The Rooted Podcast

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Jesus says, am the way, the truth and the life and the devil is said to be a liar from the beginning. something about matching our characters as far as possible to the character of God. Is lying always wrong? It can't be right to lie because lying is in and of itself wrong and you can't use something that's inherently wrong for a good end and then justify using it.

There are quite a few examples in the Bible of people telling lies. We're dealing with people living in a fallen world who are trying to navigate their way through it as best they can. And the way I think we see God's hand in all of that is how he picks up those threads when we've made mistakes and starts directing things in a better way. You're listening to the Rooted Podcast from Bible Society. In each series, we take a closer look at a theme or book of the Bible and explore its relevance in our lives today.

This is our series on Proverbs. Friends, welcome back to the Rooted Podcast. I'm Mark. Sadly, this week, Noel and Esther are ill, but I'm joined by the wonderful Stuart Ford. Welcome to you, Stuart. We had Stuart on our last series to talk about priesthood in Hebrews, and we're really glad to have him back to continue our series through the book of Proverbs, in which today we are going to be looking at what Proverbs has to say about honesty and integrity.

Stuart, thank you so much for coming on and it's great to have you back. Thank you. It's great to be back. Thanks for inviting me. Excellent. Before we jump into the conversation, please do leave us a review or a rating and be sure to share this episode with a friend if you like it. So we're going to be talking about what Proverbs says about honesty and lying.

We have a list of Proverbs and I thought it would be quite good if Stuart and I just read some of these alternately just to give you a flavour of what it is that Proverbs says. This is Proverbs 4 verse 24, put away from you a deceitful mouth and put devious speech far from you. And the next one is Proverbs 12 22, the Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people

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who are trustworthy. Proverbs 19.5, truthful lips will be established forever, but a lying tongue is only for a moment. And Proverbs 12.19, a false witness will not go unpunished, and he who tells lies will not escape. Proverbs 25.18, like a club and a sword and a sharp arrow.

is a man who bears false witness against his neighbor. then lastly, Proverbs 30 verses 5 and 6, every word of God is tested. He is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words or he will reprove you and you will be proved a liar. So, those are a few, but there are a lot more along the same lines. But Stuart, I was

I was really struck just reading through that list again by the references to false witness, which go back to the commandments, of course, don't they? Yes, absolutely. Yes. So this ties the teaching directly back to the Ten Commandments, which is interesting really because you often hear when you do something like the Bible courses we have at Bible Society or other forms of Bible timeline, sometimes it's difficult to fit.

wisdom literature into that scheme, because it's not explicitly covenantal. It doesn't link back to the covenants of the Old Testament so much. But here you kind of see the covenantal moral teaching that you get in the Ten Commandments expanded into these pithy sayings that people can memorize and internalize and start just to act upon in their lives when they encounter those sorts of situations.

Yes, absolutely. one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about just this expression, don't bear false witness, is that it looks quite simple on the surface, doesn't it? You shouldn't say something about somebody that isn't true for your own benefit, for your own gain. But when you dig down further into it, there's more going on under the surface than you might imagine.

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I think, isn't it? I mean, I was thinking about gossip, for instance. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where I think lying can sometimes be, well, it's on a scale, isn't it? We think of lying in terms of gravity. If a lie impacts somebody more profoundly, perhaps destroys their character or their business, we see that as far more significant than if we tell a white lie.

even just about ourselves, maybe exaggerate something about ourselves in a CV or maybe at work. We see those as two kind of different things. But one of the things that's challenged me a lot is as a Catholic, I rely on the teachings of my church and that's kind of condensed for me and the catechism of the Catholic church, which basically takes us right back to first principles and says, know, Jesus says, I'm the way, the truth and the life.

and the devil is said to be a liar from the beginning. Part of his character is to be a liar. And so when we engage in lying, whatever kind of stripe, whether it's gossip or whether it's detraction or something more serious, we're straying from the way of God, the way that we were meant to be and the communication is meant to be done. And I think that's a real challenge because

those little white lies are so easy to slip into and almost normalised. But I think as Christians we're kind of called to take a step back and think, okay, is this right or not? Yeah, that is interesting, isn't it? And it makes me think, well, you know, what is a lie? How do you define a lie? I know that many Catholic writers have really

dug down into this. mean, was thinking of St Augustine and Aquinas and people like that. You know, we might come back to that. one of the things I was thinking about is how we can sometimes slant what we say in a particular direction. So if anybody were to challenge us on it, we might be able to say, well, this isn't untrue, but neither is it the full truth.

