The Penalty of Lies – The Ninth Commandment

The Penalty of Lies

Exodus 20:16; Deuteronomy 5:20

“You shall not bear false witness.”

Romans 1:24, 25

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie…

Lies have consequences.

One lie leads to another, as we have seen, that snowballs into more lies and bursts into a blizzard of lies, until whole cultures become grounded on and pervaded by lies, blinding people to the truth of the Gospel. As you can imagine, such a situation does not please God. Indeed, He moves against those who prefer lies to the truth and hurls against them every damaging effect of sin and disobedience in an effort to bring them to their senses. But what happens too often, as we see in Romans 1.24-32, is that a people and a culture enter into a downward spiral of lies, sin, judgment, corruption, degradation, violence, and death, bringing whole civilizations to an end and relegating once-great nations and empires to the dust-bin of history. Don’t think such an outcome can’t befall our own nation. The 20^th century alone should warn us of how quickly great nations can unravel when the spiral of sin and lies gains irreversible momentum. The Christian’s response to the pervasive lies of our day must be that which Solzhenitsyn recommended: Let the lies come, if they must come – only not by me!

Will you be confronted by the lies of our culture today? Where? In what forms? How will you respond?

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“In the Gates” is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore

T. M. Moore is editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001,2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The use of a translation other than the Authorised Version in an article does not constitute an endorsement in whole or in part by The Christian Observer.