You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. (Exodus 20:16)
The Ten Commandments can be divided into two parts: the first part is what it looks like to love God and the second part is what it looks like to love your neighbor. When Jesus was asked, “Which is the great commandment in the law?” He gave a two-part answer – love God and love your neighbor. In fact, he said, “On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:40) That’s a pretty astonishing reply because it means you can boil the entire Old Testament down to just love God, love your neighbor. And since Jesus did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, the same holds true for us who live under the New Covenant.
Which brings us to consider the Ninth Commandment. Telling the truth. “Bear false witness” suggests a courtroom context and Exodus 23:1-3 confirms that. But, if you think about it, in Matthew 12:36 Jesus indicates that we shall have to give an account for every careless word we speak. The Bible teaches us that, while we humans have to evaluate people based on people’s words and actions, God looks on the heart. (1Samuel 16:7) To put it bluntly, God knows when we’re lying. And that includes “white lies” and “half-truths.”
American author Mark Twain is credited with saying, “A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on.” A couple hundred years earlier, Irish writer Jonathan Swift said, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” And of course, James, the brother of Jesus, tells us, “How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness.” (James 3:5,6) Jesus himself tells us, “Let your yes, be yes and your no, be no. Anything more than this comes from evil.” (Matthew 5:37)
At the Last Supper Jesus reassures His disciple Thomas, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6) If we call ourselves Jesus’ disciples then the truth ought to matter to us. No good thing has ever come from a lie – just ask Adam and Eve when they believed the serpent rather than God.
So how does this apply to us at the one quarter mark of the 21st Century? Less than a hundred years ago a man declared, “A lie spoken once remains a lie. But a lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.” That man’s name was Josef Goebbels and he was the Minister for Propaganda in Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The Nazi’s lies set the whole world on fire in World War II and destroyed Germany itself, the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation, where the Bible was first printed in the language of the people. But the majority of the German people (and even the majority of German Christians apart from notable exceptions like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer) preferred the lies.
We might feel like we are living in a particularly evil time but God’s church has always had to deal with lies. Less than forty years after Jesus rose from the dead, the Apostle Paul wrote to his protégé, Timothy: “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.” (2 Timothy 4:4,5)
In the early days of computers there was a saying among programmers, “Garbage in, garbage out.” There’s still a lot of truth in that. So check yourself. Are you spending more time on devices and social media than in the Word of God? Engaging more in culture warfare than spiritual warfare? Worried more about what others say about you than resting in what God says about you? Well, take the time to meditate on Philippians 4:8 – “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”