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Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

SERIES: In Tables of Stone #10 of 11

2008-11-30

PRODUCTION #: 1129

SPEAKER: Shawn Boonstra

Maybe it’s happened to you. You go to the fair, or the local flea market, and you see someone demonstrating a miracle product. And you have to admit, it looks pretty good. I mean, look at all the vegetables he can cut with that knife, and the stuff he can clean with that cleanser. And they even promise that if you’re not 100% satisfied with the product when you bring it home, they’ll give you all your money back.

There’s just one little problem. Sometimes, you discover they were exaggerating a little bit—and when you try to return it, you find that the return policy isn’t as liberal as they promised. So why is it that so many people tell one story before they have your money, and another story after they get it? What is it about lying that really makes us mad, and what in the world can you do to stop it? Stick around, and we’ll look to the Bible to find out.

The year was 1944 and the United States was in the midst of a war, World War II—a war against the Japanese in the Pacific and the Germans in the East. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the fate of civilization literally hung in the balance. Just try to imagine how different our world would be if the Allies had lost.

The American president at the time was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and as commander-in-chief of the United States military, Roosevelt had to be at the top of his game. That is precisely what the American people saw—a jaunty and robust leader inspiring the nation during its darkest hour. Roosevelt and his team used every available means to let the American people know that he was in great health and up to the heavy tasks and awesome responsibilities that fell on him.

When asked by reporters about Roosevelt’s health, Harry Truman, who had just finished lunch with the president, assured them that Roosevelt, “Looked great and ate a bigger lunch than I did.” There was, however, one little problem. Everybody was lying. Roosevelt lied. His doctors lied. His cabinet lied.

Even Truman lied—something that is evident in a statement he made to Harry Vaughan about the very same lunch. He said, “I had no idea he was in such a feeble condition.” The entire administration was lying, because far from being healthy, Roosevelt was dying. He had hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, cardiac failure and acute bronchitis.

In 1944, the year before his death, Roosevelt’s blood pressure numbers were something like 186/108, 200/108, 210/112, and 260/150. You don’t have to be a Ben Casey to know how bad those readings are. Due to the president’s congestive heart failure, he couldn’t even breathe when he was lying down, and for months he had been sleeping with four inch blocks of wood propping up the top of his bed in order to keep his head elevated so he wouldn’t suffocate.

Someone who saw him said, “The president was the worst looking man I ever saw who was still alive.” The commander-in-chief was so sick that some days he only worked for four hours, and on other days he could only manage two. Finally, on the morning of April 12, 1945, Roosevelt put on a dark gray suit and a red tie to pose for a watercolor portrait.

As the artist painted, Roosevelt lit a cigarette, raised his left hand to his temple and then squeezed his forehead, uttering his famous last words, “I have a terrific headache.” Then he keeled over and two hours later the man everyone said was “the paragon of health” died from a massive stroke.

Okay, they all lied. But this was war right? I mean, after all, we were fighting the Nazis, and maybe, just maybe, if our government hadn’t lied, we’d all be speaking German or Japanese. Didn’t Churchill once say something to the effect of, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended to by a bodyguard of lies”?

Besides, this wasn’t the president lying under oath about his promiscuity or covering up for Watergate. It wasn’t even one well-known vice president telling people that his mother used to lull him to sleep as a baby with the song, “Look for the Union Label,” even though that song wasn’t written until he was 27 years old.

No. This was different, right? This was lying for the good of the country—for the fate of the free world. Fair enough. I know that the issue of lying can get pretty complex and I’ve studied enough situation ethics to know about the gray areas in life, and having to choose between the lesser of two evils. But I still want to draw your attention to the Bible, and in particular the Ten Commandments, where God simply says (Exodus 20:16):

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”

Just in case we’re tempted to think that God is only talking about our neighbors, don’t forget this passage over in the book of Revelation, chapter 21 (Revelation 21:8):

“But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”

Now, I hope you noticed it said all liars, and it didn’t limit it to things like just lying about your neighbor. And then couple that with a statement Jesus made about liars back in His day (John 8:44):

“You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.”

Now that’s a pretty tough language. According to Jesus, the devil is not only a liar, but the father of lies. If the devil is the father of lies and we lie, well, I think you get my drift. To put things mildly, the Bible treats the sin of lying in pretty clear-cut terms.

You know, out of all the commandments we’ve looked at so far on this program, this is the first one that deals strictly with our words. All the others have dealt with actions—how we act in relation to God and our fellow human beings. But this commandment takes morality to a deeper level, to the level of what we actually say.

There is this story in the Talmud—an ancient Jewish commentary on the Bible—where a king was entertained by two witty court jesters. One day the king is in a philosophical mood and tells one jester, “Simon, go out and bring back the best thing in all the world.” Then he tells the other jester, “John, go out and bring back the worst.”

So the two of them go, and when they return they stand in front of the king, each holding a little packet. Simon opens his package and reveals what he believes is the best thing in the world. It’s a tongue. Laughing, John comes forward and opens his package, which is supposed to have the worst thing in the world, and of course, his package has a tongue, too.

