NOT to be taken at one’s word, is hard; and it betrays unwarranted severity, when, in daily intercourse with children or with servants, it is often said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world: “This is what you say, but it is not so.” He who makes a habit of this, fosters untruthfulness in child and servant alike.
“To speak the truth”, is of the ten commandments given on Sinai the only absolute and natural one, because it alone applies to the Eternal Being Himself; the truth being the expression of His very Being.
For God the first commandment is unthinkable. An image of Himself God has made. He can never take His holy name in vain. To the seventh day sabbath the creature is subject, but not God. The fifth commandment does not apply to the Eternal Being. Every day He kills the child of man. He robs by the violence of the elements. The seventh commandment of itself falls away. God covets everything that is ours. So there is acutally but one commandment (not as commandment of course, for who should command God), which in its essential nature applies to God, to wit, the ninth, the commandment regarding truth.
Therefore spake the Mediator, Himself being God: “I am the truth.”
And therefore also Satan is called: the father of lies.
Truth and falsehood stand in God and Satan directly over against one another, and it is our glory as men, that we have power to grasp the truth, but also the dreadfulness that it is possible for us to speak the untruth.
Yet even in fallen man, who is inwardly poisoned by falsehood, reverence for the beauty of truth is still so strongly alive, that to be called “liar”, is in all higher classes of society the blackest stigma.
Even where one means this, by gentler manners he softens the expression, because the stigma of liar would cut too starply.
Thus appreciation of truth counts among us as a mark of nobility of soul.
Circles in which to be called “liar” does no longer offend honor, have fallen below the human gauge.
There is something of this wounding of one’s honor also in the oath.
An oath is only in order, when danger of running aground upon falsehood, must be averted.
On the new earth, among the just men made perfect, even the possibility of the necessity of an oath will no more be thinkable. An oath can only be necessary among sinners, for sin’s sake, in circles where the poison of sin has entered.
The oath is the means of resistance against the danger which from the spirit of untruth menaces truth, innocence, and good faith.
Hence the perfectly lawful and natural use of the oath in the courts of justice, which in the name of God dispense the right, because we, sinners, stand before God’s eye in our untruthfulness. But hence also in circles of a higher tone of life, no oath is demanded from one another save in direst necessity; and no oath is offered.
This takes place among the dregs of society, where all truth is venal. It is the most untruthful man, who is most ready to take an oath; and it is among that low, rough class of men, that again and again all sorts of oaths are demanded of one another. Oaths, which frequently, alas, have no foundation in truth, but on the contrary, in falsehood and deceit.
Thus perjury is created, which is an almost satanic hardening against the truth.
Then the judge must stand in between, with human punishment to punish the criminal, who defiantly turned even the sacred oath into sin.
First you should have a clear perception in your mind of the nature of the truth, of the evil character of the lie, of the solemn significance of the oath, and of that satanic nature of perjury, if you would understand, what it must have been to Jesus, when in the presence of the whole Sanhedrin Caiaphas dared to defy Him with the words: “I adjure Thee by the Living God”.
Jesus forced to an oath!
Not to an oath as witness in behalf of some one else, but to an oath concerning His own word and character.
“I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God” (Matt. 26:63).
As Son of God He had come into the world. As Son of God He had announced Himself. And now the Sanhedrin stood up against Him, as though they would say: “This is what You say, but you know, this is not so. You can not take an oath on it, nor would you dare to do so. Yet, if you dare, then, do so. I, Caiaphas, the High Priest, demand it of you. I adjure you by the Living God. Of two things one. Either you will refuse to take an oath, and acknowledge thereby the falseness of your claim; or you will take it, and stand guilty before us all of perjury and blasphemy. This will disgrace you but the more deeply, as it can not prove your preposterous claim, that you are the Son of God.
Thus was he bent upon the exaction of an oath. Jesus must bend and break down before it, or dare the imputation of perjury.
Hence when Jesus had taken the oath, Caiaphas rent his clothes and exclaimed: “He hath spoken blasphemy,” and left his seat, that with all the members of the Sanhedrin he might attack Jesus, whom they now took for a perjuror, and make Him the target of their violence and scorn.
DO you now realize what grievous insult, and in it what keener suffering, this compulsion to take an oath, and the immediately following accusation of perjury, must have been to Jesus?
