Proverbs 14:25 ESV
A truthful witness saves lives, but one who breathes out lies is deceitful.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+14%3A25&version=ESV]
We often condense the ninth commandment (Ex. 20:16) to ‘don’t lie’, and very often, the summarization is perfectly valid. Not lying, usually, is sufficient to avoid bearing false witness against your neighbor. Yet the ninth commandment, like the rest (Matt. 5:21-22,27-28), has more to it: a positive command to tell the truth on one hand and a negative command to not engage in harm via deception on the other. This double result of the ninth commandment can be seen clearly in the two halves of today’s verse. First, we are commanded to be truthful witnesses, if only by implication; we are even promised a reward of sorts for such virtue. Second, we are warned that the man who ‘breathes out lies’ is ‘deceitful’, a dire warning that only gains its full weight when we consider the rest of the Bible.
Of course, that last half of the verse may be bugging you. It looks like an effective tautology, a statement that states ‘A is A’- true but worthless. Obviously, liars are deceivers. The first is almost a synonym and certainly a category of the second. An understanding of the Biblical context, however, will clarify this apparent meaninglessness. The word here translated ‘deceitful’ appears 34 times in the Hebrew text used by the ESV, 22 of those times in either Psalms (14) or Proverbs (8). Outside of those two books, the word’s use is factual, as in 2 Kings 9:23 (translated ‘treachery’), or clearly condemning the immorality of deceit, as in Genesis 27:35, Job 15:35, and Micah 6:11, whether by narrative context (Genesis) or by parallelism (Job, Micah).
Inside those two books, the teaching is very clear. Not only is deceit wrong, to be avoided, as per Proverbs 20:23, it brings upon its practitioners the wrath of God: “You destroy those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man” (Ps. 5:6). This half of the verse at hand, then, is not merely a statement of the nature of those who breathe out lies. The indictment of such men as ‘deceitful’ places them under the wrath of God, the wrath which scorched Sodom and Gomorrah, the wrath which tore stone from stone in the apocalypse of A.D. 70.
From this part of the passage we can derive the negative half of the command: do not live a life of deceit. To ‘breathe lies’ is not to lie every now and again. To ‘breathe lies’ is to make lies a part of you and your life, to make them essential to how you live. This might seem hypothetical, exaggerated, impractical, but this is the nature of lies. Every lie, pressed with any scrutiny, requires a legion of lies to surround it, smaller and larger. Big lies, of course, hit this stage quick. Adulterers, (as-yet unproven) murderers, unregenerate church-goers (Heb. 10:38-39; Matt. 12:43-45), all these lies will quickly pile up whole mountains of lies trying to keep the dirty laundry under cover, until, in most cases, it collapses, till the adultery comes out, the murder is discovered, or (and in our culture this is the easiest) he stops pretending, to himself and to the world and to God (Acts 5:1-11), that he has placed his faith in Christ. Small lies, though, pile up, and they have the additional strength of not seeming so big at first. One lies to fix one problem turns into two lies for two problems; two turns into three because one of them needs to be propped up. The habit builds. We’re all susceptible to it.
An easy excuse, in these sorts of situations, is that we’re not actually lying, not actually saying anything untrue. Imagine a kid who ate the cookies out of the cookie jar, then cleaned up after himself meticulously and never mentioned his escapades at all. He didn’t say a single untrue word. He didn’t have to. His actions were still calculated to deceive. When it comes to breathing lies, the breath doesn’t have to be words. In a more extreme example, the adulterer maintains a cordial relationship with his wife, wooing her and treating her to all appearance as he should is not relieved from the guilt of lying about his affair. Silence speaks loud, sometimes.
This truth leads us into the positive half of the ninth commandment, the duty it enjoins and the first half of today’s appointed verse. We have a duty not just to avoid lying but to seek out truth. The truth is hard, unfortunately. We are sinful men, sinful women. We find it much easier to deny faults, to cover up inadequacies, to create illusions which give us comfort. Men lie to themselves as much as anybody else.
Nevertheless, in seeking and embracing the truth, we may find that the life we save is not merely that of the flesh. In telling the truth to men, we may be His instrument to bring them salvation, His instrument to give them that knowledge necessary for the faith which saves the life of the soul. More, in the truth lies our own salvation. Faith is, Hebrews tells us, “The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (11:1). In other words, faith is conviction of a truth we have not seen. Not in vain does the Jesus state, “If you abide in My word, you are truly My disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32). Only by the truth can we reach and see Christ, as His people will upon the final marriage day of the Lamb (Rev. 19:6-10). That will be a truth and a glory beyond compare. Till then, we wait, doing good works that our holiness might match more rightly to the righteousness which alone saves us, the righteousness of Christ imputed by faith in the truth of His promise, and in those good works heeding not just the bare minimum of His commands but in love seeking out the fullness of the duties He gives us, to fulfil them, and the truth of the bounds He sets around us, to heed them.
God bless.
Written by Colson Potter
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
