Lies, Lying and Liars
TCF Sermon
October 17, 2004
How many of you have ever received a gift you didn’t like? Maybe it was a really hideous tie. Maybe it was a fruitcake. I’ve heard of families where the same fruitcakes were passed along from member to member for years.
Nobody could bring themselves to eat it. Well, in the interest of helping you handle these situations without having to hurt someone’s feelings, I offer
The top 7 things to say about a gift you don’t like
7. Hey! There’s a gift!
6. This is perfect for wearing around the basement.
5. If the dog buries it, I’ll be furious!
4. I love it - but I fear the jealousy it will inspire.
3. Sadly, tomorrow I enter the Federal Witness Protection Program.
2. To think - I got this gift the same year I vowed to give all my gifts to charity.
And the Number One Thing to say about a gift you don’t like:
1. "I really don’t deserve this."
We’re all faced with such situations...and we can debate on what’s appropriate to say in protecting someone’s feelings in given situations. I don’t want to get bogged down this morning in these kinds of questions, these special cases, as much as I want to look at the bigger picture of what scripture has to say about Lies, Lying and Liars.
Maybe you agree with the little boy who was asked what a lie was and replied,
"A lie is an abomination to the Lord, but a very present help in time of trouble!"
But the truth is that there is a cost to lying. Those who lie, sometimes even once in a given situation, find it hard to win their way back to being trusted again.
I find it very interesting that in our culture of lying, which we’ll examine in depth this morning, it’s still one of the worse things you can say of someone...He or she is a liar.
Almost everybody does it, but no one wants to be labeled a liar. A look at secular bookshelves tells you that.
On the left these books include Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. On the right of the political spectrum, you have Ann Coulter’s Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.
If there’s anything in scripture that’s absolutely clear, even if only by the sheer force of the number of times it’s prohibited, or spoken about negatively, it would be lying.
Leviticus 19:11 " ’Do not lie. " ’Do not deceive one another”
As people who follow the One who said, I am the Truth, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the hallmark of our character, a mark of our integrity, should be that we are truth-tellers.
It’s interesting that, the admonition to tell the truth, and the corresponding injunction against lying, is something that is spoken of clearly in almost every major world religion.
It’s a standard on which most of the world seems to agree, even if, as we’ll see, that agreement doesn’t seem to affect behavior as it should.
Taoism says: Do not assert with your mouth what your heart denies.
Buddhism say: “Lying is the origin of all evils; it leads to rebirth in the miserable planes of existence, to breach of the pure precepts, and to corruption of the body.”
Oooh. Rebirth in the miserable planes of existence can’t be good.
Hinduism says: All things are determined by speech; speech is their root, and from speech they proceed. Therefore he who is dishonest with respect to speech is dishonest in everything.
Islam says “There are three characteristics of a hypocrite: when he speaks, he lies; when he makes a promise, he acts treacherously; and when he is trusted, he betrays.
Confucius says, "I do not see what use a man can be put to, whose word cannot be trusted.”
I believe the world agrees that lying is not a good thing for very practical reasons. Have you ever thought about what the world would be like if there wasn’t at least a general agreement that we should relate to one another on some level of truthfulness?
Nietzsche said: What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on, I can no longer believe you.
An author named Sissela Bok wrote a book called “Lying : Moral Choice in Public and Private Life.” She thought through this question:
“In such a world, you could never trust anything you were told or anything you read. You would have to find out everything for yourself, first-hand. You would have to invest enormous amounts of your time to find out the simplest matters. In fact, you probably couldn’t even find out the simplest matters: in a world without trust, you could never acquire the education you need to find out anything for yourself, since such an education depends upon your taking the word of what you read in your lesson books. A moment’s reflection of this sort, makes it crystal clear that you benefit enormously by living in a world in which a great deal of trust exists – a world in which the practice of truth-telling is widespread. All the important things you want to do in life are made possible by widespread trust.”
I thought of a few practical examples related to a form of lying called cheating:
How about putting yourselves in the hands of a surgeon who might have cheated on his tests, or in some other ways lied about his credentials and training?
Do you want someone like that holding a sharp instrument, getting ready to cut into your flesh? What if he cheated on his anatomy final, and doesn’t know where your spleen is? Up here, right?
That kind of scenario would lead to a couple of things you don’t want to hear a surgeon say in the operating room:
Wait a minute. If this is his spleen, then what’s that?
Hand me that...uh...that uh....thingie.
Or how about an engineer who would have flunked bridgebuilding 101, except he cheated on his final? Keep me away from any bridges he builds.
