Honored historians plagiarize. Politicians invent war records. Coaches embellish résumés. Employees call in sick when they’re playing golf. Advertisements promise intimacy with someone beautiful if you buy this car or drink that beer.
We’re so used to being lied to, and so prone to self-deceit, that it’s hard to discern what’s true and what’s not.
In one poll, sixty-four percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “I will lie when it suits me if it doesn’t cause any real damage.” Fifty-three percent said, “I will cheat on my spouse—after all, given the chance, he or she will do the same.” Only 31 percent of Americans agree that “Honesty is the best policy.” When asked what they would do for 10 million dollars, 25 percent said they would abandon their family, 23 percent would become prostitutes for a week or more, and 7 percent would murder a stranger.
Once we had a moral consensus. Not everybody lived by the standard, but they recognized it. The words of Judges 21:25 seem eerily prophetic of our times: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (NASB).
Years ago, on a family vacation, I looked into taking my family on a boat ride. If I was willing to sit and listen to a sales presentation, we could go on the ride for fifteen dollars instead of sixty dollars.
All I had to do was sign a document claiming that I made a certain amount of money. When I explained that I didn’t make that much money, the salesman said, “No problem. Just say you do. It’s okay.”
I replied that it wasn’t “okay.” It was a lie.
“Look,” the salesman explained, “these people would rip you off in the blink of an eye. They’d lie to you in a heartbeat.”
I was supposed to feel guilty—or at least incredibly stupid—for telling the truth.
I went down the street to another salesman. Children twelve and under were half price. “How old are your kids?” he asked. I said one was eleven; the other, standing there with me, was thirteen.
“No sweat,” he assured me. “Just say she’s twelve. They’ll never know.”
“But it’s not true.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The truth matters. We’re trying to teach our children that.”
As we left he shook his head, muttering under his breath.
My wife’s family has a cabin on the Oregon coast. Every year they have a Fourth of July parade. People on the floats and trucks throw saltwater taffy into the crowd.
One year after the parade, the streets were covered with taffy wrappers. Hundreds, everywhere. If there had been one or two, I wouldn’t have noticed, but the cumulative effect was striking. That pretty little beach town had become an eyesore.
Lies are like that. They pile up. Take each lie and multiply it by tens of millions in business, school, family, and government, and you have monumental moral erosion. It’s like bleeding to death from ten thousand paper cuts.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize acceptance address, “One word of truth outweighs the entire world.” What did he mean? That the truth is bigger than us. Just as the Berlin Wall finally toppled, the weight of all the world’s lies can be toppled by a single truth. Truth resonates in the human heart. People may resist it, yet it’s the truth they need, for it’s the truth that sets them free.
Tragically, Christians can be as untruthful as the world. Some Christian speakers regularly misrepresent the truth. The names of Christian celebrities are prominent on books they didn’t write. Christian leaders take credit for columns written by their assistants. Christian liberal arts colleges routinely publish doctrinal statements that many faculty members neither believe nor teach. Some Christian musicians take offerings for needy children, not divulging that they retain 20 percent for themselves.
When we fail to tell the truth, we fail to represent Jesus, who is the Truth.
