranted in matters of weight and moment, under the New Testament no less than under the Old, so that our Lord did not abolish the oath but purified it. And fourth, the sober duty that follows: a lawful oath, being imposed by lawful authority in such matters, ought to be taken, and the man who refuses it refuses a duty. Negative and positive, warning and warrant, fear and freedom: these are the four strands of a single cord, and we shall follow them in turn.

Scripture Foundation

The foundation of the whole matter is laid in a single verse of the law, and it is worth our closest attention. "And ye shall not swear by my name falsely, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD" (Leviticus 19:12). Notice what the verse assumes before it forbids anything. It assumes that men will swear by the name of God; the prohibition is not against the oath but against the false oath and the profaned name. The Hebrew word behind "falsely" is sheqer, a lie, a deception, a word that does not correspond to the thing it claims. To swear by the name of God bash-sheqer, in falsehood, is to take the God who is truth and press Him into the service of a lie, to make the Fountain of all veracity the guarantor of a deception. And the parallel clause deepens the warning: neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God. The word is the same family as that which describes the piercing of a sacred thing, the treating of the holy as common, the carrying of that which is consecrated into the marketplace of the profane. The reason for both prohibitions is the seal at the end of the verse: "I am the LORD." The whole weight of the divine self-disclosure rests upon those three words. Because He is who He is, the I AM, the self-existent One, the God of truth, His name is holy, and the man who swears by it must swear with reverence and with truth, or not swear at all. But the verse also teaches us, by implication, the great positive truth of this section: it is God's name by which men are to swear. The law nowhere licenses an oath by any lesser thing. When the Lord would bind Israel's tongue, He binds it to His own name, for His name is the only guarantee in the universe that cannot fail. Every other name, the name of a man, of a magistrate, of an angel, of a creature, is the name of one who may lie, or fail, or die. The name of God alone carries the full weight of omniscience and omnipotence and immutability that an oath requires. To swear by any lesser name is to build a house upon sand; to swear by the name of the Lord is to build upon the rock of His unchangeable truth. The prophets press the same point with a tenderness we ought not to miss. Jeremiah, looking forward to the ingathering of the nations, describes their conversion in these terms: "And it shall come to pass, if they will diligently learn the ways of my people, to swear by my name, The LORD liveth; as they taught my people to swear by Baal; then shall they be built in the midst of my people" (Jeremiah 12:16). Mark well the astonishing thing. The sign of a Gentile's coming home to God is not that he builds a temple, nor that he observes a feast, but that he learns to swear by the name of the Lord. The nations had sworn by Baal, by their idols, by every false god of wood and stone; conversion is the exchange of those names for the one living Name. To swear by the Lord is, in Jeremiah's vision, the very badge of belonging to the people of God. And the formula is the ancient one: "The LORD liveth." The pagan gods are dead; Baal does not live; but the God of Israel is the living God, and to swear by the living God is to pledge one's word upon a life that cannot end. Isaiah carries the thought to its widest horizon. In one of the sublimest passages of the Old Testament, the Lord declares, "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" (Isaiah 45:23). Here swearing is set in parallel with bowing the knee, as one of the two great gestures of universal worship. Every tongue shall swear, as every knee shall bow, because the oath is a confession of deity, an act of homage that belongs to God alone. The prophet could no more imagine a tongue swearing by a creature than a knee bowing to a statue; both are reserved for the one God. The apostle Paul would later press this very verse upon the Philippians, applying to Christ the oath that belongs to God alone. And what does the New Testament make of all this? It does not repeal the doctrine; it confirms it, and it does so in a scene of surpassing solemnity. Our Lord stands bound before the high priest Caiaphas, and the whole trial has stalled until the court can extract a word from Him. At last the high priest speaks the formula that no Jew could lawfully ignore: "I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God" (Matthew 26:63). The Greek verb is exorkizō, to put under oath, to bind a man by a solemn adjuration. It is the strongest instrument the law of Israel possessed, the appeal to the living God as witness and judge. And here is the point that silences every objection to the lawful oath: Jesus does not rebuke the adjuration. He does not say, "I may not swear, for I am under a new