Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 3-116 Sunday 15 Jun 2003

Psalms on Sundays Reading: Psalm 12 – THE GOLD STANDARD OF TRUTH

Come to God’s Word with sincere thoughts and words of your own.

The motto of the London Stock Exchange, ‘My word is my bond’, may need a little reframing for the digital age, but no one reading this psalm can be in any doubt that the standard of truthful speech also needs a lesson from the ancient world. Business integrity, personal relationships and protection of the weak and needy – all of them – float or sink on a sea of words (vs 2,5,8); and when no one has a firm standard of truthfulness the Lord will get involved (vs 5,6).

How rigorous can we be? Our six-year-old has just accused us of lying because we told the organiser he couldn’t go to a party he didn’t want to go to. Should we exempt ‘white lies’ to avoid hurt? At another level, whatever else ‘postmodern’ means, it involves seeing truth as a provisional construct in a context rather as than an absolute. Can Christians rub along with such an intellectual context, recognising that what we assert will only be taken as a provisional, local truth?

From this psalm, we might consider that compromise with the truth is dangerous because it will compromise justice. What causes the Lord to intervene in this psalm is the oppression of the weak and needy (v 5). When a public figure is caught lying, even now the system totters unless they are seen to be punished. There is also the danger of taking a smug delight in their fall.

Contrast all this muddy dealing with the words of the Lord (v 6), flawless, refined, purified. But they are words still, vehicles of communication rather than objects behind a glass case or fetishised in some arcane argument. They do things, they protect us from the dishonest and the wicked. And, perhaps we should add, from the tendency to dishonesty, even among the faithful.

What temptations to half-truth or worse are there in your working and private life? And how might they be resisted?

– Roger Pooley

Copyright Scripture Union, 2003, Encounter with God

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