How to Define Lying

So we're turning to Exodus 1 and we'll read a little bit of context here. Verse 15, then, let me switch my microphone, excuse me here. So is the microphone on? Good, hey. I'm a little surprised everything seemed to go well until I interrupted it now. Here I am.

Exodus 1 verse 15. Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Pua. When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him. But if it is a daughter, she shall live. 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 midwife 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 so that's a reading of the word of God from Exodus chapter 1 we are in the context of Exodus 20 thou shalt not steal thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. I started trying to quote it, and my brain went to thou instead of you, how I have it memorized because of the catechism, and I lost track of where I was.

So when we talk about Exodus 20, verse 16, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, there are some considerations that people make. Some people split the verse out and say, This is only about bearing false witness against your neighbor, and it doesn't include all manner of lying. The catechism destroys that argument quickly. If you look at the Baptist catechism for this commandment, because it says we're to preserve truth.

And we inherently understand that lying is wrong. People all over the world understand this inherently. This is not something that requires special revelation for people to, we'll say, have knowledge of. Now, when we think about what it means to break the commandment, we have to understand what lying is and what bearing false witness is, what truth and falseness are in the first place.

And a lot of these things go without saying. And pretty young people, you know, your children at a very young age, probably one of the first sins that you ended up disciplining them for was for lying. Okay, disobeying you, they may not even understand that. But at a very young age, most parents can tell their kid, no, you need to tell me the truth. And you don't get out a dictionary and tell them what it is.

We all know that people know what it means. And so I'm not going to try to define every term, But I looked up the term lie in the Merriam-Webster dictionary just to get an idea of what if somebody really said, I don't know what this means. What would the dictionary say? And by Merriam-Webster, the definition of to lie is an assertion. I guess it'd be the noun lie, an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker or writer to be untrue. with intent to deceive.

And then it says an untrue or inaccurate statement that may or may not be believed true by the speaker or writer. So you kind of have two sides of this definition. The first one is you know something to be true or you believe something to be true and you just literally assert what is untrue. The second part of this is that you actually communicate an untrue or an inaccurate statement, whether you believe it or not.

And so in that case, you can lie simply by misrepresenting a situation that you don't even know fully the truth of, which I do think the commandment would have that in mind. If you're going to go to court and bear witness against somebody and say, this guy did something, for you to say something you don't believe is true is lying, or for you to say something that's untrue, because maybe you assume it, maybe you think it's true, that's a lie as well. I think that sinful lying is a concept that we have to understand. and I called it sinful lying and if you have a brain that works ahead as a guy speaking at all that means I'm probably going to define non-sinful lying I'm probably going to at least try to make a case for its existence or and I will in fact or I at least would argue with you that there are people that believe in it and we'll look at that and the Hebrew midwives being the text I read is the final text I'm planning to get to.

But again, I have a bullet point list of a bunch of small items I want to kind of power through and just put on your mind. None of these concepts deserve the full sermon. So it's going to go a little quick at first. But sinful lying is a concept that we need to understand Intentional misleading is not always a sinful lie because of context So Merriam Dictionary would not allow a lot of things that we would probably allow and you see that Using true words, so you can actually say something truthful, using true words in a way that's intended to deceive is more like lying than using false words in a way intended to convey truth.

It's so strange that everyone's on this side. Because usually, so my brain is freaking out about my eye contact thing. So anyway, I'm a real human up here. I'm not just like some robotic preacher guy. And so these things affect me. I'm not mad or anything.

So first question you have to ask yourself. And again, just like last week, I have notes this week, and just like at the end of the stealing one, all of these are smaller bullet points, and some of them you may not be satisfied with my explanation today. You can say, well, let's talk about that one more. So does the ninth commandment prohibit all lying is the question.

Some people who are like I used to be, to some extent at least, would say yes. Thanks. He moved for me. You're still all a little bit slanted for me, but that's fine. Thanks, Elijah. I used to be the kind of person that thought all lying was sin and thus needed to be punished on the cross by Jesus Christ if you're a Christian, regardless of the context or situation.

And yet I still would have made certain exceptions that I understand better now as well. And I know that some of these things can be difficult. It's very difficult to say, well, not all lying sin. And then I have three children in a room who aren't going to understand all the context that I give. And so Calvin argued in one case where Jesus acted like he was going to go a little farther on the way to Emmaus in Luke 24.