So we shouldn’t miss the point. The gift of speech can be one of the most wonderful gifts God has given us. But it can also be one of the most abused—with the potential of doing incredible damage. One of the most obvious ways we abuse the gift of speech is through the sin of lying.

You know, I find it strange that in our postmodern world where nobody believes in absolute right and wrong, calling someone a liar is still once of the worst things you can say about them. Nobody wants to be called a liar. Some years ago, the political comedian, Al Franken, put out a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Hardly a subtle title, but it kind of makes a point.

Even though the world is telling us that right and wrong aren’t absolute anymore, we still instinctively know that lying is wrong. A lot of people have this secular, atheistic view of the world that teaches that our existence began by pure chance—the accidental mixing of elements and chemicals that kicked off the process of evolution. Now, if this was really true, and if we really were the products of accidental forces, then you have to ask the question: What is wrong with lying or deception if it helps you survive?

Far from being immoral, lying in order to take care of yourself would, in my humble opinion, seem to fall right in harmony with survival of the fittest. But here is the thing that doesn’t fit. There are a lot of secular, postmodern people who believe in evolution, but still don’t believe in telling lies. For some reason, they suffer a twinge of guilt when they tell one lie.

So why is that? How does that fit in with the evolutionary model? Well, frankly, it doesn’t. The truth is, we are moral beings created by a moral God who gave us a conscience. Part of that conscience tells us that lying is wrong—that it causes problems. That’s why the Word of God speaks so strongly against it. The Bible is filled with examples of lying and the trouble it brings.

You can barely flip open the first page of the Bible and you come to the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden with the lying serpent. God told Adam and Eve that if they ate from the forbidden tree, they would surely die. But Satan, the father of lies, as Jesus called him, said (Genesis 3:4):

“You will not surely die.”

God says one thing and Satan says another. Then practically on the same page, we have Cain, who just murdered his brother, and lied to God. Here it is in Genesis, chapter 4 (Genesis 4:9):

“Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ He said, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’”

Now, that was an outright lie. What about the horrible deception Jacob played on his blind old father—lying right to his face about who he was, and stealing the blessing that belonged to his brother? In the end, that lie caused pain and suffering for the whole family.

Then there is the story of Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers. They took his coat and dipped it in animal blood and made their poor old father believe that his son was killed by a wild animal. That caused pain and suffering for years.

Then there was Joseph in Egypt—he was thrown in prison because of the lies of his master’s wife—who had tried to seduce him. Then Sarah lied when she said she didn’t laugh at the promise of God. We haven’t even gotten through the first book of the Old Testament.

Then you skip over to the New Testament and you find the same thing again. The Roman guards lied about what happened at the tomb of Jesus. The religious leaders lied about Jesus. Ananias and Sapphira lied about the money they had given to the church, and Peter lied when he denied Jesus—and he did it three times!

All through the Bible, in the Old Testament and the New Testament, we are given scores of striking examples of people who lied and the problems they caused. And you know, no one likes getting lied to, either. It kind of makes you feel like a fool—violated, cheated and deceived. It’s a horrible feeling.

No wonder the Psalmist wrote (Psalm 120:2-3):

“Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips and from a deceitful tongue. What shall be given to you, or what shall be done to you, you false tongue?”

The problem of lying is so pervasive that for centuries people have tried to come up with ways to tell if someone is actually telling the truth. In medieval English courts, they had wonderful ways of detecting liars. This was all based on the not-so-scientific notion that a person telling the truth would always be protected by God. A suspected liar would have to carry a red-hot iron bar for nine paces. Either that, or he could choose to walk across nine red-hot plowshares.

Either way, if the suspected liar was burned, it was proof he was a liar. So they took him out to be hanged. Or in some cases, the accused liar was stuffed in a sack and thrown in a pond. If the victim sank, this showed he was innocent, even though more often than not he would drown anyway. If he floated, then this was proof that he was lying, and he would be pulled out of the sack and hanged.

Then there is the problem of torture, which works on this assumption: If you give people enough pain, they’ll tell you the truth to get you to stop. What we’ve discovered, though, is that people will tell you anything to get you to stop, whether or not it is the truth.

Centuries ago, a town in India realized they had a thief in their midst. So a wise man came up with a ploy to catch the thief. He would put a donkey in a dark tent and tell everyone it had magical powers. If the guilty man pulled the donkey’s tail, it would sing. Everyone in the village had to go into the tent by himself or herself and pull the tail. The idea being that sooner or later that donkey would sing and the thief would be uncovered.

Well, you know, everybody lined up and one by one. They went into the tent and they pulled the donkey’s tail. But when they were done, the donkey never sang, and still they caught the thief. How? The wise man had covered the donkey’s tail with soot from a lamp, and only one man’s hands were clean at the end of the day.

Today we have polygraph tests and we use them quite a bit—even though they are notoriously inaccurate. CIA turncoat, Aldridge Ames, actually passed his lie detector test—even though we now know he was selling secrets to the Russians. An $860,000 government study on 10,000 hypothetical employees that included 10 spies revealed that even if the polygraph did better than it usually does out in the field, two of those spies would go undetected. And 1,598 innocents would be falsely accused, which is probably why we are still looking for something better.

