Give No False Witness
Notes
Transcript
Over the past few months we have been walking through the ten words, the decalogue in Exodus 20, and we have been learning a lot. We took the words of Jesus in Matthew 22 as a way to see these words in a whole new light as Jesus said Matthew 22:37-39
37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
38 This is the great and first commandment.
39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
We talked about how Jesus had summed up the ten words in just two, because the first 4 of the words encapsulate how we are to relate to God as we live in covenant with him, and the last six are how we are directing us how we are supposed to live in relation to each other, our horizontal relationships, as we live in covenant with God. And contrary to popular belief none of these things were given to restrict oru lives or setup fences we are supposed to live inside to make us suffer and not have good lives. Instead, these words were given to give us life and to help us live in a way he intended us to from our origins in the garden of Eden, where all of our lives are completely dependent and focused upon Him.
Today, we come to the ninth word in the series, a simple Hebrew syntax
lo - ṯa-‘ă-neh ḇə-rê-‘ă-ḵā ‘êḏ šā-qer.
Not you shall bear against your neighbor witness false
When we first think about this, it is easy to think about this in terms of a court case and how we would see that today, and this is a good place for us to recognize these words and how we are supposed to use them and apply them to our lives. The thing we must understand is in this community justice was a very important part of their society. I would like to think it is a part of our society as well, but for them justice was everything. Remember, they are coming out of this Egyptian oppression and they are hoping and waiting for God to make it right, to give them justice; this is something we still see as we read the new testament and look at the life of Jesus - the people of his day are waiting for the Messiah to come and give them that justice, to make right all that Rome has done to them so they are hoping when they see Jesus as the Messiah he was about to do that, that is why so often they missed the mark on who Jesus was and what he was actually doing because they were awaiting Jesus to rain down justice on earth in terms they understood justice. For them, it would have been justice for God to wipe the egyptians out, or later the romans out, because it was what they deserved, so in a sense their idea of justice departs a little from ours.
Did you know that eyewitness testimony is statistically known to often be incorrect, especially as time goes on when no notes or anything have been taken to be able to call our memory to those points. I want to just put our skills to test, lets watch this video, and it will give you instructions, but what we are going to be doing is counting how many times the people with white shirts pass a basketball.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
So be honest, how many of you got the number of passes correctly? Okay, now, how many of you actually saw the gorilla dancing around and thought, what in the world is that doing there?
The study when this was conducted found that almost 50% of people did not see the dancing gorilla they completely missed it. This is why eyewitness data is so hard, because we all have bias we all have things that come in to our brain and our brain gets rid of and some things our brain holds on to, and its what they call witness bias that controls that. For instance, the reason many of us didn’t see the gorilla is because going into the situation we had decided the important thing for us to watch was people wearing white shirts, so you know what happened? Your brain decided that anything black in the video was unimportant, and it decided to throw it away. It was unneeded, useless information so you completely got rid of it. Isn’t that interesting.
This is an important study because it shows how difficult this can be to not perjure yourself in court in relation to the law given here, and would seem so simple to keep. However, its not just about in a court of law, it goes so much deeper beyond all of that because as we talk about justice what we see is God showing us that truth is foundational to justice and if we want true justice to come we have to make sure we are truthful when we are asked to speak about the world and not give a false testimony, because when we do it destroys the foundations of everything; the walls of justice collapse when we are not truthful and honest, and as we will see later relationships breakdown when we are not truthful and honest.
We could take this to just the court, but it is so much bigger, it is in our every day lives when we give false witness, or lie that we are breaking down the relationships around us and hurting people. Remember, Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves and it would be easy for us to look and think, again brother that has nothing to do with me that is the old testament, but Jesus really doesn’t leave us room for that, in fact in John 14:6 he says that he IS the truth
6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
As we are to emulate him and live our lives with his example it should be no secret and no surprise we are to live in truth. And living a life of love for neighbor when following Jesus means we are rejoicing in truth even when that truth isn’t necessarily good for us.
