The ninth commandment calls for honesty. God wants us to be truthful in what we say and what we do, and that sounds simple enough, and yet lying seems to come so naturally.
Why do we struggle telling the truth? Today, Alistair Begg gets to the source of our problem on Truth for Life. Now I invite you to turn to Exodus chapter 20. Exodus 20, and we come to the sixteenth verse. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. Now the ninth commandment is a call to truthfulness. It forbids prideful lying that is designed to do down one's neighbor and simultaneously to exalt oneself.
Positively, it calls for the seeking of our neighbor's good and speaking truth about our neighbor in such a way as to produce good in their lives. The call to truthfulness expressed here in the sixteenth verse of Exodus 20 is as vital in our day as it was then, but many crimes at the time that this commandment was given carried with them the death sentence. And consequently, if a person gave false evidence in a court of law, it may well lead to the death of the individual, and it would, in point of fact, amount actually to murder.
In order to address this issue, to safeguard against it, the witness was to be the executioner. So that if one lied in a court of law, giving testimony that was untrue, which brought about the death sentence on the individual concerning whom we spoke, then we would inevitably incur the bloodguiltiness of the one about whom we had spoken falsely. Now in each of these commands—and we've tried to say this each time—in each of these commands, implicit in them is the understanding that behind the decalogue, behind the Ten Commandments, exists a personal creator God who, by dint of who and what he is, possesses every right to guide his creation in the way that he chooses. He is the source of truth in its essential character, he is the one who speaks, and we do well to listen.
Now, we live in a climate where that is rejected almost exclusively. No one has been more responsible for this in philosophical terms than Immanuel Kant. Kant, more than any other philosopher of more modern times, was responsible for introducing the notion that there is no absolute truth, that truth is in point of fact relative, that truth is only what we believe it to be, that truth possesses no existence in and of itself.
It is only what we subjectively conceive of in our own minds. Now, the way this plays out in our culture is in the kind of silly statements that we hear all the time, where when we have made a statement concerning something, an individual may respond by saying, Well, that may be true for you, but it isn't true for me. Now, we need to understand that the Bible rebuts that at every point, because the Bible begins with God, in the beginning God, God who is a truth-telling, promise-keeping God, God who cannot lie, God who in himself embodies truth, God who in his incarnate form says, I am the way, the truth, the life, God who on account of his great holiness cannot tolerate sin, and in the list in Proverb 6 of the seven things that God has said to hate, twice in that list, if you go to it and read it at your leisure, you will discover that God says he hates lies and he hates deception. Now, despite the fact that the Bible is so clear, the attitude of many in our society this morning is characterized by the misquote from the law courts, I promise to tell the whole truth and nothing like the truth. Now, people may not say that, that may be a misquote, but in point of fact, in many cases, it's actually true. And one of the great dilemmas of modern jurisprudence is that without an absolute standard of righteousness, without a concept of true truth, to try and try cases on the basis of truth on a sliding scale has got to be one of the great dilemmas of modern time, especially when those who are in the jury have been brought up to believe that what is true for you may not be true for somebody else. And so this great quest for truth is like going through a desert and coming upon mirage after mirage.
It's just an illusion. Now, if we doubt this in any way, let me quote to you from a couple of sources. The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently argued that, quotes, proficiency at lying, proficiency at telling lies, may be the best measure of advancement with primates—that's us, playmates—with primates much more adept at it than other mammals and human beings the most masterful deceivers on the planet. So the evolutionary hypothesis says that what the Bible regards as sin, contemporary culture regards as a virtue. Though what the Bible says is absolute, contemporary culture says is relative.
So if you don't think that it's a challenge for us to go out into our days upholding the truth of God's law, presumably you've never gone out to try and uphold the truth of God's law. Some of you will be familiar with a magazine called Child. It essentially has to do with child psychology. In its April 1992 edition, in an article entitled The Truth About Lying, it expressed the old view, as it called it, and the new view. See which is your view. The old view, they said, like other issues of morality, was seen only in black and white. Children were taught that all lying was bad, deserving of strict punishment, and they were frequently reminded that, quote, lying will make your nose grow as long as Pinocchio's. Which, of course, is in itself a lie.
It's the old view. The new view, quote, lay, some lying is considered normal. In fact, a child's first few lies are seen as an important step in the development of self. Now, does that kind of run counter to what we're looking at here? You shall not give false testimony against your friend in preschool.
