Devotional 116: The Binding Nature of Oaths: They Must Be Kept

The Confession Read

Whosoever taketh an oath ought duly to consider the weightiness of so solemn an act, and therein to avouch nothing but what he is fully persuaded is the truth: neither may any man bind himself by oath to anything but what is good and just, and what he believeth so to be, and what he is able and resolved to perform.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 22, Section 3

Introduction

There are words that, once spoken, can never be unsaid. A man stands at an altar and promises before God and a roomful of witnesses that he will love and keep one woman till death parts them, and the words leave his mouth, and the door closes behind them, and from that moment he is not the man he was before he spoke. A father tells his child, "I will be there," and the child builds a whole small world upon that sentence, and if the father fails, a world falls down. A witness in a courtroom raises his right hand and utters a formula, and on the strength of those few syllables a man's liberty, his reputation, perhaps his life, will stand or fall. Our speech has weight in this world, and there are certain utterances that carry more weight than any others, utterances where we invoke the name of God and bind our souls to the truth of what we have said. It is of these that the Confession speaks this morning, and it asks of us a question far more searching than any we have yet considered. Not, what is an oath? That we learned in our first study. Not, by what name and in what manner may a man swear? That we settled in the second. But this: who is the man who may stand before God and swear, and what is the matter to which he may bind himself? We turn, that is to say, from the nature of the oath and the name invoked in it, to the disposition of the man who takes it and the substance of the thing he swears. The oath, we discovered, is an act of worship, a calling of God to witness and to judge; and the name invoked is the name of God alone, spoken with holy fear and reverence. But a man may know all this and still swear amiss, for worship can be offered by a wrong heart as well as by a wrong formula, and a right name can be attached to a wrong thing. The Confession therefore turns its face inward, to the conscience of the swearer, and lays down what may be called the soul of a lawful oath: that it be taken with a due sense of its weight, that it avouch nothing but the truth the man is fully persuaded of, and that it bind him to nothing but what is good and just, what he believes to be so, and what he is able and resolved to perform. Four great requirements, and every one of them a searchlight into the heart.

