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[Music] [Music] Lying, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman And God spoke all these words saying,

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"I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make yourself a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.

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You shall not bow down to them or serve them. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work,

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but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work. Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you. You shall not kill.

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You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor's house.

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You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his ox or his ass or anything that is your neighbor's. Now when all the people perceived the thunderings and the lightnings and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled and they stood afar off and said to Moses, "You speak to us and we will hear, but let not God speak to us lest we die."

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And Moses said to the people, "Do not fear, for God has come to prove you and that the fear of him may be before your eyes that you may not sin." And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to the understanding of this inspiration. Pray with me.

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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lying is the opposite of loving. That's the reason our Father God says to us,

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"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." The Ten Commandments are, of course, general principles. They are not an attempt to lay out for us guidance with regard to each and every question that we confront in life. They instead give us signposts of direction.

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They give to us an understanding of those things which God would have as basic to our human experience. "Thou shalt not kill" teaches us of the sanctity of human life. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" teaches us of the sanctity of marriage. "Thou shalt not steal" teaches us of the sanctity of private property.

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Each of these, you see, leads us to a world of understanding far greater than the Prohibition itself. You see, God understands that all of us are pretty good at taking care of ourselves, but he is concerned that we also be responsible for others. The whole Ten, you see, can be summed in loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself.

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Now, as to this matter of lying, Mark Twain said once that he had identified 869 different ways to tell a lie. Well, I'm not sure about that calculation, but I am sure that the worst of all kinds of lies is the lie which is specifically perpetrated against someone.

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And it's that particular kind of most grievous and serious lying that is brought before us in this commandment to give us guidance for truthfulness in all of our lives. The commandment says, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." Now, the context of the commandment is the law court.

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Put very literally, this commandment is an injunction against perjury. It says that when you are bringing witness in a trial, you are not to prostitute the truth. You are instead to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. What is suggested here is this, that if one lies in a court of law, one makes a mockery of justice.

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And when justice dies within a nation, the nation itself will soon perish. There is an admonition here, then, against those things which are an attack upon the nation. "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." But there is also here, by implication, a suggestion that in all of our dealings with our neighbors,

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in all of our dealings with others, our word is to be a true word. In this one commandment, then, the ninth of the ten, there is a word of warning. "We are not to lie, for it wounds our nation, and it wounds those to whom or about whom we lie." Now, this note is accentuated in a lot of other places in the scriptures.

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In Leviticus, we read, "Thou shalt not go up and down as a tail-bearer among thy people." The psalmist records, "Who shall dwell with the Lord? He that hath used no deceit, and hath not slandered his neighbor." In the New Testament, James writes, "If any man thinks himself to be religious,

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and does not bridle his tongue, but lies to his own heart, that man's religion is in vain." And Paul sums the whole matter for us in Ephesians when he notes that we are to speak the truth in love. The testimony of the scripture, then, is indisputably clear. Yet I think I'm far within the mark when I say tonight

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that this commandment is broken more than any of the others. Many people who would not think of stealing, many people who would not think of committing adultery, many people who would not think of killing, do not hesitate to lie. And in so doing, they hurt their country, and they hurt their neighbor.

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Lying hurts a country because lying builds a culture of untruth. That is, when you live in the midst of a people who are constantly lying to one another, lying becomes so much a part of the warp and woof of the society that the whole society is in peril. Every school of ethical philosophy recognizes that our environment, to a certain degree, influences our character and our conscience.

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Now, I am not saying that environment determines our character, our morality, and our conscience, but I am saying that environment does influence them. If I plant a rose bush, it will, if properly cared for, come up and produce roses. But the way I cultivate that bush, how I prune it, how I nourish it, how much water and how much heat I give to it,

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will determine, to a very great degree, how large, how colorful, how fragrant the roses will be. We are what we are, made in the image of God. We will grow as human beings. But the kind of human beings we will be, the seriousness with which we take the guidance of the God who made us and sustains us, will be largely influenced by the culture in which we live.

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If we grow up among thieves, we will not think feeding so very bad. And if we grow up in a culture of lies, we will ourselves be more prone to lie. And when a culture is producing a web of lies, when truth is slain within a nation, all trust and faith disappear. And when trust and faith are gone, hope is gone. And when hope is gone, the nation perishes.

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This is what led Christopher Lash, in his very important book, The Culture of Narcissism, to say that, and I believe he was quoting here Daniel Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, that we live today in a nation that is so caught up in lying, through advertising and propaganda and our daily conversations with one another, that we are imperiling the very life of our state.