Oh, no, says the lady. We like to hear those early lies. It's an indication of the development of their little selves. Stupid stuff. No wonder the Bible says, The fool has said in his heart, There is no God. That is not intellectual incapacity. That is moral foolishness. And anybody with half a brain knows it's foolish and knows it's wrong. And yet some of the most intelligent people in our world today, some of the most influential thinkers, some of the folks who are always on the chat shows, always on the talk shows, are filtering this down so that it is embedded in our culture.
And as Christians, once again, we sing our songs, we make our march, and we fail to challenge the culture at the point of greatest issue. People have made lying an absolute fine art. It's just something that you can become skillful at, and presumably the more skillful you become, the more human you are, the more you express your distinctiveness from other mammals.
It's interesting, very interesting. Now let's talk a little bit about the means whereby we tell lies. How do you tell lies? Well, you can tell lies with a wink of your eye. You can tell lies by silence. You can tell lies with a nod of your head.
You can tell lies in a number of ways, but the most common way in which we tell lies is by means of what physicians tell us is essentially a two-ounce slab of membrane. In some of our cases it's a little heavier than that, I'm sure, but the slab of membrane encloses a complex array of muscles and nerves, and it enables our bodies to be able to chew and to taste and to swallow. It's called the tongue. It's a vital part of human existence.
God deemed it so. Without a tongue, no mother can soothe her baby to sleep, nor can she shout to her son, TIDY UP YOUR ROOM! Without a tongue, no teacher can communicate with pupils, no ambassador can adequately represent our nation, no attorney can present truth in court. Without tongues, in short, our world is reduced to unintelligible shrugs and grunts. So our tongues are vital. And the Bible says our tongues are vicious. Vicious.
Take a saw from your workshop and use it and use it and use it. It gets more and more blunt. Take your tongue and use it and use it and use it in this way, and it gets sharper and sharper and sharper. A scorpion has all its venom in its tail, and a human being has all its venom in its tongue, so says the Scriptures. James chapter 3, a fire, he says, is our tongue, a restless evil, it's full of deadly poison. And it is by means of our tongues that we fall foul of the ninth commandment so often. Somebody wrote these words, If your lips would keep from slips, five things observe with care.
To whom you speak, of whom you speak, and how and when and where. Somebody else wrote, If all that we say in a single day with never a word left out were written each night in clear black and white, it would make strange reading, no doubt. And then just suppose ere our eyes should close, we would read the whole record through. Then wouldn't we cry and wouldn't we try a great deal less talking to do? And I more than half think that many a kink would be smoother in life's tangled thread if half that we say in a single day were to be left forever unsaid. You see, that's why the Bible says that a perfect man is the man who has perfect control over this vital yet vicious little slab of membrane that we all understand. So the means of our breaking the ninth commandment is our tongue.
The source of the problem is, as we read in John chapter 8, that we belong to our Father the devil. We like to do his deal. We like to speak the way our Father speaks, and he speaks his native language. What's his native language? He has a language all of his own, and it's lies. Everything out of his mouth is a complete lie. Anytime he ever uses truth, it is in order to manipulate it in order to create lies and chaos and distortion. And so the world held in the grip of the evil one buys into lies like crazy. And religious people going through their religious duties, proud of their associations and their background, unless their tongues have been redeemed by the blood of Christ, are the proponents of their Father's material. And so, consequently, we find that we lie from the beginning.
To Eve in the garden, the serpent comes and says, Hey, you know, if you eat that fruit, you will not die. That was a lie. And with a lie it began, and with lies it has continued. What about the manner in which we tell lies? If the means whereby we tell lies is largely our tongues, although we recognize we do it with silence, what about the manner in which lying occurs?
Well, let me just run through one or two, most of which are obvious. First of all, perjury. Perjury. Courtroom lying. People going into court and taking an oath and then failing to tell the truth or deliberately misrepresenting the truth. Ask any trial lawyer, and they will tell you in all honesty that this is far more prevalent than our culture is prepared to admit. Indeed, one of the reasons that it is so difficult to try cases effectively is because of an endemic problem with lying. That is one of the reasons, I think, and this is pure conjecture, that many of the issues are settled out of court on the basis of kind of counterbalancing the interests of people because it saves them from going into court and lying through their teeth and making it obvious to everybody that what they're trying to do is simply secure their own ends and their best benefits.
Loved ones, it is not inconceivable that if this continues in this country, our courts not only will take a long time, but they will prove absolutely, totally useless. And when that happens, anarchy takes the streets. Revolution takes place. And if we think that in this country we're not right for some kind of revolution, we're crazy. Because the way in which the laws of this land were set up were posited upon the fact of a personal creator God who exists, who speaks, and you listen to what he said. And so all your constitution and your Bill of Rights and all that fostered the greatness of this nation is posited on those truths.