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I mean, for instance, I read a particular newspaper and sometimes I think, well, why am I reading this? Because, you I don't agree with half of what it says and so on. But it takes a noticeable line with regard to a particular political party and anything that this political party or its members say or do will have a negative spin on it.

and it's always looking for something that they can criticize and they're very rarely able to put anything positive without some sort of comment. It just feels wrong and I think personally that that comes into the category of bearing false witness against somebody, not because it's actually a lie, but because it reflects a lack of

lack of respect, I suppose, a lack of generosity of spirit, or of simple even-handedness. So there's a lot going on there with this idea of lying, isn't there? There is, you might also say, a lack of integrity as well, which I know is something we're going to come back to. But yeah, is interesting, isn't it, how lying can take so many different forms. You think back to Genesis and the fall, where

You could argue on one level that the devil was not explicitly lying. You are not going to die if you eat this fruit. And of course, you're in the story. Adam and Eve didn't physically die at that moment, but they experienced a different kind of death. So there's that twisting of the truth, that lack of honesty, lack of integrity that I think we can all maybe intuit when we encounter it, as you have reading that newspaper.

that something seems manipulative about what's being said. Stuart, is lying always wrong? That's a very good and multifaceted question. The short answer is yes, which sounds like a weird answer to give because you could think of many examples when you would think that lying would be right, or at least morally justifiable. We think of those situations in World War II.

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We've heard stories where people are being sheltered from the Gestapo. The Gestapo knock on the door and what do you say? Do you hand over the people that you're protecting, these innocent people? Well, the moral answer from the Catholicist's point of view, again speaking as a Catholic, it can't be right to lie because lying is in and of itself wrong and you can't use something that's inherently wrong.

for a good end and then justify using it. people like Aquinas wrote about this quite a lot and said, the right thing to do in that situation is to be ambiguous or to say nothing at all, which sounds easy on one level, but in practice, it's going to be difficult to do that. It's something that I grapple with. think, yeah, I can think of situations when I think it might be justifiable, but maybe I'm wrong.

Well, that's interesting because Aquinas also distinguished, didn't he, between lies which were forgivable and lies which were not. So, in Catholic terms, between mortal sins and venial sins. So, I think he was envisaging a situation, well, like the one that you've mentioned, where somebody's life is in danger if you give them up. You can tell a lie

in order to save a life, well, it's still wrong to tell a lie, but you take the circumstances into account and it's a sin which is understandable and forgivable. There's a narrow window, isn't there? Yes, there really is. I mean, I think what we're sort of coming up against here is the realities of living in a fallen world. This is not ideal stuff. I think Aquinas

is right for my money that we have that, as I was saying earlier, of gradation in terms of lying, the gravity of lying depends on the circumstances. yeah, telling a small white lie would be in Aquinas's terms, a venial sin, something that is a fault rather than something that is not going to separate you, as it were. But

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at the same time you have to acknowledge that it's wrong. And ideally, if situations were not for them, we wouldn't have to be in that position of lying in the first place. And I think for all of these writers and thinkers, it's again going back to, what exactly is a lie in and of itself? It's an offense against truth. And what is truth? Well, it's ultimately part of God's character. So he's always going to be offended when lies are made.

even if the situation is justifiable in our eyes. And so we have to make amends for that. We have to confess it. We have to say sorry when we fall into those small white lies. There's something about matching our characters as far as possible to the character of God, isn't there? That kind of patterning

ourselves and our moral character according to his. You cannot imagine Jesus telling a lie, can you? And as disciples of Jesus, then that is what we're to aim at. I found a quote, this is going back quite a long way now, Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled,