Some people think we have it in the Siemens MAGNETOM Trio at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s basically an MRI like the ones at the hospital. But it’s been designed as the world’s most powerful lie detector. Supposedly, if you tell a lie, the screen will light up because certain parts of your brain have been activated. How well it works, I don’t know, but if it’s true, it might be the ultimate truth detector.

That just goes to show you how much we are willing to invest in the project of stopping lying. Now, does that mean that all lies are bad? What if you can tell a lie that will save someone’s life? I know for a fact that some situations are tough, but we still need to be really careful, because the human brain is very good at finding a justification for anything.

The safest course of action according to the commandment is just to be truthful. God didn’t just give us this commandment because He was trying to protect the victims of lying. It’s actually for the good of would-be liars, too. You’ll remember how we started out today by mentioning presidents who lied.

Well, we all know the fable about George Washington, who was asked as a child if he cut down the cherry tree. According to the story he admitted it, saying, “I cannot tell a lie.” In response to this story, Mark Twain once said, “I am different from Washington. I have a higher and grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won’t.”

Now, let’s do a hypothetical experiment. Let’s assume God had made us so that we, like George Washington, couldn’t tell a lie. I mean, suppose you were programmed in such a way that it was impossible for you to lie.

Now, think about how many other bad things you wouldn’t do, because you knew you couldn’t lie about them? Is Frank going to cheat on Sally if he can’t lie about where he’s been? Is Jones going to pilfer the company cash register if he can’t deny it in the investigation? Is Louie going to plan the murder of Joey if Louie can’t lie about where he was the night of the shooting?

If you could take away the possibility of lying, you would change the world. This commandment against lying is kind of a first line of defense. If we surrender our lives to God at this level, if we are determined by God’s grace not to lie, then we are not going to let ourselves get into the kinds of things that all but guarantee we are going to have to lie.

This command against lying is a defense that, if obeyed, will impact what we do with our bodies, period. The Bible says (Psalm 52:2-4):

“Your tongue devises destruction, like a sharp razor, working deceitfully. You love evil more than good, lying rather than speaking righteousness. Selah you love all devouring words, you deceitful tongue.”

On the other hand, if we are determined not to have deceitful tongues, if we are determined to obey God’s commandment, it’s going to change the whole pattern of our behavior. Think about how much more at peace, how much more at ease you would be if you didn’t put yourself in situations where you felt like you had to lie.

You know, I suppose that to some degree, every one of us could be named in that book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, because really, who hasn’t lied? But remember what I read earlier—Jesus called the devil the father of lies—and so when we lie, it is pretty serious stuff. It really is. It gives you a heritage I’m not sure you’d be proud of on the day that Jesus comes.

Deep down inside, most of us want a world of truth. It would be good to open a financial report and know that it is the absolute fact. It would be nice for a change to listen to the editorials on news stations and know that the truth is being told. It would be great if our family members and friends were just honest with us, and even though you can’t make the whole world honest, there is something you could do about it. You could start with yourself.

The good news is that Jesus died for liars. In fact, along with your other sins, your lies nailed him to the cross, because lying is just a sinful as breaking any one of the other commandments. It’s just not something you are still going to do if you find yourself in the kingdom of heaven, so why in the world would you want to do it now?

Today, right now, you can go to the cross and have your slate cleaned. You can have a fresh start with God and come clean with the people around you. It’s true, you might have to live with the consequences of your lies, but there’s something about a clean conscience that lets you sleep a whole lot better at night. That’s because now you’re living the way God suggested you live in the first place, the way He designed you to live.

Oh, your problems might not disappear when you start telling the truth, but your guilty conscience will disappear. That’s worth something; it really is. You don’t have to lie to survive this world. You really don’t, because if your Father is God, you are going to own the whole world one day anyway.

It can all start for you right now. Take your sinful past to the cross of Christ and leave it with Him. The Bible promises in no uncertain terms that if we take the stains of the past, the stupid things we did and the lies we told to cover them up, God promises to forgive you and wipe the slate clean. It’s the ironclad guarantee, because God never lies.

Imagine a world of truth, where you always knew that what you heard was the honest truth. It could all start with you.

Why don’t we pray together now?

PRAYER:
Father in heaven, one of the toughest things in the world to control is our tongue. We want to dedicate every part of ourselves to you today and we want to speak truth. Give us honest minds and hearts. Teach us to be like Jesus, for we pray it in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Scriptures Used in “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
—Exodus 20:16

“But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”
—Revelation 21:8

“You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.”
—John 8:44

“You will not surely die.”
—Genesis 3:4

“Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ He said, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’”
—Genesis 4:9

“Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips and from a deceitful tongue. What shall be given to you, or what shall be done to you, you false tongue?”
—Psalm 120:2-3

“Your tongue devises destruction, like a sharp razor, working deceitfully. You love evil more than good, lying rather than speaking righteousness. Selah you love all devouring words, you deceitful tongue.”
—Psalm 52:2-4