I sometimes wonder whether God has structured these ten commandments with the most obvious sins first and the least obvious or most subtle at the end. Or is it just that our age has become blind to the last couple of commandments?
Truth is a difficult concept in this day and age isn’t it?
Let me tell you a story: A minister was walking down the street when he came upon a group of boys, all of them between 10 and 12 years of age. The group surrounded a dog. Concerned the boys were hurting the dog, he went over and asked "What are you doing with that dog?" One of the boys replied, "This dog is just an old neighborhood stray. We all want him, but only one of us can take him home. So we’ve decided that whoever can tell the biggest lie will get to keep the dog." Of course, the minister was taken aback. "You boys shouldn’t be having a contest telling lies!" he exclaimed. He then launched into a ten minute sermon against lying, beginning, "Don’t you boys know it’s a sin to lie," and ending with, "Why, when I was your age, I never told a lie." Well, there was dead silence for about a minute. Just as the minister was beginning to think he’d got through to them, the smallest boy gave a deep sigh and said, "All right, give him the dog."
There was a time when a man’s word was his bond, when "I’ll take your word for it" was a common expression that meant something. But things have changed. Over the last century we’ve come to realise that people can’t be trusted. One of the great discoveries of the 20th century was that history is written by the victors and so it only tells one side of the story. In fact, we discovered, what we’d been relying on as historical accounts, and therefore true accounts, were in fact often highly biased and in the worst cases untrue. As oppressed people gained their freedom and received greater educational opportunities, they began to tell the old stories from their own point of view. The stories they told were of terrible things done by colonial powers, acts of war that contravened all standards of civilisation. We began to question the possibility that we could actually find truth in historical accounts. And if history books didn’t tell the truth, what did?
Then with growth of news services we began to learn of corruption in the police forces, in the courts, in government. Not that this was anything new really. The Old Testament has plenty to say about such things, but the power of the media meant that everyone heard about it, with the result that our confidence in authority figures also began to wane. It seemed you couldn’t trust anyone. No longer could we take someone’s word for it. Now we needed proof! And of course the scientific establishment just added to this by asserting that if something couldn’t be proven by scientific evidence then it probably wasn’t true.
It’s a very sad state of affairs isn’t it? If you can’t trust someone to tell you the truth you’re in big trouble. Relationships break down. Stress levels rise. Paranoia increases. What’s more if there’s no longer any such thing as objective truth, if all we have is subjective truth, the truth as I see it, then the possibility of collective action about important issues is diminished.
From a Christian viewpoint of course it’s even more important than that. The Bible tells us over and over again that God is truth. Jesus says: he’s the way the truth and the life.
So if we’re followers of Jesus Christ, if we love God, then truth is central to what we are and what we do and say.
During his trial, Jesus said to Pilate "I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." And Pilate’s famous reply was a cynical "What is truth?" (John 18:37-38) Pilate had been around politics long enough to know that truth was a rare commodity in this world. And truth wasn’t going to help him in the situation he found himself in. So his answer was to ignore the issue.
In the sermon on the mount, when Jesus is talking about making oaths he says: "Let your yes be yes and your no, no." Now, he’s talking about taking God’s name in vain in that passage, but it’s not just about taking God’s name in vain. It’s also about being godly people, people of integrity, people who always tell the truth, for whom a simple yes is enough.
The problem is we live in a world where no-one seems to be able to consistently tell the truth. You may have seen the movie "Liar, Liar" with Jim Carrey. For those who haven’t it’s the story of a fast talking lawyer, Fletcher Reed, who specialises in finding excuses without much concern for the truth. In fact he’s an habitual liar. Trouble is, he even uses this technique to explain why he misses important dates with his young son. Well, when he misses his son, Max’s, birthday party, Max decides to make a special birthday wish. He wishes that his father could just tell the truth for a whole day. And so begins the worst day of Fletcher’s life, as he finds he just can’t tell a lie.
It’s really a parable on modern life. So much of what people do is built around lies, or if not lies, then half-truths. I mean, imagine you were going for a job and told the interview panel every mistake you’d ever made. You wouldn’t do it would you? And how often do you tell people what you really think of them?
"I think you’re a pain in the neck!" "I wish you’d stop your whinging." "Do you ever stop talking?" "That new hairstyle really looks silly, you know." We don’t do it, do we? It’d ruin our social life. We wouldn’t have any friends. People would think there was something wrong with us.
So how do we obey the 9th commandment? How do we ensure that we’re not bearing false witness? In a court of law, which is the context of this commandment, you stand up and declare that you’ll tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But how do we do that in our ordinary everyday lives? And is that what God wants of us?
Well, let’s think about the question of telling the truth or lying. The problem with lying is that there are a whole range of degrees of lying aren’t there? Perjury may be the worst example but what about those benign forms that lying takes? I’ve already mentioned some of them. Keeping quiet when you don’t like something about someone may be a form of passive lying mightn’t it? Not telling the boss everything might be another.
Last week Bill talked about stealing as being trying to get as much as possible while giving as little as possible. And similarly here the issue with lying is that it’s an attempt to gain some end by either omitting the truth or changing it. So the motive behind your use or otherwise of the truth may be an important factor.
So not saying what you think so as not to hurt someone’s feelings is different to flattery, where you’re just trying to gain some advantage. Someone once defined flattery as "saying to someone’s face what you’d never say behind their back." Flattery is when you say what you think they want to hear even if there’s no truth to it just so you can make a good impression.
The next level is probably exaggeration. This is where you want to make a good impression so you overstate your achievements or the situation you’ve been in, or you take credit for something that someone else did. Or perhaps you overstate the harm that someone’s done to you in order to get greater sympathy. At its extreme of course that sort of thing becomes slander, but even in the milder form it takes away the possibility of the person you’re talking to making a balanced judgement about your situation.
