As I understand it, the OT Jews were worried about the commandment which says "I will not hold him guiltless who takes My name in vain." If we read this verse in the way the Jews would have been likely to read it, we see it as presenting an apparently unpardonable sin.
My point is that to be held "not guiltless" is a damning disaster. And the verse promises this damning disaster for anyone who uses His name in vain. The Jews figured that they'd better put a whole lot of distance between themselves and that disaster--so they didn't use God's name at all.
But if we continue this mindset in the era of the New Covenant, we miss some of the most important points of the gospel.
First of all, what God demands of us is genuine faith, not vain professions of same. It follows from this that God will burn the tares--and He explicitly declares that He will do this.
This reminds us that God will not hold guiltless the person who has no genuine faith in the God Whose name he would presume to take upon himself. To profess faith in Christ when you are not even born again is a vain use of the Lord's name.
But it is also true that the very nature of faith is such that it entails a true vital union with Almighty God and a trust stemming from that relationship. We must appropriate this bliss in the faith of God's elect. And the bliss is like that of a blessed marriage, in which the bride certainly does take upon herself the very name of her beloved.
It will not do, by the way, to say "Well, I'll take the name of Jesus/Yeshua upon myself, but not the Name of G_d." This is tantamount to a denial that the person who is Jesus/Yeshua, no matter what name we use, IS God. We need to stay out of this antichristian confession. It is potentially deadly, as the Apostle John warns us!
(My point here is that the legalistic mindset is more dangerous than some folks have realized. See Jeremiah 17:9. Except a man be born again, he will get everything important to Christianity WRONG. It is possible to be a pseudo-sincere religionist like Nicodemus was in John Chapter 3 and wind up in hell.)
Therefore, the faith of the Son of God demands that we sincerely claim for ourselves the name of Almighty God and expect in that sincerity of trust that He will save us unto heaven itself.
Failure to do this is to draw back to perdition. Failure to be bold in the faith of the Judgment Day sincerity which regeneration always produces is a kind of cowardice which God loathes.
So, when we apply the third commandment to the matter of hypocritical claims upon the Name/Being of God, we see that intractably obdurate unbelief is the real essence of the only unpardonable sin mentioned in the Lord's gospel.
Look at the ironies here. It is possible for a person to be so worried about fastidiousness concerning the legal implications of the third commandment that he misses Christ altogether.
I do not assume that Messianic Jews are lost just because they are afraid to use the name of God in the ordinary which Gentile-born Christians do dare to use it. Most of the Messianic Jews have learned the wrong mindset from birth, and it is hard for them to come all the way out of this. But they really need to grow out of some of this stuff. They need to leave carnal baggage behind and walk in the Spirit.
I am not saying that the Messianic Jews should not delight to realize that God has a remnant of His elect among "even" the Jews in a day and age in which the vast majority of Christians are Gentiles. But they need to realize that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile. They need to realize that the Law Code which partitioned us into two groups is not in force as a Code anymore. They need to realize that attempts to continue the Old Covenant in any form undermines the New Covenant which it anticipated in the typology of progressive revelation.
The pinnacle of God's purposes is not national Israel, not even a converted national Israel. Rather, the pinnacle of God's purposes is His BRIDE. And that is the CHURCH.
When we see that, the gospel is exciting indeed! I certainly hope that some of my FReeper brethren will get this vision. Failing that, there is a worst-case scenario which should be mentioned. It is possible for some ostensibly "Messianic Jews" to be harboring an evil heart of unbelief after all. As the Book of Hebrews warns us, we'd better not make a vain profession and draw back to perdition as faithless cowards. We need to see the continuum which the two Testaments present, but we'd better not get stuck in the mindset of the lost Jews.
We'd better be Christians. That's different. According to Paul, we Christians are the true Jews. The fellow who is a little too interested in being an ethnic Jew may not be a true Jew after all. (See Romans 2 and Ephesians 2 and Philippians 3 and Galatians and Hebrews and John 3!)
I've also remarked in the past that it's passing strange that a Jew will write "G-d" but not "Dani-l" or "Isra-l."
Dan