God's people need to learn to fear and hate lies.
We live in days of great deception. Believers need to know how seriously God takes falsehood and deception. We seem to think some little lies are okay. They are not. It no longer seems to be a big deal to post a list of things on social media about a politician or public figure you fear or dislike, some of which you cannot verify. Falsehoods are demonic. In John 8:44-46 Jesus spoke pointedly about this to the religious leaders of His day
“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.”
Years ago my wife and I went with a group on a mission trip. Some of us arrived in the destination country without our luggage. A man among us was fluent in the language of that country. He went up to the airline counter and spoke to the frustrated person working there. He came back and told us that he told the person a lie to get them to hurry up and find our bags. Later he told about lying to the people of the church where he was working to get them to respond to God. That gave me the creeps. Do you think God approves of that sort of thing? Do you think it would help to bring about God’s will?
The weekend after the attack on the U.S. Capitol a respected Christian leader wrote a blog on how wrong the attack was. Someone replied saying he had heard from a friend who lives in D.C. who said, “Don’t believe what you see on T.V. There was no riot. There was no attack. There was no break in.” To believe that, you have to believe the conspiracy included every news outlet, conservative, liberal, and extremist. It would have to include every person in congress including Trump supporters. It would have to include the families of both police and insurgents who were injured or killed in the break in. It would even have to include insurrectionists who were already posting selfies of themselves in the capitol building.
Many of us are guilty of repeating things we read on social media. If we had stopped to think about many of them we would know they were lies. The Soviets said, truth was whatever they said it was. Are we moving in that direction? In these days believers need to know that we do not determine truth by whether it is spoken by a politician that we support or one we oppose. Our witness to the world is at stake here, not to mention the next generation of Americans. Even more serious is our standing with a holy God. Lies are of the devil and we need to run from them. This does not mean that we should stop opposing or endorsing political views. But we will defeat our purposes and alienate ourselves from God if we condone falsehoods in any form. I have addressed this to Christians. I needed to start somewhere, but I fear the viability of our form of government may depend upon an entire nation committing ourselves to absolute honesty.
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Posting on social media so others who are blinded by their partisan presuppositions begin to reimagine how our faith has been infected, from both left AND right.
Also, I noticed a misspelled tag and while I was editing it, added a tag so that articles like this one are connected: "christian-nation."