Calvin argued that, well, Jesus didn't have any deceit in him. But even if he sort of faked him out a little, we shouldn't try to imitate that because we're so weak. We won't know how far to go with our lying, even if that was a bit of a deception. But there's a lot of explanations for that verse. And some of them, I think, are good. There's a better translation.

So I didn't even bring that verse into my sermon. But so the first point I have for you is fake handoffs. All right. So now it's me being a sports fan in a room full of non-sports fans. You may not know quite what I mean, but in a lot of sports, a person will pretend like they're going to go one way, and then they're going to go the other way. That's how you get the layup.

That's how you get the running back able to run down the field. How about a card game? Has any of you ever played cards? You have? Do you show everyone your cards the whole time, or do you hide them? yeah you hide your cards from other people there's a number of I'll call them trivial matters where you'll do something in that context like playing a game where you literally to win the game have to either hide truth from people or maybe even pretend something is true that's not true in order to try to win certain games now I call those trivial because they don't really affect anything they don't have any intent to hurt others, even though, by Merriam-Webster's definition, there is intent to deceive.

I will caution you, though. There are games that have been created where you will practice lying during the game so much, and your face has to get controlled so that you can lie without revealing the truth, so that people will never know if you're lying or telling the truth, and you can actually sear your conscience a little bit. And you can become a person who I think could become a habitual liar through searing your conscience in certain games.

I don't think if I met most NFL quarterbacks that I would be afraid that they're lying to me just because they're really good at fake handoffs. I just wouldn't. I don't think if a guy's playing basketball with me and he starts to the left and then I go and follow him and then he goes to the right and goes around me, I don't think I'm going to think, well, what a liar.

I think we all understand this, but these are the kinds of things we think of when we're black and white. When we say, all lies are bad, which some people will try to say that, and they can't even have the conversation. The second type of lying that can occur is not following through with a commitment. So I'm going to go through a list of things that are technically lying or deceit, and then we're going to talk about whether it's truly something we need to repent of.

But not following through with a commitment. Matthew 5, turn there if you will. The Sermon on the Mount where Jesus effectively is explaining the law to us. If you want to understand the Ten Commandments, you can listen to my 30 sermons. You can just read Matthew 5. But in Matthew 5.33, Jesus says, Again, you have heard that it was said to those of old, You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.

So it's talking about swearing falsely according to the temple and things like that. And Jesus says, but I say to you, do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. I just love that we're saying, may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem.

And you start to put all these things together, right? But he says, do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. So he's basically saying, don't promise stuff to people. And don't promise by the gold in the temple. Don't promise on your mama's grave. Don't promise on the name of God.

Don say I swear to God something or other He says in verse 37 let what you say be simply yes or no And that would be enough If Jesus says, let what you say be simply yes or no, He's telling you, make sure that you're honest. Make sure that when you commit, you're going to do something. Barring acts of God which prevent us, you know, you say, I'm going to see you Saturday, and then we say, Lord willing, because God could providentially completely hinder that.

But when you make a commitment and you don't keep that commitment, you've told somebody yes, and now you didn't do it. And you made yourself a liar. You've made yourself a ninth commandment violator by most of the time over committing. We want the person that asked us, hey, can you help me with my yard work? Can you help me move something? Can you do this for me?

We want the people to like us, so we commit. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll do it. And we mean well at the time. But because we're disorganized and we're not good planners, and a lot of times because we're afraid to just tell someone, no, I don't have time for that, we end up making ourselves liars. And usually if you're a bit sociopathic about this, you actually get mad at the person who's now disappointed in you for failing to keep your own commitment that you made.

Hopefully nobody in here has that, but maybe you know people like that. I do. Jesus says, though, let what you say be simply yes or no. And he's not just saying, like, only use those words. In a sense, he is. But he's saying, do it.

If you say yes, do it. If you say no, don't do it. You don't have to promise on your mama's grave to make other people trust you more. If you have to do that, it's because you're not trustworthy. You've already built up your reputation with people where unless you put your hand on the Bible and say, I swear to God, they're not going to believe you. But then he says, anything more than this comes from evil.

That's pretty intense to me. So don't be a person who overcommits. Follow through with your commitments. And if you're having a problem with that, I've had this problem. I still have to, on a regular basis, I have to really think these things through. A lot of it just comes down to you're disorganized.

You don't plan well. You don't think about how long something will actually take. And that's a different story than you tell someone you're going to do something, and then, boom, your kid gets sick, and you're in the hospital. People understand providential hindrances. That's why we say, Lord willing, when we make promises. We say, if the Lord wills it, we're going to do it.

