The Truthful God
March 6, 2022
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Exodus 20:1-2,16
1 And God spoke all these words, saying,
2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery….
16 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
Introduction: Is lying a big deal?
Each of the commandments comes with what we might describe as, for lack of a better phrase, a “hang-up.” It’s not that the commandment is bad, but as we read it from our place and time in history, at first something might not be clear to us. For example, with the second commandment about idols, we might get hung up at first about how the second commandment differs from the first as they seem so similar. With the fourth commandment about Sabbath, we might get hung up about the ways the Sabbath is still applicable today (or not applicable). With the sixth commandment about murder, we wouldn’t necessarily get hung up, but we might wonder what to preach about because everyone believes murder is wrong.
The hang-up we might bring to the ninth commandment, I suspect, is believing that lying is not really all that big of a deal. I remember when I worked in construction before I was a pastor, and there was a project manager named Joe. Joe worked for a general contractor, and Joe was notorious for lying about everything. I remember leaving one meeting with Joe and getting back to my office to talk with our superintendent. The superintendent and I talked about when we might be onsite at Joe’s job and those sorts of things. Then the superintendent asked me, “But how do you know if Joe was lying to us?” I said, “I don’t know.” “Were his lips moving?” he asked me. “Yeah,” I said. “Well,” says the superintended, “he was lying.” And we laughed it off and took precautions accordingly to document our work and whatnot.
We often don’t feel lying is all that big of a deal. Consider those online forms that require you check the box that you have “read and agree.” No one even knows what’s in that giant wall of words, yet still we click that we’ve read and agree—because it’s no big deal. When we preached about adultery, we mentioned the euphemisms of affair and cheating, which are nicer sounding words than the reality. With lying, the euphemisms abound. You might tell a fib, a whopper, a tall tale, a white lie, or a half-truth. You can spin a yarn. You can pull a fast one, pull someone’s leg, or pull the wool over someone’s eyes. You might equivocate or even bamboozle. You might spread fake news. Perhaps you could falsify figures, distort facts, or be given to exaggeration. “The fish he caught was this big.” “No,” says the fisherman, “it was THIS big.” Over the entrance to The Bass Pro Shop the sign says, “Welcome fisherman, hunters, and other liers.” I could share other euphemisms for lying, but they seem less appropriate to share from the pulpit, but, even from this list we can see how they add up to make it seem like lying is not a big deal. But lying is a big deal.
If you’re holding a Bible, please turn to the book of Exodus. It’s the second book in the Bible. Our passage comes from Exodus 20, found on page 57 in the pew Bibles. We’ve been teaching through the book of Exodus for months and then spending several weeks on the ten commandments within the book of Exodus, and now we come to the ninth commandment and read in v. 16, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
You’ll notice that it does not say, “You shall not lie,” but rather, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” The commandment certainly has something to say about all lying and fibbing and telling of tall tales, but the wording of the commandment indicates a specific kind of lying: lying as a witness in a court case, which is a big deal.
Flip over a few pages to Exodus 23 to look at the first three verses. The chapters after the ten commandments talk about specific situations in Israel where these laws applied.
You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit. (Ex. 23:1–3)
Here, again, we see the stress on the importance of a truthful witness in a court of law.
I remember a time I had to testify in court as a pastor. For whatever reason, the lawyer did not prepare me well for the event. He made it seem like no big deal. I’d just say a few things on behalf of the defendant, only those aspects of his life I knew about—no big deal. When my name was called, I walked forward to approach the wooden box. A woman told me to raise my right hand and solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It sounds like a cliché, but my knees started to buckle, and I felt lightheaded. And I wasn’t even going to lie. I was just going to share a few sentences about what I knew. But the weight of the moment landed on me much heavier than I expected, in part, I believe, because of how big of a deal telling the truth is, especially telling the truth in a court of law. And if this is true in our day, it was especially true back in ancient times when a witness was everything. Today, we might have video footage, DNA samples, cellphone records, and other kinds of evidence to put forth, but back in the day, the word of a witness was everything.
