Is It Ever Right to Lie?

In the Bible, sometimes good things result from a lie being told. Does that give us justification to lie in certain situations? Today, Sinclair Ferguson probes questions about honesty, deception, and discretion.

If you’re from the United States of America, you’re probably more familiar with the name Mason Locke Weems than I am. He was the author of the book The Life of George Washington, which had the delicious subtitle, With Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honorable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen. With a title like that, how could it possibly fail to be a bestseller? Actually, it was when it first appeared in 1800. But apparently, it wasn’t until a few years later, in the fifth edition, that Weems included the story about the six-year-old George Washington and his new hatchet and his father’s cherry tree that has become so famous.

“I cannot tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” Of course, what makes these so famous words somewhat humorous is that, apparently, they’re a fabrication. I hesitate to call them a straight-out lie. I don’t mean Washington was telling a lie; I mean that Mason Locke Weems, apparently, made up the story. His motives were good. He wanted to set Washington before young people as a fine moral example to follow. But what is slightly curious about this story, and ironic, is that Mason Locke Weems was an itinerant preacher, and McGuffey, who reworked the story in his famous reader, was a Presbyterian minister, but they didn’t seem to be telling the full truth about George Washington. And I think that’s sometimes true when we come to this particular commandment, the commandment about honesty: “You shall not bear false witness.”

One of the questions I think often arises in connection with this commandment is, “Well, is it ever right to lie?” And of course, the question becomes a little pressing because people sometimes—indeed, quite often—answer it by appealing to examples in the Scriptures of people telling lies, and good seems to result.

Here are a couple of considerations we need to bear in mind. The first one is the fact that good following a person telling a lie is no more a justification of a lie than that the blessing of God resulted from Joseph’s brothers selling him as a slave into Egypt and him ending up as the prime minister. We can’t argue backwards from what God does in His providence to justify everything that we or other people do.

Perhaps to take a more specific example, the fact that Rahab seems to have told a lie, and the aftermath was that spies escaped, Israel conquered Jericho, and she was saved, doesn’t in itself justify her lying. Rahab bearing false witness was never the sine qua non of God overcoming Jericho, and we need to bear that in mind.

But the second thing to say is that, while we should never bear false witness, this does not mean that we are obliged never to withhold information, or that we are obliged to tell people anything that we know that they want to know.

Remember Jesus’ own words in the Sermon on the Mount about not casting pearls to pigs who will devour them and then trample you. Christians are to be resolutely committed to not bearing malicious false witness. We are to be committed, in fact, to never bearing false witness, so that when we speak, we tell the truth. But we’re under no obligation to tell the truth to anyone who wants to know it.

Put it this way: If the local Christian busybody and nosy parker in your church asks you about someone you know well—and about whom you know more than perhaps anybody else—and then says, “Tell me the truth about them; don’t bear a false witness; tell me,” you and I are not under any obligation to tell them anything. There’s a time to speak and a time to keep silent, and we need to know the difference. And we also need to be able to discern people’s spirits.

And just one last thought today. We’ve been learning that every commandment implies its opposite, so it’s not enough to refrain from lying speech. As the book of Proverbs tells us, we need to learn how to use truthful words in a way that both blesses and heals others, and that’s part of our growing Christian maturity. So let’s remember that every time we open our mouths to speak today.