But we are meant to do it. Lord willing as in some excuse. Lord willing is a guardrail against the fact that, well, it is possible I won't do it, but what we're saying is we're really going to do what we say we're going to do. So trivial matters, although deceitful, I think are not prohibitive lying in that sense. I think you have to be careful. Not following through with commitments, that's a huge problem.

I think it's lying. I think it makes you a liar. literalism alright so literalism is a way that we look at words so you guys are all older or younger than I am so I don't know if you remember the Amelia Bedelia books but those are the books, the girls are looking at each other so I got some attention, those are the books where she's told to do something and whatever it is she does it quite literally right? so you know that's why when people say I'm going to jump in the shower I say well be careful You can slip and hurt yourself, you know. We always use colloquialisms.

We always use manners of speech that don't mean literally what we say. We have sarcasm, which there's really sinful forms of sarcasm. And I also think that sarcasm has under its umbrella just saying the opposite of what we mean to prove a point. There's exaggeration, and I think there's non-sinful exaggeration. Sometimes it's just a figure of speech. Hyperbole, which is just exaggeration.

Tone. Even your tone can communicate something different from what your words are saying. All of these forms of communication are valid. We all understand them and we all use them. So we can't decide if something is not a lie just because the words are not false or not true. So, for example, if somebody says, you know, at work this happens a lot.

Well, why do we do this? And they say, well, we've been doing it this way forever. Well, does the person mean that since the beginning of all time that that's how they've been doing it? Do they even mean since the inception of this company? You know what I mean? We know what the person means.

What they mean is we've been doing it this way for as long as I can remember. There was never a different way or, you know, whatever. We know what people mean by the things they say sometimes. But if I took that sentence, we've been doing it this way forever, it technically is not true if I go with the literal sense of each of those words in the sentence. if you've ever been in a language class in school and you've translated something that was written in another language particularly Greek and Latin and some of the older languages you find figures of speech all over the place we're not the first people that just had jokes and opposite speech it's been going on forever and so understanding what figures of speech are and not taking everything literally is part of knowing what a true or false statement is Let's see, I've told you a hundred times, you know, if you ever said that to your kid, it just means I've told you more than I should have to have told you.

We don't literally mean a lot of these things oftentimes And so we have to be able to understand figures of speech enough to know what being communicated in the person speech So if I ask somebody who just spent the day cleaning up vomit because their kids were all sick and then they themselves felt sick the whole day and I say how was your day yesterday and they say oh great. I don't think they're lying to me even though it wasn't literally great. Their tone of voice is often so clearly communicating something more than the words.

And so we have to be able to understand communication in such a way that we don't just listen to the words somebody says literally and just take them literally and say they're lying or not. We have to sometimes just ask, well, what did you mean by that? And if somebody tries to tell you, well, I meant something a little different from what it sounds like, you could argue, well, you should communicate better.

That's acceptable, but that's different from you lied. We also need to be careful. When you speak, be careful that the things you say can't so easily be construed as lies. If you're always sarcastic, maybe people won't take you seriously enough at the time you're trying to be serious. There's also true statements that are meant to mislead. So, for example, that's called equivocation sometimes using words with different meanings but the whole story is that Corrie ten Boom is at home and they're hiding Jews in their basement in Germany and her family wasn't Jewish I don't think they were hiding them and the Nazis came and they said where are the Jews and Corrie ten Boom points to the kitchen table and the table's over there, there's nothing beneath the table It would be almost like to use an object lesson like this stool here.

But she says, the Jews are under the table. And people have lauded that for being an honest statement. So she not only hid the Jews, but was honest the whole time and never sinned against God. Well, clearly it was meant to mislead. So I'm not maligning what she did. I think she should have misled them at that time.

I think it was what I would call a non-sinful lie. But she misled them. You can say something that's true, and you can say it in such a way where you are seriously trying to mislead the person to actually believe the opposite of that truth at the time. So you can't just evaluate the words. I think that's one of the problems with this whole black and white thing is we end up coming up with ways we can lie while we can technically say the sentence was true.

And I think that we miss the spirit of the command here. And we'll talk more about the Jews thing, or just the concept of non-sinful lying. Sometimes you can be misleading to people because you aren't using agreed-upon definitions. If you ask your kid, did you throw the ball at your brother? And he says, no, because in his mind he says, I tossed it. You know, we need to understand what other people are trying to say when they talk to us.

