Sermons from Lone
Rock Bible Church
To Tell the Truth (Part 1) Lying is a bad idea, not just because it leads to mistrust and further problems, but because it goes crosswise to the character of our perfect God. Why should God’s people be people of truth? 1. Because God is the God of Truth The Ninth Command is stated for us in Exodus 20:16: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Stated positively, it means that we should always be characterized by truth. Try as I might to make this into one sermon, I was not successful. Again! The more I got into it the more I discovered. I was doing some word work on the expression “false witness,” only to find that the concept is everywhere in the Bible. As I meditated on some of the places that expression or something similar to it is found in Scripture, a rather dark scenario entered my mind. I imagine a man, a desert dweller. He is trying to get across the desert. We can imagine what sort of challenge that might be given temperatures and lack of water. His first mistake was that he took his bearing on not on stars, but rather on planets. In the New Testament the word we use as planet is the word for error. That is because a planet will move and it’s not a good idea to take your bearings on something that moves. When you are changing pipe you don’t line up on that white cow way over there because she will move and your line will go with her. So his first mistake was he took his bearing not on a star that could be trusted. So he got lost. Off in the distance he was sure he could see an oasis. It was a mirage, heat waves playing tricks with his eyes. He stumbled on and did find some foliage, sure he would find water, but the promise of the greenery did not lead to water at all. In desperation he dug in his pack and he got religious. He pulled out the idol that he had been worshipping, that he had actually made, and he found that the idol was just grinning at him, in mockery perhaps. He is at the end of his rope. He knows the end is near and he resigns himself to death. The tragedy is despite what he believes will occur after he dies, despite the fact that he has always believed that if you are good enough, if you just do the right things or don’t do the wrong things when you die it will all be ok. In this case this individual slipped from this life into next only to come face to face with the arch deceiver himself. He is doomed. The Bible says we are to be characterized by truth. Often I find myself capitalizing that word. We are not supposed to tell lies. The Bible says do not bear false witness, don’t tell lies. People get hurt by that. If you tell lies people won’t trust you. Back in the old west, if someone called you a liar, you meet them at high noon out in the street because if you cannot be trusted you really have nothing. Integrity, truth, has been huge at a human level. Lying is a bad idea because it leads to mistrust. Mistrust leads to uncertainty. Uncertainty to unwise choices. Unwise choices to disaster. Disaster to pain; and pain to death. All because someone does not traffic in the truth. Let’s all make up our minds, let’s just tell the truth. It’s good for us to tell the truth because it is helpful in life, but the Bible takes it much further. God’s Commandments, the ten and all the ones that explain them are not commandments just because it’s a good idea for us, although they are. Socially we do better as we honor them, but they are what God wants because of who God is, and that’s the point. Because God is a God of truth, lying is a bad idea not only because it ruins lives but because it does not accurately reflect the God of truth. Truth is everything, and we need to be characterized thereby. I have four points. I’m going to try to cover a couple of them today. They are reasons why God’s people should be characterized by God’s truth. I hope that we can all hang in during these, particularly during this first one because it required kind of a stretch of my brain. Because God is the God of Truth We want to be characterized by God’s truth first of all because God is a God of Truth. It is His nature. God, as God, defines truth. We are going to have to get a little bit abstract here, perhaps, and try to think big because God is. He is unimaginably huge. Thinking big, even thinking outside the Bible. We can come to some understanding of the existence of a personal God through a couple different avenues. We don’t need the Bible to begin with them. We can look around in creation and we can reason with our brain. God had given us a logical sense in what is called the cause and effect fashion. In other words, everything is as it is because it was caused by something previous. That’s true with buildings, with children, with history, with any course of human events. Everything is caused by something and if we trace the causes back far enough, eventually we must come to a beginning point. It is only logically necessary. At that point we have to stop. We have to say at some point that we have an Uncaused Cause. That’s abstract. It’s hard to contain in our head, but isn’t God? At some point, someone had to kick it all off. We can begin with primordial goo or something. No, something caused that. Well, we have to begin with energy. Something had to cause the energy. Everything is finite, except God. Everything is limited, somehow, except God. So He becomes the Uncaused Cause. We can go one click further. If you are walking down the road and you see lying there before you a pocket watch and you pick it up and take a good hard look at it you see all kinds of things happening. If you pop the back off and see