Scripture Foundation

The first text to which we turn is among the plainest in all the law, and it sets the frame for everything that follows. "If a man vow a vow unto the LORD, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth" (Numbers 30:2). The language deserves to be weighed as carefully as the oath itself, for the Holy Spirit has chosen His words with precision. The man who swears does not merely make a statement; he binds his soul with a bond. The Hebrew noun is issar, a bond, a fetter, a thing that ties, and it is drawn from the verb asar, to bind, to imprison, to fasten one thing to another. When an Israelite swore an oath, he was not decorating his speech with a flourish; he was taking a cord and tying his own soul to the performance of his word. The bond was not laid upon his tongue only, but upon his very being, so that to break the oath was not to break a promise but to tear a soul from its moorings. And the command that follows is absolute: he shall not break his word; he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth. Here, in a single verse, is the reason the Confession speaks of the "weightiness of so solemn an act." The oath is heavy because it binds the soul, and what binds the soul is not to be taken up lightly, nor set down again when it grows inconvenient. If Numbers lays down the binding force of the oath, Ecclesiastes sounds the warning that stands guard over it. "When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed. Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay" (Ecclesiastes 5:4-5). The Preacher, that sober man who had tested every pleasure under the sun and found it wanting, turns at last to the subject of a man's speech before God, and his counsel is the counsel of one who has watched the fool too many times. The fool is not the man who refuses to vow; the fool is the man who vows and does not pay, the man who flings a sacred word into the air and then walks away from it as though it had never been spoken. God, says the Preacher, has no pleasure in such a man; his vow, which should have been an act of worship, has become an insult, a promise offered and then snatched back. And the remedy is startling in its simplicity, and it is the very remedy the Confession presses upon us: better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay. Better to be silent before God than to speak and default. The man who duly considers the weightiness of the oath will often conclude that the wiser course is not to swear at all, and that conclusion is not cowardice but reverence. But the Confession does not only ask whether a man will perform what he swears; it asks first whether what he swears is the truth. And here the prophet Zechariah speaks with the authority of the Lord Himself. "Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates: and let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour; and love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith the LORD" (Zechariah 8:16-17). Mark the astonishing phrase at the centre of it: love no false oath. The Hebrew is shevu'at sheqer, the oath of falsehood, the sworn lie. The Lord does not merely forbid the false oath; He forbids the love of it, for the man who has learned to enjoy the protection that a lie sworn in God's name can give him has reached a depth of corruption from which only grace can raise him. The false oath is singled out among all sins as something God hates, and the reason is not far to seek: the false oath takes the very God who is truth and presses Him into the service of a lie, making the Fountain of all veracity the sponsor of a falsehood. The Confession's first requirement, that a man avouch nothing but what he is fully persuaded is the truth, is simply Zechariah's command turned into a rule for the swearer: what you swear, swear because you are persuaded it is so, for the false oath is an abomination to the Lord. There is yet another strand in Zechariah's words that the Confession will take up, and it concerns not the truth of the oath but its justice. "Execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates," the prophet says, for the oath is not a private luxury but a public instrument, a thing sworn in the gates where justice is administered and disputes are settled. An oath, rightly understood, is never merely about the man who swears; it is about the neighbour whose cause hangs upon the word, and the community whose peace is preserved by the truth. This is why the Confession insists that a man bind himself to nothing but what is good and just: an oath sworn to an unjust end is not worship but violence, the name of God enlisted in the service of oppression. The swearer stands in the gates of his neighbour's life, and the word he speaks there must be such as truth can own and justice can bless. And one text more, a psalm of approach, teaches us how deep this persuasion must run. "LORD, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart" (Psalm 15:1-2). The word emet, truth, is the Hebrew word for that which is firm, reliable, that which can be leaned upon and will not give way; and the remarkable thing is where this truth is said to dwell. It is not enough to speak the truth with the lips, for the lips can lie while the heart dissembles. The upright man speaks the truth in his heart, in the inward man, in the secret place where no other ear can hear. His word is true because his heart is true, and his oath is trustworthy because it rises from a fountain that is itself pure. Here is the deep root of the Confession's phrase "fully persuaded." The man who swears is not to swear what he merely hopes, nor what he guesses, nor what it would be convenient to affirm; he is to swear what he holds in his heart to be the truth, and to hold it so firmly that the oath is nothing more than the outward speaking of an inward certainty.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines set down this section, they were doing something the careful reader of the Confession may miss: they were legislating for the heart, not only for the tongue. The first two sections had concerned the nature of the oath and the name by which it is sworn; this third section descends into the conscience of the man who swears and lays down the qualifications without which no oath, however correct in form, can be pleasing to God. It is, in the best sense, a spiritual anatomy of the lawful oath, and it proceeds by laying open four requirements in turn. The first is the frame of mind with which the whole act is to be approached: the man who takes an oath "ought duly to consider the weightiness of so solemn an act." The word weightiness is the hinge on which everything turns. An oath is not a light thing, and the man who treats it as light has failed before he has begun. The Divines had in their minds the tragic examples of Scripture in which men swore rashly and reaped a bitter harvest. There was Jephthah, who, going out to battle, "vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me... shall surely be the LORD's, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering" (Judges 11:30-31); and the first thing that came forth to meet him was his only daughter, and he was bound by his own bond to a grief that broke him. There was Herod, who, pleased by a girl's dancing, "promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask" (Mark 6:22-23), and was entangled into the murder of John the Baptist because he had sworn without weighing. The oath, the Divines insist, is to be entered upon as a man enters a holy place, with deliberate and reverent consideration of what he is about to do, for a rash oath is a wound self-inflicted upon the soul. The second requirement touches the assertory oath, the oath in which a man affirms that a thing is true: he is to "avouch nothing but what he is fully persuaded is the truth." The word avouch is a strong and deliberate choice, an old word meaning to affirm solemnly, to put forward as one's own, to pledge oneself to the truth of a statement. It is not enough that the thing sworn be true in fact; the man must be fully persuaded of it, so that his oath is the utterance of a settled conviction and not a guess hazarded in God's name. The Divines were here guarding against that subtle corruption by which a man swears to what he hopes is true, or to what he has heard others say is true, or to what it would advantage him to have believed, while his own heart withholds its assent. To swear what one is not persuaded of is, in effect, to ask God to witness to a thing one does not oneself believe, and that is to trifle with the Searcher of hearts. The third and fourth requirements turn from the assertory to the promissory oath, the oath in which a man binds himself to do something. And here the Divines lay down three conditions with a precision that leaves no loophole. The thing sworn must be good and just: it must be in itself lawful, conformed to the will of God, such as a man may undertake without sinning. No oath can sanctify an evil, and the man who swears to do a wicked thing has added a second sin to the first, binding himself by the holy name of God to that which God forbids. Scripture supplies its own terrible examples: the forty men who "bound themselves under a curse, saying that they would neither eat nor drink till they had killed Paul" (Acts 23:12), swearing a solemn oath to a murder. But the Divines add a second condition, and it is the tenderest of them all: the thing sworn must be something he believeth so to be. It is not enough that the matter be good and just in the abstract; the man's own conscience must assent that it is so, for "whatsoever is not of faith is sin" (Romans 14:23), and a man who swears to do what his own heart condemns has wounded his conscience even if the deed itself were lawful. And the third condition crowns them both: the thing sworn must be something he is able and resolved to perform. A man may not bind himself to the impossible, promising what no creature can accomplish; nor may he swear to what he has no settled purpose of doing, for such an oath is a lie the moment it is spoken. Good and just in itself, believed so by the swearer, and both possible and purposed: these are the three stones of the promissory oath, and the Confession will not permit a single one to be removed.