And we need to be able to be honest back. You know, I didn't kick him is something I've heard from children sometimes. And it's like, OK, well, but your foot hit him. Maybe you don't call it a kick because you're changing the definition. But the most famous example, again, we've got some younger people than me in here, Bill Clinton. and anybody that knows about Bill Clinton I'm not going to go into details here Bill Clinton famously lied by changing the definitions of words and saying things that when he was accused of lying his instead of admitting yeah yeah I lied I just didn't want you to know he says well no I technically didn't lie I just used words differently than you would use them.

Abandoning the common usage of words, especially in a situation where you know the other person doesn't agree with the words you're using, doesn't have the same definition, that's sinful lying in that case. So again, in Bill Clinton's mind, and in his justification afterwards, he didn't lie. But he, in fact, had the intent to mislead and intentionally used words differently than other people would have understood them.

I think we should be patient with one another in this. I'm not saying we should be patient with the President of the United States if he does that kind of stuff. But I think we should be patient with one another when they use different words than we use. When people use a word that in their mind means one thing and in your mind it means something else and you start to realize, okay, wait, let's make sure we're talking about the same concepts here.

Keep in mind that words are just representations of concepts. Our confession says an oath is to be taken in the plain and common sense of the words without equivocation or mental reservation. And so that's an interesting study because I just read Jesus saying, do not take an oath at all, right? So there is a time for oaths that Jesus wasn't speaking about in chapter 5.

But equivocation, that's when we use one word to mean something different from what the other people in their mind are going to make it mean, are going to understand it to mean, I should say. Another way that people lie, so we have fake handoffs or trivial matters, not following through with your commitments, lying, taking things too literally, or being too literal yourself. You have to just figure out what do people really mean by what they say, using different definitions to mislead people.

But how about hiding something that is true? Some people would say, if you don't tell the whole truth, you're lying. And so a lot of times when people make these kinds of assertions, you just have to think to yourself, What does that mean, right? So if I said, hey, what did you do yesterday? Well, do I need a 12-hour explanation? Because if you told me every detail, I might, right?

And did you do anything that probably requires privacy? Most of us do. Most of us love to say, like, every human being has elements of their life that literally you just probably should just never talk about with, you know, when somebody asks you that general question, maybe a doctor or your wife, you know, full honesty, every detail. We have to be careful when we make the definition of breaking the ninth commandment, not having offered all the information necessary.

Now, if your parents ask you a question, hey, what happened with you and your brother? What happened with you and your sister? And your answer is, well, you know, she kicked me. He punched me. But you omit the part where you antagonized him first. We have to understand. and this happens with adults too, that how much truth to give in a situation may differ from situation to situation.

And in some cases, hiding parts of the truth may be the very thing that causes the rest of the things you say, although true, to be misleading. This is what journalism has become. This is what a lot of preaching has become. You get up, or a journalist writes an article, and you just put forth all the things that support your point, and you omit everything that anyone has ever said contrary.

Or with some of these journalists out there now, they leave out important facts or stories to paint a picture that matches their thesis that they want people to believe. Their headline they got people to click on. It's in fact lying. if you know that there is evidence that would be contrary and you omit it so that the people reading your article won't know it.

And they'll make a decision based on just the facts, maybe real facts you gave them. It's happening right now. I'm not afraid to name names. I mean, Julie Roys is a pretty famous journalist lady who famously brought down James MacDonald, who is a terrible human being, and she identified abuse in his church. but she's made a career out of trying to tear down men who run churches.

Or I shouldn't say run churches, but people in pastoral positions. And she has now set her sights on John MacArthur. And she's writing articles about John MacArthur, what a terrible guy he is. And in some of the articles, she says a lot of true things, and she doesn't provide any of the context. and she's misleading people so that they'll believe what she wants them to believe about John MacArthur and to follow her instead of a faithful pastor.

So it's lying. It's wickedness. Being vague is a form of hiding something that's true. Just saying things that are not quite true or that are technically true but again, not giving the whole picture. answering a question with a question sometimes you can do that and I don't think you're lying Jesus did that the Pharisees would ask him a question sometimes he'd say well here's my question back to you Jesus didn't tell the whole truth nothing but the truth he communicated what was important to communicate to that crowd at that time So there's ways we can hide what is true, where we are being sinful, misleading people to believe something, because we hide important elements of the truth.

