Students cheerfully lie to my face.
They don’t do it all the time, and I’m always willing to listen with fresh ears and an open heart, but as a college professor I find that the truth is often unavoidable: students lie.
I don’t mean “fudge the truth” or “riff on something” or “get caught out in a spontaneous moment.” They lie. So boldly and brashly and with such complete confidence and assurance that even when I know I am in the right I have to be careful not to gaslight myself about what I know the truth to be.
Recently, a student initiated a conversation with me. He emailed to tell me he had been excused from completing an assignment in my course by the University. He had not; I knew he had not. And yet, in the face of my refusal to grant the excuse, he doubled down. He lied so persistently and for so long over the course of the email exchange that I checked my own information three times (it was correct) and began to wonder if he was suffering from a sort of illness.
Evil can be so incredibly banal, and yet so persistent.
I paused writing that: “evil.” I almost erased it. I was concerned initially that someone would think I was dismissing the student as irredeemable, beyond hope. I wouldn’t: every student always has an opportunity to make good as far as I’m concerned. And yet in God’s eyes lies are evil. They are sin. A form of wickedness. The curse, the serpent, in our actions and our words.
And I think it’s important to consider that student, who in the end—if you knew him—is probably not a bad kid, really, who wanted to get out of some work, who had what he perceived to be a justification, who probably wasn’t thinking of sin and God and the cosmos when he tried to trick his professor into giving him a break.
But evil can be like this: unexpected, insistent, stemming from places and people we’d like to think better of. And that’s the thing. This kind of evil—the kind that lies and seethes with pride, that uses deception and flattery to get what it wants,that obscures and obfuscates—can be deadly. All the more so because we don’t treat it with much seriousness.
It was always a matter of bewilderment to me the sins we “picked” to focus on. My home church used to hold skits and seminars and whole entire sermons on the evils of premarital sex and the dangers of pregnancy out of wedlock. I know believers who protested sexual sins at college campuses and carried signs and engaged in thunderous call-outs on the use of pornography and alcoholism.
Where are the protest signs for lying? Why don’t we see “GOD DIDN’T MAKE US TO SPEAK WITH LYING TONGUES” slogans parading around on the local news? Where are the skits in congregations and churches meant to make us sweat, shamefaced, and promise to God that no matter what else we did we wouldn’t do that? Where’s the Christian anti-lying movement, parroted at Christian conferences with pithy slogans and illustrations of how lying can wreck a life?
We don’t do that.
Maybe because lying lacks spectacle. It’s not as shock-inducing as some other sins, being at times less scandalous in the amount of gasps it can produce and spectators it might titillate. Lying can be subtle, quiet, barely noticeable. Maybe because we don’t care unless someone important (like a celebrity or a pastor) is lying about something we care about (sexual sin). Maybe—and this one hurts—lying is something many believers do with such frequency or with such commonality that condemning it to the same bin as some of the “other” awful sins hits a little close to home.
Meanwhile, Ananias and Sapphira died for lying to God. Ananias was struck down without even saying a word! That he set the money before Peter, implying it was the full sum, was enough to earn the condemnation. A lying tongue is second on the list of things God hates, second only behind “haughty eyes” (and what this says about our sin priorities, I don’t entirely know).
Strange what we’ve grown to tolerate, or even excuse, especially in service of what we perceive to be a greater good. But the ends don’t justify the means, and God judges the heart.
I’d like to posit here that lying might be especially deadly because it’s indicative of a poisoned heart. The sins that emerge from our mouths are deep-rooted. They speak to our us-ness, who we are inside, the kind of self we’ve cultivated. Garbage in, garbage out.
Any believer who finds that lying comes easily should be a five-alarm fire.
And yet. And yet. When it comes to these “less visible” sins, we’re quick to forgive (especially ourselves)—so quick, sometimes, that we might miss the impact of them or what the sin might tell us about the state of our heart. As I pondered that student, unrepentantly lying his face off for a series of six to seven emails, I wondered: what sort of a person will you become? What sort of a person will this make you, in the end? Will you ever look back at this as something that mattered? It does. It does.
I grieve for him. And I grieve for us, too. May we never lose the gravity of our sin—or the refreshing wonder of God’s grace and forgiveness every time it renews. Lying matters. But if we recognize that and seek to mend our hearts, truth will begin to leaven our words.
Samaritan's Song 