(60 second quick read)
Although the Bible tells us that sin is sin, we like to think that some are bigger than the others. And in our minds, we create categories for them: tall, venti, grande. We have the huge sins: sins that we think we’ll never do. Then there’s the medium, and then the small. There’s another category we sort sin into: the necessary sins. The sins we think we can’t live life without. And there’s one in particular we should talk about: lying.
Lying feels like it’s a necessary sin
We live in a world where the king of lies is present. And we live in a world where it feels like we cannot survive without the casual lie. And it’s all pervasive: without lies, it seems that we cannot maintain an intimate relationship with someone, we can’t hold down a job, and that we cannot handle people’s emotions around us.
“The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy.”
The word “detest” in Hebrew is very strong: it indicates to us that God has a nauseous reaction to lying. And if we look at John 8:44, we see that God doesn’t like us lying because we speak the devil’s native tongue when we do. We must understand that God hates lying, and that there is no room for lying in the life of a believer. The only way we can keep lies in our life is by moving away from the God of truth, and towards the king of lies. It’s a choice — a clear, hard choice we have to make.
Whom do we lie to?
A. We lie to others
In Jeremiah 9:5, we see that friends deceive friends.
B. We lie to God
Lying to others is part of who we are, but when we lie to each other in the community of faith, we consequently lie to God. In Acts 5:4, Peter tells Ananias and Sapphira exactly that.
C. We lie to ourselves
In Psalms 119:29, we see the prayer of the psalmist as he admits that he’s lying to himself, which leads to his living the lie. And the end game of this is losing all sense of what the truth actually is, and losing sense of what your identity is.
It reads to me like a three-act-structure to easily lose sense of yourself: we tell a lie > we live the lie > we end up believing the lie. So is lying a sin? The Bible already tells us unequivocally that it is. So that’s not the question to tackle. The big question to answer is this: “why do we lie”.
THIS IS PART OF THE DEVOTIONAL SERIES TITLED “THE NECESSARY SIN”.