There's also ways we don't disclose all the truth, because frankly, the other person doesn't deserve to know it. Where are the Jews? Well, they're under the table, actually, below the floor in the basement. We've been hiding them there for weeks. Those Nazis didn't deserve that information. She had no reason.

She had to provide the whole truth in that situation. So does every question deserve an honest answer? Turn to Exodus 1 now. One of the two, call them, famous texts of the Bible where there's a lie. the other one being in Joshua 2 where Rahab lies straight up to people in Jericho so if you want to review Rahab lie you can Rahab who is lauded for her faith in Hebrews 11 But in Exodus 1 15 through 20 the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah, when you serve as a midwife, right?

So they're delivering babies for Hebrew women. Shiphrah and Puah, Hebrew midwives here. Says when you serve as a midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son you shall kill him but if it is a daughter she shall live and the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them but let the male children live this passage is interesting because one commentator guy who we're supposed to respect and thinks a great guy says these are obviously Hebrew women and the next one says well they're obviously Egyptian women so it's hard to know who to believe sometimes and i didn't have you know i didn't study every document about hebrew midwives i could so it's interesting to wonder i always have tended to think these are egyptians that participate in the midwifery for probably anyone but including hebrew women who are giving birth but it says here in verse 17 the midwives feared god all right my guess would have been that's why i think they were egyptian i my guess would have been if they were jewish like hebrew women already it would have been assumed they feared god that we wouldn't have had to state that that clearly but it says and did not do as the king of egypt commanded them again you have this sense that maybe they were under his authority as egyptian women who were midwives to the hebrews and so the king of egypt called them and said why have you done this and let the male children live.

So what you have is this command from the king, you need to kill the male babies of the Hebrews. So you get there, they didn't have ultrasound. You had to be there when the baby came out, and just like today, when the baby comes out, you know if it's a boy or a girl right when it comes out. So I don't want to get on another hobby horse, but it's important to understand.

And when the baby comes out, they're supposed to dispose of the child by murdering the child if the child was a boy. So the Pharaoh didn't want the Egyptians to keep growing. And the midwife said to Pharaoh, when they didn't do what he commanded, somehow he finds this out. Like, this isn't like a one-day thing. Like, he gives this command, and then like, you know, the next sentence, he's like, why didn't you do it?

I mean, this is over the course of time. And he starts to find out, hey, they're not doing this. Okay? Somebody told them. It's not like the Pharaoh walked around the slaves and said, Hey, I noticed some male babies. People are disseminating information.

It takes time. People are starting to realize, wait, we were out with the Israelites today, and there's the same number of boys running around as girls. You know, this could have taken years before this conversation continues. But the Hebrew, these midwives, the Hebrew midwives, The midwives to the Hebrews said, because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.

And it's almost comical sounding. And yet there's commentators who have argued that, no, this was not a lie. It was true that these slaves were so strong. and they were, these women it's like they could just be out there building stuff and making brick and then they just kind of give birth and they just move on and I've heard stories of women who are able to do that kind of thing exceptional stories that are one in a million kind of things but the people have argued that they've looked at ancient paintings and the Hebrew women were big and strong and more and the Egyptians were little tiny things and there was just, you know, the Pharaoh couldn't understand this.

Well, I don't buy it. One of the reasons I don't buy it is in verse 17. It says, but the midwives feared God, right? And did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. This is a bald-faced lie. they are looking at the most powerful man they know maybe in the whole world, it's irrelevant it the one they know and they going to lie straight to his face and they going to tell him something that he too stupid not to understand They know he doesn understand midwife This guy never been around a birth This guy has no idea.

They know that he'll believe it. And they lie to him. Within a verse or two of being told that they fear God, we're told that they lie. So you have to ask yourself, was it a good lie? was it a sinful thing they did? but it was still maybe the better thing? some people would argue that well it was still a sin but it was still a good thing to do well if you believe the New Testament where we're told that every time we're tempted to sin we're given a way to escape it you can't have this idea that there's some sins that are okay so either what they did was righteous and they committed deceit or they sinned and Jesus Christ had to be punished because of their sin well let's look at verse 20 this is some of the ways that we're supposed to understand Hebrew text God doesn't always state explicitly and here's what I thought about that And you're right.

It doesn't always give us the immediate. Oh, by the way, this is the breaking of my ninth commandment that I haven't revealed to them yet anyway. But moving on. God often gives us some more context to understand his disposition towards someone's behavior. So God dealt well with the midwives. This doesn't sound like the God who cannot lie. who is angry with sinners every day, communicating that, oh yeah, by the way, they sinned against me and I just wasn't unhappy about this one.

