I just listened to your podcast on swearing… I think you missed the point of the commandment to “not take the Lord’s name in vain”. It has always bothered me that our society has clumped together the Lord’s Name with profanities (defiled terms) about things like excrement and sex * . I think that the commandment was about preserving the holiness of the Lord; we should reserve it for reverent usage, and certainly not in a manner that defiles. How can we sing a hymn to Jesus in one moment, and in the next moment toss off His name to let someone know we’re angry? In our mind, these two usages would get merged together.
The grammatical meaning of “expletive”, also reveals why we should keep the Lord’s Name holy. An expletive is a word that takes place in a sentence, but contributes nothing to the meaning of the sentence. This is why we can bleep out expletives and still understand what’s being said- the word might as well not be there. If our God is holy, something far beyond anything that can be touched or understood, then his Name should always hold meaning in our minds and in our speech.
* The fact that our society considers sex profane is the subject of another (connected) rant.
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