I remember reading that quite a long time ago and thinking very highly of it actually. He was a psychotherapist, I think you call him, and a general spiritual writer. He said, need our life to be dedicated to the truth, i.e. a life of total honesty. It means a continuing and never-ending process of self-monitoring to ensure that our communications

not only the words that we say, but also the way we say them, invariably reflect as accurately as humanly possible the truth or reality as we know it. And I quite like that as a statement of what we're about as Christians. It's something to do with reflecting reality as clearly as we possibly can. Yes, I think that's right. And for me, it links into humility.

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real humility is about being real. can hear, I like playing around with the etymology of words and in humility you can hear words like humus. What is humus? Well, it's earthy. It's the Latin word for earth. yeah, to be humble, truly humble is to be what you really are, is to be grounded, to be rooted. Sorry, no pun intended. But yeah, I mean,

That kind of humility is honesty. It's standing before God as you really are, and then standing before the world as you really are, created in His image and likeness. can also be quite costly, can't it? If it's costly for you, then that's one thing, but if it's costly for other people, that's another thing. I mean, sometimes we tell lies in order to spare people pain, don't we?

thinking about a wartime situation. I remember a story from the First World War where a soldier returned from the trenches, went to see the mother of one of his comrades who had been killed. And it was a sort of duty call really, but she asked him how he died, how her son had died, and he felt he ought to

tell her, he could have lied and said, well, it was instantaneous and he was killed by a shell and never knew what was happening. And what had actually happened was that the Germans had captured him and used him for bayonet practice. And he told her, and I read this account which he'd written later and said he had always wondered whether he'd done the right thing. And that's the sort of situation where you can very well imagine that telling a white lie.

would have been the right thing to do. But the question is, well, who are we to decide what another person can bear? Who are we to deny them the right to deal with the truth in their own way and perhaps in a way which helps them to grow and to deepen in their own spirituality and their own relationship with God and their own understanding? So these are difficult questions, they Stuart?

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They're incredibly difficult questions. people could easily point to biblical examples where people have lied and not necessarily been condemned. mean, we think particularly of Jacob and Esau and that whole situation. at no point in that story are we told that God commanded the lie. God didn't ask for a lie to be made, but he used that lie in order to bring about good.

And I think that's part of the difference is that we're not called to do evil, but when we do fall into it, God is able to use it for good. There are quite a few examples in the Bible of people telling lies, and some of them are, you know, obviously bad lots from the beginning, but others of them are...

some of these heroes of the faith. We've got Abraham twice telling the same lie about Sarah, once in Egypt and once with Abimelek. She's an attractive woman. He thinks they're going to kill him and make off with her. so she says, she's not my wife, she's my sister.

Well, I think actually he says, she's my sister, which was technically true because she was his half sister, but it's deception, isn't it? And he does that simply because he's scared and he's prepared to put Sarah at risk because of his own fear. We've got the midwives in Exodus, Shifrah and Puah.

who are commanded to kill all the male Hebrew children and say, well, know, Hebrew women are good at giving birth and the babies are born before we get to them. You know, that kind of thing. So that's another example of a lie. And there's Rahab concealing these spies at Jericho as well. It's a lie, but it's part of a story, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. you know, this reminds me of the way Augustine

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defines a lie. It has two kind of elements to its definition of a lie. The first is it's a falsehood. Secondly, that it's told with the intention to deceive. And that's where you bring up Abraham, technically maybe telling the truth, but with the intention to deceive. And so he falls into that category of lying. But the other aspect you bring up, I think, is really important that these are narratives, these are stories. And

Again, there's narrative plot devices maybe being involved, but also we're dealing with people living in a fallen world who are trying to navigate their way through it as best they can. And the way I think we see God's hand in all of that is how he picks up those threads when we've made mistakes and starts directing things in a better way. Ultimately, culminating, as we said, with Jesus, and you get Jesus standing in front of pilot.