Without that as a given, this stuff is a recipe for total chaos. Because then everybody's right becomes everybody's right. And so I have the right to do whatever I want to do.
If I want to take all my clothes off and walk down Madison Avenue and embrace homosexuality, there is no one in the world has any right to tell me I shouldn't, because after all, I have my rights. You see, once you have broken the link between the God of all creation and the creation, then all you're left with is rampant, all-embracing anarchy. And we cannot hold it together, pro tem, in this country on the basis of pragmatism alone.
It will not work. Now, if that sounds like a prophet of doom, then maybe it is. But what it is is to say this. If the church doesn't get on its knees and cry to God for revival so that as in the great eighteenth century awakening into the early twenty-first century that God begins to restore amongst his people a concern for righteousness and for truth. For if judgment first begins at the house of God, what will become of those who know nothing of Christ? If we do not do that, then we deserve what we get. How long will it take for us to understand that when we get before God in honesty in relationship to the things of Christ and the gospel and see that righteousness proceeds from transformed lives but does not create transformed lives? See, you cannot stop lying by an act of Congress. Prohibition doesn't work, because the heart of man is desperately wicked. And if we could get it as good as we can get it, it still wouldn't be that good. That's why Jesus said, Go into all the world and do what? Preach the gospel.
Why? Because it has changed lives, that creates changed streets, that creates changed families, that creates changed schools, that creates changed cities, that creates changed cultures. Never in the history of man has culture been changed from the top down. It has always been changed from the bottom up.
Whether it is the Stalinist revolution or whatever it is, it has always been changed from the bottom up. How did Jesus Christ change things? From the bottom up. What was going on in Corinth?
Bottom up. Think about your conversion. He says, Not many of you were wise, not many of you were powerful, not many of you were influential. The people looked around and said, You know, that's right. So what happened?
Well, there were just a bunch of ordinary people who believed that Jesus Christ was true, and they proclaimed him as such. Now, we're a little off the point, so let's get back here. That all started from perjury.
And then I allowed myself a major tangential run. And for those of you who want to let it go, then let it go. Now, let me tell you another way in which we break the ninth commandment. We break it by rumor. By rumor. The seeing of things that just aren't true. The little gossipy statements about other people. There need be no basis to it.
It need only be allegation. It can be a pack of total lies. But in the culture in which we live, where truth is relative and not absolute, where chaos reigns, where people love to believe the worst, where rumor abounds and sells millions and millions of magazines, we'd be hard-pressed to rebut the things said. Shakespeare says of rumor, he says, Rumor is a pipe that is a musical instrument blown by surmises, jealousies, and conjectures, and of so easy and so plain a stop that the blunt monster with uncounted heads, the still discordant wavering multitude, can play upon it. Shakespeare did not think much of the proletariat.
He calls the populace the blunt monster with uncounted heads and the still discordant wavering multitude. He said, You could go into the multitude and ask them to play this beautiful organ. They couldn't play it. But ask them to play on the pipe of rumor, and any one of them can play.
It's so easy to play. And the way you blow it, he says, is on the basis of conjecture and jealousy and surmising. You've been involved in rumor lately?
Passed any rumors on this week? Passed on any unsubstantiated information to anybody, stuff that you've got no way of knowing whether it was true or not true, but you like the feel of it? A little juicy one? A little kernel about somebody squeezed out from some corner, dropped in casual conversation, never made much of it, you don't need to?
It drops like an incendiary device into an environment, into an office, into a coffee room, into a school, something that may damage the life of that individual for a long, long time. One throwaway line concerning the high school senior girl, one passing comment concerning that student, one word of innuendo concerning that work colleague who has now gone on vacation. Lies. Our words can do real damage. Our lies hurt others. That's Alistair Begg with part one of a message titled The Truth Matters.
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Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139. I'm Bob Lapine on behalf of Alistair Begg and all of us here at Truth for Life. We wish everyone in the United States a very happy Thanksgiving.
Our offices are closed today so our team can be home celebrating with their families. However, our online store is open and features many wonderful Bible teaching materials that can make terrific Christmas gifts if you'd like to share the Gospel with friends and family during the holiday season. You'll find the selection online at truthforlife.org slash features. Now if honesty is really the best policy, let's be honest, all of us are guilty of saying things that just aren't true. We'll find out what motivates us to tell lies tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
