Proverbs 17:4 ESV
An evildoer listens to wicked lips, and a liar gives ear to a mischievous tongue.
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“Lies, damned lies, and statistics,” these are the components which too often seem both warp and weft of history, of the world around us. In our own lives, we hear lies; worse, at times, we tell them. They’re tempting, after all. A lie can make me look better, him look worse, can mean so much more fun now, can hold off a consequence, can comfort us in a crisis. The truth, on the other hand, tends to be unpleasant, uncomfortable, or even painful. This holds true in the little things of life as much as the big; we men are given to disliking God’s providence, however much He assures us (Rom. 8:28). Lies, however, are not so costless as they seem, never harmless, never without weight. Lies make us liars, and save God intervene, liars are drawn towards lies in a spiral of destruction.
A lie does not stop with itself. A lie is a seed of evil-doing, a flame raging on the tongue and out across the soul (James 3:5-8). If I lie, I make it easier to lie the next time and the next. More, we people are prone to notice patterns. A man who lies for short-term benefit and gets it will imitate himself the next time he has an issue: he will lie. Perhaps the next issue is actually the consequence of the first lie, a point at which his best course is to confess, to bear the punishment, to prevent the slide, but lying seemed to work last time, so he lies again, and again he gets a short-term benefit, all the while he piles up larger and larger issues for himself down the road, both in this life and the next. Lies breed lies in the individual.
Lies also breed more liars. Liars are fools, and they flock together as fools. More, as a liar victimizes another, unless the victim has the Spirit to aid him, to enliven his conscience, he will be prone to learning the wrong lesson- that lying works. We humans tend to respond to an evil done to us not by returning good but by imitating that evil right back, in parody of lex talionis (Lev. 24:17-22). When we lose an eye, we want to take an eye or two, al a Lamech (Gen. 4:23-24). To that end, we use the means to which we are accustomed: lies, more lies, and the other evils of the world under which we suffer. There’s a reason that revolts of the oppressed, in the ancient world (like in Rome) and the modern (like in France), nearly always end in greater tyranny: without the pervasive influence of God’s word, as we had in America, the oppressed merely imitate the oppressor, generally with less restraint.
Today’s proverb considers yet another element of the decay lying brings: how it changes the liar’s perception of other lies. The liar, of course, expects others to lie. He has made a habit of it, as his conscience informs him; why shouldn’t other people? Lies, he knows, are easy, convenient, helpful. Surely others are liars. More, the liar dislikes being somehow worse than the rest- so he believes, to sooth himself, that everybody is a liar like him, that the honest man is the weird one, the aberration. Sometimes this suspicion is even accurate, in a place or time, though of course this doesn’t excuse the lying.
How does the liar respond to the world, when he thinks it full of liars? As this proverb lays out, the liar is hardly disgusted. He probably considers some lies ‘OK’ and some ‘reprehensible’, a judgement of taste and an indication of how far his own lies have gotten, but overall, he greets a lying world not as a horror but as an opportunity. If everybody is lying, he thinks, might as well get my share. Other people become tools, things to be manipulated; as he does not respect God, to deny His truth, so the liar does not respect God’s image. People become instruments; they are liars too, he thinks, and their lies are to be used or destroyed according to their utility. Examples of this can be found in philosophers like Plato, who would have the government educate its citizens in a false reality, and like Rousseau, who found religion useful without being true.
Finally, as noted before, the liar does not like honesty. He knows, by the conscience God gave him (Rom. 1:19-21), that he sins, and he hates that guilt. Honesty, when he finds it, is an accusation, however unwitting. So the liar does not merely dislike honest men; he will often seek actively to tempt the honest man into a lie, to break him or hurt him. So the guilty liar thinks he can, for a while, atone for his own guilt; so he can bring down the contrast to his level, hoping that by removing what his eyes see, he will rid his conscience of its standard. This is in vain, of course. God remains; therefore all lies are delineated, doomed, and damned.
What is our response to all this? First and before all, we must turn from all hope in ourselves; we must turn to our hope in God, the foundation and essential of truth (John 8:32; Is. 65:16). In Him, then, we can turn from the lies of ourselves and others, turn towards the truth. This is repentance of falsehood, to turn heart and soul and body and strength from lie to truth, and it will hurt. On this earth we are sinful still, though no longer sinners in nature (John 3:5-7), and peeling away all the lies, small and large, which we accrete upon ourselves, which we fabricate and adopt even as Christians, it is a task of a lifetime. Yet, by the good grace of God, it is a task which will come to an end in full and perfect holiness of truth (Is. 61:10), in the New Jerusalem of God (Rev. 22:1-5).
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.
