All Lies Matter

Matthew 28:12-13 “When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, ‘You are to say His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’”

Unbelievable! The chief priests bribed the soldiers to lie about Jesus’ resurrection. The greatest event in human history had just occurred and they wanted more than anything to deny it happened. Even to the point of promulgating a bold faced lie. Here I thought such twisting of the truth was birthed in present day politics.

Not really….It’s clear deception has marked human nature since the fall of man. But the terrible consequences of loving lies more than truth may not be as clear. After a while, we get to the place where we can’t distinguish what’s true and what’s not (2 Thess 2:10-12). The amazing gift of discernment God gives us as a means of protecting ourselves atrophies from lack of use.

And without truth we become defenseless.

I don’t think the shriveling up of truth happens all at once. Who would choose to defend something that can only be maintained by lies? For most, it’s probably a slow journey into darkness. We hedge a little here, fudge a little there, thinking our mini-deceptions harmless. Eventually we buy into the idea that the ends justify the means. We reason if our goal is important enough, any means of achieving it is acceptable—even if those means include lying.

The Communist Party used this ideology to establish their power in the Soviet Union. Leaders justified all kinds of evil in order to reach their goal of communist domination. One of their most powerful weapons rested in propaganda. Ironically, the official newspaper of the system was entitled Pravda. Pravda means “truth” in Russian. Truth they were happy to kill. Make no mistake, lies always destroy.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive” remains one of the most quoted lines in Scottish poetry. Lies trap us. They cause us to compromise and veer from the truth until truth becomes no longer recognizable. Truth offers the blade we need to cut through the tangled web.

All lies matter…even small ones…even ones we cling to for self-preservation. As believers in truth, we must resist deception in whatever form it raises its ugly head. And stand, always, for truth.