Lying Series

I would like to start off with a few questions that require an honest answer. The first question is how many of you have told a lie in the last five years? I am not talking about the white lies when your wife asks you if her jeans make her butt look big. I am talking about honest to goodness lies. How many in the last year have told a lie? How many in the last month? How many in the last week? Today? Some of you are taking the Fifth Amendment. The second question is a little bit easier. How many of you would say you are an honest person? Interesting. The same people that just admitted they are liars now basically are saying they are honest people. How can that be? Psychologists have an answer. They say the reason we can hold two conflicting ideas about ourselves in our brain is because we have the power to rationalize things. We don’t really see some of actions even though they might be wrong. We don’t technically see them as lies so it doesn’t affect our self-worth or our idea of honesty. For example, if you were filling out an application for a job or preparing a résumé and you are updating your profile on LinkedIn and you added a degree or skills or jobs you didn’t have, many people would not consider that a lie because it is just embellishing and everybody does it so it isn’t really a lie. Seeing that it is tax season, everyone is filling out their tax return. Technically, you are supposed to put your income down from all sources, including the cash tips or the business you did on the side and got money under the table. Technically speaking, you are to add it to your income tax because it is taxable. But I suspect that some people don’t do that because everybody leaves things off. Uncle Sam doesn’t need more of my money anyway. That is where we get into the idea that when we fudge the truth a little bit, it is not really technically lying because everybody does it. The problem with that is it creates a culture that is pervaded with dishonesty and lying. As we know, the more lies there are in society, the more difficult it is to navigate through the culture to determine what is really truth. A perfect example is the ongoing arena of political candidates. No matter who you are voting for, basically all the candidates lie to a certain degree. The challenge we have as Americans is not who is telling the truth but who is telling the least amount of lies. It gets very difficult to navigate society. We are able to hold these seemingly conflicting ideas in our head that we are basically honest people, but there are times when you can fudge the truth a little bit. I think that is the attitude that Jesus is trying to address today in Matthew 5. Again, we are going through the series called Learning to Live Everyday Life Like Jesus. It is a sermon series based on the Sermon on the Mount. Today, we are going to deal with the topic of oaths and lying, and falsified oaths. I would like to have somebody stand up and read the passage Matthew 5:33-37 from the NIV. (Scripture read here.)

I am sure many of you read that passage and on the surface level it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense what is going on there. That is why it is helpful to give you a little bit of background as we move through it. The passage opens up with Jesus saying “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’” I would suspect that most of us know what an oath is, but in case you don’t I am putting up the dictionary definition. An oath is a solemn appeal to a deity or some revered person or thing to witness one’s determination to speak the truth, to keep a promise, etc. Many of us are familiar with the oath you might take in a courtroom setting where the bailiff asks you to repeat “I solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help me God.” That is an oath we are thinking of. It is very similar to what Jesus is referring to here. An oath back in the day and even today seems to add a lot of weight to your words because technically speaking we know if we break the oath that we have given to God then at a minimum we are going to be charged with perjury in the courtroom. At a maximum, we are going to experience the wrath of God. Oaths are very serious things. In the first century, the oaths would often extend out into the culture and the marketplace. People would take oaths when they were dealing in transactions. They would take them when they were exchanging property, selling animals or livestock and that sort of thing. So oaths were very common. They find their biblical basis back in the Old Testament. There are many passages that speak of that. But one passage in particular comes out of the book of Leviticus 19:12 where it says “Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.” As a side note, when he is talking about profaning the name of the Lord, he is not necessarily talking about what we think of as a profanity, although that is obviously not a good thing to use the Lord’s name in vain. But what he is talking about here are oaths. Oaths we would take where we would invoke God’s name as a witness that we are about to tell the truth. When these people heard Jesus’ words where he said “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord’” most of the people would nod in agreement. I understand this. Any oath I make when I invoke the name of the Lord, I keep it. I keep that particular commandment. But as we talked about the last few weeks, we know also that the Pharisees and teachers of the laws would look for loopholes in the law that would allow them to kind of keep the law but also allow them to get what they want. The attitude developed if I can’t speak falsely in a particular situation because I have invoked the name of God, then maybe I should try a different strategy. Maybe I should not swear an oath in the name of God but possibly substitute something else for that name. So they got in the habit of substituting words that seemed to relate to God but weren’t the same as swearing directly to God. They would swear by heaven or swear by earth or swear by the city of Jerusalem. Later on we would see they would swear by the temple or the gold in the temple or the altar in the temple. It is similar to how we would say I swear on a stack of Bibles. In some sense it is swearing on something holy. It is giving credibility to words, but it is not quite the same as swearing to God. That way, if you broke the oath, you wouldn’t have to deal with the wrath of God. This is a loophole that the people developed.