White Lies?

“Just play the game; just go and play the game.

It’s not as if you’ve never lied

To suit the needs of either side.”

Bend it Like Beckham (2015)¹

A little over two years ago, I wrote a post called ‘The Truth About Lying’ in which I argued that lying isn’t actually a sin. And then I expressed my intention to write a follow-up post accounting for other parts of scripture that seem to take rather a dim view of lying the following weekend. And then I tried to do that, but I wasn’t happy with what I wrote and ended up posting something else that week instead, and also the next week, and the next, and then before I knew it, my expressed intention had been left unfulfilled for all of, well, a little over two years.²

Well, they do say better late that never. So here goes.

 

An absolutely gorgeous artistic interpretation of Pinocchio by SimonT at newgrounds.com. A comment from the author: "In a pinocchio's story fairy who turned him into a living figurehead promised him that she will turn him into a human if he deserves it. Well it took him a little bit longer then he thought."

To recap the thrust of my previous post: lying – which I define as verbal assertion of something the speaker knows is untrue, not including other forms of deception or dissimulation – categorically cannot be a sin in and of itself, because of the cases of Shiphrah and Puah, and Rahab, in both of which, God actively commends and rewards someone purely on the basis of her having told a particular lie. The lie is not merely tolerated as some lesser of two evils, but openly celebrated as an act of God-fearing faith and obedience. Which means that, when, elsewhere, the scriptures seem to condemn lying – you shall not bear false witness against your neighbour; lying lips are an abomination to the LORD; do not lie to one another³ – they must, if we believe in their consistency, be condemning something other than simply verbal assertion of something the speaker knows is untrue in and of itself. The question is what.

Let’s try to answer that by looking at some more scriptural case-studies – this time ones where the person who tells the lie is berated and/or judged for having told it.

An obvious example that springs to mind is the story of Ananias and Sapphira.⁴ We’re told that in the very earliest days of the Church, lots of its members were selling property they owned and handing over the money to the apostles for distribution to the poorest among their brothers and sisters. Ananias and Sapphira sold a field and handed over part of the money for this purpose. Peter was less than impressed: “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.” Ananias fell dead; his wife came in and restated the lie that they had handed over the full price they received for the field; she died too. Why this stark jugdement? Because they kept back part of the proceeds? No, once the land was sold it was at their disposal. Rather, because they lied about it.

But what was the problem with them lying? Not mere verbal assertion of the known untruth, because that was fine, praiseworthy even, when Shiphrah and Puah and Rahab did it. But Ananias and Sapphira were lying because they wanted to get all the kudos for being generous, while still keeping a good chunk of their cash. They were lying to present themselves as more virtuous than they actually were. Their sin wasn’t lying so much as hypocrisy, and the covetousness for which hypocrisy is so reliably a cover – covetousness of wealth and reputation. This is the exact sort of thing Jesus used to have a go at religious leaders over.⁵

Here’s another one, from the book of Jeremiah. A chap called Hananiah (funnily enough, Ananias is the Greek form of the same name) prophesies that the Temple vessels and King Jehoiakim and all the exiles will return to Judah within two years. Some time later, Jeremiah tells him: “Listen, Hananiah, the LORD has not sent you, and you have made this people trust in a lie. Therefore thus says the LORD: Behold, I will remove you from the face of the earth. This year you shall die, because you have uttered rebellion against the LORD.” And sure enough, that year, he died. That’s how you tell a real prophet from a false one, kids: do his predictions come to pass, or not? In the following chapter, we get a few more individuals singled out to similar effect: “Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, concerning Ahab son of Kolaiah and Zedekiah son of Maaseiah, who are prophesying a lie to you in my name: Behold, I will deliver them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and he shall strike them down before your eyes. Because of them this curse shall be used by all the exiles from Judah in Babylon: The LORD make you like Zedekiah and Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted in the fire – because they have done an outrageous thing in Israel, they have committed adultery with their neighbours’ wives, and they have spoken in my name lying words that I did not command them.” All right, so we’ve got adultery as well as lying there, but the lying is clearly a big part of the charge. Then again: “Thus says the LORD concerning Shemaiah of Nehelam: Because Shemaiah had prophesied to you when I did not send him, and has made you trust in a lie, therefore thus says the LORD: Behold, I will punish Shemaiah of Nehelam and his descendants. He shall not have anyone living among this people, and he shall not see the good that I will do to my people, declares the LORD, for he has spoken rebellion against the LORD.”⁶

 

Michelangelo’s depiction of Jeremiah from the Sistine chapel. Not looking too happy, surprisingly enough.