What about gossip? Gossip’s great isn’t it? Don’t you love to hear the juicy bits of news that get passed around? The trouble is, often the juicy bits aren’t actually true. Sometimes they’re just exaggerated forms of what was once the truth. But sometimes they’re fabrications, made up either to spice up the story for the sake of the hearers or even made up to hurt the reputation of the person you’re talking about. Perhaps the worst form of this is when the gossip pretends to be telling the story out of concern for the other person, when all they’re doing is feeding their own ego at the expense of another. And once the rumours start flying it gets hard to differentiate the truth from the lies.
Lies are at the centre of the story of the fall in Genesis 2 aren’t they? When the woman tells Satan that God’s warned them that they’ll die if they eat the fruit, Satan replies: "You won’t die. In fact the opposite. You’ll get smarter. You’ll finally know how to tell good from evil." He doesn’t say it but the implication is there: "Then you can really live." Well still he seems to be saying that to people today doesn’t he? "Forget truth, just get on with enjoying life, however you want." And he continues to ask "Did God really say...?"
Part of the process of the loss of belief in absolute truth has been the dismissing of God’s word as having any authority in the modern age. ’It’s so old fashioned’, they say. ’It’s so out of date.’ ’We’ve moved beyond that boring moralism.’ ’We’re enlightened these days.’ ’We don’t need God’s word to tell us how to live.’ ’We can work that out by ourselves.’
The trouble is, where truth fails, justice fails. I recently watched the movie American Gangster. It’s a story based on a real gangster and the real detective who finally caught him. It’s a bit like "The Untouchables." The detective has a huge battle to overcome not just the gangsters, but the other police how are being paid huge bribes to hide the truth.
But you know, the same thing happens at a much more mundane level every day. As soon as we begin to think that truth is a matter of opinion or perspective we lose the ability to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. Our ability to discern between good and bad behaviour becomes clouded or compromised. We’ve seen it over the last month or so with the controversy around naked children being photographed in the name of art.
The artists are quite right, if truth is just a personal perspective. They’re just taking beautiful pictures. The trouble is, if you take that line of thinking too far you can justify all sorts of things that society would otherwise condemn. No, we need to know what’s true and what’s a lie.
So how do we find the truth? Jesus talked about that a lot, especially in the passage from John’s gospel that we just heard read. "31If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; 32and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." He says to the Pharisees: "43Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot accept my word."
The key to knowing the truth is in God’s word. It’s God word that brings us salvation and it’s God’s word that shows us how to live lives that reflect God’s intentions for the world. Peter tells us this: "You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God. 24... ’The grass withers, and the flower falls, 25but the word of the Lord endures forever.’ That word is the good news that was announced to you." (1 Pet 1:23-25)
The power of the gospel is that it changes people’s hearts, it opens their eyes to see the world from God’s point of view. In other words it gives us a true picture of the world. But that miracle of revelation brought about by God’s word is like the seed that Peter uses as his metaphor. It begins it’s life in a small way and gradually grows into a healthy tree. In our case, the seed of truth, of salvation, begins as the word of God is planted in our hearts and grows as God’s word continues to feed us and lead us into deeper and deeper truth. Paul tells us that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. Jesus said: "It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life." (John 6:63)
So if we’re to grow in our Christian life we need to feed on God’s word. If we desire truth in our inward being as the psalmist puts it, we’ll be immersing ourselves in God’s word.
But then we need to live it out. Jesus said "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; 32and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." It’s not enough just to know the truth. It needs to be lived out so we can experience the freedom that living the truth brings. When he says "If you continue in my word..." he’s talking about our obedience to what he tells us, our acceptance of his word as authoritative, our acceptance of his word as absolute truth. And when we begin to live it out it becomes real for us. Do you remember the parable of the wise builder? There were actually two builders in that story. Both heard the message, but only one took notice and did what they were told. The wise one heard Jesus’ words and acted on them. The foolish one heard them and ignored them. When the storms of life come, the one who’s acted on Jesus words will be able to weather the storm while the other is likely to crumble under the pressure.
Well before we finish let me give a warning on the misuse of truth. There’s a difference between what we might call a truth warrior and a truth terrorist. The commandment tells us not to bear false witness against our neighbour. Well sometimes we can bear false witness simply by speaking the truth in an unhelpful manner. As I said before, our neighbour doesn’t need or want to hear everything we’ve ever thought about them. We don’t need to tell others everything we’ve ever done or thought. It’s a matter of discernment of the right context in which to speak the truth.
Now there are some people who are simply naive in the way they say whatever they’re thinking irrespective of the consequences. There’s even an emphasis in our culture on open self-expression. It’s one of our basic rights isn’t it? The right to free speech? Larry Crabb, an American psychologist, suggests that one of the major issues for us today is the emphasis on ideals like openness, authenticity, transparency, assertion, fulfillment and genuineness, at the expense of self-sacrifice, self-discipline, self-giving love, obedience and willing endurance. As a result we’ve lost the ability to commit ourselves to any direction that runs counter to our urges. Well Paul says a similar thing in Eph 4:29: "29Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear." (Encouragement: the Key to Caring, pp42-43)
The truth terrorist sometimes even speaks the truth in a way that’s meant to hurt. I guess we’ve all done it in the heat of an argument. We call it giving them a piece of our mind, but usually it’s not a very sanitary piece of our mind, is it? We claim to be just speaking the truth but we’re certainly not speaking the truth in love. In fact the truth in this case could be seen as bearing false witness, not by its content, but by its intent.
Well that’s all we have time for today. Let me sum up by saying let’s speak the truth, but let’s do it in love so it that it builds up and gives grace to those who hear.
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