Theological Depth

The soul of this section has been ploughed by some of the church's deepest divines, and we do well to hear them, for they take us further into the conscience than we can go alone. Stephen Charnock, whose meditations on the divine attributes have instructed generations, grounds the whole matter in the character of God Himself. In his treatment of the truth of God, Charnock observes that an oath is only as strong as the truth of the God who witnesses it, and that this is why every lawful oath must be an oath of truth. God is "a God of truth" (Deuteronomy 32:4), and therefore He cannot be summoned to witness a falsehood; the man who swears a lie asks the God of truth to underwrite it, and that is a contradiction no reverent heart can entertain. But Charnock presses the point further, into the very reason an oath confirms anything at all: men swear by the greater, and there is no greater than the God who is truth itself, so that to invoke His name is to appeal to the final and unshakeable ground of all certainty. A man who is "fully persuaded" of the truth may swear it with a clean conscience, because in swearing it he is doing on his lips what God is in His being. Charnock's counsel to the swearer is therefore a counsel of conformity: let your oath be true, because your God is true, and let your persuasion be deep, because the witness you invoke is the God who cannot lie. Zacharias Ursinus, the author of the Heidelberg Catechism, supplies the classical statement of the conditions of a lawful oath, and it is worth hearing, for the Confession stands squarely upon his shoulders. Expounding the commandment against taking God's name in vain, Ursinus teaches that every lawful oath must be conformed to three things, drawn from the prophet's words that a man should swear "in truth, in judgment, and in righteousness" (Jeremiah 4:2). The oath must be in truth: the thing affirmed must be true, and the man must know it to be true, and he must not swear to what he does not believe. It must be in judgment: the oath must be taken deliberately, in a weighty matter, and not rashly, in a trifle, or in the heat of passion, for the name of God is not to be scattered over every idle dispute. And it must be in righteousness: the thing sworn must be lawful, just, and honourable, such as a man may promise before God without shame. These three adverbs of the prophet are, Ursinus insists, the measure of every oath that has ever been sworn, and any oath that lacks even one of them is a taking of God's name in vain. Here is the exact grammar of our section, spoken two generations before the Divines sat down to write it. Matthew Henry, the beloved commentator whose expositions have fed the church for three centuries, brings the doctrine down to the level of the trembling conscience. On the passage in Numbers, Henry remarks that God has appointed the oath to be a bond upon the soul, and that therefore no man should enter into it who has not first counted the cost. He turns to Jephthah with something like a groan: the man swore without weighing what his vow might demand, and when the demand came, he was trapped by his own word. And on the Preacher's counsel, Henry is tenderly practical: it is better not to vow at all than to vow and not pay, and the man who has already vowed amiss should humble himself before God, repent of his rashness, and, where the vow was to an evil thing, count himself released, for a vow to sin binds no man, and to keep it would be to double the offence. Henry's counsel breathes the wisdom of the Confession: weigh before you swear, and if you have sworn amiss, do not add the sin of performance to the sin of the swearing. Herman Witsius, the careful Dutch theologian, rounds out the doctrine with a point the Confession assumes but does not state, and it is the point that gives the section its devotional warmth. In his dissertation on the oath, Witsius observes that the lawful oath is not a mere instrument of civil society but an act of communion with God, and that its conditions are therefore not external rules but the expressions of a living faith. The man who swears truthfully, deliberately, and to a righteous end is exercising faith in the God of truth; the man who swears otherwise is not merely imprudent but profane, for he has taken the name of his God into a heart that does not fear Him. It follows, Witsius argues, that the oath, rightly taken, is one of the sweetest acts a believer can perform, a public leaning of the whole soul upon the truth and righteousness of God. And it follows also that the preparation for a lawful oath is not a moment's care but a lifetime's: a man who would swear well in the hour of his oath must have learned long before to speak truth in his heart, to love righteousness in his inmost being, and to count the cost of his every word.