Three cases here, then, of the telling of lies being directly met with God’s judgement. But again, not merely the telling of lies in and of itself. To tell people lies about what God had spoken was to dishonour him, to give his saints false expectations and lead them astray, to usurp his place and declare revolt against him. Why were these people doing this? Well, because they didn’t like what God was actually saying, namely that the exile would last seventy years and the right thing to do was to build lives in Babylon while it lasted. That was what Jeremiah was saying, and in case you hadn’t noticed, he didn’t get a lot of appreciation for it. His message was unpopular. Hananiah contradicted him in public; Shemaiah actually went so far as to send letters to a priest called Zephaniah telling him that the LORD had made him High Priest instead of Jehoiada and he ought to get on and tell Jeremiah to shut up. You can bet that these guys, and others who claimed to speak for God and predicted a swift end to the exile, were a lot more favourably received than Jeremiah was. Their sin wasn’t lying so much as rebellion: making God out to be a liar, making his people trust in falsehoods whereby they would come to harm, persecuting his true prophet while trying to gain the glory of a prophet’s status for themselves. There’s plenty to deplore there without needing to make the actual act of false utterance part of it.

I think it’s fair to say that most of the time, people lie because they want something that the truth doesn’t entitle them to. They want wealth, or they want the approval of others, or they want to get one over someone they don’t like. These things are sins already: love of money, fear of man, hatred. What lying does is allows you to indulge those desires while maintaining a veneer of virtue. That is, at the end of the day, the point of the lying: nobody, after all, lies hoping to be found out.

But found out by whom? If the threat is that you’ll be found out by a just and righteous authority, then there is no good reason to lie. In that case, you must be lying because you want something that sits contrary to justice and righteousness. If, on the other hand, the threat is that you’ll be found out by an unjust and unrighteous authority – well, that’s a different kettle of fish. For instance, I once read a book that consisted of the memoirs of two Iranian Christian women who’d been incarcerated for their faith.⁷ When they were interrogated, they had no qualms whatsoever about lying when it came to revealing the identities of other Christians they knew. For the sake of keeping their brothers and sisters from harm, they flat-out denied that they knew any. And, well, that just makes sense as the right course of action, doesn’t it? What else would we have had them do?

Lying to an unjust authority in order to protect or help the people of God is not wrong; it’s commendable. That’s what Shiphrah and Puah did, what Rahab did, and what so many saints have done before all the unjust authorities that have risen and fallen in the millennia since. It’s not like the kind of lying I discussed above, where the aim is to obtain things for yourself that truth and justice don’t entitle you to; on the contrary, it’s often very selfless indeed. A person who loved money and reputation and revenge more than truth and justice would rather sell others out in order to save his own skin than lie to protect them. A person who loves truth and justice more than money or reputation or revenge, meanwhile, will lie for the sake of saving others.

So the fact that lying isn’t a sin is contingent on the existence, in the present age, of unjust authorities. To lie, by contrast, before God, the supremely just and supremely righteous and supremely truthful to boot, is always a sin. (Pro tip: he knows you’re lying anyway.) Why? Because if you’re trying to lie before him, you must be after something that his perfect truth and justice wouldn’t entitle you to. And that’s covetousness, and rebellion, and an impugnation of his goodness. Most lies are. This, I think, is how we account for the frequent exhortations against lying in scripture. Insofar as God is the authority we’re under, we shouldn’t be lying. Lying isn’t part of what a perfectly righteous world looks like, and the occasions when it’s the right thing to do are rare, much rarer, I feel entirely sure, than we’d like to persuade ourselves they are. Such occasions do, crucially, exist, but they’re a mere handful next to the ocean of lies which serve only to advance the lier’s own self-interest.

Still, we look forward to a time when not only will God himself, in all his truth and justice, be established as the only and total authority, with all injustice trampled beneath his feet, but we will be raised imperishable and made sinless, so that we’re no longer prey to any impulse that would make us wish to lie before him. Lying isn’t in and of itself a sin in the present age, but it’s nevertheless true that, in the age to come, as surely as there isn’t any sin, there won’t be any lying either.

Footnotes

¹ Yep, the 2002 film you know and love is now a stage musical, with one of my favourite soundtracks ever. The cast’s performance from 2015’s Children In Need show should give you a flavour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BydEhIveYtY. I’m so gutted I didn’t get to see the show live before the end of its (very short) West End run.

² If you want to check out ‘The Truth About Lying’ before reading what is essentially its sequel, you’ll find it under March 2018 in my blog archive.

³ Exodus 20:16, Proverbs 12:22, and Colossians 3:9 respectively.

⁴ As told in Acts 5, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+5&version=ESVUK, though do scoot back to the last few verses of the previous chapter for context.

⁵ The classic place to go for that jazz would be Matthew 23: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23&version=ESVUK.

⁶ I’ll give you chapter 29, and you can click back one for the bit about Hananiah: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah+29&version=ESVUK. Jeremiah is such an under-studied book. Well worth spending some time in.

⁷ It’s a good time to buy the odd thing from 10ofthose to help keep them going with all the Christian conferences and stuff cancelled, and this one was a pretty great read: https://www.10ofthose.com/uk/products/18042/captive-in-iran.