The Ninth Commandment in an Age of Lies

There are ten commandments. Every one of them shows up on courthouse lawns and church bulletin boards. Nine of them get preached about at some point in a normal church year. One of them has gone almost completely quiet in the movement that carries the Bible in its hand.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. (Exodus 20:16)

I am the onlooker. I did not write that verse. I did not put it in the top ten. God did. And I have watched the movement that calls itself the most biblical branch of the American church spend the last decade defending, repeating, and applauding lies at a scale I have never seen in my lifetime.

That is the subject of this chapter. Not politics. The ninth commandment.

What the Book Actually Says About Lying

The Bible does not treat lying as a minor sin. It treats it as a form of violence.

The Hebrew phrase behind false witness is courtroom language. It describes a person who stands up and says something untrue about another person in a setting where that untrue statement will do damage. It is the sin of using your mouth as a weapon. The commandment does not just forbid the lie. It forbids using a lie to harm.

Proverbs comes back to this again and again.

There are six things which the Lord hates, yes, seven which are an abomination to Him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that run rapidly to evil, a false witness who utters lies, and one who spreads strife among brothers. (Proverbs 6:16-19)

Read the list slowly. Seven things God hates. Two of the seven are about lying. One is about the lying tongue in general. One is about the false witness specifically. Lying is not a slip on the ledger. It is on the short list of things the text calls abomination.

Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who deal faithfully are His delight. (Proverbs 12:22)

That is the same word used elsewhere in the Bible for the sins the movement talks about the most. Abomination. When it is used about a lying tongue, the movement goes quiet. When it is used about something they already opposed, they turn the volume up.

Then the New Testament.

Therefore, laying aside falsehood, speak truth each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another. (Ephesians 4:25)

Paul does not treat truth-telling as good manners. He treats it as the basic infrastructure of a community. Once people start lying to each other, the body cannot function.

Then the sharpest verse in the whole book on this subject. Jesus is talking to religious leaders who are convinced they are on God's side. He tells them who their father actually is.

You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. (John 8:44)

Jesus does not soften that. He does not say lying is unfortunate. He says the person who habitually lies has a father, and the father is not God. The father is the accuser. The father is the deceiver. That is language the movement uses about its enemies all the time. Jesus used it about religious people who thought they were on the right team.

Then Revelation, which the movement quotes constantly and reads carefully almost never.

Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying. (Revelation 22:15)

That verse is in the last chapter of the Bible. It is describing who is on the outside of the city of God at the end of the story. The list includes murderers and idolaters. It also includes everyone who loves and practices lying. Not the person who told one lie under pressure. The person who has come to love the lie. The person who has built a life around it.

Put all of that together and the Bible's position on lying is not subtle. Lying is on the short list of things God hates. Lying is an abomination. The habitual liar has the devil for a father. And at the end of the book, the person who loves the lie is standing outside the gate.

What the Onlooker Sees

Now I put the book down and I look up.

I watch a movement that has organized itself around a public figure whose relationship with the truth is not disputed by anyone who is paying attention. The count of documented false statements from his time in office is in the tens of thousands. That is not a hostile opinion. That is a printed record kept by journalists who watched him say a thing on Monday and then say the opposite on Tuesday and then deny on Wednesday that he had said either.

I watch pastors who used to preach that character matters explain that character no longer matters.

I watch congregations who used to weep over the ninth commandment nod along when their leader says something that is not true, and then defend him when someone points it out, and then attack the person who pointed it out.

I watch the lie about a stolen election travel through churches like a virus. I watch people who claim to follow the one who called Himself the truth repeat a story that has been examined in more than sixty courtrooms and thrown out every time, including by judges the leader himself appointed.

I watch the lie about vaccines kill people. I watch the lie about the pandemic kill more people. I watch the lie about the enemy within, the enemy outside, the enemy in the schools, the enemy in the ballot boxes, get shouted from the same platforms that on Sunday morning quote Ephesians 4 about speaking truth with your neighbor.

