Speaking the Truth
Keeping a tight rein on the tongue.

Alistair Begg

You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. —Exodus 20:16

The cultural climate is one in which there is plenty of room for personal preferences and little if any for eternal principles. Instead of the church seizing the opportunity to proclaim God's law and sin as an offense against that law, it is guilty of an embarrassing silence.

The words of the prophet Isaiah seem to describe our society only too well: "Justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter. Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey" (Isaiah 59:14-15a).

If the statistics on lying are to be believed, then 91 percent of the American population tells lies regularly. The majority of us find it hard to get through a week without lying. One in five can't make it through a whole day. Dishonesty, it would seem, is woven into the very fabric of our culture. Deceit runs through our society like so many dark veins through marble. The corridors of political power are plagued by it. The academy is rife with plagiarism, and organized religion cannot deny the fact that it has significant internal problems with honesty and integrity.

The issue is pervasive, but instead of tackling it as we would a noxious weed in a garden, we mistakenly tolerate it and in certain cases cultivate it. An article from Child magazine in the 1990s contrasted the "old view," which taught that all lying was bad, with the "new view" that some lying is considered normal. The proponents of the new view tell us that parents should not be unduly alarmed by their children's first few lies, but should view them as an important step in the "development of self." In striking contrast, the Bible identifies a lying tongue as evidence of our depravity: "Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips" (Romans 3:13).

The ninth commandment is a call to truthfulness, a commitment to truth that is more than skin-deep. God delights in truth in the inward being. Honesty is first and foremost an affair of the heart. Once again, in this commandment, as in all the others, we come face to face with ourselves in the mirror of God's law. The first deception we need to tackle is self-deception: kidding ourselves that we are fine, ignoring the lies and the slanders, the broken promises, and the gossip of which we are guilty. "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us" (1 John 1:8).

At the same time, the law functions not only as a mirror but also as a signpost pointing us to the Lord Jesus. Better still, it acts as a pedagogue, taking us by the hand and leading us to the truth that sets us free. (The pedagogus in Roman culture was the slave who took the child to school.)

A life that is marked by wisdom, joy, light, spiritual energy, and integrity is what David describes in . The laws of God are not irksome to his children. They are precious and sweet. They warn of danger on either side of the path, and there is great reward in keeping them (v. 7-13).

The law of the Lord is perfect because God is perfect. He cannot lie. He is the God of truth and is made known to us as the true God. This is in contrast to the gods "who did not make the heavens and the earth" and who "will perish from the earth and from under the heavens" (Jeremiah 10:11).

Before issuing the first command, God identifies himself as "I AM." He is the living God, the eternal King who stands in striking contrast to the worthless idols and images that are a fraud; they have no breath in them. It should then be no surprise that those who by grace have become children of the true God should themselves bear the family likeness and be characterized by truth. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, and Jesus is the truth, and everyone who is on the side of truth listens to him (John 18:37).

The apostle John concludes his first letter with a warning to stay away from idols. They represent lies, and the believer lives in the realm of what is true (1 John 5:20).

Stated most simply, the ninth commandment tells us that we must tell the truth at all times. Solomon tells us, "the Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in men who are truthful" (Proverbs 12:22). We may tell lies or practice deceit with a wink of the eye, a nod of the head, and even by our silence, but we sin most easily in our words. Indeed, says James, it is religious hypocrisy that allows a man to regard himself as holy while failing to "keep a tight rein on his tongue" (James 1:26).

James describes the devastating impact of the tongue in terms of fire and poison (James 3:1-12). The tongue is a difficult member of the body to tame. Human restraint is ineffective. It will be brought under control only by divine power, the power that raised Jesus from the dead. In the same way a small spark may set a forest on fire, our tongues are capable of beginning a blaze that will not easily be controlled (James 3:6).

"Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body" (Ephesians 4:25). Unless we are routinely before the mirror of God's Word in a manner that takes care of what we see, we may begin to tolerate half-truths, flattery, gossip, and caustic, harmful comments, and thereby poison the life of our community. One wrong word may spoil a character, smear a reputation, and mar the usefulness of a life. Part of what it means to love our neighbor is that we are absolutely truthful in what we say to and about them.

When we exaggerate, we distort the truth. Sometimes we exaggerate in order to curry favor with a person. We are tempted to tell our supervisor that his talk to the staff was "the best we had ever heard." If in our heart of hearts we really thought that it was marginal, then we are lying, and the form in which we serve up our deceit is exaggerated talk. We may also exaggerate in order to impress. When we are asked how our game of golf turned out, we say, "I never missed a fairway all day." It would be more truthful to say, "On 5 out of 18 holes I was in the fairway." When someone exaggerates on our behalf and we fail to correct them because the false impression they've created feeds our ego, we are guilty of falsehood.

We will be saved from much of this by a commitment to let our "yes be yes and our no be no." If we are careless with the facts in assuring a client of a delivery date for a product or in describing the benefit of a product, we will all too quickly slip into a pattern where our vagueness becomes a form of deceit.

The wonder of the gospel is this—that all our lies and deception have been laid on him who perfectly obeyed the truth. When he died upon the cross, we were the beneficiaries of his obedience.

Alistair Begg has been in pastoral ministry for 33 years, 8 years in Scotland and 25 at Parkside Church in suburban Cleveland. He has written several books, and is heard daily across the nation on his radio program, Truth for Life. This article is excerpted with permission from Pathway to Freedom: How God's Laws Guide Our Lives, by Alistair Begg, Moody Publishers, © 2003, all rights reserved.

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