June 26, 2014
Bearing False Witness
Recently I talked to a Christian woman who was
trying to justify her stance on a particular issue. Even though each of us had
a different recollection concerning a very public and politically toxic
situation, she wanted me to agree with her interpretation. I knew what she was
saying wasn’t true, but yet I didn’t feel like she was lying. As I grappled
with what was happening it occurred to me that this could be a case of “bearing
false witness.” In her attempts to justify herself, she was disparaging others.
I’d always considered false testimony or false witness, to mean lying, but now
I’m thinking it is something more grievous. The ninth Commandment doesn’t say
you shall not lie, but rather it says, “You shall not give false witness
against your neighbor” (Ex 20:19 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----You’re really trying to make righteousness intricate and detailed, aren’t you? Evil is intentionally damaging somebody (could be yourself, too.) Mistakes are different, especially those so subtle that few can discern them from correctness. Who wants to carry that kind of burden around? But you’re dead-on right.
-----In a certain sense we all have that giant, blank screen that is the backside of our visual field. We can’t see what’s there, but our thoughts fill it up with constructs often better called imagination. And it should behoove us all to recognize that each and every one of us is surrounded in every way by a vast void in knowledge being imagination‘s playground. We don’t have to go back too far in time before we don’t have an idea about what went on. We can only imagine. We don’t need to go too far forward in time before we can’t reason with an ounce of certainty about what will occur next. We do not have to travel very far up or down or to the right or left or forward or backward before we come to a place about which we know far less than we actually do know, if we know anything of it at all. We do not even have to travel too far into ourselves until we meet that blanketing void of knowledge again, and then we continue on imaging. Nor can we travel at all into another to know anything for certain there. I think the fact of greatest import after that of Jesus Christ is Lord and King and Savior is that we know far less than we do know, so we imagine mostly. It is why the first fact is so important.
-----Remember? Life is complex. Your acquaintance was probably certain about the truth of her position. Maybe she even has spent much time vetting her information and carefully reasoning it into concepts. But one has not completed the vetting process until every aspect of a piece of information has been analyzed against known realities and found to be truly existent. As for the reasoning process, few people today have even taken time to read a logic book, let alone to study one. Probably this is so because reasoning comes natural to the human psyche. But it does not come naturally complete. In fact, our innate reasoning abilities are found surprisingly short when placed beside the intricate complexities of logic. Consequently, we are blunderingly dangerous with both fact and logic, because imagination too conveniently fills the gaps, often entirely unbeknown to us.
-----So, the deliberate part of bearing false witness even when one most wants to and thinks certainly that she is bearing the truth is her bearing witness to anything she has not searched and reasoned out to the very last drop. Which process she probably did not complete because the ages spent sorting through seeming irrelevancies pushes us on to conclusions made then by greater presumptions. Until one has gone the full distance of vetting her own conclusions for truth, she is best offering them as either possibilities or probabilities rather than as witness. Thus, that “bearing falsehood” problem is solved; humility has been discovered; and her ideas have been heard.
-----Now, as an aside, one of the more fundamental evidences I see for the truth about Christ and our Holy Father is that in spite of the absolute enormity of the unknown, the most important thing knowable to man is available for all men to know. One need not think too far to know why, as such knowledge is carried to each who desires to know by the inspirations and influences of the Holy Spirit working in whatever or whomever He must to make delivery, which often is merely through some humbled solitude spent in the Bible.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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