Preached on 09-27-98

TELLING THE TRUTH

A Sermon by the Rev. Patrick A. Rose

"You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." (Ex. 20:16)

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS ARE HEAVEN. They are the universal laws of eternal happiness. Anybody in the church who wants to be happy, really happy, happy forever, must cultivate the habit of doing, as a matter of principle, what these commandments say. This doesn't always come naturally. There are many times when most people would prefer to ignore what the Lord tells them to do. The person who is truly intelligent, though, will listen to the Lord. The Lord is far wiser than any man; indeed, His wisdom is infinite.

Today we would consider the eighth of these commandments: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." This, like the other commandments, is an injunction which can, on many occasions, seem far easier to ignore than to obey. After all, there are so many times in everyday life when an apparently harmless lie seems far preferable to telling the truth. Things seem to go much smoother, and other people seem far happier, when they are told what they want to hear. And so it is that some people get into the habit of telling lies, not all the time, but whenever they think it necessary. And so what they think takes precedence over what the Word teaches. They ignore the Lord's command, and exercise their own judgment in the matter, as if, in some way, their own judgment were superior to the Divine wisdom.

People can always dream up arguments for disobeying the Lord. The child who lies in order to escape punishment might think that he has found a way of keeping both himself and his parents a little happier. The student who copies someone else's work and presents it as his own sees this as a way of keeping the teacher happy and of getting better grades for himself, and fails to see how anybody has been hurt. What about the scientist who falsifies his data in order to impress a committee with his work, so that he can get the research grant he needs? What harm is done, he asks, if it gets him the money to do further research, research which might well benefit mankind as a whole?

For people who think this way, lying can become almost a way of life, something they do whenever it seems expedient. They see no reason to always speak the truth. The truth is not that important to them; certainly it is not as important as other considerations.

The truth, though, is very important. Obviously it is important in a court of law. Telling a lie there, bearing false witness in the most obvious literal sense, can send an innocent man to jail. The truth is also obviously important when we talk about other people. To lie about a person so that others think badly of him is slander -- it is to falsely convict a man in the court of public opinion.

Most would agree that the truth is important when a man's freedom or reputation is at stake. What many fail to realize, though, is that the truth is important the rest of the time as well. It is important because human society depends upon the truth. If we could never depend upon others to tell us the truth, the whole of everyday life would be filled with doubt and distrust. Men would constantly be suspicious of one another. Everything of any significance would have to be checked and verified. There is more than convenience involved here -- the convenience of not having to check up on everything we are told. The feelings of other human beings are involved. Consider how we feel when we discover that somebody we trusted has lied to us. We feel cheated and we are angry. We feel a sense of outrage, even a sense of violation, and our hearts are filled with a heavy feeling of dismay. When we realize how badly we feel when we are betrayed, we can see how important it is not to betray the confidence that other people might have in us.

To acquire the habit of speaking the truth in our day-to-day lives is thus a vital manifestation of our respect for those we deal with, and of our concern for society as a whole.

There are, indeed, occasions when lies are overlooked by the Lord. The Writings give the example of someone saying that he is pleased to see a guest when, in fact, he is not pleased (SD 4233). In this case the intention is not to deceive, but to welcome. It is what we would call a simulation of charity. There are also extraordinary situations -- such as war -- when lying may well be permitted, just as killing is then permitted. People can indeed consider and debate difficult situations. The general principle, though, is clear. The truth is important, and we should speak the truth, or else keep silent. Certainly we should speak the truth far more than our natural inclinations would indicate. We should have the courage to speak the plain truth, even when it might seem to our benefit to twist the truth, to exaggerate, or even to utter a downright lie. A lie might have the appearance of being convenient at a particular time -- but the person who thereby acquires the habit of lying will, in the end, poison his very own soul. Lying involves contempt, contempt for others, and contempt for the truth itself, and contempt is something which enters deeply into the character, indeed into the very spirit of man.

It is one thing to be polite and civil to others. It is quite another thing to manipulate them through the speaking of falsity. To callously manipulate other people through the telling of lies, whether they be lies of flattery or lies about the facts, is to treat these people simply as objects, objects which are obstacles to one's own will. This, unfortunately, is so often the voice of the age! Get people to do what you want, no matter what the means! This is nothing but a sordid external pragmatism. It is evil, for it involves an ever-deepening contempt for others, and for their freedom. Indeed, in essence it involves a contempt for the very truth that people need in order that they might be free. To be a liar is to have contempt and hatred for the truth itself, and contempt for the people who need this truth.

Thus it is that the bearing of false witness corresponds, in the spiritual sense, to a crime against spiritual truth, a crime against the truth of doctrine itself. The truth that the Lord has revealed in His Word is a precious gift. It provides men with a vision of the Lord, so that they can turn to Him for salvation. It gives them hope and comfort in states of despair. It can galvanize them into action during periods of spiritual slothfulness. It gives them the light they need to walk the path to heaven. To undermine the truth of the Word, either by twisting and distorting it, or else by flatly denying it, is a terrible thing indeed.

The truths of salvation are the Lord's hands, hands held forth towards the people He loves so much. What kind of person is it who would slap those hands? What kind of person would try to tear himself and others away from the Lord? This, though, is what the spiritual liar does, and he does it because he hates truths and loves falsity for the reason that his heart is evil.