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From time to time we encounter a young man or a young woman on the campus who cheats. Cheating, of course, is a form of lying. And I've heard many people, when that happens, exclaim, "How could such a person end up doing such a thing?" I don't really think it's very hard to understand.

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Chances are, when that person was six years old, he saw his father slip a $20 bill to a traffic policeman to avoid a ticket, and he saw the policeman accept it. When he was eight years old, he heard his mother and father talking about how they would cut corners on their income tax form and explaining that everybody did it.

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When he was 12 years old and broke his glasses, he heard his mother call the insurance company and report that they were stolen instead of broken in order that the insurance company might pay for them. When he went to high school, his coach told him how to surreptitiously grab a T-shirt while throwing a block or how to throw a hip into a forward who's charging down the basketball floor.

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When he got his first job in a supermarket, he was taught how to put the best-looking fruit on the top and the overripe fruit on the bottom. When he came to college, he found out that he could buy the answers to some tests or he could find those tests in the files of fraternities and sororities.

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And he could use those tests because professors who claimed to be very much up-to-date and diligent in the pursuit of their studies had not produced any new tests for years and caught at his cheating and expelled from the college on the very day that he leaves. He hears someone say, "All of the kids that come here to college are wonderful."

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Now, caught up in a constant and continuing web of deceit like that, why is it a surprise to us when somebody lies? When honesty takes a holiday, the very atmosphere of the nation is polluted so that we breathe in poison and noxious waste.

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And when that happens, building codes and quality controls and fire safety standards can no longer be trusted. And the oath of office that the president takes at his inauguration is not believed and the doctor's Hippocratic vow is not believed and marriages are built on promises which are not kept.

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When we are so ready to bend the truth, to look the other way, to borrow what is not ours, to overcharge some people, to undercharge other people, to slip answers across the top of the table or money in payoffs under the table, when the moguls of Madison Avenue make advertising into nothing but a tissue of lies,

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when we lie endlessly and ceaselessly to one another, what can happen but that the nation dies? Time magazine said just a year ago that every profession is now filled with legions of liars. Sixteen years ago, a newspaper reporter in Washington, D.C.,

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reporting on just one story, coined the phrase "credibility gap." And that credibility gap is now as wide as our country itself. The quota of duplicity in America has become intolerably large. Watergate, Abscam, the Daily Number, corporate criminality, the rackets,

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they so much infest our time that we no longer trust the TV repairman or the automobile mechanic or our doctor or our lawyer or our athletes who compete in sports or even the engineers who faked x-ray inspections on the Alaskan pipeline. We have become a people that's constantly expecting corruption.

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And that's a tragedy. It eats away at the very core of the life of a society, at the very heart of what a nation is supposed to be. It was brought home to me very powerful recently with the experience of a man named Henry Durham, who was a production manager for a large company engaged in defense production.

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He became aware of the fact that certain improper practices were being conducted by this company, and he went to the company and he complained, but the company did not make restitution. And so he quit his job and reported the entire matter to the government. The government entered into an investigation and found that the overrun had been in excess of $2 billion.

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And what happened to Henry Durham? Because he told the truth? Well, the people who worked in his factory with him called him a traitor. Signs were put up about the plant which said, "Kill Durham." People who had been his friends and his family's friends for years ostracized them,

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and federal marshals had to live in his home for two months to protect him and his loved one. And at the end of that experience, Durham wrote, "I have become disillusioned with the virtues I used to believe in." In other words, he says, "Now I'm going to start lying too." The categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant is inadequate as an ethical touchstone,

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and its inadequacy is demonstrated at precisely this point. We have become so much a part of a lying society that we lie and expect everybody else to do it too. And it's over against that that our Father God says, "Thou shalt not bear false witness, for when you lie you kill the truth, and God is truth.

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When truth goes, God goes, and when God goes, there is no hope." Lying is the opposite of loving. If you love your country, you will not lie against your neighbor. But this commandment also has a personal dimension.

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When I speak about deceit within our nation, the subject seems so vast that it's almost beyond our comprehension, and we come to think, "What in the world can I do about anything that is so overwhelming in its scope and in its importance?" The thing we need to remember at such a time, of course, is that lies are always told by individuals. We are the ones who must become the agents of truth.

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We are the ones who, under no circumstances, must lie. The court in which we are called to appear every day, the court of public opinion, there is the place that we must begin our stand for truth. See, I'm deeply convinced that every one of us has the right not to be lied about.