and Pilate says, know, well, are you a king? And Jesus doesn't lie, you know, but he does say, well, you say it, you know, which is an interesting way of answering the question. You know, he doesn't, in a sense, tell the truth in the way we might sort of think, yes, I am a king. But he answers it ambiguously. Maybe that's where people like Aquinas are getting their notion from, that, you know, when confronted with a situation where telling the truth,

would perhaps cause harm. We can maybe answer ambiguously, but there's a dangerous line there between being just innocently ambiguous and being manipulative. These are really kind of choppy waters, think. And it's Pilate, isn't it, who just asked the basic question, what is truth? Yeah. And he doesn't stay for an answer. I wonder if we can think about what

the result of dishonesty might be in relationships in society at large. I'm thinking of one of the proverbs that we read earlier, if a ruler pays attention to falsehood, all his ministers become wicked. And that's quite a telling phrase, isn't it? It's as though there is something about the need

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for really high standards of honesty and integrity to be set from the top downwards. And if that doesn't happen, then a society itself becomes corrupted. If you can't trust somebody's word, if you can't trust that they're going to do what they say they're going to do, then there is this element of corruption which enters into all of the different ways in which we

relate to each other, in which the state relates to subject citizens. The whole thing kind of breaks down without this basic integrity. Yeah, I think that's really perceptive. I heard an interview with Stephen Fry recently and he was asking these questions of integrity and honesty in public life and the effect that it has on us. His response was, it's like what's happening to our water.

it's being polluted and we have to exist in that pollution and we ingest it, it becomes part of us. So yeah, when things are rotten at the top, it has a filtering down effect into our everyday lives. We absorb it just from interacting with other people, interacting with the news, maybe interacting with social media. And it can be insidious. It has that kind of effect on us. But it also, I think,

It is worth pointing out that Proverbs has this kind of communitarian aspect to it. It's life in community. You get lots of Proverbs, we didn't read any of them out, where God seems to be very concerned with weights and measures. Be honest in how you measure things out. that sounds a bit odd to us, but in the ancient world, this is how bartering worked. This is how you sold...

a pound of flour or something. If you are dodgy with your weights and measures, you could maybe get a few extra coins for selling less flour. That doesn't sound like a lot to us, but it's repeated throughout Proverge. Don't do that. Be honest in your business dealings. Why? Because again, it has that effect of polluting a culture and polluting the way we interact with one another, as well as polluting our own souls. Yes.

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And so the righteousness of God is reflected in everything that we do in our business dealings, in our relationships with each other, our…so truth telling runs throughout everything. Yes, absolutely. From, you know, as you say, from the top down, there's no kind of area that we can exclude that from. And that's quite a frightening thought.

and quite intimidating thoughts, you because it's easier to sit back than as individuals who don't have that power and say, well, you know, well, I don't see that changing at any point. But, you know, it's something that we just need to be aware of and pray for. You know, it's one of those things that Paul tells us to do, pray for those in authority, pray for those in leadership. Maybe we need to do that more. Because the standards are really, really high, aren't they? And, you know, we look at Proverbs and it's all there.

This is what Proverbs is in a good part about, I think. It's about how you create a society that works in the way that God wants it to work. It's a very challenging book. It's a very challenging book indeed, I think. really is. I don't know if this was ever done, but there's a kind of a legend, I guess, in Catholic circles that years ago priests, when they died, would be buried the opposite way to their people.

The reason being that, you know, the resurrection, they would be resurrected and look at their people first and have to give an account for how they cared for them. And that kind of honesty and integrity, think, in public community life is just really important to the biblical worldview. You know, it is to do with how we relate to one another as well as how we relate to God.