The world recognizes that, for a wide variety of practical reasons, we need to be able to trust, that what people tell us, is true. When people don’t tell the truth, havoc reigns, in society, in relationships. When people don’t tell the truth, it can have serious consequences. Did you ever stop to think how much of our world is messed up by lies? Did you ever think about many of the practical consequences of lying, and the ripple effect it has on our culture? We’ve seen it in heads of major corporations that lie about their companies’ financial picture, and cause millions of dollars to be lost in the stock market, resulting in thousands of people losing their jobs.
Think of that huge ripple effect. Our legal system relies on people telling the truth. Justice relies on truth-telling. Without it, there’s no real justice. And so much of our court system depends on getting at the real truth. In so many court cases, someone is clearly lying.
It’s the job of judges and juries to determine who’s lying and who isn’t. That’s not always easy, so justice is far from perfect.
Lisa was in a wreck a couple of months ago. She was approaching an intersection, and the light was green. The light turned yellow right as she entered the intersection, so she continued through. Well, a young man driving another vehicle hit her front end as she got into the intersection, the impact spun her car around to the other side of the intersection, and flipped his vehicle onto its roof.
Lisa said she had the right of way because the light was green, then yellow. The other kid said he was trying to get a jump on the green, I guess implying that he didn’t slow down as the light turned green for him. Someone didn’t tell the truth.
Now, I believe my daughter, but the point is that regardless of who you believe, someone lied. They couldn’t have both had a green light. The police at the scene, because there were no eyewitnesses, wouldn’t determine fault. The insurance investigators for both companies denied the other’s claim. So both sets of parents were out the cost of a car, because someone lied.
We could give many other examples, but the point is, because our society relies on people telling the truth, when someone lies, in many circumstances, everybody pays.
Yet, despite the fact that we can readily agree that our society needs to have a common understanding about telling the truth, it’s clear something’s gone awry.
One study shows that 74 percent of high school students out of 12,000 surveyed,said they had cheated on an exam at least once in the past year. That’s up from 61 percent of students surveyed in 1992.
After doing 3.8 million background checks, Automatic Data Processing Inc. announced that 52 percent of job applicants had lied on their résumés.
In another survey, students at religious schools proved more likely to cheat and lie to parents and teachers than the national average.
A university of Massachusetts psychologist did a study recently that said the most popular students in school sometimes are the best liars.
Robert Feldman said: We found that convincing lying is actually associated with good social skills. It takes social skills to be able to control your words as well as what you say non-verbally," said Feldman.
Study after study shows that lying seems to be a way of life for many. Of course, that’s if you believe the study.
The book The Day America Told the Truth says that 91 percent of those surveyed lie routinely about matters they consider trivial, and 36 percent lie about important matters; 86 percent lie regularly to parents, 75 percent to friends, 73 percent to siblings, and 69 percent to spouses.
• A national survey by Rutgers’ Management Education Center of 4,500 high school students found that 75 percent of them engage in serious cheating.
• More than half have plagiarized work they found on the Internet – we’ll look at that more closely in a moment.
• Perhaps most disturbing, many of them don’t see anything wrong with cheating: Some 50 percent of those responding to the survey said they don’t think copying questions and answers from a test is even cheating.
I found this quote in an article about high school students cheating:
"What’s important is getting ahead," says (one student). "The better grades you have, the better school you get into, the better you’re going to do in life. And if you learn to cut corners to do that, you’re going to be saving yourself time and energy. In the real world, that’s what’s going to be (happening). The better you do, that’s what shows. It’s not how moral you were in getting there."
Here’s another couple of quotes:
“I actually think cheating is good. A person who has an entirely honest life can’t succeed these days."
How about this one:
"I believe cheating is not wrong. People expect us to attend 7 classes a day, keep a 4.0 GPA, not go crazy and turn in all of our work the next day. What are we supposed to do, fail?"
All I can say is that I hope the person who said this will not be a doctor holding a scalpel over me someday. Or an aviation engineer who helped build a plane I’m flying on.
Just as seriously, we see people dumbing down lies and making excuses.
Alexander Haig once said this: "That’s not a lie, it’s a teminological inexactitude."
How far we’ve fallen as a society. How dangerous this is getting for our future. I hope I’m not tempting any of our youth by telling you this, though I’m guessing many of you already know it.