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Of course, in the court of public opinion there are oft times many confusing and tumultuous things, and I would not suggest or argue that within that court the judgments are always fair. But I would defend this proposition, that in that court made up of our friends and our colleagues and our neighbors and in our family, each and every one of us has the right not to be lied about.

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How awful it is when because of some deceitful act, because of some prostitution of the truth, those whose opinions mean most to us, our family, our friends, our colleagues, are turned against us. And it's so easy to lie in the court of public opinion, to damn somebody with faint praise. I've heard people lie about others at the very moment they appeared to be extending sympathy.

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It is, you see, such a delightful sin, so deliciously entertaining to do something that seems to be so small and yet can do so much damage, and so few go to jail for it. That's what makes doing it all the more malicious. I would remind you that our Lord Christ was killed by lies ever before He was hung on a cross.

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They brought before Him all kinds of false witnesses, and false witnesses are still killing people over teacups. I read about a man named Melvin Willett, who teaches in a high school in Freehold, New Jersey. He had an ethics class, and he brought up for discussion the quiz show scandals of about a decade ago when certain contestants were given the answers to quiz questions and won great sums of money.

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Well, the class didn't think the matter was too serious, so a few crooked contestants won a little bit of extra cash. So the next week, Mr. Willett rigged the test he gave to the class. He gave nine of the students the answers. When the test was over, those nine had passed, and everyone else in the room had failed.

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And after this occurred, Mr. Willett explained that he had rigged that test just as those quiz shows had been rigged. And as you might very well imagine, the members of the class felt quite differently about their own failure, their own loss because of lies, than they had felt about the quiz show story from some years before. What made the difference in their reaction?

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The difference was this. They were against what Mr. Willett did with his test because it affected them personally. But you see, the point is that every lie is personal. Every liar is a person. Everyone that is lied about is a person.

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And therefore, our resistance, our refusal to lie, must start at the personal level. Please turn your cassette to the other side. Let me give you some very specific suggestions, very general, but at the same time with enough specificity that I think they can guide us aright. I would suggest, for example, that we ought never to say anything about another person

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until we have arrived at a true and just judgment concerning that person. You're a very rare individual indeed. If you've never had someone lie about you on the basis of some complete misunderstanding of something that you have said or done, had they traced the matter down, had they come to a true and just decision with regard to the matter,

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they never would have said what they said. I'm suggesting that we need in our personal relationships to have the same commitment to truth that we find within the scientific community. You know, scientific research is built on the foundation of truthfulness. It would be very easy for some scientist in his laboratory to cheat and to come to whatever results he wished.

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And that kind of thing would be very difficult to trace down. If someone is there in the laboratory to see, and if someone in another laboratory runs the same experiments and arrives at a different conclusion, it would be relatively easy for the first scientist to say that he'd made a mistake and not been deliberately deceitful, and who could prove him wrong. Science rests on the understanding that when a scientist does his research, he records what he does truthfully.

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If you want to see an example to the contrary, look at the Nazis. When they permitted the lie of anti-Semitism to enter into their scientific research, they so prostituted, they so broke down the importance of truth within research, that they lost the opportunity to get the atomic bomb before the Allies did. It is one of the great ironies of history that the reason they didn't get that bomb is because one of those they lied about, a Jew, Albert Einstein,

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fled their nation and came here, and it was his mathematical research that opened the door to atomic capacity for us. We must not, you see, allow lies to confuse our judgment, but like a scientist, assess matters accurately. I'm not saying for one moment that we have to approve everything that someone else does. This is no appeal for soft-headedness. We are to be hard-headed.

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When you pursue the truth, you're always hard-headed. I'm not handing out insipid counsel like Dale Carnegie in his "How to Win Friends and Influence People," when he says that all criticisms are like homing pigeons, and once you send them out, you can be sure they'll come back again. They'll never criticize anybody else, and they'll never criticize you.

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Carnegie, you see, is pursuing prudence. I'm talking about pursuing truth. If you hear something which accurately judged is wrong, you hit it, and you hit it hard, but you're sure before you do that. What this is is a plea for humility. Bruno the Astonomer was burned by the Church because the Church wasn't humble enough to doubt its own wisdom.

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The South cut off all communication with the rest of the world, censored mail and newspapers, and didn't permit those who visited the South to speak against slavery, so caught up in its own conclusions that it brought death and destruction upon itself and crippled this nation even until today. You remember how those people in the very early days of the Vietnam War spoke up against the war,

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and individuals responded by saying, "You either love America or you leave it." That kind of attitude, you see, is without responsibility. It is without just judgment. It is without the spirit of humility. The Scriptures say, "The Lord has more light to reveal." Let's make sure we have enough light before we say something about somebody.