I watch a movement that once fired preachers for adultery embrace a man who has boasted publicly about it, married three times, and paid to bury the story, and I watch that same movement call him God's chosen. I do not have to speculate about that embrace. It is on video. It is at the pulpit. It is on the flag.

I am the onlooker. I am not adding anything. I am writing down what the book says on one side and what I watch on the other and letting the reader put them next to each other.

The Pattern the Prophets Warned About

The Bible has a category for the leader who lies and the people who love him for it. It is not a modern category. It is one of the oldest patterns in the book.

Jeremiah writes about it with grief.

An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule on their own authority; and My people love it so! But what will you do at the end of it? (Jeremiah 5:30-31)

Read that again. The prophets are lying. The priests are running the show on their own authority. And the line that shocks the prophet the most is not that the leaders are corrupt. He expected that. What shocks him is that the people love it. They prefer the lie. They will not tolerate anyone who tries to bring the truth back into the room.

Then Isaiah names the exchange plainly.

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. (Isaiah 5:20)

That is the exact move the movement now makes on a weekly basis. The behavior the Bible calls sinful is renamed strong leadership. The behavior the Bible calls righteous is renamed weakness, or worse, evil. Compassion is renamed cowardice. Cruelty is renamed courage. Truth-telling is renamed betrayal. Lying is renamed strategy.

Isaiah did not write that verse about a modern movement. He wrote it about a people in his own time who had gotten so used to the inversion that they could not feel it anymore. That is the state I watch a large part of the American church living in right now.

The Figure in Revelation

I want to be careful here. The movement has been badly served for a hundred years by preachers who point at a headline and say, this is the beast, this is the antichrist, this is the mark. That is not how Revelation works. Revelation is a vision. It is written in symbols. It is describing patterns that show up in every empire, not one specific politician.

But because it describes a pattern, the pattern is worth reading. And the pattern in Revelation is worth reading right now, because the movement has spent decades telling everyone that Revelation matters, and then it has ignored the parts of Revelation that actually describe what is standing in front of it.

Here is the pattern.

There was given to him a mouth speaking arrogant words and blasphemies, and authority to act for forty-two months was given to him. And he opened his mouth in blasphemies against God, to blaspheme His name and His tabernacle, that is, those who dwell in heaven. It was also given to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them, and authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation was given to him. All who dwell on the earth will worship him, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who has been slain. (Revelation 13:5-8)

The beast in Revelation 13 has a mouth. That is the detail the movement never lingers on. The weapon of the beast is his mouth. He speaks arrogant words. He blasphemes. He speaks against God while claiming to speak for God. And the crowd worships him.

Read the description of his mouth and then listen to any given speech from the figure the movement has embraced. The vocabulary of self-worship. The vocabulary of grievance. The vocabulary of enemies. The habit of calling himself the only one who can save the country. The habit of demanding that people call him what he is not. I am not saying this man is the beast of Revelation. I am not qualified to say that and neither is anyone else on television. I am saying that the pattern the Bible warned the church to recognize is not a hidden pattern. It is loud. And the movement that spent the last hundred years selling books about how to spot it has not spotted it. Or has spotted it and decided it likes it.

Revelation 17 describes a great city that has grown rich on the suffering of others and drunk on the blood of the saints. Revelation 18 describes her fall and the mourning of the merchants who profited by her. Read those two chapters and ask which side of that vision the modern movement resembles. Ask whether the movement is standing with the martyrs or standing with the merchants. Ask whether the movement is grieving the empire's cruelty or grieving the empire's decline.

Then read 2 Thessalonians, which is Paul's own version of the same warning.

The coming of the lawless one is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false, in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness. (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12)

Paul says the deception works because the audience did not love the truth. The lie succeeds not because the liar is clever but because the crowd wanted a story that flattered them. God gives them over to the story they chose. They believe what is false because they took pleasure in wickedness.