There are more than 250 web sites where you can buy term papers. One’s called killeressays.com
“Welcome to killer essays! We’re got all the killer essays for you to download. We care for you, the student, so please do not copy, steal, or plagiarize our essays because cheating is wrong and teachers know about this website. Our essays are for research purposes, so read our essays and get some ideas out of them, not plagizarize them. Enjoy the site!”
How many of you believe these sites are used for research? Not at up to $10 a page! I found one term paper on a site called freepapers.net, and the ironic title of this paper was Ethics in Business.
Educational institutions are having to go to great lengths to fight this form of lying.
Coastal Carolina University had a page on their website devoted to this issue. One purpose was to show the teachers where students were getting papers. The other was to try to convince the students that this was a foolish way to get a good grade.
“Students: read the warnings at these sites. If you turn in one of these papers as your own work, you are plagiarizing. If you need help with research, ask the experts at your institution, the professors, librarians, Writing Center personnel, etc. You are capable of producing work that is much better than what is offered at these sites.
These are business sites, they exist for one purpose, to make money off you. They don’t care about your grades, your integrity, or your problems, despite their assurances to the contrary. They want your cash or credit cards. Caveat Emptor (Let the Buyer Beware).”
To fight back against plagiarism, another web business is doing a sort of detective work to help teachers determine when students have turned in plagiarized work. It’s called turnitin.com Here’s their pitch to teachers:
“:Our plagiarism prevention system makes it easy to identify students who do submit unoriginal work, and also acts as a powerful deterrent to stop plagiarism before it starts. At the heart of our plagiarism prevention system are our customized Originality Reports, which contain extensive documentation of any potential plagiarism. Any text in the paper that is found by our system to be unoriginal appears underlined, color-coded, and linked to its original source. All work submitted to Turnitin is checked against three databases of content”
So, here we see the problem. When you don’t believe the rules of life are fair, you make up your own moral code. Students think it’s unfair to have to study to get a grade, so they cheat. People think that music companies make too much money anyway, so they download illegal songs. One writer said: “For working stiffs, stealing office supplies and fiddling expenses feel like petty acts of revenge against an exploitative system in which rich people wangle their way out of their proper share of the tax burden, and corrupt CEOs get away with rap-on-the-knuckle fines. Stealing cable or downloading MP3s doesn’t feel like theft, either, if you justify it as reprisal against impersonal corporations with their overpriced wares.”
Even secular writers notice this. Lying and a form of lying, cheating, like many sins, is contagious. First, you start with what we might call “little lies, or white lies.” And it grows from there to more serious consequential lies.
Then, the more people do it, the more it becomes accepted. The more people accept it, the more people do it. In fact, David Callahan, author of a book called, The Culture of Cheating, writes:
“If you feel like everyone is cheating, then not cheating seems foolish. You’re just shooting yourself in the foot -- you’ll suffer while all the other cheaters get ahead. Being scrupulously honest may seem like a nice idea, but to some people it’s pointless, as quaint and as practical as ditching your computer and writing with a quill.”
Remember earlier, we saw how the world agrees that lying is not a good thing for very practical reasons? We considered what the world would be like if there wasn’t at least a general agreement that we would all relate to each other on some level of truthfulness?
We all benefit from the system when it works like it should and everybody participates. But in reading the secular authors about this idea, where they get bogged down is this:
How does this idea of the personal benefits of truth-telling translate into a personal, moral conviction of, or allegiance to, telling the truth?
Here’s how the author Sissela Bok we quoted earlier dealt with this:
“(people have found) the social practice of truth-telling to have great value both generally and personally. You benefit directly from the practice. But how does this fact of personal benefit translate into a personal moral allegiance to veracity? The fact that a system of truth-telling benefits you enormously, doesn’t by itself justify your adhering to the Principle of Veracity. After all, if personal benefit is all that counts for you, then why not reap all the benefits that a system of truth-telling brings, and then reap a little bit more by lying for personal gain?”
Of course, you don’t want people to distrust you. A lie is to your advantage only when other people will believe it. People will believe it, only where a practice of truth-telling generally prevails. Such a practice prevails only when most people are doing their part to support it. That is, when most people are telling the truth.
The liar, then, wants to be what this author calls “a free rider.” He or she wants others to do their part to maintain a system, while he or she doesn’t do his or her part. Isn’t it interesting how upset liars get when they find you lie to them?
The liar reaps the benefit of the system, without investing the sacrifice of supporting it, that is, by telling the truth.
But, what gets you from
point a: the recognition that a system of truth-telling benefits you personally,
to point b: living by a moral principle against lying?