Puritan Application

Let us bring the truth down to the conscience, for a section that searches the heart will not let us go until it has searched ours. First, weigh every solemn word before you speak it. The Confession's first requirement is not addressed to the oath alone but to the habit of the heart that makes a good oath possible. Before you vow, consider; before you bind your soul, count the cost; before you promise before God, ask what that promise may one day demand of you. Jephthah's grief and Herod's guilt were not the fruit of wickedness but of rashness, and rashness is a sin of which the most upright of us are capable. Let the Preacher's counsel be written on your heart: better to be silent before God than to speak and default. In a world that chatters and promises and forgets, be a man or woman whose few words are heavy, because they have been weighed in the balance of God's presence. Second, swear nothing you are not fully persuaded is the truth. This searches the secret places of the heart, for it forbids not only the lie but the guess, the hope dressed up as fact, the convenient affirmation that your own conscience has never ratified. Examine yourself: are there oaths you have taken, affirmations you have signed, testimonies you have given, to which your heart did not fully assent? The God who is truth hears your words and the reserve that lurks behind them. Ask Him for a heart that speaks the truth in the heart, that your yea may be yea and your nay nay, and that when you swear, you may swear what you hold with a full and settled persuasion. And let this persuasion be a daily discipline, not a moment's manufacture: the man who is careless with the truth in small things will find, when the great occasion comes, that he has no settled conviction to avouch, but only a shifting cloud of hopes and fears where a firm word should stand. Third, bind yourself only to what is good and just, and only to what your own conscience approves. No oath can make a sin lawful, and the man who swears to an evil has heaped a curse upon himself. But the Confession presses nearer still: do not swear even to a lawful thing against the protest of your own conscience, for whatsoever is not of faith is sin. And beware the entangling oath, the promise made to please a face or win a favor or escape a difficulty, which afterward ensnares you in what your conscience cannot own. Herod swore to please a girl and killed a prophet; the forty men swore to please their malice and bound themselves to murder. Let no oath of yours be forged in the heat of any passion but love for God and love for your neighbour. Fourth, swear only what you are able and resolved to perform. The oath looks forward, and it binds the man you will be tomorrow to the word you speak today; therefore swear nothing that exceeds your power, and nothing that you do not intend with all your heart to do. Consider your capacity, consider your circumstances, consider your resolution, and if all three do not stand firm, be silent. And when you have sworn, be like the man of Numbers who binds his soul with a bond and does according to all that proceeds out of his mouth: pay what you have vowed, keep the promise though it cost you, and let your sworn word be as immovable as the God who witnessed it. Fifth, and this is the gospel beneath it all, lift your eyes from your own broken oaths to the oath that God has sworn. There is not a one of us who has not, at some point, sworn amiss, promised rashly, or failed to pay what we vowed, and the memory of those words rises up against us. But there is one who never swore a vain word and never broke a word He spoke, and He has bound Himself by an oath to save all who come to Him. "God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?" (Numbers 23:19). Here is an oath taken in perfect truth, for He is truth; in perfect judgment, for He weighed the cost and did not turn back; and in perfect righteousness, for He bound Himself to the good of those who deserved nothing. He is able to perform, for nothing is impossible to Him, and He is resolved to perform, for He who spared not His own Son will with Him freely give us all things. Rest there, dear soul. Your words have failed; His word is sure. Your bonds have been broken; His bond held to the cross and holds forever.

Prayer

O Lord God, God of truth, who canst not lie and dost not change, we come before Thee with the weight of our own words upon us, and we ask Thee to teach our tongues the reverence that becomes the house of God. We confess that we have sworn rashly, promising what we had not weighed, and that we have sworn falsely, affirming what our hearts did not hold. We have bound our souls to bonds we then despised, and we have made light of words that were spoken in Thy name. Forgive us, O Lord, for the sake of Him who, when He was adjured by the living God, answered in truth, and who never in all His life spoke a single false or empty word. Teach us, we beseech Thee, to consider the weightiness of every solemn word before we speak it. Give us hearts that speak the truth in the secret place, that our outward oaths may be but the utterance of an inward persuasion. Restrain us from binding ourselves to any thing that is not good and just, or that our conscience cannot approve, or that we are not able and resolved to perform. And where our rash and broken words have wounded others or dishonoured Thee, grant us grace to repent, to make what amends we may, and to flee to the cross where every false word of ours was borne away. Above all, we bless Thee for the oath which Thou hast sworn, and which Thou hast kept. We lean our whole weight upon the God who is not a man that He should lie, who hath said and will do it, who hath spoken and will make it good. Thou art able, and Thou art resolved, and Thy word cannot fail. Keep us in that promise, and let our every word be an echo of the Word made flesh. In the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Amen, the faithful and true Witness, Amen.