dispensation." He answers it. "Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (Matthew 26:64). The Lord of glory, who in the Sermon on the Mount warned against vain swearing, here submits to a lawful adjuration imposed by a lawful, if corrupt, authority, and answers under oath. No proof could be more decisive. The oath is warranted under the New Testament as well as under the Old, because the very Author of the New Testament took one. Nor is our Lord alone in the New Testament. The closing book of Scripture gives us a picture from heaven itself. "And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer" (Revelation 10:5-6). Observe whom the angel swears by: not by another angel, nor by any creature however exalted, but by the Creator of all things, the One who lives forever and ever. Heaven itself teaches us the rule of this section: the name of God only is that by which men ought to swear, and the angel's lifted hand is directed not to a creature but to the throne of the Creator. Against this bright background, Scripture sets the shadow of its prohibition. The prophets weep over a people who had learned to swear by false gods: "They that swear by the sin of Samaria, and say, Thy god, O Dan, liveth; and, The manner of Beersheba liveth; even they shall fall, and never rise up again" (Amos 8:14). And Zephaniah pronounces judgment upon a divided and fickle worship: "them that worship and that swear by the LORD, and that swear by Malcham" (Zephaniah 1:5), the one tongue trying to serve two masters, invoking the true God and the idol in the same breath. And our Lord Himself, in the sharpest of His woes, unmasks the casuistry that would make some oaths binding and others empty: "Woe unto you, ye blind guides... whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!" (Matthew 23:16). The whole system of oaths by heaven, by earth, by the temple, by the gold, by the altar, by one's own head, was a device for swearing cheaply, for calling God to witness while pretending He was not present. The apostle Paul, cataloging the sins from which the law restrains the ungodly, places among them epiorkoi, "perjured persons" (1 Timothy 1:10), those who swear falsely, the oath-breakers whose word under oath is as worthless as their word without it. So the Scripture stands before us as a single coherent witness: swear only by the name of God, swear with holy fear and reverence, swear the truth, and the oath will be worship; do any less, and it becomes a blasphemy.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines wrote this section, they wrote as men who had themselves stood under oath, and we shall misunderstand them if we forget it. The Assembly that produced the Confession had been summoned by the Long Parliament in 1643, and its members were required to subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant, a religious and civil oath binding them to reformation in the three kingdoms. These were not theorists musing about oaths in the abstract; they were men who had lifted their hands and sworn, under lawful authority, to a grave and public undertaking. When they wrote that "a lawful oath, being imposed by lawful authority, in such matters, ought to be taken," they wrote from experience, and with a clarity born of having examined their own consciences on the very question. The section divides into a negative and a positive, and the negative comes first because the danger of the age pressed upon it. Three great errors surrounded the Assembly, and the sentence is aimed at all three. There was the error of the profane, who used the name of God in vain and rashly, seasoning their everyday speech with oaths they never meant and never weighed. There was the error of Rome, which had multiplied oaths and vows beyond all count, taught men to swear by saints and relics and the Virgin, and then dissolved the force of an oath through the doctrine of mental reservation. And there was the error of the Anabaptists, who, having seen how Rome and the world had corrupted the oath, fled to the opposite extreme and forbade all swearing whatsoever. The Confession steers between them with a precision that is the fruit of careful exegesis. The opening rule is absolute and positive: "The name of God only is that by which men ought to swear." The Divines set down the doctrine that the oath is worship and the name of God is the only worthy object of that worship. Here is the first thing to be seized: the phrase "the name of God" is not a mere formality. In Scripture, the name of God is God Himself as He has revealed Himself, the sum of all that He has made known of His being and His character. To swear by the name of God is to swear by His truth, His power, His presence, His justice, all that the name contains. And the name is to be used "with all holy fear and reverence." The Divines could not have chosen their words more carefully. The fear is holy, not slavish; it is the fear of a son who trembles at offending a beloved Father, not the terror of a slave who dreads a tyrant. The reverence is the outward form of that inward fear, the bowed head and the hushed voice and the guarded tongue. The man who swears is standing on