LYING SILENTLY
When Silence Becomes Sin
Consider the following scenario: A man wakes in the night to an unmistakable scent—smoke threading through the hallway. Orange light pulses against bedroom walls. His wife stirs beside him, alarm rising in her eyes. Down the corridor, their children sleep soundly, oblivious to the flames ascending the staircase.
Then comes the unfathomable. The father turns to his wife and whispers, "Don't wake the children. It will only frighten them."
What manner of parent would say that? Who in the world could witness encroaching destruction yet chooses silence? We would not characterize such a man as compassionate or protective. We would rightly name him negligent—even cruel. His silence constitutes complicity with death itself.
Yet this impulse pervades contemporary Christian culture. We detect the acrid scent of rebellion and yet we convince ourselves that confrontation would be unloving. We observe bitterness smoldering in our marriages yet suppress our concerns. We watch hypocrisy metastasize through the Church and rationalize that addressing it would prove divisive. We sense deception within our own hearts and, rather than repenting, retreat into comfortable denial.
We baptize cowardice as a form of compassion. We reframe fear as gentleness. We mistake silence for humility, as though self-imposed muteness were somehow virtuous. But heaven recognizes the deception. Peace that conceals truth is no peace at all—it is a whitewashed sepulcher, pretense masquerading as prudence, the gradual suffocation of everything good.
The Scope of the Ninth Commandment
The ninth commandment dismantles every rationalization for such deadly quietness. It prohibits not merely overt falsehood but deception in all its subtle manifestations. It indicts not only our speech but our silence. If God is, as Moses declares, "a God of faithfulness and without injustice; righteous and upright is He" (Deuteronomy 32:4), and as Isaiah proclaims, "the God of truth," then every false statement, every calculated evasion, every polite concealment betrays His character. When Christ identifies Satan as one who "speaks lies out of his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44), He warns us not merely about demonic deception but about our own capacity for it. Each time we distort truth, we attempt to corrupt the language of heaven with the vocabulary of hell.
The Westminster Larger Catechism expands this understanding, leaving no sanctuary for cowardice: God requires that we "appear and stand for the truth" and "speak the truth, and only the truth, in matters of judgment and justice, and in all other things: and that from the heart, sincerely, freely, clearly, and fully." This constitutes not situational counsel but divine mandate. Truth must be spoken sincerely, even when it exposes our failures. Truth must be spoken freely, even when it offends. Truth must be spoken clearly, even when ambiguity offers refuge. Truth must be spoken fully, even when it shatters the fragile equilibrium we've constructed to preserve our comfort.
Truth as the Lifeblood of Community
Paul intensifies this imperative in Ephesians 4:25, commanding believers to "put away falsehood" and "speak truth with his neighbor, for we are members of one another." The Church is not an assembly of autonomous individuals but an organic body unified by truth. Every lie—even socially acceptable ones—severs a connection. Every silence where truth should resound numbs the body's extremities. Eventually, entire limbs lose sensation. Sin becomes progressively easier to tolerate, excuse, rationalize. The body ceases to register pain in its members, and love devolves from lived reality into abstract theory.
Conversely, when truth is spoken—when a husband acknowledges his sin, when a friend refuses empty flattery, when a church exercises discipline rather than capitulating to cultural sensibilities—vitality returns. Sensation revives. The sinews and nerves of Christ's Body awaken. Truth transcends doctrinal precision; it functions as the lifeblood enabling the body to feel, function, and flourish.
Diagnostic Questions
These realities demand ruthless self-examination:
Do you speak truth only when it costs nothing? Do you remain silent because honesty might destabilize a relationship? Do you soften reality to protect your reputation? Do you rebrand fear as "gentleness" because gentleness sounds biblical while fear sounds contemptible? Do you disguise gossip as pastoral concern? Do you acquiesce to falsehood because the price of opposition seems unbearable?
And most searching: Are your sins more frequently committed through words you've spoken—or through words you've been too afraid to speak?
The Grace That Liberates
Into this convicting examination comes a staggering reality: Christ never lied, never evaded, never embellished. His speech remained utterly untainted by deceit. Yet that truthful tongue was condemned by a council of liars, slandered by false witnesses, and affixed to a cross between criminals. He who is Truth incarnate died beneath the weight of lies so that liars might be reconciled to truth. He bore our evasions, our flattery, our calculated silences. From that cross, with labored breath and life ebbing away, He declared the most honest sentence ever uttered: "It is finished."
That proclamation signals the death of deceit, the liberation of speech, the restoration of integrity. The One wrongfully accused now speaks grace over us. The Truth crucified for liars now sanctifies our words through His Spirit.
A Call to Confession and Transformation
Therefore, let us confess—not merely the lies we've told but the lies we've lived. Let us confess the silence we marketed as kindness. Let us confess the carefully curated half-truths we deployed to shield our pride. Let us confess the quietness that protected our idols rather than our neighbors.
And let us come to the One slandered for our salvation, who lives to intercede for us, who fills our mouths with words both faithful and true. In Him, we find not only forgiveness for our failures but power to speak truth in love—truth that wounds to heal, truth that disrupts to restore, truth that costs everything yet gives life to all who receive it.