Think of the dignity that God intended to give Israel as a new nation in this commandment. God’s people were coming from a context, as the preface to the commandments says, “out of the house of slavery” (Ex. 20:2). They had been slaves in Egypt where they had no legal power. If you were stronger and in charge, well, you just did as you wanted. As slaves, they had no legal protection. But here, in commanding that witnesses in a court of law be truthful, God was giving to Israel a society that valued what God valued. God was giving Israel courtrooms that were fair and just. God was giving dignity to the weak and wounded as he leveled the playing field of power and wealth in ways they could never have imagined in Egypt. Are you powerful? Great. You’ll be treated fair in court. Are you poor? Great. You’ll be treated fair in court.
So, what shall we talk about when we talk about this commandment? We could talk about plagiarism done by students on homework and pastors on sermons. We could talk about how in the workplace more generally people can take credit for someone else’s good performance. We could talk about how we, especially as Christians, should be so careful before jumping on a media bandwagon because sometimes the first take on a situation is not the correct one. We could talk about how when someone shares something online that is incorrect, it tends to get a lot more shares than when someone later posts a correction. We can talk about phishing scams, which are lying ways to cheat money from people. We can talk about truth in advertising. We could talk about a mechanic shop right down the road from our church that told my wife the problem with our vehicle was one thing, but then when I, the husband, went in, all of a sudden, the car problem was not so bad. Super shady. We could talk about the betrayal in personal relationships and the sting of being lied to. We could talk about the technical meanings of defamation (i.e., wrongly damaging someone’s character), which when it happens in print is called “libel” and in speech is called “slander.” Lots to talk about.
And this is just to stay in the “genre” of lying. When talking about the ninth commandment, many authors and pastors branch out from lying to talk about all the ways we might tear others down with our words rather than building others up. In this way, a sermon about the ninth commandment becomes a sermon about our speech more generally. And I don’t think that would be a wrong approach.
But I want to do something different. Rather than branching out from this command about bearing false witness in a courtroom to talking about our speech more generally, I want to back up. Let’s ask the question, Why would someone bear false witness in a court of law? What’s going on in the human heart that leads to bearing false witness? Why would someone lie? Here’s my answer: We want to get our way more than God’s. You will lie when you want to get your way more than God’s.
1. Lying will happen when you want to get your way more God’s way
When you study this commandment about bearing false witness, three Bible passages keep rising to the surface, each showing that the issue behind lying is loving our way more than God’s way.
First, there is the story of a man named Naboth and his vineyard. Naboth just so happens to have a vineyard near the king’s palace. So King Ahab offers to buy the land from him, but Naboth says no. King Ahab pouts about it, and his wife, Queen Jezebel, says essentially, “Don’t pout; be happy; I’ll get it for you.” You can read about this in 1 Kings 21, where it says that Jezebel
wrote letters in Ahab’s name and sealed them with his seal, and she sent the letters to the elders and the leaders who lived with Naboth in his city. And she wrote in the letters, “Proclaim a fast, and set Naboth at the head of the people. And set two worthless men opposite him, and let them bring a charge against him, saying, ‘You have cursed God and the king.’ Then take him out and stone him to death.” (1 Kings 21:8–11)
And that’s what they do. The witnesses lie about Naboth; he’s stoned; Ahab takes the field. And God is furious with Ahab and Jezebel because they bore false witness when they wanted their way above God’s way.
You may say, well, that’s a story about a bad king and queen. Perhaps more famous is the story of King David, a “good” king, and Bathsheba. In 2 Samuel 11 we read that at the times when kings go out to war, David stayed home. At home he saw Bathsheba, the wife of another man, and took her for himself. Then he lied to her husband Uriah. Then David had Uriah killed in battle. Again, the story illustrates that the heart behind deception is a heart that loves its own ways more than God’s ways.
It’s not just our virtue that keeps us from lying but our suspicion that we’ll get caught lying. But when you can get away with it, you might try (cf., following the speed limit).
The third passage that comes up often when talking about the ninth commandment is from the religious leaders who sought to kill Jesus. In Mark 14 we read,
Now the chief priests and the whole council were seeking testimony against Jesus to put him to death, but they found none. For many bore false witness against him . . . (Mark 14:55–56)
The religious leaders so wanted Jesus dead that they bore false witness.
2. Honesty will happen when you love God’s way more than our own
In a way, I’m preaching a sermon about lying and a sermon about truth-telling. But if in our sermon we’re asking the question of why someone might lie, and we discover that behind our lying is our desire to get our way, then the sermon can’t merely be about lying. The sermon must be about crucifying our pride. It’s a sermon that confronts the way our hearts love to get our way. In each of the Bible passages—Naboth and Ahab and Jezebel, and David and Bathsheba and Uriah; and the religious leaders and Jesus—lying grew out of hearts that wanted their way more than God’s ways.