holy ground, and he must take off his shoes. Then the two great negatives, and they are stated with a severity that brooks no evasion. "To swear vainly, or rashly, by that glorious and dreadful Name" (the phrase "glorious and dreadful" is itself a translation of the Hebrew mind, echoing the psalmist's "great and terrible name," Psalm 99:3) "is sinful, and to be abhorred." Two sins are named. To swear vainly is to swear emptily, to invoke the name of God in a matter that does not warrant it, to rattle off an oath as a mere ornament of speech, to use the holy Name as a filler word. This is the sin of the third commandment made flesh in the oath, the name of God taken in vain in the very act that is supposed to be worship. And to swear rashly is to swear without thought, in heat, in passion, without weighing what is being asserted or promised, binding oneself to a word one has not considered. The vain oath dishonors God by its emptiness; the rash oath dishonors Him by its thoughtlessness; both are to be abhorred, a word that means not merely avoided but loathed, turned from with the same revulsion with which a man turns from a defiling thing. And the second negative sweeps away every creature as an object of the oath: "to swear at all by any other thing, is sinful." Not by heaven, though it is God's throne; not by the earth, though it is His footstool; not by a saint, nor an angel, nor a relic, nor one's own head, nor one's mother's grave, nor one's honor. Every one of these is a creature, and to swear by a creature is to ascribe to it the attributes that belong to God alone: to make the creature the witness of the heart and the judge of the conscience. It is, in the end, a species of idolatry, the tongue bowing to a false god. The Divines were unsparing here because Rome's multiplication of oaths by creatures had become, in their eyes, a practical denial of the first commandment. Then the section turns, in its closing words, to the positive side, and it is a vital correction of every overscrupulous conscience. "Yet, as in matters of weight and moment, an oath is warranted by the Word of God, under the new testament as well as under the old; so a lawful oath, being imposed by lawful authority, in such matters, ought to be taken." Three qualifications guard the lawful oath. It must be in a matter of weight and moment, not a trifle; the oath is reserved for the confirmation of truth and the ending of strife, not for the decoration of idle talk. It must be warranted by the Word of God, and warranted under both testaments, for the New Testament does not abolish the oath but purifies it, as we have seen in the adjuration of our Lord. And it must be imposed by lawful authority: the magistrate, the court, the church, the parent: wherever God has placed a lawful power, that power may summon a man to swear, and the man so summoned ought to take the oath. The word "ought" is deliberate. It is not merely that he may; he ought. To refuse a lawful oath imposed by lawful authority is, the Confession implies, a failure of duty, a withholding from God and from one's neighbor of the confirmation that truth may require. Here, then, is the balance the Divines achieved: the oath is not to be multiplied, as Rome multiplied it; it is not to be forbidden, as the Anabaptists forbade it; it is not to be profaned, as the world profanes it. It is to be reserved for weighty matters, sworn only by the name of God, taken with holy fear and reverence, and accepted when lawful authority imposes it. That is the narrow path, and it is the path of Scripture.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of the oath, and especially the reverence due to the name of God, has been the care of the church's ablest teachers, and we may deepen our grasp of this section by sitting at the feet of four or five of them. Wilhelmus à Brakel, the beloved Dutch divine whose Christian's Reasonable Service warmed the firesides of the Netherlands, treats the name of God with a tenderness that is almost overwhelming. The name of God, he teaches, is not a mere sound but the revelation of the divine essence, and therefore it is holy, and therefore it is never to be taken upon the lips without a corresponding reverence in the heart. He presses the point with a searching question that has lost none of its edge: can a man truly fear God, and yet toss His name about in jest, in irritation, in careless exclamation? The tongue, Brakel insists, is the index of the heart, and the man who is profane with the name of God in small things has revealed that his reverence was never more than outward. The remedy he prescribes is an old habit: so fill the mind with the majesty of God that His name becomes too heavy to be spoken lightly, for we need not more prohibitions but more of the fear of God. William Perkins, the Elizabethan Puritan whose writings shaped the early generations of the English church, directs his keenest fire against rash and customary swearing. In his directions for the government of the tongue, Perkins lays bare the anatomy of the common oath: a man swears, not because he has weighed a grave matter, but because he has formed the habit, and