| Liars and Lying. |
John 8:44: "You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. [NASB] I love the clarity of Christ's words here in that He says, "he speaks from his own nature..." I have heard even (otherwise) godly men and mature believers use the example of Rahab to suggest that it is sometimes okay to lie. They reason that a lie is no longer wicked if it is being told to spare someone else pain, death or "needless" grief.
I suggest to you this day that there is only one reason that a person lies: It is because telling the truth in the given situation won't serve that person's desires.
I suggest to you this day that there is only one reason that a person lies: It is because telling the truth in the given situation won't serve that person's desires.
Even a lie that benefits others (think Rahab in Joshua 2:3-5) is still told because the teller believes that telling the lie will yeild a better outcome for them, than telling the truth would. By faith the harlot Rahab welcomed the spies of Israel in peace, and for this she was grafted into Israel - but there was nothing faithful about her lying. Had she spilled the beans, God would have saved her just the same, and He would have preserved those spies too.
I know that some of you reading don't really believe that, and you don't believe that because you think that life is more important than anything else. You believe that unless God preserves a person's life, He is not serving the greatest good, and that is because you have exalted life as a greater good than God. I have written on this philosophical pollutant before. Try to imagine, for a moment, that God is not obligated to keep Rahab or the spies alive, and you might understand why I say that it was wrong for Rahab to lie. Her life is not so valuable, nor the lives of those spies, as to warrant telling a single lie to protect them. In lying she was relying on her own resources to spare her life, because she loved her life more than she loved truth, and since it was her opinion that the truth wouldn't serve her life, she set it aside in order to embrace what she felt would.
This post however is not a judgment of Rahab, but I go there just because if I didn't someone else would.
Until we see the lie for what it is, we are blind. When we lie, we are doing exactly what Christ described the devil as doing: we are speak from our own nature, and we do so in order to protect, pamper, and serve that nature; we lie in order to satify and gratify the flesh and its desires.
I was going preemptively answer a bunch of objections at this point - you know, the fringe examples - what about this horrible, but unlikely situation where the "best" thing you can do is tell a lie. Listen: The best thing you can do is sometimes keep your mouth shut, and if you are forced into a choice between lying or telling the truth - let me reiterate this again - the deciding reason you will lie is because it serves your interests to do so. Maybe there are ten other reasons, all of them great reasons, and each of them presenting themselves as altruistic, holy, and good - and surely you will be powerfully motivated and moved by such things, but these will not be the primary reason you will set the truth aside. The primary reason you will set aside the truth is because you are convinced that it won't serve YOUR PURPOSES as well as a lie will.
Chew on that, liar, until you can swallow it.Labels: lies and lying |
posted by Daniel @
9:33 AM
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