BIBLICAL BRIEFS 92
Society refers to non-serious untruths as “little white lies”. People sometimes only tell half a truth, dodge something, or place the true facts in a slightly different context, often with a good personal reasoning for doing so. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not about trifling, but it is certain that God does not despise anything (Job 36: 5), also not this shady habit. The actual question is rather, from which misleading root cause of untruth is the formulation of these white lies coming from? We know from John. 8:44 – “For you are the children of your father the devil, and you love to do the evil things he does … He has always hated the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies.” As a result, one should categorise these white lies as untruths, leading to the exposure of your spiritual fatherhood. The fallen man who functions by the seed of the serpent (Gen. 3:15) cannot but lie. The apparent half-truth from the serpent to Eve (Gen. 3: 1-5) has done great harm to all humanity. Our thinking and imagination capacity is irrevocably part of our fallen nature – it creates a false reality of untruthfulness. The old Adam within everyone is the functioning of the evil principle inside of us. This understanding of Leanne Payne indicates the complex evil state of natural humanity. She calls it “the hell of our false selves”, and refers to “the reality of God, present in and through His creation”, which she calls “incarnational reality” (p. 10). In our deepest motives and deeply rooted selfishness and self-obsessiveness, we try to overlook the truth, look beyond it, or pretend that it is not (completely) true. We are continuously occupied with sweeping the evidence of our evil under the rug of our own consciousness. We can always find a very good reason why we eventually do what we do – one calls this rationalization. Peck says in his book People of the Lie: “The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it. ” (p. 85). In psychology, the term rationalization refers to a defence mechanism, but from a spiritual point of view, it only confirms our lying nature. Craig Hill confronts this crisis of most believers in his book: Deceived, Who Me? in which he shares his personal testimony of how, through self-righteousness and, by doing and saying the right thing, he unnoticeably allowed himself to be misled by rationalization. Whilst he was convinced that he walked in the Spirit, he began to slightly ignore any indications of the “promptings of the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 7: 6), later even playing it down as irrelevant feelings of guilt. All of this is the operation of the spirit of falsehood WITHIN us. Hill explains how lies frequently slipped into simple, sometimes trivial, situations in his life and over the course of time he realized that the reason for withholding the truth is because he is actually fearful of the reality which the truth has the potential of exposing. The spirit of falsehood is often the shadow of the spirit of fear. 1 John. 2:21 sets a practical guideline around falsehood: “no lie comes from the truth”. Half truths, silence, unrighteous emphasis, hyperboles, reduction, falsehood, hypocrisy, double standards, even something like flattering someone falsely (Ps. 5: 9; 12: 2; 62: 4), are indeed also lies. It’s obvious in 1Tim. 1: 8-11 where Paul combines a whole series of iniquities that “contradicts” specifically “the gospel of glory”. He then names these perpetrators of injustice, and the list is terrifying: killers, fornicators, human traffickers and, for example, but also pertinent: liars. Jacob the fraudster walked with God for a long time, but he had to come to a place where he could confront the subtle lying being within himself – this happened at a ford in Jabbok (Gen. 32:22), which means “place of emptying” in Hebrew. It is time for everybody in the Bride to release herself from lying, for an identity of truth is unnegotiable in the acquisition of a divine nature.
Dr Tom Gouws