In his heart, nobody who loves evil welcomes the truth. The truth hurts. The truth points out how insane he really is. It is because of this that the person who chooses to love evil will come to hate the truth, and, hating the truth, will think of all kinds of reasons for denying it. He might decide, in his heart, to become an atheist, and will devote himself to thinking up all kinds of arguments for the non-existence of God. He might, on the other hand, continue to accept superficially the teachings of the Word, but will make up all kinds of reasons why these teachings do not apply to himself. He may well explain away all kinds of teachings, pretending that all he is doing is making a reasonable interpretation of them. And, on the surface, his arguments may well sound rational and plausible. What about the atheist who argues that God would show Himself if He existed? What about the adulterer who argues that his wife doesn't understand him? What about the tax cheat -- the thief -- who argues that taxes are excessive because people are expected to cheat a little? Arguments such as these -- and they are often presented in a very sophisticated way -- are lies, nothing but lies. A person might, it is true, have been misled simply by his own ignorance. It is more likely, though, that he is lying, lying to himself, and lying to others. And he is lying, because the arguments he makes up are not his real reasons for twisting and ignoring the truth. His real reason, deep down inside, is that he wants his own way, not the way of the Lord. His arguments are, really, the lies of the devil.

The man who lies in this way -- the spiritual false witness, is, as we have said, not the man in ignorance. The man who, through no fault of his own, happens to be in ignorance, is not a liar. The man the Writings condemn is the man who knows, or who could know, the truth, but who denies or avoids it because his motives are evil. Such a man, in time, becomes blind to all that the Lord says; he becomes insensitive to everything that the Word teaches.

Here is the real danger! We all know that the truth can hurt. What the Lord tells us in His Word is not always what we would like to hear. Yet we must be brave enough to listen to Him anyway. We must not ignore what He tells us; we must not explain it away.

The Lord will never stop loving anybody. He will never stop trying to help him. But if a person ignores the Lord, if he twists His words, then in time this person will render himself incapable of hearing, incapable of seeing, the Lord's teachings. He will have lost all desire to turn to the Lord and to be helped by Him, for he will have become a spiritual liar, a hater of the truth.

There is, though, an even deeper evil involved in the telling of lies. When a person tells a lie, he violates the eighth commandment in its natural sense. When he does this -- when he tells a lie on the natural plane of life -- he tells a lie on the spiritual plane as well. He sins against the truth, and thus violates the spiritual sense of the eighth commandment. To sin against the truth, though, involves, inevitably, a crime against the Lord Himself, for the Lord is the truth. When the Lord told His disciples that He was the truth, this was not a mere figure of speech. He is the Truth; all truth that is truth has its origin in Him alone. This is why every lie involves an act of blasphemy. This is the celestial sense of the eighth commandment: to lie is to blaspheme, to blaspheme both the Lord and His Word. This celestial sense does not stand alone. It is within the natural sense, so that when a man breaks the eighth commandment in the natural sense, he is breaking it in the celestial sense as well (Life 87).

A man, by bearing false witness, by lying, is committing blasphemy. He is not likely to be aware of this. He probably does not consider what he is doing to be particularly evil at all. Inevitably, though, a disrespect for the truth in one's dealings with others involves a deeper disrespect, a disrespect for the Lord Himself, and, indeed, a blasphemy against Him.

There are terrible things involved in the plain everyday lie, that kind of lie that many ordinary people tell once in a while. If we knew how bad it really was, we would never do it. But we don't normally realize just how bad something like this really is. When we do something wrong, we don't usually think of it as a crime, a horrible crime, against the Lord Himself. We don't see the atrocities hidden within an apparently simple lie.

This, though, is the very reason why we need to make a point of resisting evils such as this. Though we can learn in the Writings about the horrifying evils which lurk within many of our actions, we don't really believe this at first. We don't believe it in our hearts. In fact there is only one way in which to come to see the real horror of evil, and that is, to resist it.

If a man tells lies, and keeps on telling lies, he will never see how wicked they are. He will, in fact, come to love them more and more. But if a man resists falsehood -- if he makes a point of telling the truth -- then gradually the Lord will give him a love for the truth. This love will grow, and as it does, even the thought of lying will become repugnant to him. He will come to see it as the repulsive horrifying thing it really is. He will shudder at the mere idea of lying. He will shudder for the simple reason that he has come to love the Lord, and he does not want to act against the Lord in any way. He is happy, truly happy, in the knowledge that the Lord is his Father, and his greatest delight is in doing what the Lord commands.

So it is that we, as members of the church, must seek, in all the many different areas of life, to uphold a love of the truth. Our children must be taught that to tell lies is not merely "naughty," but a sin against the Lord. In our dealings with others we must encourage, in whatever ways we can, a respect for the truth. Certainly we ourselves must shun the apparently convenient and seemingly innocuous occasional lie. And within our own minds we must have the courage to face the truth -- the truth of the Word, and the truth about ourselves.

The truth can indeed hurt, and the Ten Commandments, being truth from the Lord, can make us feel guilty and very uncomfortable indeed. And yet the purpose of the commandments, and the purpose of the truth, is not to make us feel miserable at the thought of all the evil we have committed. The truth has been given us by the Lord so that we can change the way we live. If we resist things we know to be wrong -- if we allow the truth to lead us away from evil habits and evil ways, then we will be on the way to heaven. We won't become perfect overnight -- nobody ever does -- but we will, nevertheless, be walking the path -- that path which leads to heaven, to eternal happiness, and to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

Amen.

Lessons: Ps. 120, n. 8:31-45, TCR 321-323 [pts.]

© 1998 by the Rev. Patrick A. Rose