A Return To Civility: 9 Do Not Lie Series

I think that if we were honest today, we’d all agree that there is a feeling of violation that happens when we feel that we have been deceived. Most relationships can take almost anything except deceit.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who said, “I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”

This is why Ann Landers cautioned her readers, “If you marry a man who cheats on his wife, you’ll be married to a man who cheats on his wife.”

Next time you’re at a party and want to stimulate conversation ask people what they are looking for in a relationship and see how many of them talk about honesty.

I’m sure that a good part of the hurt that comes when a spouse betrays the other isn’t about the physical side of it, as hurtful as that may be. The most hurtful part are the lies, the deception.

We are coming close to the end of our series on civility.

I mentioned how earlier this year I had speculated on what I saw as a loss of civility in our society. We’ve come to a place where we can no longer agree to disagree, and we’ve stopped treating one another with respect, at least with those we disagree with.

It seems that society, as a whole, has come to a place where we demand others need to be tolerant of our views, but we aren’t all that interested in being tolerant of their views.

And I wondered if we lost some of that civility when we lost a common morality. That there was a time, that the majority of Canadians, participated in corporate worship of some kind. It might not have been Christian, and it might not have happened on Sunday, but most Canadians were in a worship service on either Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

They may not have had a relationship with the god they were worshipping, but they came together to worship their god, and we shared a common morality.

And the thing that we had in common was a sense of morality, a sense of what was right and what was wrong, and the one thing that we all seemed to agree on was a short list of laws, called the Ten Commandments.

Now if you’ve been with us over the past several weeks then you know that we are coming to the end of a series on the Ten Commandments, a ten-part series as strange as that might seem.

If you haven’t been with us over the past several weeks, well we are still coming to the end of a series on the Ten Commandments.

Today we are looking at commandment number 9, which says in Exodus 20:16 “You must not testify falsely against your neighbour.

The original meaning of this commandment was pretty specific. It was concerned with how we should deal with other people’s names and reputations.

You might recall the third commandment dealt with respecting the name of God, this commandment deals with respecting the name of others. And specifically, it is concerned with not lying about them. Particularly not lying about them in legal situations.

When I spoke about not killing, I mentioned the only way a capital case could be heard in ancient Israel was if there were two eyewitnesses to the crime.

As a further safeguard listen to Deuteronomy 17:6–7 But never put a person to death on the testimony of only one witness. There must always be two or three witnesses. The witnesses must throw the first stones, and then all the people may join in. In this way, you will purge the evil from among you.

Does anyone see the significance here? Do you know why the first people to throw the stones were to be the witnesses who had testified against the convicted person?

The reason was that if the accused was later found innocent then the witnesses were guilty of murder.

Compare that with today, criminal lawyer Johnnie Cochran wrote, “If you commit perjury in a so-called first-degree murder case, and you're caught red-handed for the entire world to see, and you get only a $200 fine, what kind of message does that send about lying in our courts?”

However, in Israel, the crime of perjury was taken very, very seriously and not just in capital cases.

Again, looking at the Book of Deuteronomy 19:16–19 “If a malicious witness comes forward and accuses someone of a crime, then both the accuser and accused must appear before the Lord by coming to the priests and judges in office at that time. The judges must investigate the case thoroughly. If the accuser has brought false charges against his fellow Israelite, you must impose on the accuser the sentence he intended for the other person. In this way, you will purge such evil from among you.