I think to the time when Jesus is standing completely innocent before Pilate and Pilate is trying to give Jesus an out, he is looking for Jesus to give him a reason NOT to crucify him so in Luke 23:3 Pilate asks him this question
3 And Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And he answered him, “You have said so.”
He was on trial for what the Jews considered blasphemy against God, but until this point he had never explicitly said he was the King of the Jews, people had given him the title and equated him to the Messiah, Jesus had repeatedly used the I am moniker in relation to himself, but he had never said these words, and it would have been easy for Jesus to just get his way out of this question, but Pilate asks him, are you the king of the Jews, and Jesus says, You said it. Which would lead to his death.
The question becomes, in light of the light of Jesus, can you live and speak that truth even if it means it is not in your best interest? Can you follow his lead and speak truth even when it is incredibly hard and seems to be against our natural instincts?
So what are we to do, What does this mean for us in light of the word here in Exodus 20 and how we are supposed to live today? While what we say starts in our hearts and drives our words, everything we are talking about this morning, the truthfulness of our words, starts with something smaller, our tongues, and in my favorite book of the Bible we find James giving us instructions on how our tongues guide our lives and how we are supposed to handle them.
4 Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs.
I want you to just think about this for a second, I have a picture of a cruise ship and its rudder on the screen.
Let me just give you some information, the average cruise ship is about 1000 feet long and 125 feet wide and weighs 200,000 tons. I just want you to understand thats a lot of weight, thats a huge vessel size, its gigantic. And to get a little nerdy, what my research shows when it comes to rudder size is rudder surface area = the square root of the waterline length of the vessel but you divide this by 2 becasue the surface area is on both sides of the rudder. Are we following? SO for a ship this size, the square root of the waterline length is 100, because 100 x 100 is 1000. If you divide this by 2 you get the total surface area on both sides of the rudder should be 50 feet. For the ease of math you can break that down into 5x10. So this means that huge ship you are thinking of, can be steered by a rudder that is only 5 feet by 10 feet and you start to get the idea of how small it is moving such a large thing. James goes on
5 So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire!
I really love this verse, James is like, man your tongue is so small, but he sure does say some things that makes him think he’s a big somebody. It reminds me of the guys you know with what they call Napoleon syndrome. He’s like its says a whole lot of stuff and its not that big, but he says, you know what happens, those little forrest fires, they often times just start with a spark. I remember a couple years ago there was the wildfire out in california that burned thousands and thousands of acres of land and they decided the whole thing started because someone had just thrown a cigarette out.
6 And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell.
7 For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind,
8 but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
This may be hard for us to grasp, because up until this point James has used simile but here is directly equating one to the other. And so the question would be how is the tongue this fire, and the answer comes just as we talked about the cigarette being tossed out and starting the fire - there is no evil in the world, inside the church or outside the church that cannot be started by the tongue. Letm e stop and say that does not mean that every evil is started by the tongue, but there is no evil the tongue cannot start.
Lets just look at the previous three commandments we have looked at and we can see how the tongue can start every single one of those.
Murder: You may think, how is it possible the tongue could possibly start murder? Have you ever been in a place where someone said something and the person who they were speaking to immediately went from 0-100 and were ready to fight? And sometimes those things go a step further and can completely come unhinged and someone could be killed because of it.
Adultery: For so many adultery was never the initial plan but can start with a glance and a word to stranger that opens to door to a meeting, or a drink, or a relationship that was never intended. Just a spoken word to open the door that will lead to actions that will destroy lives and marriages.
Shall not Steal: I have seen and heard stories of thieves who took things because people shamed them for their lack and who they were as a person making the person feel inferior so they decided to take those things for themselves to teach them a lesson.
All things that break teh order of how we are supposed to live with one another just ignited from something as small as our tongue and the words coming from it.
James goes on to tell us how we should use our words instead.
9 With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.
10 From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.
He’s saying we have this duality with our words, we bless God, but curse the people around us, its like hes telling us we kept the first most important law Jesus told us about, but we are breaking the second great law. And he says..
11 Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water?
12 Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.
And this is so condemning, he is telling us if we are doing one we can’t do the other. If we are cursing our neighbors we really can’t speak words of blessing toward our father, because we can’t have this duality in us. He is calling us to have words that speak only of good things and blessings toward people, words of honor and truth.
The question for you this morning is are you living a life where your words can speak truth even if it isn’t to your benefit, are you speaking words of life and goodness to the people around you?