I wonder if we can pick up on this idea of integrity. Like you, I enjoy words as well and I looked up the origin of the word integrity and it's Latin integritas. It's the same word as the word integer, which is something that cannot be divided. So you don't break it apart, it just is what it is. And there is just this idea of us

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living with integrity so that we are the same person in whatever situation we find ourselves in. And I was just reminded of that when you talked about priests being buried the opposite way from people, because when I was in pastoral ministry, I'm a Baptist minister and I had two churches in the past, very happy ministries actually. The second one of those was in a village and I would always make a

point of wearing a clerical collar just round and about the village. So if I were just out, I would wear a clerical collar. I didn't bother in church services because everybody knew who I was, but I just thought it was important that people knew that there was a minister in the village and so I would wear it out and about. And I was quite conscious of how differently I behaved.

It was as though wearing that outward symbol of being a minister actually held me to account. It held me to a higher standard in terms of behavior and that sort of thing. I mean, I'm not saying I would behave badly or anything like that without the collar. It's just that, well, for instance, if you're in a supermarket and you get the dreaded unexpected item in the bagging area message from the self-service tills and that sort of thing.

Like everybody, I can get a bit grumpy when that sort of thing happens. But wearing the clerical collar, I think just kept me honest a little bit, just because people would see, this is a minister, he ought to behave in a particular way. And so it made me behave better, I think. And I acknowledge that. I acknowledge that sometimes I need something to keep me on the straight and narrow.

But I think if I had really and truly been a person of that deep integrity of which Proverbs speaks, I probably wouldn't have needed it. I probably shouldn't need it, you know, because we should be that kind of person without the artificial help. Yeah, I think it's one of these things where, you the ancients would talk a lot about virtue theory, you know, and it's making a bit of a comeback, which basically says, you know, our moral decisions are based on our character.

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something that is ingrained in us. We don't have to sit there with a rule book and figure out, okay, what do I do in this situation? We've formed our consciences, formed our characters enough that we know what to do in a given situation. And I think Proverbs is based in that kind of worldview. These little pithy sayings are supposed to kind of be absorbed into who we are.

not sort of, you know, it's not a handbook in a sense that you can pick up and think, right, okay, I'm facing this situation, quick, what do I do? It's supposed to become part of us and then we act naturally. So I think you're absolutely right. You know, we all, all of us face situations where, you know, if we're in different situations, we act differently. working at Bible Society, we've all, all of us have done a kind of a personality quiz.

And that differentiates for us between, okay, what do we like in the work environment and what do we like in the home environment? And it's interesting to see those differences. How do we operate in those different environments? But yeah, you're absolutely right. Integrity, integer, being whole, being one, being indivisible, is in a sense the opposite to what Jesus talks about in terms of hypocrites. And the Greek for that is somebody who wears a mask.

We all have masks and we swap them around for different occasions depending on who we're talking to. But the ideal again is to be an integer, to be a whole united individual person. Yeah, absolutely. I was reminded, well last night actually, I went to see a

play at our local theatre. It's Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, is based on the life of Sir Thomas More, St Thomas More, who was Henry VIII's Chancellor and he was executed because he refused to recognise Henry as the Supreme Head of the Church of England and didn't support his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and so on.

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But I was really struck by one of the lines that the playwright makes Thomas More say. And he says, when a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self in his own hands like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again. And I thought that was really powerful because it draws the connection between what we say

and what we actually are. And I think that this is what Proverbs is getting at. It's not just practical advice for living. Well, it's what you were saying, Stuart, really. It's about who we really are in our deep core, in the very heart of ourselves. What sort of person are we? And we would want to say how closely are we patterned on the life of Jesus. Absolutely. And I think this is something that

it would be great for the church in this day and age to recover. Proverbs, I think, is a neglected book. We don't read it as much as perhaps we ought to do. This was brought on to me recently. I was reading something by St. Jerome, who was an early church saint who translated the Bible. And he said in a letter to a lady whose daughter had become a Christian and she wanted to know how to encourage her to read the Bible, Jerome said, start with the Psalms.

and then get her into Proverbs. This is how you live as a Christian, as a son or a daughter of God. This is the kind of character that you need to form in yourself. And only then, once those books have been covered, he said, then get into the Gospels and into the rest of the New Testament. But those two books for him were foundational. That, I think, reflects the importance that they had in that early church, which we've kind of lost.

And yeah, it would be great to recover some of that.

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