Tongue Like a Bow

“They bend their tongue like a bow.”

I have a dear friend who professed faith in Christ back in his youth, but in his twenties married an unsaved woman and wandered far away from the Lord … or maybe the process worked the other way round. Either way, raising a family in lockstep with the worldview of a woman who does not know Christ or the scriptures, he has grown comfortable subjecting himself to the propaganda of the leftist media on a daily basis.

Eager to please his wife, he now pays arguably more attention to her ideology than she does.

Defilement and Holiness

Ingesting progressive opinion podcasts and online political analysis are his daily routine in his retirement years. Evenings are devoted to TV series and movies that recycle the same emotional manipulations in rhetorical form for progressives who can’t do dialectic. The smartly-told stories of compulsive liars are possibly the most effective propaganda tool ever invented. Their effects go all the way down.

To keep things civil between us, I steadfastly avoid discussing politics. The gentlest query about the validity of his worldview assumptions enrages him, inviting mockery and a barrage of boilerplate leftist talking points and questionable factoids.

In the Old Testament, God told Haggai the prophet to ask the religious authorities of his day a question about what the Law of Moses teaches about defilement. He inquired, “If someone carries holy meat in the fold of his garment and touches with his fold bread or stew or wine or oil or any kind of food, does it become holy?” The priests correctly responded, “No.” Haggai then asked, “If someone who is unclean by contact with a dead body touches any of these, does it become unclean?” “It does become unclean”, replied the priests.

Precisely.

Hard Work and Infection

Defilement is infectious in a way that holiness is not. It happens almost by accident, without you noticing, like catching the flu bug on the subway. Soiling ourselves is easy. Holiness, on the other hand, is just hard work. Becoming set apart to God is an act of the will. You must determine to do it. “Go out from their midst and be separate from them,” says the Lord. “Touch no unclean thing.”

“Go out” and “touch not” are instructions that require obedience. If you refuse or delay in responding to them, you will shortly find yourself incapable of any good service, assuming you even notice the change in your character. Usefulness in the service of God requires a conscious commitment to separate oneself from everything and everyone determined to defile you. It requires self-awareness and an alert spirit willing to respond to the promptings of the Lord throughout the day.

Defilement requires no such sensitivity. In fact, it depends on you letting down your guard. So then, “Bad company ruins good morals”, as Paul observed to the Corinthians. It’s probably a quote from Menander’s comedy Thais, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Haggai’s prophetic parable, not to mention the rest of scripture, reinforce its credibility.

Manners and Customs

The Greek word translated “morals” (or “manners” in the KJV) is ēthos, a word that refers to a man’s customary behavior. Some translations render it “character”. Defilement changes your daily habits in ways you do not notice, and we are the sum of our habits.

The NT writers use a related Greek word to describe all kinds of actions Jews engaged in habitually without thinking about them. For example, in a Jewish first century family, mom and dad didn’t have a big debate about whether to circumcise their baby boy on the eighth day. They did it automatically, because everybody did. It was part of their ēthos. How the Jews wrapped their dead with linen cloths full of spices was part of their ēthos too. No first century Jew ever sat down beside a dead body and thought, “Hmm, why don’t we try the Egyptian method today?” There was a universally accepted Hebrew custom, and nobody questioned it. The Roman legal system had its customs too, and made no exceptions to them. A man accused of a crime invariably faced his accusers. Nobody questioned that. It was part of the Roman ēthos. It operated below the surface. If anyone tried to challenge the unspoken rule, he would meet with stern opposition. The ēthos was the default expectation of the culture in which these folks lived, moved, and had their being.

Jeremiah talks about men and women for whom telling lies had become part of the culture. Dishonesty had become so habitual to them they never thought to operate in any other way. He writes, “They bend their tongue like a bow.” Truth is a straight line, but the words of the people Jeremiah met every day were as warped as a finely crafted piece of wood attached at both ends to a string stretched back to its limits by all the trembling musculature of a soldier’s upper body. An artist seeking to describe that arc with pen or brush would need to be lightning quick: a second later, the bow would completely change its shape. A tongue like a bow may say anything from a vague approximation of the truth to a convolution so strained and implausible it can only be sustained for a moment.

Defilement is communicable, and the dissembling disease had spread throughout Judah, moving steadily from person to person. “Every brother is a deceiver, and every neighbor goes about as a slanderer. Everyone deceives his neighbor, and no one speaks the truth.” Falsehood was the Judean ēthos. There were no straight lines to be found.

Dishonesty as an Ethos

My friend has been marinating in a morally inverted worldview for so long that he can barely bring himself to conceive reality any other way. He knows the New Testament backward and forward. If you asked him, he wouldn’t even disagree with its teaching, intellectually at least. But his daily custom is something else. It determines what he reads, listens to, thinks and says. It spreads to his children so it can echo back to him from their mouths. It makes it easier for him to be with people who make the same underlying assumptions about the world as he does and who would never challenge his preconceptions.

There is a way back, but it involves separation. It demands obedience. It requires a daily regimen of “go out” and “touch not”. It requires conscious determination to seek the will of God at every turn, and the unshakeable conviction that following Christ no matter the cost is the only way to go.

That is very difficult when you have allowed dishonesty to become your custom, because the easiest person in the world to deceive is yourself.