Can we ever escape from falsehood?
Posted at Reformation Scotland:
Can we really trust what we see and hear? In the news and on social media, there is a crisis of confidence as people take an increasingly sceptical and cynical approach to some of the content they consume alongside a gullible and naively accepting approach to other sources. What we then share with others may not be disinformation — deliberately intended to deceive — yet it may still be misinformation, spread on the mistaken assumption that it is valid. With technological advances in social media and now AI, falsehoods can now easily be shared to large audiences in a plausible way that affects people’s thinking and behaviour. When we are all floundering in a fog of half-truths and uncertainties, the outcome is not to make people believe a specific lie, it is to make us distrust the possibility of a final truth. Yet there is a tension between the recent cultural assumption that truth is relative and flexible enough to be different for different people and the more immediate contemporary realisation that when people accept falsehoods as true there are real-life damaging consequences, both for individuals and the fabric of society more widely. Our culture, while naturally wanting to escape from lying and falsehood, is simultaneously ambivalent about truth and hungry for it. What God offers, by contrast, is the truth, and God’s people reflect this in their aversion to all forms of lying and falsehood. Thomas Manton (1620–1677), one of the clerks to the Westminster Assembly, preached on David’s prayer in Psalm 119, “Remove from me the way of lying, and grant me thy law graciously.” In the following updated extract, Manton shows how David is a pattern for us in begging to be free from lying and to be granted the gracious gift of God’s truthful law.What is lying?
Lying is when people knowingly and willingly, and with purpose to deceive, signify what is false by gestures, actions, or (especially) words. The matter of a lie is a falsehood, but the form of a lie is with an intention to deceive (therefore a falsehood is one thing, a lie another). We lie when we not only speak falsely but knowingly, and with purpose to deceive.
There are two ways of lying in our words. One way is by asserting as false what you know is true, or by asserting as true what you know to be false. The other way of lying is when we promise things we do not intend to perform.
There is also a lying to God and a lying to other people.
Lying to God is the worst sort, because it indicates unbelief and atheism, low thoughts of God, as if He was not omniscient.
How do we lie to God? Partly when we put Him off with a false appearance, and make a show of what is not in the heart, as if He would be deceived with outsides and vain pretences (Hosea 11:12). Partly too, when we do not perform the promises we made in a time of trouble. We throw out promises to flatter God till we get out of trouble, but we do not seriously set our hearts to accomplish them.
As for lying to other people, there are three sorts of lies. There is the mendacium jocosum, when an untruth is devised for merriment. (This does not refer to fables or parables, which are only an artificial way of representing the truth in terms which more people are able to grasp; nor to irony, which is a notable way of making truth strike the heart with force). There is also the mendacium officiosum, the “officious lie,” for the help of others, such as when Rebekah taught Jacob to lie so that he would get the blessing (Gen. 27:1). There is also the mendacium perniciosum, the “pernicious lie,” to harm others.
All these sorts of lies are sins. Scripture condemns all lying without restriction (Eph. 4:25; Rev. 22:15).
