At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“A faithful witness will not lie: But a false witness will utter lies.”
Proverbs 14:5
Taken at face value, this proverb seems almost tautological. A faithful witness will in fact be a faithful witness, but a witness who lies will be the one who is lying. But it is a godly tautology, and one that we really need to keep in mind at all times. Especially if you are on Twitter.
If I may be permitted to bring in an autobiographical element here, I speak and write as someone who has been lied about for a very long time, and the total of the lies, reckoned in tons, has also been significant.
First there are the liars who have given themselves over to the practice. They follow their father the devil, who carries lies with him wherever he goes. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44). These people, sons of the devil, will chase after lies until they are completely out of breath.
After this are the middlemen. These are not the inventors of lies, but they do circulate them assiduously. Some of them are more than halfway malevolent—they wanted the lie to be true, and it was too good to check. But there are also people who do this that may be classified as chumps. And, truth be known, there are some Christians out there who are the very chumpiest. They will confidently pronounce something to be true, which I know for a fact to be utterly false, and then they will add the extra topping of “just look it up.”
And last in line would be those good-hearted people who do not invent the lies, and they do not circulate them, but they do hear them, and they are unsettled by them. They do not act, but remain right where they were . . . but now in a destabilized and unsettled condition. They don’t have as much trust in their pastor as they did before. They still trust him, but sometimes . . . it makes you wonder. These are the ones who have been softened up by the artillery prior to the invasion proper.
So what should we remember? Liars lie.
