BROADCASTS.com

\u201cYou shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. (Deuteronomy 5:20)

\xa0

This word honours and guards the integrity of all words by keeping honesty and integrity at the forefront of our dealings with one another, particularly in a court of law.\xa0 We are not to falsely use the name of God: the same applies to the name of our neighbour\u2014it ought not be falsely dragged through the mud.\xa0 By extension, this word upholds truth and bars us from deceit, slander, and falsehood.\xa0 \xa0

This ninth word is one of the clearest invitations for us to defend the truth.\xa0 But there are perhaps two different notions of truth to distinguish here, which we tend to use interchangeably without noticing what we\u2019ve done.\xa0

One form of the truth is that which I myself have witnessed: that I have seen, heard, and experienced firsthand, in person, myself.\xa0 When we are called upon as a witness in a legal court, this is the form of truth we swear to tell\u2014an accurate portrayal of reality as we have witnessed it.\xa0 This form of truth is inherently subjective and not infrequently the testimony of truthful witnesses will disagree with one another\u2014just as the four Gospels in the New Testament do\u2014because we each witness events from our own vantage point, interpreting what we see and hear through our own assumptions, biases, and experiences.\xa0 Historians see these slight variations in witness accounts as a mark of authenticity.\xa0 When a narrative is too flat or when different accounts are too identical, as if a set of witnessed \u201cpracticed\u201d together what they were going to say\u2014judges and historians get suspicious.\xa0 And rightly so.\xa0 Human life and reality has a natural and necessary variation to it.\xa0 We do not all perceive the world the same way.\xa0 But that does not make our account of reality as we\u2019ve experienced it any less truthful.

The second form of truth is a much more modern notion not known to the times of the Bible, but more often than not, this is the sort of truth we are talking about in Christian circles these days.\xa0 This is a truth that is\u2014as much as possible\u2014flattened and codified into an objective, identically repeatable formulation.\xa0 It is a systematic truth\u2014or a systematic theology sort of truth.\xa0 It is removed from the inconsistent world of subjective experience.\xa0 And yet, this second form of truth depends on the first for its existence.\xa0 The second form is logically deduced from the first, making it a secondary, or derivative form of truth\u2014disembodied from the messy embodied reality of human life and perception.\xa0 In this process, subjectivities are supposedly eliminated to create a smooth, coherent, linear formulation of \u201cthe truth\u201d in a universal, abstract sense that applies everywhere to everyone in exactly the same way.

If the first form of truth\u2014the subjective, eye-witness sort\u2014is a living stone admitting of hundreds of variations, the second form of truth is a brick: flat, monotonous, and infinitely repeatable.\xa0 However, God\u2019s people were told not to make bricks anymore.\xa0 Rather, we\u2019ve been made to become living stones built together into a holy temple that rises to witness as eye-witnesses to the works and wonders of the living God that we ourselves have subjectively experienced in our own day-to-day lives as the Spirit works the salvation of Jesus into us and sanctified fruit out of us for the sake of the world.\xa0 When we are called to be witnesses of Jesus and his truth: this is what is meant.\xa0 And when we are called not to bear false witness, this is what is meant.\xa0

So when this command is extended to demand that we defend the truth of words and the Word\u2014the sort of truth we are called to defend is not the \u201cobjective,\u201d systematic theology sort that demands logical apologetic arguments of us (which C.S. Lewis likens to a pinning of God\u2019s wings to the cork board like a dead biology project).\xa0 But rather, what we are called to defend is the truth of our eye-witness confession of faith: \u201clook what the Lord has done for me!\xa0 I cannot do otherwise than believe and love this Jesus because I know him, I talk with him, and having seen him for myself, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he lives!\u201d\xa0

These days, the places we are most tempted to slander another are those places where things get heated: places of political rancour or culture war\u2014whether internally against fellow Christians or externally against the world of neighbours around us.\xa0 Our desire to force others into the mold of what we believe to be objectively true seems to give us the green light to use any means necessary to accomplish this end: including slander, defamation, false witness, embellishing, and plain ol\u2019 lying.\xa0 The \u201cconservatives\u201d are guilty of this.\xa0 The \u201cprogressives\u201d are guilty of this.\xa0 And, many of us who live in between and get angry with the polarizing voices that are rocking our boat are guilty of this too!\xa0 \xa0\xa0

Speaking God\u2019s name without false use requires that we speak our neighbour\u2019s name without false use too.\xa0 When our words no longer ring true in this personal, subjective sense, when we no longer hold a relational fidelity to speaking truthfully with and of one another, the basis for any form of trust between people erodes and relationships become difficult to tend\u2014as we\u2019ve experienced these past years.\xa0 God knows this, and so his 9th word of covenant fidelity is a gift to us, that when lived, can restore trust and relationship between people in God\u2019s world.

\xa0