the habit has become a second nature, and the name of God has become the crutch of every weak assertion. Perkins calls the customary swearer to account with the logic of the gospel itself: if you tremble to be thought a liar, why do you not tremble to profane the name of Him who is truth? The man who cannot be believed without an oath has, by his own confession, so wounded his credibility that only the sacred Name can prop it up, and to drag that Name into the service of a trifle is to compound one sin with another. Perkins's remedy is characteristically practical: break the habit, word by word, by the grace of God, and let the tongue be retrained until it is as reluctant to take the name of God in vain as the hand is reluctant to touch a live coal. Calvin, whose treatment of the oath we have already begun to drink from, supplies the theological principle that undergirds the whole section. The oath, he teaches, is an act of worship because it is a confession of God's glory, and for that very reason the name invoked in the oath is of the essence of the matter. To swear by God is to ascribe to Him omniscience, truth, and power; to swear by a creature is to transfer that ascription to one who cannot bear it. It was for this reason, Calvin argues, that God commanded Israel to swear by His name alone, not for the oath's own sake, but to train His people in the reverent and exclusive use of His name, and to drive from their lips every false god by whose name the nations swore. The prohibition of swearing by creatures is no arbitrary rule but a guardian of the first commandment, a hedge against idolatry creeping back into the tongue. For Calvin the doctrine hangs together: one God, one name, one oath, one worship. John Murray, the Scottish theologian of the twentieth century, brings the doctrine to its New Testament conclusion with a rigor that settles the matter once for all. In his treatment of the oath, Murray insists that the Christian must not read the Sermon on the Mount as though our Lord had repealed the oath; the words "swear not at all" are aimed at the abuse, not the use, and the proof is our Lord's own conduct. When the high priest adjured Him by the living God, Jesus answered, and in answering He honored the adjuration. Murray draws the lesson with apostolic plainness: a Christian may take an oath, and when lawful authority imposes it, he ought to take it, and he takes it with a good conscience, because his Master took one. To refuse a lawful oath, Murray warns, is not a mark of superior holiness but of a scrupulosity that has parted company with Scripture, and that confuses the corruption of the oath with the oath itself. George Gillespie, one of the youngest and ablest of the Scottish commissioners to the Assembly, adds the final word on the duty this section imposes. Gillespie, who had thrown himself into the controversy over the Solemn League and Covenant, understood as few men did the relation between the oath and lawful authority. The oath, he taught, is an ordinance of God for the confirmation of truth and the binding of conscience, and therefore the magistrate who imposes a lawful oath is God's minister for good, and the man who takes it renders to God the obedience He has commanded. But Gillespie was equally clear on the other side: the authority of the magistrate extends only to matters lawful, and no oath can bind a man to sin. Lawful authority may require an oath in a weighty matter, and that oath is a duty; but unlawful authority, requiring an unlawful oath, is to be resisted, for we must obey God rather than men.

Puritan Application

Let us bring the truth home to the conscience, for a doctrine that does not reach the tongue and the heart is a doctrine only half-learned. First, guard your tongue against vain and rash swearing. This is the sin nearest to every one of us, for it lives in the thousand unguarded moments of ordinary speech. The name of God is on your lips a hundred times a day; ask yourself how often it is there in prayer and praise, and how often in exclamation and irritation and the careless filler of idle talk. The habit is not a small thing, for it trains the tongue to treat the holiest Name as a common word, and it prepares the heart for graver profanities. Nor is it only the full oath that is forbidden; the minced forms, "for heaven's sake," "my word," "good heavens," and their kin, are but the vain oath wearing a polite mask, the creature still invoked where only the Creator may be. Break the habit, not by a new resolution of the flesh, but by so filling your mind with the majesty of God that the name of God grows too heavy for light speech. Let the bush burn again in your memory, and take off your shoes. Second, swear by nothing but the name of God, and let your plain word be enough. Our Lord has taught us that a man's yea should be yea and his nay nay, and the man whose simple word is trustworthy has no need of oaths to prop it up. The world swears by everything, by its honor, by its mother's grave, by the moon and stars, because the world's word is cheap, and a cheap word needs a costly oath to be believed. But the Christian is called to a better