If you’ve ever seen a toddler throw a tantrum—which I’m sure we all have—you’ll know it’s quite an event. It’s the toddler’s way or nothing. He’ll scream and yell and turn red in the face and lie and demand. As adults, we may grow out of the visible signs of a toddler’s tantrum, but our hearts don’t grow out of our nature. We need to be saved out of our nature—which is why we need Jesus. Which is why I need Jesus. We may not be in the house of slavery that was Egypt, but by our nature, the Bible says, we are enslaved to sin (John 8:34; Rom. 6:18). Your nature wants your way more than God’s way. This is the truth that sets you free: seeing the need for Jesus and having him in the gospel.
Some of you know I enjoy following professional cycling. Most of you will be at least vaguely aware of the scandals around Lance Armstrong and the cheating by him and his teammates and almost all professional cycling in that era. But for the longest time Armstrong remained adamant about his innocence. One of the early whistle-blowers against Armstrong was a guy from around here named Floyd Landis. Armstrong tore his reputation apart with lies. And all of Armstrong’s teammates sang the same tune.
Until they didn’t. The story is told of George Hincapie, one of Armstrong’s chief lieutenants and one of the more respected people in cycling. Hincapie kept the lie going, he said, until guys showed up at his house with uniforms and guns and subpoenas talking about jailtime. That’s when the lie all unraveled, quite publicly.
I’m not saying Hincapie became a Christian, but that moment does serve as a kind of illustration of what it means to reckon with our sin and our need for Jesus. Either Hincapie could have maintained the lie into court and had everything crumble there, or he could have let go of his pride. He chose to let down his pride.
Or maybe we wouldn’t say he chose to let down his pride, but maybe that he was forced to let go of his pride. This is why thinking about the ninth commandment makes me love Jesus so much. In thinking about guys in uniforms coming with guns and subpoenas, we probably wouldn’t say that those coming to throw George Hincapie in jail loved him—not the way Jesus loves us, anyway.
Let me read from Luke 22:60–62 about Peter caught in the biggest lie of his life.
But Peter said, “Man, I do not know what you are talking about.” And immediately, while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed. And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the saying of the Lord, how he had said to him, “Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly.
Jesus dies and he comes back to life. And one of the first things Jesus does is make Peter a meal that they eat together.
Thinking about the ninth commandment and my own guilt really makes me love Jesus because I know I wouldn’t love him if he hadn’t first loved me (1 John 4:19). On my own, I could see scenarios where I would maintain my own “rightness” until the moment I’m exposed as a fool. I could tell you stories of seeing others caught in lies and how hard it is for them to admit it when they are wrong, but I can also tell you how hard it is for me when I’m caught in the wrong to admit it. When I discipline too harshly, too much in anger, I could tell you how hard it is for me to repent to my children. When I speak too rashly in a work meeting and know it, but still, I create a hundred reasons why I’m not in the wrong. Thinking about the ninth commandment and how much I love my own way really makes me love Jesus, “who is the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
When men bore false witness against him, he didn’t argue in return, but he said, “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34). When his most outspoken lieutenant, a man named Peter, lied three times about even knowing Jesus, Jesus loved Peter and pursued him. When all his disciples fled away from Jesus at his crucifixion, Jesus, by staying the course, was, in a way, pursuing them. As he pursues us. If you’re here, the living Jesus is pursuing you because he loves you. If you don’t know him, you can know him. And if you do know him, you can know him better.
As a closing passage, look with me at Acts 1, which is on page 855. Acts is the story of the birth of the early church after the resurrection of Jesus. At first, the disciples are asking about whether at this time Jesus will restore Israel, that is, make their earthly kingdom into a great kingdom. In a way, they are still the same types of disciples as you and I, constantly wanting their way and their kingdom.
But Jesus gives them grace. He gives forgiveness to men who lied about even knowing him. He helps them take our eyes off our little kingdoms and gives us a vision of his kingdom, making us bear true witness about the kingdom that will never end.
So when they had come together, they asked [Jesus], “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:6–8)
May you and I become these types of witnesses—true witnesses with power from on high to testify to the true kingdom, the kingdom of God.
Next week Noah Gwinn will preach the tenth and final commandment. Let’s pray . . .
