What about lying?

Question 12008

The sin of lying looks like the easiest ethical question in the Bible. God says do not lie, so do not lie. Case closed. Then somebody asks about the Hebrew midwives, or about hiding a family from a death squad, and the simple answer starts to wobble.

I want to take both parts of that seriously. Scripture’s commitment to truth is absolute and rooted in God’s own nature. Scripture also records deceptions that it does not obviously condemn. Handling this well means refusing to flatten either side.

Truth is not a rule, it is a Person

The prohibition is not arbitrary legislation. It flows from who God is. God cannot lie (Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18). His word is truth (John 17:17). Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Truth is not a standard God happens to keep. It is what He is.

Set against that is the description of Satan as a liar and “the father of lies” (John 8:44). The moral shape of the universe in Scripture runs along that line. To deceive is to borrow the character of the one who opposes God, which is why the sin of lying is treated with a seriousness that surprises people who think of it as a minor fault.

What the commandment actually forbids

The ninth commandment reads, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour” (Exodus 20:16). The immediate setting is judicial. It forbids the perjury that could cost a neighbour his property, his reputation or his life. In a society without forensic evidence, testimony was everything, and a false witness was a weapon.

The principle reaches well beyond the courtroom. “Lying lips are an abomination to the LORD, but those who act faithfully are his delight” (Proverbs 12:22). Paul tells believers to put away falsehood and speak truth to one another because “we are members one of another” (Ephesians 4:25). Deception inside a body is like a nerve sending false signals. The whole thing starts to malfunction.

The hard cases: midwives, Rahab and the rest

Now the passages that keep this question alive. The Hebrew midwives misled Pharaoh about why Hebrew boys were surviving, and God “dealt well with the midwives” and “gave them families” (Exodus 1:20-21). Rahab hid the spies and sent the search party in the wrong direction, and she is commended for faith in Hebrews 11:31 and for works in James 2:25.

Three readings are commonly offered. The first says the deception was itself righteous, because the duty to preserve innocent life outranked the duty to speak truth to a murderer. The second says God commended their faith and courage while passing over the deception, which He often does with imperfect people. The third says they sinned and were forgiven, with the commendation attaching to something else entirely.

I lean towards the second, with sympathy for the first. What I notice is that the text commends the fear of God in the midwives and the faith of Rahab, not their skill at fabrication. Scripture is describing what happened rather than issuing a general licence, and there is a difference between those two things that we should be careful not to lose.

Why the extreme case is a poor foundation

Here is my pastoral concern. Almost nobody asking me about the sin of lying is hiding refugees in an attic. The hard cases occupy an enormous share of the discussion and a vanishingly small share of real life. They function, if we are honest, as a hatch through which ordinary dishonesty escapes.

A tragic moral collision, where two genuine obligations cannot both be met, is not the normal condition of the Christian life. It is a symptom of a fallen world. Building an everyday ethic on the rarest possible scenario is like designing your kitchen around what you would do in a house fire.

Where the sin of lying shows up in ordinary life

The New Testament addresses the deceptions of ordinary life with striking directness. Flattery, exaggeration, half-truths, the strategic omission designed to leave a false impression, the promise made with no intention of keeping it, the CV that improves with each retelling. None of these involve death squads. All of them involve the sin of lying.

There is also the lie told by silence. If I allow someone to believe something false when a word from me would correct it, and I stay quiet because the truth would be inconvenient, I have deceived them just as surely as if I had spoken. Ananias and Sapphira did not claim a figure out loud. They allowed an impression to stand (Acts 5:1-4).

And we lie to ourselves most readily of all. “The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9). The habit of shading the truth outward usually begins with the habit of shading it inward, which is why honesty before God in prayer is the ground on which honesty before others grows.

Truth spoken in love, not truth used as a weapon

Some people wield candour like a blunt instrument and call it faithfulness. Paul says we are to speak “the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15), and both halves of that phrase are binding. Truth without love wounds needlessly. Love without truth is not love at all, because it leaves the person believing something that will hurt them later.

Being truthful does not oblige me to say everything I know to everyone who asks. Confidentiality is not deception. A pastor keeping a confidence, a friend declining to pass on gossip, a doctor withholding another patient’s details, none of these are lying. Discretion chooses what to say. Deception chooses what to fabricate.

Repentance and the long road back

If you have built a habit of shading the truth, the way out is not a resolution but repentance, and often restitution. Zacchaeus did not simply feel sorry about his fraud. He paid it back fourfold (Luke 19:8). Where a lie has cost someone something, putting it right is part of turning from it.

That is costly and humbling, and it is also freeing. The person who never lies has nothing to keep track of. There is a lightness to a life that does not need a filing system for its own stories, and I have watched people discover it with something like relief.

Truth telling in a culture of spin

We live in an environment engineered for deception at scale. Advertising exists to create impressions that the product will not sustain. Political communication is measured by whether it lands rather than whether it is accurate. Online, whole economies run on manufactured outrage and edited images. It would be strange if none of that had shaped us.

The believer who wants to be truthful therefore has to swim against a current. That means resisting the temptation to share the story that fits our side before checking whether it is true. It means being as careful with a forwarded message as with a spoken word. Paul told the Philippians to think about “whatever is true” (Philippians 4:8), and the discipline of checking before repeating is one small, unglamorous outworking of it.

It also means being suspicious of the flattering account we give of ourselves. The curated version of a life is not a neutral thing. When the gap between the presented self and the actual self grows wide enough, it becomes deception, and the person most thoroughly deceived is usually the one doing the presenting.

Finally, remember what truthfulness is for. It is not a badge of moral superiority to be worn in front of less scrupulous people. It is the ordinary condition of a community where trust is possible at all. A church in which people can be believed is a church in which confession is safe, counsel is worth having, and love has something solid to stand on. That is worth far more than the small advantages a well-placed untruth might buy.

Ask yourself what a stranger would learn about your character if they could hear every account you gave of yourself over a single week. That is a searching question, and I do not enjoy it either, but it locates the issue where it actually lives.

So, now what?

God is truth, and His people are called to be people of truth. The difficult cases in Scripture remind us that a fallen world sometimes forces genuine moral collisions, but those are the exception. They are not the shape of ordinary discipleship.

The daily test is not whether you would deceive a tyrant to save a life. It is whether you will be honest when honesty is awkward, expensive or embarrassing. That is where the character of Jesus is either formed in us or quietly abandoned. Where has honesty cost you something recently? You may also want to read whether there is any such thing as a white lie and how to know whether something is a sin.

“Lying lips are an abomination to the LORD, but those who act faithfully are his delight.”

Proverbs 12:22 (ESV)