That is the mechanism. That is how a movement that once quoted the ninth commandment on billboards ends up cheering a serial liar. It did not love the truth enough to resist the story that made it feel powerful again.

Again, I am not saying any single politician is the figure in Revelation. I am saying that the Bible gave the church a description of the kind of leader to be careful of, and the movement has walked past every warning sign the book put on the road.

The Small Lies Under the Big Lie

The public lies get the attention. There are quieter lies underneath them that hold the whole thing up. Those quieter lies live inside the movement's own sermons.

There is the lie that the founding of the country was a Christian founding, when the record is much more complicated than that.

There is the lie that a certain race of people were content and cared for under slavery, a lie that runs through Sunday school curricula in some places to this day.

There is the lie that the Civil War was about states' rights and not about the preservation of the ownership of human beings, a lie that ordained pastors preached from Southern pulpits and that some seminaries still soft-pedal.

There is the lie that poverty is always a moral failure and never a systemic one, a lie that lets the movement blame the poor for what the prophets blamed the rich for.

There is the lie that the Bible is against a particular group of people in a particular way, when the verses used to attack them are lifted out of context and the verses that would defend them are left on the cutting room floor.

Each of those lies serves a purpose. Each of those lies allows the movement to keep believing it is on the right side of God while doing things the book condemns. Each of those lies is a small ninth-commandment violation stacked under the big one.

The big lie is not just about an election. The big lie is the whole architecture of small lies the movement has told itself in order to sleep at night.

What Truth-Telling Would Cost

I want to be honest about why the movement does not repent of this. Repentance would cost too much.

If the movement admitted that its leader lies, it would have to admit that it followed a liar. It would have to admit that the people who tried to warn it were right. It would have to face the family members it cut off, the friends it lost, the pastors it drove out of the pulpit for telling the truth. It would have to look at all of that and say, we were wrong.

That is the price of the ninth commandment in the current moment. That is what obeying it would cost. And the movement has decided the price is too high.

But the book does not care about the price. The book says the person who loves the lie is standing outside the gate. It does not lower the standard because the audience finds the standard inconvenient.

What the Onlooker Sees on the Ninth Commandment

I hold the ledger up again.

The book says do not bear false witness. The movement circulates false witness by the hour.

The book says lying lips are an abomination. The movement has made peace with a lying mouth and calls the peace loyalty.

The book says the habitual liar has the devil for a father. The movement calls the habitual liar God's anointed.

The book says the person who loves the lie stands outside the city. The movement has built the lie into its identity.

The book says the prophets prophesied falsely and the priests ruled on their own authority and the people loved it. The movement is living inside that sentence.

I am not writing this to score a point. I am writing this because the ninth commandment is one of the ten. It sits on the same tablet as the ones about murder and adultery and stealing. If a movement takes nine of the ten seriously and tosses one out, it does not have the ten commandments anymore. It has nine. And the one it threw away happens to be the one that would indict the leader it has decided to worship.

Where This Points

The question that has been forming since the beginning of this book is getting louder.

If a person can read thou shalt not bear false witness on Sunday and then spend the week repeating known falsehoods, defending known falsehoods, and attacking the people who correct known falsehoods, then the ethics governing that person's Monday are not coming from the commandments they read on Sunday.

Something else is doing the moral work. Something else is telling them which lies are acceptable, which liars are acceptable, and which truth-tellers must be destroyed.

We are almost to the point in the book where I have to ask you the question directly. I am not asking yet. I am setting the table. When the question comes, it is going to be simple. Where do your ethics actually live. In the book you carry. Or in the movement that has taught you which parts of the book to read out loud and which parts to keep quiet.

The stranger stood at the border in the last chapter. The liar stands in the pulpit in this one. The book has not changed. The commandments have not changed. The onlooker is only writing down what he sees when the book is closed and the microphone is on.