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And here's another suggestion. Let us never relate our inferences as if they were facts. Many times we assume a certain thing on the part of a person. We see them do one thing and assume that they will do the other. We cannot base our reporting on that kind of inferential assumption.

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If you see a man on a certain street, it is not legitimate to say that he went into a certain house on that street, unless you've seen him go into that house. If you know a woman who is poor, and she appears dressed magnificently, it is not right to say that she lied about her poverty.

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It is not right to say that she stole the clothes. It is not right to say that she was heedlessly extravagant. There's another possibility. She could have had someone who gave to her the clothing that she was wearing. In other words, our inferences are not necessarily true.

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I know a woman who contracted terminal cancer. She kept it a secret to herself and her family alone. It was told to no one else. Except the priest of her parish. This good man of God came regularly to visit her and minister to her.

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Every day he came and sometimes stayed for an extended length of time. And some of the people in the neighborhood, seeing the priest come to the house every day, and noting how long he stayed, made evil and iniquitous inferences out of that, and began to spread stories.

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Two months later, when she died, they came and confessed what they had done to the priest. It was, of course, too late for the sake of the good one who was gone. You know, there's a basic principle of educational psychology that says, "You do not punish a child. You punish the child's behavior."

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Because there's not always a direct relationship between the behavior and the child. We're not altogether logical in what we do. Because we believe one thing or say one thing, that does not necessarily mean that we will do the logical thing which is derived from it.

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Therefore, in our dealings with others and in our speaking about others, let's not enter into any oral inflation. Oral inflation is as hard upon truth as economic inflation is hard upon a nation's economy. Let us build what we say on what is certain, not on what we infer.

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And here's a third principle. If, with the very best intentions, we still find ourselves consistently saying what is not true, then we ought to be silent. A number of years ago, they conducted a survey on the British railway system,

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and they discovered that one out of every 20 employees was colorblind. Now, that was a very serious circumstance. A brakeman or an engineer on a train needs to know when the light is red or when the light is green. And those who are colorblind see red as green and green as red.

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It's very obvious, I would suggest, that people who are colorblind should not be in that kind of work. Just so, I would say that some of us get caught up in an intellectual colorblindness, or in a prejudicial colorblindness, which so cripples us that with regard to certain subjects we are not able to be objective and fair.

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When it comes to discussing those subjects, I submit that we ought to have nothing to say. Now, I'm sure you've encountered someone or other who has said at one time or other, "I'm sorry, I just feel so deeply about that, I don't want to say anything, lest I say something unfair." That's precisely the spirit that I'm talking about now.

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Oh, I recognize, I fully recognize, that people who are intellectually crippled on a certain subject, or so prejudiced that they cannot analyze it fairly, are rarely aware of their plight. But let us be aware of the way we think, and why we think in the way we think. About a year ago, I was sent a clipping by an acquaintance.

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This clipping was a writing of a noted commentator here in the United States, not widely known, but sufficiently well known. And this man is generally represented as a spokesman for views that are extremely to the right. The article was a review of a book by a man named Ron Sider,

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the title of the book, "Rich Christians in a Hungry World." Now, this is a very interesting book, and it's created quite a bit of comment. It begins with a masterful exegesis, and then goes on to some very controversial and disputable ideas. That's one of the reasons the book has been such a bestseller amongst Christians.

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Everybody who reads it either is very enthusiastic or very disenchanted by it, and it's promoted a great deal of conversation wherever it's been read. In any case, this gentleman, in reviewing this book, chose to do so by branding Mr. Sider as a Marxist, which is a very interesting thing to do, since there's an extended passage in the book itself

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in which Mr. Sider delineates his position from Marxism, and anyone who knows Marxism as a philosophy knows that Mr. Sider is most assuredly not a Marxist. But what had happened? This man, caught up in a very prejudicial view of this subject, chose not to debate it, but instead hurled a loaded word.

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That word "Marxist" is as loaded as a gun. You can play intellectual Russian roulette, you know, and that's what he chose to do. If you are not able to get down into the arena of intellectual combat and speak there the truth, and defend your arguments with the truth, if the only thing you can do is hurl names,

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then don't get into the arena. That kind of lying is the opposite of loving. And we are called by God not to bear false witness against our neighbor. And one last thought.

