I’m beginning to think that the ninth commandment
is more important than I ever realized.
Traditionally, it reads, “Thou shalt not
bear false witness” (KJV), or more colloquially, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.”
Well … Duh!
“Okay,” I said to myself when I first read
it, “that makes sense. In court, telling a lie about someone or something can
get an innocent person into serious legal trouble. And to do that would be
malicious. Fair enough.”
But lately I’ve started wondering. Is that
all the commandment means? Is it just for courts and legal situations? Or is it
quite reasonable to think it might apply elsewhere — maybe even far beyond
the limited precincts of the courthouse?
I shared my doubts about this with a
friend. His reaction was, “Of course.” Not helpful, but pointed.
Am I the last one to pick up on this?
The Parameters of False Witness
The prohibition, I’m now thinking, is much
broader than that. Maybe we can no more confine it to the courtroom than we can
limit it to the city gateways in which judgments were held in the ancient world
from which the commandment originally arose. It’s a prohibition for all
circumstances in which judgment is weighed as to matters of fact and personal
integrity. It wouldn’t really matter whether the “judge” was a magistrate, a
policeman, a referee, or a citizen merely acting as arbitrator in one of the
many situations of judgment we all face routinely. Either way, the principle
upheld is this: don’t say things that give witness to that which is not true,
to that which perverts the judgment or distorts the reputation of others,
regardless of the forum in question. It’s “Do not lie” writ large and with the
implied consequences written in.
Looking at it like this makes it considerably more important than if we treat it as a mere injunction for
courts. Because really, our society is just full of false witnesses, isn’t it?
Obfuscation Abounding
We all know about the lies of advertisers and politicians, who “bear witness” to falsehoods every day. We’ve come to
accept that as totally normal. Then there’s the internet, that hub of
cacophonic lies, from whence the truth can only ever be extracted with great
pain and effort, if at all. We’re told nowadays that our news is all “fake news”.
(That might actually be right: but something’s got to be true.) There’s also
our starkly polarized political language, with Leftists shouting that conservatives
are all neo-Nazis and “deplorables”, and conservatives shouting that the whole
Left is composed of pinkos, neo-Marxists and SJW wimps. Do we ever stop to
think, “Maybe I’m not being entirely fair to the opposition” or “Hey, maybe
some of the people on the Left or Right of us are actually trying to do the
right thing?”
In our public schools, we’re told that truth itself is relative, that morality is optional, and that even the word of
God itself is a matter of mere private interpretation. All religions are good —
as is none at all — and all roads lead to … well, wherever it is all
roads lead to, I guess. And no lifestyle is ever bad, so long as a person can
want it. Nor is any act of savagery an atrocity, right down to the butchering
of children in utero, so long as
somebody wants to do it on the road to their own version of “happiness”. Indeed,
the only sin left is the sin of impeding someone else from doing what
they want.
Fragmentation and Character Assassination
Even within the Christian community we see increasing fragmentation into camps and denominations, each inveighing against
the beliefs of others, but not always staying within the bounds of truth to do
it — the holders of contrary opinions sometimes simply have their names
blackened and dismissed without due inspection of what they actually believe or
why they (even misguidedly) are advocating it. Camps are formed. Rallying cries
are raised. And part of marshaling the troops is sometimes the characterizing
of all opponents as demented or ungodly.
Then there’s the private stuff. I mean the stuff each of us does when we’re agitated about not getting things going our
way. Sometimes it’s just the misrepresenting of someone else’s view when we
report it to others after the fact. Sometimes it’s more insidious and direct
than that: after all, it’s awfully easy these days to set up a false front on
someone using posts or blogs or Facebook, to bully and harass online, and thus
to assassinate the characters of others in the broad public domain. And when is
anybody ever called on that? And there are the little “adjustments” we so
routinely make to any story we tell about ourselves — those little add-ons
that spice up the story or give it just a little twist so that we don’t come
out so bad in the end, or so that those on the other side do. Who can resist
making the story just a little bit better?