all the gears and springs and all the little pieces, no one would be able to convince you that that pocket watch just kind of happened, like an explosion in a factory someplace and we have a pocket watch. Chaos, an explosion, always leads to further disorganization and chaos, never in the reverse. What are called chance mutations always lend to the harm of the mutation not to its advancement, not to its greater detail. So we take a look at this watch and think somewhere out there is a watchmaker. If we had the vision or the capacity and we could walk down the road somewhere and see lying in front of us at the size of a pocket watch, a single cell. A single living cell. We would make a couple observations right out of the box. One is, we would say I thought the watch was complicated. And then we would stand by in amazement as that cell without any help, makes another cell. That can’t be replicated anywhere. We would be forced to think that somewhere out there, there is an incredibly intelligent and able cell maker. We can go there. There is a first cause. There is a Designer, Engineer, Orchestrator. The Bible takes it from there and says He has a Name. Better news yet, He has made Himself known. It is this God who has made all the rules because it is all His creation, because He is the Uncaused Cause. He is the unmoved mover and He is the Designer of all. So it is His. We end up then with a personal God who is most amazing in His character. We have to stop and think if we have a God like that and we must, we have a God who is complete. We have a God who needs nothing. Never, ever let it be said that God ever needed anything. I think this argument for the creation of people -- God was lonely -- no, the harmonious relationship among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for untold eons of time all was well socially. If God is complete, if He is the ultimate reality, the unmoved mover, He needs nothing. He is complete. If He is complete, that means He is perfect. That means His intellect is perfect. His thoughts are perfect, spot on accurate without exception. That means His character is perfect. He then, just by being God, defines what is good from what is bad, what is right from what is wrong, just by who He is because He is complete. Therefore He is perfect in character and He is perfect in ability. There is nothing He cannot do in consistency with His character. Nothing. When I became a Christian I was in the Service and I was stumped by this question: “Do you believe God can do anything?” “Sure, God can do anything.” “OK, can God create a rock so big even God can’t lift it?” He had me on that one for awhile, until I realized that God will not do anything not consistent with His own character. That means God will not do anything self contradictory. God will never work against Himself. Not only that, God will never do anything dumb. He is perfect. Follow this. If He is perfect, that means He is unchanging. He does not need to change. God never needs a thing, therefore, change is utterly out of keeping with who He is. His character does not change. His will does not change. God does not change because change would imply something is lacking or that God is bored. That would make Him more like us, which He is not. God has no need to change. Because of His ability and because of His knowledge, that makes God sovereign. Are we getting a big God here? I hope so. Much bigger than we can fathom. He knows the end from the beginning. God already knows who is going to win Super Bowl 312, if in fact we have Super Bowl 312. He knows the end from the beginning. We are fascinated by that but we really don’t need to be because He is outside, in the blimp, watching everything. He can see the whole parade at once. He can see everything at once. So He is totally familiar with the end, the beginning, and everything in between. He knows what actually is and He knows every hypothetical possibility that could come. He is that smart. He is that aware. He is that perfect. He knows the actual from every possible option and he orchestrates it all. It is His to do. He is sovereign. That brings us to a God -- and this is the point of thinking big -- who is utterly, perfectly, consistent in His character, in His will, and in His Word. He is consistent totally through and through, all the time. The Bible says you should not bear false witness. You should not tell a lie because a lie is not in keeping with the character of God. Why do people lie? Why is it that people tend to lie? I’ll suggest a few reasons. We sometimes lie because we are afraid. I think that’s sometimes why children lie. They tell a lie because they think if I tell the truth I’m going to get it. Parents say if you tell a lie you’re going to get it even worse. We tell a lie because we are afraid. What scares God? Nothing. He has nothing to be afraid of. What about if it’s really dark? Sometimes we get afraid when it’s really dark. Psalm 139 - even the darkness is light to You. God is not afraid. He has no reason to be afraid. Other times we lie because we are ignorant. We just don’t know so we speculate. God doesn’t have a problem, though, with ignorance. Sometimes we lie because we see in an untruth a way to get gain, perhaps to enhance our reputation in the eyes of others or perhaps to get the inside track on something financial. We lie out of greed or through a desire for power. God doesn’t need anything. He doesn’t have any problem with greed and He has all power. So He is pretty well set and lying is not one of God’s problems. We lie for the same reasons we do other things too -- because of our