In other words, we don’t lie simply because it’s wrong to lie, not just because telling the truth benefits society and ourselves by extension. Again, here’s where our secular society gets stuck. This author’s answer:
What she called “a simple egalitarianism.” She described that like this:
“You can’t see any reason why you are special, why you are different from all the rest of mankind. Yet you have to view yourself as different if you think a different rule applies to you than applies to everybody else. In wanting there to be a system of truth-telling, and in wanting also to lie, whenever it benefits you, you want to make an exception for yourself – an exception from the rule you want everybody else to follow, which is to tell the truth.”
However, if you are unwilling to make an exception of yourself, and you are unwilling to believe you are more special than everybody else, then the author supplies you with one argument she says you need, to see why you should adhere to the Principle of Veracity:
She says telling the truth is just your doing your part to uphold the practice you benefit from. She writes:
“So, there are two steps to defending the Principle of Veracity: (i) the fact that you personally benefit from a system that you want others to do their part in maintaining; and (ii) a principle of reciprocity or fair play, requiring you to do your part in maintaining the system if others are doing their part.”
Let me ask you something. Even though I appreciate this philosophical thinking about truth telling, and I think it’s pretty good as far as it goes, and maybe even reflects in part a sort of Biblical view of lying vs. truth telling.
How many of you think appealing to fairness is enough to keep people telling the truth? This is the problem with modern secular teaching on ethics.
Appealing to fairness isn’t enough. Without a stronger foundation than that, we just breed more liars. What it takes is a fundamental change. It takes a change of heart. Scripture recognizes what modern man doesn’t. Our hearts are inherently evil. Only God can work this kind of change. And as believers in the One who is the Truth embodied, we can rely on Him to make that change.
One passage seems to appeal in part to the same argument this author did.
Ephes. 4:25 Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body.
Here, the apostle Paul is appealing to the fact that lying hurts the body of Christ.
Life Application Bible says about this verse:
“Lying to each other disrupts unity by creating conflicts and destroying trust. It tears down relationships and leads to open warfare in a church.”
We belong to the same society. In Christ, we belong to the same body. Lying tends to threaten that life together. So this is a worthy appeal. But there’s a phrase here that also appeals to something else.
That’s the idea of the old man – what we used to be before we were in Christ. Paul says “put off” falsehood. This is the same language he uses in the verses just prior, as well as in other passages.
Ephes. 4:22-24 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Then, Paul writes, Therefore....
“Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body.”
Paul’s reminding the Ephesians, and us, lying is part of the old life, the way we used to live. Telling the truth is part of the new. Now, remember, Paul is writing to believers here.
Colossians 3:9 makes a similar point:
Col. 3:9 9Do not lie to each other,
Why?.... since you have taken off your old self with its practices.
So, both the Ephesians and the Colossians needed to be reminded by Paul that lying was not only not a good thing, but that it was a part of the way they used to be, it was a practice they should no longer adhere to.
Let’s read a bit more of the context of the Colossians passage:
Col. 3:7-10 You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.
There are other things here that tell us how seriously God sees the habit of lying. Look at the other things he bunches it with:
anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language.
You think – well, I don’t do those things.
If that’s not bad enough, look at Revelation 21:8
Rev. 21:8 But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars--their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur.
Lying is not seen in very good company here, either. It’s classified with murderers, sexually immoral, idolaters, etc. And again, you think, well, I don’t do those things. But what we see here is that lying is not a lesser sin. The Word of God speaks throughout the NT and OT clearly on this issue, too.
Here’s just a small sampling:
Proverbs 12:22 The LORD detests lying lips, but he delights in men who are truthful.
Proverbs 6:16-19 There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him: 17haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, 18a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, 19a false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.
John 8:44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
So, lying is not something we should avoid just because it causes trouble for us, and for the people around us. It’s true that lying hurts our culture, hurts those around us, hurts the church.
But another reason that we are not to lie, is because it’s part of that old man, that old part of our old selves that has been nailed to the cross, has been tried and convicted, and put to death. Our lies are sins that Jesus died to pay the price for. Lying is part of our old life, and we shouldn’t have any use for it anymore. We’ve only scratched the surface this morning, but let’s close with this admonition.
Let’s tell the truth....
In all of our interactions with one another, and with the world we’re trying to reach for Christ, let’s reflect the character of the One who is the embodiment of truth, the one described in
1 Samuel 15:29 He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie
Let’s be truth tellers. Let’s take lying seriously, so seriously that we cannot do it... we must not live in it
Amen.