The Consequences
So while a great many of these situations never make it to the courthouse, it’s got to be clear to anyone who’s not
asleep that the penalties visited upon the victims of these kinds of false
witnesses are often as nasty, or nearly so, as any legal punishment could be —
destroyed relationships, ruined reputations, job loss, loss of children, loss
of friends, public humiliation, financial devastation … and on and on and
on …
You used to be able to escape a false witness. Nowadays, they can gang up on you by internet, chase you when you want
to leave, and spread their poison worldwide, if they want. And all of that
while the accuser remains under the pretext of free speech and protected by
layers of false personalities. The false witness can now mobilize the world
against you before you even have a chance to defend yourself. And let’s face
it: people like a scandal more than they like the truth. They’ll tend to
believe about you whatever is most interesting, not what is most honest. Today,
you can be character-assassinated without even the chance to clear your name in
a real court.
The Lord’s View?
The Lord has a lot to say about the false witness and the lying tongue. We can’t cover it all here because it’s a big
topic, but I’ll bet you know most of it anyway. Suffice to say that Proverbs
calls slander the language of fools and repeatedly tells us that such
will be punished and not escape. Psalms promises they
will be destroyed. The Lord himself says that false witness proceeds from
the black heart of man, and James says the unruly tongue is a thing
“set on fire by hell”. The apostles repeatedly enjoin the believers
not to participate in
any form of
false witness.
Indeed, the devil himself is called the “accuser of our brothers” and the
“father of lies”. Let us not walk in his company!
Justice Served
Now, it’s interesting what the Old Testament penalty was when someone was caught actually deliberately bearing
false witness. The accuser would have everything done to him or her that he or
she planned to cause to happen to the accused. Was it loss of money? Loss of a job? Loss
of property or family? Loss of freedom in jail? Back atcha, Sunshine — one
for one.
That makes the mounting of false allegations kind of an expensive hobby, doesn’t it?
But before anybody gets in an uproar about the possibility this would punish a “victim”, it would not. There is no biblical
penalty specified against an accuser whose accusation merely lacks sufficient
proof for conviction. Rather, this penalty is for those cases in which the
prosecution is verifiably malicious — where there is found to be no truth
to the allegation, and is it shown that the alleger lied and knew he or she
lied in order to harm another person. And there are enough such cases.
That tells you something important about God’s view of justice in regard to this issue. Justice is that whatever gain
the liar thought to obtain through the lie should be taken away, and every harm
he intended to visit upon his victim should be visited on him.
Not worth it, is it?
The Bottom Line?
Here’s what I’m thinking. In our day, we all need a redoubled vigilance about our lips. We need to speak the truth, and
only the truth — most especially, when we are speaking of our brothers and
sisters in Christ, but for everyone else as well. Slander, half-truths,
innuendos, false labels and character assassination, even in service of an
allegedly “good cause”, have no place in the arsenal of the man or woman of
God. At all. Not in writing. Not on the internet. And not in person. Not even
when we’re verbally reporting out own story, maybe even in the presence of
friends. No rewriting history.
We must take care to speak no more, no
less, and no other than what is true, even of those we oppose. If we speak in
excess (and who is there who does not occasionally fail in this?), then we need
to be quick to restore the truth — even at the cost of personal
humiliation or to the detriment of our own cause.
Seems frightfully obvious, doesn’t it? We all know that. Maybe it makes you wonder why I even bothered to write.
Truth in Short Supply
Except maybe the things we ought to know
are sometimes the things we also know the least. What we know in our heads, we
may not even remember to practice, just because it’s so very familiar. Such
things maybe just seem to take care of themselves …
But they don’t. Our age, mad as it is on communication of all forms, multiplies the opportunities for the bearing of false witness. Models of those who do it successfully are around us on every side. Enticements
to it abound, since we are so increasingly conscious of our own public images;
and the costs of failure to manage our own public profiles have never been
higher or more immediate.
Today truth-speakers are in frightfully short supply. But the bottom line on the Ninth has not gone away. Speak
truth: bear no false witness. Keep the facts the facts. Do not spin, fold or
mutilate, for any reason. To be a Christian is to walk openly, staying in the
light, manifesting what one actually is, and what has actually been done, no matter
what the cost.
It’s obvious: but sometimes the bottom line just needs some underlining.
___________________________
Photo courtesy Not That Bob James under CC BY 2.0
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