way: to make his unsworn word so true that no oath is needed, and, when an oath is lawfully required, to make it by the name of God alone, for there is no other name that can carry the weight of a soul's bond. Examine your speech for the substitutes you have taught yourself to swear by, and cast them out. Every one of them is a little idol, a creature you have set upon the throne of the tongue. Third, tremble at the name of God, and let that fear govern the whole of your speech. The Confession's phrase "holy fear and reverence" is not a counsel for special occasions but a rule for every day. The man who has learned to fear the name of God will find that the fear spills over into all his words: he will not lie, for the God of truth hears him; he will not gossip, for the God of judgment hears him; he will not boast, for the God who resists the proud hears him. There is a reverence of the tongue that is the outward sign of a reverent heart, and it is cultivated, like all graces, in secret and in small things. Consider the promise of the prophet Malachi, for it is a promise addressed precisely to those who have learned this fear: "Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name" (Malachi 3:16). God keeps a book for those who fear His name. Let your tongue earn its page in it. Fourth, do not refuse the lawful oath when lawful authority imposes it. There are tender consciences that, having seen the profanation of the oath, have fled from it altogether, and refused to swear even where duty requires. The Confession is a gentle but firm correction of that scruple. The oath is not an unclean thing from which the believer must recoil; it is worship, and our Lord took one. When the court summons you to swear, when the marriage altar invites your vow, when the congregation receives your covenant of membership, when the magistrate requires your oath of office, you may take it with a good conscience, and indeed you ought, for lawful authority is God's ordinance and a lawful oath is God's command. Do not let an overscrupulous conscience rob God of the worship of your sworn word, nor your neighbor of the confirmation of truth that a just society requires. Swear, when lawfully called, and swear as in the sight of God. Fifth, when you have sworn, perform it, and keep your word even to your own hurt. The oath is not an ornament but a bond, and the name of God is the seal upon it. The man who swears lightly and then breaks his word lightly has taken the name of God in vain twice over: once in the swearing and once in the breaking. Think of the oaths and vows now resting upon your conscience: the promises spoken at an altar, the covenants entered before a congregation, the undertakings given in God's name. Are there any you have allowed to grow cold, any you have quietly set aside because the keeping grew costly? The Scripture's measure of the godly man is fixed, and it is not that he swears only when it is easy, but that he "sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not" (Psalm 15:4). Stand to your word. And if the memory of your own broken oaths accuses you, lift your eyes from them to the one Oath that cannot be broken, the oath by which God has sworn to save all who come to Him through His Son. There, and there alone, is the strong consolation of the believer: a name that cannot fail, a word that cannot lie, and a God who keeps His oath forever.

Prayer

O Lord God Almighty, great and terrible in holiness, whose name is glorious and dreadful, we come before Thee with our shoes from off our feet, for the ground whereon we stand is holy. We confess that our tongues have profaned what they should have reverenced. We have taken Thy name in vain in the unguarded moments of our days; we have sworn rashly where we should have been silent; we have made our word light, and in making it light we have dishonored the God of truth. We have sworn by things that are no gods, and have set creatures upon the throne of our speech. Forgive us, O Lord, for the sake of Christ, who answered under oath for our sakes and never swore a vain word in all His life. Give us, we beseech Thee, a tongue that fears Thee. Put within us such a sight of Thy majesty that Thy name shall grow too heavy upon our lips for any light or empty use. 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 lawful authority summons us to swear, grant us grace to do it solemnly, in holy fear and reverence, as in Thy very presence, remembering that Thou art witness and that Thou wilt judge. Keep us faithful to every vow we have spoken, that we may keep our word even to our own hurt, as children of a God who cannot lie. And when our hearts condemn us for the words we have broken, lift our eyes to the oath which Thou hast sworn 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 they that fear the Lord speak often one to another, and Thou hearkenest and hearest, and a book of remembrance is written before Thee for them that fear the Lord and that think upon His name. Write our names, O Lord, in that book, and make us Thine own in the day when Thou makest up Thy jewels. In the name of Jesus Christ, our surety and our great High Priest, Amen.