An unusual trial took place in London in 1670. The
defendant was none other than the founder of Pennsylvania,
William Penn. He was the leader of the Society Of Friends,
known as the Quakers, and he was charged with inciting a
riotous, seditious assembly. Parliament had made the
Quakers an object of persecution, and the judges were in
accord with the conspiracy against this religious minority.
The jury was ordered to agree on a verdict of guilty before
the trial began. Fortunately, the jury had a mind of its own,
and returned the judgment, guilty of speaking aloud on
Grace Church Street. For this, of course, there was no
penalty.
The judge was outraged, and refused to accept the
verdict. He sent them back to reconsider. When they
returned again with the same verdict in writing, the judge
lowered the boom on them and said, "You will not be
dismissed until we have a verdict acceptable to the Court,
and you shall be locked up without meat, drink, fire and
tobacco, and no one may communicate with you. We will
have the verdict, or you shall starve." The jurors in
defiance, after several days of imprisonment, reversed their
decision to not guilty. The judge became increasingly brutal,
but could not break them. The Court finally dismissed the
jury after fining them forty marks per man, and
imprisonment until paid. William Penn was jailed on a
contrived contempt of court charge, and returned to the
Newgate Prison.
This historical incident demonstrates that loyalty to the
truth does not always lead to immediate justice.
Nevertheless, it is the only hope of ever having justice at all.
Those who refuse to bare false witness in obedience to God,
rather than lie in obedience to the state were actually the
greatest friends of the state, for when all such people are
gone, the state has no future, but that of enduring the wrath
of God.
The courts require witnesses to swear to tell the truth.
They make it a crime not to tell the truth. So the truth is
absolutely essential to any system of justice. Every nation
has recognized this, and that is why perjury is universally
condemned and severely punished. God knew Israel could
not be a united people, and a representative of the God of
justice, if truth was not honored among them. Therefore, we
have the ninth commandment, which makes the preservation
of truth one of the basic principles necessary for a good
society. The whole legal, social, and moral fabric of society
will unravel in utter chaos without the thread of truth
running through it.
This is another reason why Americans have good reason
to fear for the future of our nation. The credibility gap is a
big topic in our day. It means that there is so much lying
going on that we don't even know for sure if the credibility
gap is a fact or a lie. Spurgeon said, "If all men's sins were
divided into two bundles, half of them would be sins of the
tongue." Just listen to a partial list of the sins of the tongue.
Lying, calumny, slander, misrepresentation,
contumely, insult, scurrility, railing, detraction,
whispering, backbiting, false witness, deprecation,
vilification, insinuation, abuse, tattle, insolence,
sneering, taunting, jives, jeers, defamation, libel,
satire, sarcasm, lampoon, censoriousness, slashing
criticism, surmising, attributing motives, and last
but not lease, gossip.
That is an impressive array of weapons which the tongue
has to use in the battle for evil. These weapons are not just
used by politicians, but by everybody. Paul writes to the
Christians at Corinth in II Cor. 12:20, "I fear that perhaps I
may come and find you not what I wish.....That perhaps
there may be quarreling, jealousy, anger, selfishness,
slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder." The church has
never been without its storehouse of sins of the tongue.
Therefore, the study of the ninth commandment is directed
at ourselves, and not just those of the world. Let's consider
first,
1. PERJURY.
This is a voluntary violation of an oath. The
subtlety with which men can bare false witness is amazing.
A case reported in a popular magazine revealed how even
the truth can be used for bearing false witness. The case
dealt with a will that was being contended based on the
deceased not being right in the head. Testimony was given
that he put his head between the curtains dividing the living
and dining room and cried, "Baaa, I'm a billy goat." This
way true, but as further probing brought out, it was while
playing with his grandchildren. True statements designed to
mislead are just as much lies as outright falsehoods.
No system of law will lead to justice when perjury is a
common practice, and this seems to be the case in our land
today. Mr. Samuel Untermyer says,
"Perjury has become so general as to taint and well-nigh paralyzed the
administration of justice." A judge of the supreme court of
New York declared, "We have reached the point where we
merely try to find out which side is lying most." Law and
justice cannot operate without morality. As the church has
less and less influence in America, the standard of morality
falls lower and lower, and the result will be that the values
that made us great will eventually be completely eroded. If
the practice of false witness was limited to the courts it
would be bad enough, for God hates injustice. But it is not
confined to the courtroom. It evades all of life so that people
in general feel no guilt at all in practicing
2. MISREPRESENTATION.
There are numerous ways to
bear false witness through misrepresentation, and
advertising agencies are experts on most of them. It is a
science, this technique of deceiving people into thinking they
are getting a bit of paradise with every box of soap or every
brand of beer. This aspect of false witness we could go on
blasting for the rest of the hour, but that would be a waste of
time. Let's look at the way you and I play lightly with the
truth.
