Zechariah 8:16-17 These are the things that you shall do; Speak you every man the truth to his neighbor… s: — Honesty and policy cannot live in the same heart. Who can make anything of the liar? He is the worst of all men. He has lost the higher qualities of manhood, yet the base deceiver can shudder when he sees a poor drunken man who may be a saint compared with himself. The liar cannot be converted, unless it be by the whole force of the Deity. He is hollow, he has killed his conscience, he has sold his honour. Never allow a liar to come into your house. The liar is a composite sinner; he sins all round, or would sin in any direction and every direction if it would serve his purpose so to do. Have faith in every man that loves truth. Though he fall seven times a day he shall stand at eventide. Any sins that lie along the line of passion are nothing as compared with sins of deliberation, plan, scheme, thoroughly wrought out, purposed. I have known many a soul overborne by gusts from the bottomless pit, not wanting moral beauty and fine quality, but I have never known a liar that was worth being touched by the point of the longest instrument ever fashioned by human hands. Lying is so subtle, too. It is not vulgar deception in all cases. There is a falsehood that is calculation, a very fine process of putting things together and totalling them up into certain results and considering whether those results are worth realising. Lying may be speechless. It is a mistake to say that lies are always "told": lies are acted, lies are suggested, lies are inferential. Christ came to give us the spirit of truth. Truth is a spirit. It is not a mere way of stating facts. A man may contradict himself in his statement of facts and be true at the soul. Verbal discrepancies are nothing: the meaning of the heart is everything. When an honest soul corrects itself there's nobility in the very act of self-correction; you see the candour, you appreciate the withdrawal or the addition or the modification of former statements, as the case may be. A truthful man never thinks of his own consistency; a truthful man cannot be inconsistent. So called inconsistency in his case is accidental, superficial, transient, explicable. The man's consistency is in his soul: what he means to be, that he is. Of all liars perhaps the young liar is the worst. It ought not so to be. The boy, the young man, should not lie. He should be so heroic and fearless as even to blurt out the truth when he does not tell it in sequential order. It should not occur to his young soul to falsify. Yet if one were to write the history of young hearts in any family and in any city, society could not live; we would fly away from one another as men fly from suddenly disclosed serpents. "Love no false oath," saith the text. "False oath" —what ironies there are in expression I "False balance" —what an affront to geometry! "False oath" —what an offence to righteousness! "False prophet" —what a shock to the spirit of the sanctuary! "False brethren" — who can live? The Bible grows upon our conscience and our whole moral nature by the sublimity of its criticisms and the loftiness of its spiritual appeals. The Bible will have truth everywhere, because it will first have truth in the soul. Do not treat the symptoms of your case: get at the radical disease. It is poor curing that is done by mere plasters. Only the cure that starts from the centre and works out towards the circumference brings with it summer redness to the cheek, summer brightness to the eyes. God condemns sin and all evil things in detail because they are ruinous to the man. They are spoiling the work of God's hands, they are overturning the purpose of God's heart. The sinner is a suicide. "He that sinneth against Me," saith the Scripture, "wrongeth his own soul." Think of a man committing plunder upon his own nature, stealing from himself every element that makes him a man! I have known liars that succeeded for a few months; I have before my mind at this moment three liars, all under five-and-twenty years of age, who lied and robbed and did evil with both hands, and tonight they are refuse; they are avoided by all who know the rottenness and pestilence of their character. Thus sin takes a man down line by line, faculty by faculty. Sin sucks the Divine juice out of a man. You cannot allow one evil thought to pass through your sensitive brain without leaving that brain weaker and poorer. The temptation came and left ruin behind. The temptation itself is not sin unless it is yielded to, but if the temptation have hospitality one moment in the brain it takes off some fine film, some subtle veil through which the brain saw somewhat of God. The poet can drink himself into idiocy; the genius, the master magician of words, can so treat his body that his soul will not think for him. It will give up and abandon the altar where once it burned. God sees therefore that sin ruins the man. The sinner himself goes down. The things are not only hateful to God, they are ruinous to the people who practise them. You cannot over eat yourself, and pray; you cannot soak your body in evil liquids, and then sing, you can sound the notes, but the subtle, spiritual, Divine music is gone. When fire has left the altar what is the altar? (Joseph Parker, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates: |
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