How To Lie Like Jesus
In first-year Philosophy, my tutor's checkmate against there being such a thing as absolute morality was a lie. The situation was this: the axe murderer is chasing his next victim—let's make it your best friend—and he asks you where your friend has gone. Do you tell the truth that he’s hiding upstairs or lie with a “he went thattaway”?
Of course this situation was real for the likes of Corrie Ten Boom who hid Jews from the Nazis during the second world war. To my tutor it was obvious that this meant there was no such thing as absolute morality—no universal rules that must be obeyed. In this situation clearly it was right to lie, therefore morality is relative—situational (therefore individual and cultural) rather than absolute.
God, however, disagrees. In agreement with God is Michael Hill, author of The How and Why of Love: An Introduction to Evangelical Ethics. In this book he establishes an evangelical framework for making ethical decisions based on what he calls “mutual love relationships”. Christians are to maintain “mutual love relationships” when making ethical decisions, which emphasise neither the needs of the community over the needs of the individual, nor the needs of the individual over the community. This is obviously a challenging task but is a governing principle derived from the two great commandments: “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27 ESV)
An easier way to say it is to think, “What is the loving thing to do?” In the case of the axe murderer and your friend it's probably not loving to either your friend or the murderer to let the execution take place. So you lie.
This is not situational morality, it is an application of God's absolute moral law using God-given wisdom. The law is to love and you've just obeyed it. But isn't one of the Ten Commandments about lying? Well, not really. The command is not to bear false witness against your neighbour, that is, don't say that he did something that he didn't do (especially in a legal situation). But Satan is called the father of lies (John 8:44) and Paul commands the Colossians: “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices.” (Colossians 3:9 ESV)
This is because most of the time lying comes from evil desires. Looking at the rest of the verse from John you can see this link: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
When the devil lies he speaks out of his own evil character. Our old practice was also to lie in order to preserve ourselves at the expense of others, to escape from justice or to deliberately see the downfall of others. But to define lying as simply “saying something that is untrue” allows plenty of room for lies that do not come from these evil desires. Role-playing, story-telling and exaggeration clearly fall into this category, but they are only the beginning. Often the motivation for lying is love, and God commends it.
In Exodus 1, the Egyptian pharaoh commands the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah to kill any boys who are born to the Hebrews. “But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, ‘Why have you done this, and let the male children live?’ The midwives said to Pharaoh, ‘Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.’ So God dealt well with the midwives. And the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.”
In a story very similar to our axe-murderer-and-friend, Rahab the prostitute hides some Israelite spies in her roof and lies about it to the messengers from the King of Jericho (Joshua 2). In both these stories, lying was the right thing to do—love of God and of others was upheld against the evil desires of the enemy.
But Jesus takes the whole lying thing a step further in John 7:
“After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him. Now the Jews' Feast of Booths was at hand. So his brothers said to him, ‘Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing. For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.’ For not even his brothers believed in him. Jesus said to them, ‘My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil. You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.’ After saying this, he remained in Galilee. But after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly but in private.”
Why did Jesus lie? In this case it was not in order to preserve “mutual love relationships”, Jesus simply had his own reasons to not let anyone know that he was going to feast. The fact that the Jews were trying to kill him probably had something to do with it; in the end he would submit to the Jews but his “time had not yet come”. His intention was not to harm, it was to submit his Father.
If you feel newly liberated to lie remember that this is not individual or situational morality, it is obeying God's law at all times and not indulging your own desires. Given our ability to deceive ourselves about our motives, we need to keep praying to be filled with the knowledge of God’s will so that we'll know when a lie is fully pleasing to him.
Ben and Karen Beilharz
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