This sounds like somebody who's actually quite proud of his people for making the right decision at a time that their very life was going to depend on it. These women had every right to fear that just as God knew that there were male children surviving, that, sorry, that just as Pharaoh knew that there were male children that were surviving birth, they had to know that after they lied to him, there would be a way that he would find out that they lied. And there are not a lot of rulers as powerful as Pharaoh who take lying lightly.

My guess is that it would have been certain death, if not some kind of imprisonment. But God dealt well with them, and the people multiplied and grew strong, which is wonderful. But then, and because the midwives feared God, which is the Old Testament way of saying they were saved, they believed. This is very early in history. There's not a lot of revelation yet for them.

They trusted God with their very life. and it says they feared God and he gave them families. Let's get on another hobby horse of mine. A person whose vocation in life is delivering children out of the womb and aiding their entry into this world cannot also be their murderer. Pharaoh asked the wrong people to help him. Herod actually outdid Pharaoh here.

Harrow sent soldiers to kill the babies, right? What do we do now? Our society's worse. We live in a society that's far more inclined to murder children. And you know what? Christians all over this country right now, and pro-life Roman Catholics, tomorrow morning, hundreds or thousands of them will walk into IVF clinics.

And they will pay a man whose sole job is to create life and then destroy it. to maybe give them a baby. You cannot be the murderer of children and purport to be one of the ones that delivers them into the world and cares for them medically. You cannot support an industry that's designed in such a way where the murder of children and the dispensing of children.

I hate calling them embryos because people freak out about it. Most people go to an IVF clinic. They pay tens of thousands of dollars for... There all sorts of weird stuff that I not going to get into but they pay tens of thousands of dollars ultimately for a number of human beings to be created we say fertilized eggs to become human and have a rational soul and be made in the image of God.

And I would say probably more than 90% of them are simply discarded or cryogenically frozen. It's a swash to consciences of those who don't want to feel guilty of murder. but I'll tell you what you can talk to people about it I think there's got to be some people don't understand we have to teach but don't call the people that do it doctors please that's what my point is don't call a woman a midwife who also does abortions you understand me? that person's a murderer doctors help people midwives help people and in particular they love children we need to use good language here so does every question deserve an honest answer the midwives hid truth and lied directly to the face of this man whose whole goal at this time was the murder of infants this man did not deserve the truth and in fact he has another plan now every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile you know and the one commentator like he said this plan miscarried too Moses being cast into the Nile is what ultimately brings Moses into the kingdom where he gets the training he needs to be able to go before Pharaoh and one day deliver his people and so God even uses the evil right didn't we read that in chapter 5 today? God's providence over all of creation includes his providence over evildoers.

The Hebrew midwives are heroes. And yes, the Hebrew midwives lied. And no, I do not believe the Hebrew midwives sinned in the matter. I believe the Hebrew midwives did what was necessary in a special context where that deceit was actually necessary to achieve what was good or right. Think about spies. Think about undercover police officers, people who are trying to accomplish good and will sometimes have to use some forms of deceit.

I mean, if somebody looks at a police officer who's undercover and says, hey man, you a cop? And he held to the, well, I have to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We'd have some pretty bad... We could never have a Christian police officer if that was the standard. And I don't know what kind of nation you want to live in, but a nation with no Christian police officers doesn't sound like a good one to me.

So, sinful lying is a concept that we need to understand. But intentionally misleading somebody is not always sinful. we have to sometimes understand the context it's also possible that you can mislead somebody yet still say things that you could argue are technically truthful and so I want you to be able to think through these things if you believe all lying is still sin and you believe Rahab lied I'm not opposed to you I used to think that myself frankly It's been somewhat recently that I've come around to this understanding. But I think we need to be able to think these things through and remember that the letter of God's law was never His intention for how we are to govern our lives and how we are to understand what He desires of us and what Christ had to pay for on your behalf.

The spirit of the law has always been the point. and I think we need to be able to understand that just like on the Sabbath you'd help your neighbor's ox out of a ditch or maybe you'd help them change a tire or you'd stop at the side of the road and you'd help somebody fix their car or you'd take somebody to the hospital and Lord willing, even Christian doctors would work on Sunday just like we would break or as Jesus called it, profane the Sabbath That's the purpose of doing that, which is good. There will be times that deceit, I think, is not a violation of the ninth commandment, but rather it's a way that we uphold all the commandments for others.