When it’s OK to lie
On the AV forum, Matthew Cart wrote:
When I was first a Christian I used to believe that it was always wrong to tell a lie, no matter what. Both Leviticus 19:11 and Colossians 3:9 talk about not lying to one another. There are scores of verses that talk about honesty.
I was first introduced to the idea of exceptions to this rule by a friend of mine. He spoke about the Chinese Christians who lie to communist authorities while they are escaping from prison and persecution type situations. Also there are Bible smugglers who lie to get Bibles to Christians in persecuted countries. There is a lot of deceit that happens, even with Voice of the Martyrs, doing things in secret and using deception for the sake of the gospel. You could consider this lying.
Didn’t Christians also practice deception and lying during Hitler’s reign to have the Jews? Someone would come to their house and ask if there were Jews there and they would say, “No”.
I am also challenged by the story in 1 Kings 22 where God put a lying spirit in the mouth of his own prophets in order to purposely deceive someone…
The repeated theme is (I think) actually that of the “warrior-bride” tricking the “serpent” before making an escape, as observed by James Jordan in his lectures. This would possibly include all the examples above plus the Hebrew midwives, Rahab’s hiding of the spies, Jael’s deception of Sisera, Michal’s lie after David’s escape and Esther’s “invitation” to Haman. These and many more were “eye for eye” justice from Eve upon the father of lies, the serpent, fulfilled of course in the cross.
It appears again in Revelation, when the serpent vomits out counterfeit living waters (false doctrine) which is swallowed hook, line and sinker by the Judaisers and Jews (the “Land”), but not the saints. In this case it was like Solomon’s sword – a deception that made plain which woman was the true mother of the living child and which woman was lying.
So Eve deceives the serpent. It is ironic justice.