Almost all of us like to speak with authority, and so we
tend to give the impression that our opinion is supported by
a world wide pole. We throw out judgments and evaluations
of people, groups, and ideas, without a shred of first hand
evidence, or personal research. We appeal to that world
famous authority on all matters-They.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote
,Have you ever heard of the terrible family They,
And the dreadful venomous things They say?
Why, half of the gossip under the sun,
If you trace it back, you will find begun
In that wretched House of They.
When we as Christians speak with no more authority
than an appeal to They, we are salt without flavor, and do
nothing to strengthen the grip of truth in our society.
Henry A. Luce, editor-in-chief of Time, Life, and Fortune,
said, "The most dangerous fault in American life today is the
lack of interest in truth." There are very few people who
prefer truth to their prejudices, and other self-centered
values of life. My perspective is all that counts. Life is
competitive, and so I must advance at the expense of others.
To misconstrue, misquote, or quote out of context, or
exaggerate, or anything whereby I cause another to lose
favor, is legitimate in the task of winning favor for myself.
This is the attitude of people in general, and Christians do
not stand out as impressively unique and different.
Christians have been far more influenced by materialism
than they are aware of. Biblical morality puts persons on the
highest level of values. All of these last commandments are
concerned with protecting the rights of persons. Jesus
summed them up in the statement of loving our neighbor as
ourselves. The commandments we have been looking at deal
with the tangible man: His family, his wife, his life, and his
property. It is easy to observe if you have killed him or
stolen his car. But now, with this commandment, we have
entered into the realm of his personality. If you hit him with
a car or piece of steel, the scar will show, but if you speak lies
against him, there is tangible or visible injury, it is a matter
of the spirit. You have attacked the inner man when you
break this commandment. Honor, reputation, and dignity
are invisible, but very real values that you can steal from
him by mere words. Shakespeare wrote,
Who steals my purse steals trash;
Tis something, nothing--
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
The danger of libel lurks everywhere for new reporters.
If someone is arrested and they write an article which says
Murderer Captured, or Forger Arrested, and that man is not
found guilty of the crime, he can sue the reporter for libel,
for he bore false witness against him by calling him a
murderer or forger, when there was no such thing proven.
The courts have said a man reputation is to be protected,
and the only way you can escape libel is to prove what you
have said is true. If you speak the truth, however unpleasant
it may be, you cannot be sued for libel.
Materialism focuses on the value of matter. It's stress is
on accuracy in dealing with things. We must, of course be
precise in a scientific world, for inaccuracy can cause a great
calamity. We would not tolerate a scale or ruler that bore
false witness to weight or length. Yet, when it comes to
persons we feel no such urgency to be totally accurate. We
can speak about persons carelessly, haphazardly with
unfounded implications and sloppy thinking in general. Our
words often reveal our true value system. If we care more
about being accurate when we speak of atoms than of
people, we are materialists at heart, and Christians morality
is only a veneer.
There is nothing sacred about protons, neutrons, velocity,
and mass, yet men will stop at no sacrifice of time and effort
to be accurate in their description of them. Yet, they will
speak lies and bear false witness against another person who
is of infinite value, and made in the image of God. Men
would not think of putting an inaccurate label on a chemical
in a lab, but they think nothing of putting a slanderous label
on a person whom they don't even know, just because it suits
their prejudice to do so.
May God help us to avoid both the practice, and the
being a victim, of this kind of false witness. It undermines
the whole concept of the value of persons and truth. We can
be a party to the evil of false witness by giving ear to slander
and then passing it on. It is unfair to draw conclusions
about people from second hand sources, for the party
through whom you receive the information may be a false
witness against the person in question. It is even immoral to
draw conclusions from first hand information that the
person himself would not consent to. We dare not draw
conclusions from labels, unless the person using them defines
what he means. People do not always follow out their beliefs to their
logical conclusion. Therefore, it is false witness to hold them
accountable for all that their views could lead to. A person
may believe that it is okay to persecute heretics, but this does
not prove he would do it. It works the other way too. A
man can believe it is essential to control his temper, and yet
be a hot head himself. Conviction and conduct do not
necessary coincide, and it is wrong for us to assume they do,
and declare it to be so in anyone's case where we do not
know this to be a fact. R. H. Charles says it is even false
witness to state a fact about another's conduct or conviction
if the basis for it is an exceptional situation. He writes, "We
should not strain a man's words to his disadvantage, nor
draw conclusions from any unfortunate expression that may
have fallen from his lips in some passing heat or some
unguarded moment."