weaknesses and our deficiencies and our fears and our shortcomings, not to mention our sin. This God has created physical laws. We studied them in the eighth grade and maybe again in high school. There are such things as physical laws. As I think of this I think every engineer should be a Christian. I cannot understand how a person can be an engineer and not be a Christian. An optimist is someone who says the glass is half full. A pessimist is someone who says the glass is half empty. An engineer is one who says that glass is twice as big as needs to be. An engineer thinks in terms of what is, what is known, what is predictable, what follows the rules. The rules of physics, the rules of mathematics, physical laws which God has given predictably and measurably. They govern all in the world as we know it. We cannot get away from it. Laws having to do with the conservation of matter and energy, laws having to do with gravity and entropy and weight and pressure and power, all these things are quantifiable, they are measurable, they are predictable, they are doable. We are learning more about them all the time but that is how we live and we cannot get away from it. Someone put those laws there. Someone has established and sustains them. They are always there for the reckoning. I have a quote I discovered from a pioneer in the world of aeronautics, space exploration, Wernher Von Braun. Did you know he was a solid Christian and he was not afraid to speak up in behalf of the God of the Bible. I am going to read a quote taken from a letter he wrote. Dr. Von Braun said: “One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all.” This guy makes his living by following the laws and working with the laws of nature, the laws of physics, and so forth. He could put rockets out there on a planned trajectory, planned distance, everything. It is an amazing, amazing world. But he is saying you have to go from there to God. It has to be designed and have a purpose. He says the better we understand the intricacies of the universe and all it harbors, the more reason we have to marvel at the inherent design upon which it is based. “To be forced to believe only one conclusion, that everything in the universe happened by chance,” he says, “would violate the very objectivity of science itself. What random process could produce the brains of a man or the system of the human eye?” “Some,” he says, “challenge science to prove the existence of God. But must we really light a candle to see the sun?” Good words. That’s big stuff, broad-scale stuff. Did you ever see that gecko lizard trying to sell you insurance? Do you know what it is about a gecko lizard that makes them so fascinating? I love the Bible’s happy description of a gecko as that lizard that is found on the walls and ceilings of the king’s palaces. A gecko can go anywhere its habitat allows because it can stick to anything. For the longest time, folks believed that the reason the gecko could stick to stuff was because either it had suction cups on its toes or because it had some sort of adhesive on its feet and was able to therefore defy the laws of gravity. Neither is true. Scientists took a real close look at the gecko’s feet, could find neither adhesive there nor suction. All they could come up with is there is some sort of little-understood law of atomic attraction. The gecko’s feet sticks to stuff because there is an atomic attraction going on between the feet and whatever the feet are contacting. They can’t explain it any further than that. I think that is amazing. It doesn’t matter whether we are dealing with the cosmos, which we cannot even measure except in terms of mathematics, or the feet of a little lizard with Australian accent, we have to have God in either sphere to make any sense of either one. This business of consistency in laws, always being able to depend on gravity or entropy in these sorts of things, that is the Bible’s backdrop to explain miracles. The way miracles cannot happen naturally because our entire known universe is given to specific laws and they do not change and they do not go away. Some would say therefore there cannot be miracles, but there are. How can this be? A miracle can only happen when the One who created the law and who keeps the law in effect chooses for His own purposes temporarily to suspend the law. When King Hezekiah says let me see the shadow go in reverse order, God can do that because He can suspend the laws to make it happen. When the sun needs to stand still in Aijalon God can do that for Joshua so he can finish polishing off the Amalikites. He can do that. It is His sun. It is His moon. If Jesus wants to walk on water, He can do that because He gets to suspend the laws for His own purposes because He made them and He is outside of them. That’s how miracles occur. Miracles are natural to God. They are called supernatural only by us, not at all to God. And that is a happy thought. Toward the end of the Psalms, they get really happy. They are praise songs to the Lord. Let me read from Psalm 148, as we attempt to make a point.
We perhaps have read this Psalm many, many times. But read it now from the standpoint of the vastness of what God has done and made and what He encompasses.
God’s name now is inserted. He has made himself known. Praise the name of Yahweh.
Do we see it? He has created it. He has set it in place and He sustains it. All the laws of our physical universe. He defines what is true by what He has done and by who He is. The book of Hebrews begins this way, talking about God and what He has done.
The Bible naturally assumes that God is true and is trustworthy.
