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Every week we look at the law of God because we wanna understand what God has to say to his people, we wanna know how to obey him, we wanna know how to love him, we wanna know how to worship him, not just with our lips but with our entire bodies.
We want our theology to explode out of our fingertips and not just to be things that are a part of our confession but things that are a part of our holy obsession to obey this great
God, not to earn our salvation but because of our salvation. So today we're gonna look at the ninth commandment which is you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
And we're gonna look at it from a different perspective because there is a kind of liar who does not tell a traditional lie.
Every word that this person speaks is somehow verifiable, every statement survives cross -examination.
If you put him under oath and asked him whether anything he said was false, he'd look at the camera like Bill Clinton and say,
I did not have. And he'd look in the eye and he would say no. And he would be right, technically, but he would still be a liar.
This is the sin the ninth commandment was built to reach down in the depths of our own ability to deceive ourselves because it's not perjury and it's not slander and it's not crude fabrication, it's a far more sophisticated kind of lying than saying exactly enough true things to produce a completely false impression.
That's what it is, the sin of strategic omission, the sin of the half -truth. And it's the most comfortable sin in the room because it lets us deceive our neighbors and ourselves at the exact same time.
I've said the truth. It's the kind of sin that drove Abraham to cause absolute chaos in his life.
If you remember, the famine drove Abraham down to Egypt and before he crossed the border, he turns to Sarai, his wife, who eventually would be renamed
Sarah, and he says to her, I want you to say that you are my sister. Now, here's what the rest of the narrative reveals.
In Genesis 20, Abraham defends himself to Abimelech. After Abimelech takes Sarai into his own home, thinking that he could now have another wife for his harem.
He defends himself saying, well, she is indeed my sister. She's the daughter of my father, though not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife.
She's my half sister. So technically what he said was true. She is my sister, but it was factually verifiable.
Every word would have been defensible in court, and yet that's precisely what makes Abraham's words so pernicious because Abraham wasn't inventing a lie.
He was constructing a story world in which his statement was true. He selects one true fact, strips it of all of its context, and deploys it with deliberate intention so that he would gain favor with Pharaoh and not be killed.
He knows that Pharaoh will hear. He's counting on Pharaoh will hear, and he knows that if he gives this omission that she's not his wife, that she's his sister, then he will be spared.
And when the plagues fall on Pharaoh's house, the deception unravels. I want you to notice the charge that Pharaoh brings to Abraham.
He doesn't say, you lied to me. He says, lamech lachigatayli, why did you not tell me?
He doesn't say you lied. He said, why did you withhold? The accusation that Pharaoh gives him is not against a false statement, but against a withheld one.
The crime of silence. The crime is Abraham choosing what not to say strategically.
That's the lie. And the Westminster Larger Catechism names this sin among the violations of the ninth commandment.
It lists concealing the truth and undo silence in a just cause is a lie.
So the commandment not only forbids saying what is false, it forbids withholding what is true.
And when you withhold what is true designed to lead your neighbor in a false understanding of the world or of a circumstance, then half truths become whole lies.
And the half truth never stays contained. We imagine that we've managed the situation when we give the half truth.
We've cajoled the situation to the point to where people believe what we say.
We've said just enough to get us through the moment. Yeah, I've completed my report. Not the one you wanted.
Yeah, I did this, but not what you said. And eventually the half truth in its pregnancy will give birth and it will cause chaos in your life.
Sarai is taken into Pharaoh's house. Her honor is placed in jeopardy. God protected her, but her security was stripped and she becomes currency by which
Abraham purchases his own survival. And then as a part of all of this, you have the patriarch
Abraham being rebuked by Pharaoh, a pagan king, because of his lack of honesty.
And then you have the possibility, which was horrible of what could have happened in this situation had
God not protected this family. A half truth became a whole lie and it became totally devastating. In our lives today, we do this all the time.
We give half truths and side comments and we give just enough information to make it seem like what we're saying is true.
And we know that we're withholding information that is critical to the context, but we do it, don't we?
And in that way, maybe the Lord is stirring something in your heart right now that you remember where you've done this recently.
Maybe you've done it so many times that you don't even have a fresh example because you can't remember.
Whatever it is, let's ask the Lord to help us be whole truth people. Not just the sin of committing a lie, but the sin of withholding the whole truth.
Let us be a people who are truth people and let us repent when we fall short, amen? Let's pray.
Lord, help us as we are people who communicate thousands of words a day to be vigilant, to make sure that those words are true to the best of our ability.
Help us, Lord, to think about things like exaggeration, hyperbole.
I know I struggle with these things to remember that sometimes in our exaggeration we can communicate untruths.
Help us, Lord, from the blatant lies that we do to save our own skin, but also Lord, help us from the half -truths or with the withholding of the truth in order to try to control an outcome or a situation.
Help us, Lord, help us to be people who are radically truthful and people who do that because we know the
God of truth. And Lord, help us when we fall short. Help us when we fall short to repent and to turn to you and receive your grace and to receive your mercy and to receive your healing.