We cannot begin to consider the many other ways we
must avoid false witness, but we can see it calls for constant
evaluation of our values, and constant vigilance over our
tendency to follow the values of the secular society. The new
morality says that it is not always wrong to lie, deceive and
give false impressions. There is some Biblical basis for this
perspective, but it is the exception and not the rule.
Solomon acted like he was going to divide the baby, and by
doing so, he forced each of the two women to show their
true colors, and thereby, discover the true mother. Could
the woman who was lying about the baby accuse Solomon of
immoral deception? Not hardly. Rahab told a lie to protect
the spies of Israel, and she was not condemned for her
deception. From these situations the idea has developed that
when a person has no moral right to the truth, it is legitimate
to lie to them and deceive them.
Law enforcement justifies deception of criminals on this
basis, that being criminals, they have no moral right to the
truth. The problem is, it contradicts the right to be
considered innocent until proven guilty. Who determines
when someone has no moral right to the truth? There is no
doubt that sometimes withholding the truth is beneficial for
the cause of good, but it is risky to make this judgment in
very many situations. The early Christians could have saved
their lives by denying Christ. It could have been a mere lie
and act of deception to put incense on an altar. These acts
could have been done to deceive the pagans who were
persecuting them. The chose, however, to die rather than to
lie to those who had no moral right to the truth. They chose
to suffer the consequences of truth rather than gain the
cheap victory of falsehood. Eldon Trueblood wrote, "The
only possible excuse for falsification of any kind is that of
loyalty to persons, in that they might be harmed if the
falsification did not occur."
Technically the ninth commandment is not dealing with
lying in general, but with the specific type of lie called false
witness. This lead to the death penalty in the Old
Testament. So all can agree that false witness is an absolute
wrong, but the issue of whether it is ever right to lie is open
to debate. The example is frequently cited of
the angry criminal or madman who is demanding some
information, and if he gets the wrong answer he is going to
kill someone. In that situation it seems only right that he
should be lied to, for the preservation of life. In the case of
war no one has an obligation to tell the enemy the truth
about secrets of his side of the conflict. If a thief asks where
your valuables are, are you obligated to tell him, or would a
lie be permissible? What right does one who is breaking a
commandment have to your cooperation in doing so? By
your obedience to one you aid him in breaking another. We
can see the question, is a lie ever justifiable, is a complex
issue, and every Christian has to be convinced in his own
mind about what is right.
There may be cases where a lie is the lesser of two evils,
but to stress this among a people who are not loyal to the
principle of the preservation of truth is to play right into the
hands of the relativist and rationalists. They will pervert it
for the service of evil. Long before the new morality men
have considered the idea of the necessary lie. That is, a lie
that is necessary to avoid violating a major, or earlier, moral
obligation. It is a lie that may be necessary for the
preservation of life. Those who held this view were aware of
its dangers and abuses. The fact is, it is rare, and to
rationalize that it is a tool that can be used often makes one
a dangerous person. Let us pray with the poet:
O let me never speak
What bounds of truth exceedeth;
Grant that no idle word
From out my mouth proceedeth;
And grant, when in my place
I must and ought to speak,
My words do power and grace,
Nor let me wound the weak.
If this is not our prayer, it had better be our practice, for
by our words we shall be justified, and by words we shall be
condemned. I have no doubt that one of the greatest causes
for Christians to suffer judgment will be the violation of this
commandment. I read widely and I know it is a major
Christian weakness to bear false witness, and try to make
other Christians look bad. My own feelings are expressed by
that old saint Dr. A. B. Simpson who said, "Rather would I
play with the fork lightening or take in my hand a living
wire, with it fiery current, then speak a reckless work against
any servant of Christ, or idly repeat the slanderous darts
which thousands of Christians are hurling on others, to the
hurt of their own souls and bodies."
Most Christians go their whole life and do not break some
of the commandments, but it is not likely that anyone even
gets through childhood without breaking this one. We talk
so much about other people. We are all mini versions of the
National Enquirer. It makes us look better when we put
others down. It makes us feel better to know bad things to
say about others, especially when we are jealous or envious
of them. The paradox is, though it is the most frequently
broken commandment, it is seldom to never confessed.
Tampering with the truth is so much a part of life that we no
longer even feel guilty about it. One little guy asked his
mom, "Do people who tell lies go to heaven?" She said,
"Certainly not." "Gosh," said the child, "It must be awful
lonesome up there with only God and George Washington,"
A student was asked to define a lie and he said, "A lie is an
abomination unto the Lord, but a very present help in time
of trouble."
It is important that we recognize this is a popular sin, and
that all of us are guilty in one way or another. It is
important that we recognize we are masters at rationalizing
when we defend our breaking of this commandment. If we
are aware of these things we will be more likely to feel some
guilt, and be more in conformity to God's purpose for this
commandment, which is the preservation of truth.