He cannot work against Himself. He cannot be inconsistent in His character, in other words. The little book of Titus was written to Titus, who was on the island of Crete. If you were on the island of Crete, that would be really bad. Paul accuses the Cretans in their own words of saying in verse 12, “One of themselves, a prophet of their own, [one of the Cretans themselves] said, ‘Cretans are always liars.’” “To play the Cretan” was to tell a lie. That was an idiom of the ancient world. Knowing that, the apostle Paul opens the letter to Titus, who was on Crete, with this:
I love that! God promised eternal life and He cannot lie. It is a done deal. I really like that. That does a lot for uncertainly. Finally, in the book of Hebrews:
That is so sure. That is so strong. That is so powerful. And I love it. The Bible naturally assumes God is a God of truth. It is not even an issue. In our day, truth seems to be relative. That may be true for you, true for me, true for him or her. The Bible knows nothing of that kind of truth. The Bible’s truth is standard. It is solid. It is irrefutable and it is all based on the character of God. God’s people should be characterized by God’s truth first of all because God is a God of truth. It is all His. He made it. He sustains it. He defines it. Because God has proven Himself trustworthy God has proven Himself truthful. I have a list of names here that I pulled out of the Bible. First of all, Adam. Did God tell Adam the truth? They had a wonderful relationship. Adam, stay away from that tree. You eat from that tree you are in trouble. When Adam ate from the tree did God say, “That’s one.” No, He said Adam, you’re out of here. And He kept His word. He not only sent Adam out of the garden and imposed a curse upon the people, between the people and God, between the people and one another, between the people and the creation, but at the same time as He cursed He also said to Adam, the day will come when through a special offspring I will fix this thing. Can we trust God’s promise on the one hand -- Yes. And on the other -- well I hope so because God cannot lie and He proved it to Adam. How about Noah. Here is Noah in a sea of iniquity, figuratively speaking. People everywhere, all the thoughts of all the hearts and intents of all the people were only evil continually. That’s pretty bad. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord so God said Noah, I want you to build me an ark because it’s going to rain. What’s rain? It had never rained. Noah, the Bible says, built on the ark for 120 years. People lived longer then. Some suggest that’s because X-rays were blocked out from our atmosphere from the sun and other harmful things that hadn’t come yet because there was a vapor canopy surrounding the planet and things like that couldn’t get through. So where did that rain come from in such an unprecedented scale? Everything collapsed, and here we are. Did God tell Noah the truth? Noah, it’s going to rain. Build an ark and you’ll be safe, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. Did God come through? Did Noah preach God’s truth to the people? Did God keep His promise? Sure. Noah and his family are floating on the sea and everyone else is treading water, for a while. And God proved Himself true. Probably Abraham is what you might call the high water mark of God’s promises. Abraham had no children. His wife was barren and he was old. Yet God promised him that through his offspring God would focus His favor on all the people of the earth. The first time the gospel was phrased in quite those terms and they are repeated many times throughout Scripture. God came through for Abraham. Abraham had a son even though his body was good as dead and Sarah’s womb was dead and God then through miracle granted them conception and a miracle son was born. Abraham knew God would keep His promises. God has proven Himself truthful. When He told Moses it was time to leave Egypt, did He mean it? When He told Moses if you don’t comply, Moses, you personally won’t see the Promised Land, did He mean it? Yes. When He said those of you who are too fearful to enter the Promised Land on the first run you will die in the wilderness, did He mean it? Many funerals later they caught on. Yes, He meant it. Moses took the children of Israel into the Promised Land under Joshua. Joshua, Moses’ underling, had the responsibility of claiming the land according to God’s promise. God charges Joshua in the very first chapter of that book. He said I’m going to give you this land, Joshua. You are the man. So you take these people across this river. I know the river is at flood stage, but I do miracles, so don’t worry about it. You go on in there and I’ll give you this land just as I told Moses. I will keep my word. God gives him boundaries -- from here to here and from here to here. I’ll give it to you.
What if He had said, “Hey Joshua, if I’m not too busy, if I have the time, if I’m available, I might . . . “ That’s how we would do it, isn’t it? No, He says you’re in, Joshua, and I’ll see to it. I will not fail you, I will not forsake you. Be strong and courageous. I will give you this land. Be strong. Follow the book. He goes on and on. Don’t worry, Joshua, the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. That was a rough paraphrase of those first eight verses of the book. Now if we turn to Joshua 21, after the walls of Jericho come tumbling down, after the children of Israel enter the Promised Land and they conquered south and then they conquered north, after the land was all divied up in accordance with the will of God, according to boundaries that are still there today, and all the different tribes were given their allotments of property and told to go in there and take them over, after all of that:
Amen to that! Does God keep His promises? Is He a God of truth? He told David, David you are going to be the king and by the way your ancestor will reign forever. We know who that ancestor is; that would be Jesus who would preside over a forever kingdom. How many times in the prophets of the Old Testament did God predict what would happen to this nation or that community and every single time it happened as God had said. He keeps His promises. He promised to send His Messiah, not once but twice. The first time He would send Him as the sacrifice for our sins. Did He do that? Yes, He did. And that Lamb of God died on the cross outside Jerusalem on a hill called Calvary in accordance with God’s promise. God also promised a second coming of this Messiah. Does He mean it? Oh my, yes. The Commandments are not just good ideas, recommendations for a happy life. The Commandments of God always take us back to God’s character. When He says you shall be characterized by the truth, when Jesus said let your yes be yes and your no be no, it is not only because God says it is a good idea. It is because this is who God is and as His people we are to reflect Him. To name the God of the Bible as our own and then to be untruthful is the height of inconsistency and even a denial of the One who bought us. "Scripture
taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Jim Carlson 2006, Lone Rock Bible Church, Stevensville Montana, USA |