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We must not, of course, pass on things that are brought to us. Tales are carried very quickly. We must not be tale-bearers. You know it is as much of a crime to pass counterfeit money as it is to print it. When I was a boy during the Second World War, I can remember signs, you would see them from time to time,

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that said "Careless talk costs lives." There were many people caught up in the defense industry, you see, and these people would sometimes perhaps talk about when a ship was leaving or troop transfers, and espionage agents could put these things together and discover things about our military effort

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that we did not want the enemy to know. "Careless talk costs lives." I don't think we ever should have taken down those signs. Careless talk still costs.

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It costs in terms of broken reputations, fractured friendships. I could cite for you tonight at least one suicide that I know of that occurred because of a false, malicious story that was rapidly spread through a small town not very far from here. Now I think the implications of tale-bearing are so obvious, I don't have to say anything more about it.

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But I want to turn that idea of tale-bearing around and ask you to think for just a minute about what lying does, not to the one lied about, we can understand that, but to the liar. Cicely Buck, who is a professor of philosophy at Harvard University,

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has written an interesting book called "Lying, Moral Choice in Public and Private Life," and she spends a considerable section in that book analyzing what lying does to the liar. The first thing, of course, is the liar loses his sense of his own integrity. He knows that he is a person not to be trusted.

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He understands himself in those terms. That's shaking to any person with any kind of character, whatever. The second thing that happens is that this lying, once it has begun in a life, begins to spread. You see, most people when they first lie, lie for what they call benevolent reasons.

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They lie for what they think are good reasons. But benevolence has a way of ballooning until pretty soon they're not lying for the good of others, but lying for the good of themselves. Now, as this spreads through their lives, they soon discover that they have to tell more lies to cover their first lies.

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You see, it's very easy to tell one lie, but it's very hard not to tell more than one lie. You see, you have to always be going around covering up your lies. It's a very good memory to be a liar, and all the energy you spend in recovering your lies, in remembering them, a truthful person can spend that same energy on far more profitable things.

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The fourth thing that happens is psychological barriers within you begin to fall so that, and I'm sure you're aware of this, and other people at least, and perhaps in yourself, you begin to think that you're safe and succeeding in your lies. Most liars are convinced they're getting away with their lying.

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They don't know that people talk to each other and compare notes, and that most liars are known for the lies that they tell. But thinking themselves to get away with it, because their lying kind of dopes them, so that they're not sensitive to how obvious their lying is,

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thinking that they're getting away with it, they tell even more lies, which of course multiplies the possibilities of their being caught. And the fifth result, of course, is that sending out these lies leads other people to lie, and very soon the veneer of truth in the society is eaten away,

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the moral atmosphere is polluted and made foul, and the nation begins to die. And when the nation dies, it takes everyone down with it, including the liars. And this, of course, brings us full circle, right back to where we started. Lying is the opposite of loving, and therefore it becomes our responsibility

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to never say a word about anyone until we're sure about it, to never confuse our inferences with the facts, to stay away from those subjects we cannot speak of with objectivity and fairness, and to never pass along stories that are carried to us.

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If we will do these things, we will create within ourselves and within the circle of our relationships a climate of truth. And as that climate begins to move across the face of the country, the advertisers and the propagandists, who now easily lie to us

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because they know we easily lie to each other, will discover that we're standing for truth. And they will then, for no other reason than the preservation of themselves, begin to tell the truth.

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By God's grace, you see, we can live lives of integrity. And when that happens, we will be loving each other in a very practical way, and the whole nation will be blessed. Scripture says, "By our words we will be justified,

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and by our words we will be condemned." Certainly, certainly, it is heaven upon earth to have one's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.

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That's the reason God has given us these commandments, you see. He wants us to know heaven on earth. He wants our minds to turn upon the poles of truth. That's the reason he says,

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"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." Let us pray. O Father of truth, we long to escape from the prison of lies. We're surrounded by lies.

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Lies are built into our mode of living. We're so accustomed to lies, we've almost lost the capacity to notice them. We have an infinite capacity for self-deception. We take lying lightly as though it were some kind of peccadillo

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when we know it is your enemy. O God, help us to disentangle ourselves from the web of lies that clutches at our life. Help us to live more truthfully. Indeed, teach us to love truth enough to sacrifice everything else at her altar,

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even family and friends, for nothing that must be bought at the price of a lie could ever be worth anything at all. Apart from you, O God, there are only lies,

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and the spawning of more lies. So, Father, have pity on us in our misery and our shame, and fill us, fill us to overflowing, with the love of your truth.

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For we ask it in the name of that one who called himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

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The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace.

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Thank you very much.