You also find it hard, when you are asked to take an oath; for every such demand shows, that without it you are deemed capable of speaking an untruth, and of choosing the lie in preference to the truth.
But this obligation rests upon you, because you are a sinner. You feel the offensiveness of it, but you yield, for your sin’s sake.
But what a different sensation it must have roused in the soul of Jesus, to have an oath demanded of Him, in Whom there was no sin, and in Whom the Truth itself had become flesh.
To be ordered to take an oath not in a civil matter, not in the role of witness, but before the spiritual tribunal of God’s house, in the midst of His own priesthood reflecting priests, and this with respect to His own person and being, His mission from God as Redeemer and Savior of the world, His official existence as Son of God.
And yet Jesus undergoes also this humiliation willingly. He does not refuse. With that condescending love, wherewith the Eternal Being, meeting us in our human weakness, with an oath confirmed His word, in our behalf, so, before the Sanhedrin Jesus takes the oath.
Never intent upon His own interest, always seeking to promote yours, in taking the oath He declares: Thou hast said. Yea, that He might yet avert from the guilty head of Caiaphas the threatening possibility of the moment, to wit: the. understanding of His oath as perjury, He tells him of His judgment to come. “Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.”
But nothing stops the satanic impulse of the stirring evil.
Caiaphas does not spare Jesus the very bitterest, and in the presence of the judges accuses Him of “perjury”.
And also this most poisonous drop from the bitter cup Jesus must drink.
What has never overtaken you, was imposed upon your Savior in the court of justice.
Thou, Who callest Thyself Messiah, art a perjuror before the tribunal of the living God.
We, who are all conscious of having a part in the fellowship of untruthfulness, even though it were merely in its outward form, can not conceive how such slander, sparing nothing, must have wounded the soul of Jesus, Him in Whom even the faintest suggestion of what was untrue, or opposed to truth, could never have arisen.
When an honest man, by stress of circumstance in business comes in contact with a band of deceivers who make nothing of a lie or even perjury, the very presence of such low company offends him. He feels, that he is not at home among such. Everything within him revolts against such lying and deceiving. And he thanks God, when he succeeds in extricating himself from so much human self-degradation.
He who has passed through this has suffered under it, and when he has made good his escape, he has called himself fortunate. And when, on occasion, one of these bold deceivers, dares to exact an oath from him who is honest, and even intimates the suspicion of perjury, the man of honor turns away with loathing from what is beneath contempt, and what brings the flush of anger to his face.
And this is but one who is fallible, and who presently upon his knees confesses himself a sinner before God.
What then must such humiliating treatment have been to Jesus!
To Him, Whose inner Self revolted from all falsehood, Whom every form of lying brought pain, such as we sinners only suffer in cases of extreme cruelty.
What must it have been to Jesus, to see Himself delivered to the lying-spirit of such a degraded tribunal of priests! He the Son of God, by them to be forced to take an oath, as though He were a common malefactor? And after He had taken that oath, amid ribald noises, to be pointed at as a man guilty of perjury.
This also has been a part of “the travail of His soul”, a measure of suffering which presently bare this excellent fruit, that more than ever yet it has made “lying” hated by His saints.
“When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it” (John 8:44), was the sketch which Jesus drew of Satan’s inner make-up; and for that terrible word Satan avenged himself, through Caiaphas, when in the end Jesus Himself, was called not merely a liar, but even “a liar under perjury”.
Over against this vengeance of Satan Jesus now places His own.
The vengeance of His love, that He loosens the heart of His redeemed ones from lying, imparts to it the sense of truth, enriches it with the love of truth. truth.
This flower of His suffering has bloomed these many ages; it still blooms; and he who walks humbly from love of his Savior, is conscious of its blossom budding in his soul.
For though it is true, that among “Christians”, and in “Christian families” there is still much untruthfulness abroad, such “Christians” have been estranged from Jesus; such “Christians” lack the inspiration of the secret of salvation.
Untruthfulness in the Christian domain bears witness against those who have drifted away from Christ, not against Jesus.
For as in the centuries that lie behind us, the rule of the kingdom still holds good, that hatred of a lie is the measure of love for Jesus.
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