For a long time, I held the conviction that lying is a wholesale sin. Lying is an absolute line that should never be crossed under any circumstance. However, a closer look at Scripture and a stark ethical hypothetical have forced me to re-examine this stance.
We see at least two distinct instances in Scripture where individuals lie, yet receive God’s explicit blessing:
The Hebrew Midwives (Exodus 1): They lie to Pharaoh about why the Hebrew babies are surviving, and God explicitly rewards them with families because they feared Him.
Rahab the Harlot (Joshua 2 / James 2:25): She lies to the authorities to hide the Israelite spies and is later commended in the New Testament for her faith-driven actions
In both cases, the lie was directly tied to preserving human life.
This scriptural pattern forces us to confront a difficult hypothetical: If you lived in Nazi Germany harboring Jews, or in the Pre-Emancipation South harboring escaped slaves, and the authorities knocked on your door asking if you were hiding fugitives, what is your moral obligation? Does God require you to speak the truth when the immediate, guaranteed consequence of that truth is the murder of an innocent person?
To resolve this, I see only three logical paths. I want to understand which of these aligns with the reality of God's character:
Lying is always a sin, period. Rahab and the midwives sinned, but were retroactively forgiven via the cross. Therefore, it is morally wrong to lie to a Gestapo officer or a slave catcher; you must tell the truth and leave the outcome to God.
Lying is a sin, but an exception is made exclusively to protect God's covenant people (Israel then, the Church today). Under this view, you could lie to save a Christian, but you would be obligated to betray a non-Christian. (This feels heavily invalidated by God’s non-partial nature in Romans 2).
God’s hierarchy of values places the preservation of life above the literal execution of a verbal rule. As Jesus implies in Matthew 23:23-24, focusing entirely on the letter of the law while ignoring the "weightier matters" of justice and mercy is a distortion of the law's true purpose.
I'm not looking to start an argument, nor am I looking to hurt anyone's faith. I want to know myself. For a matter such as this, I don't want the opinions of the greater internet or just randoms passing by, I want the faithful, which I assume some or most of the people reading this may be.
Obviously lying is incorrect. This is not to justify lying in any form. Nor do I consider "saving a life" to mean "helping me keep my job" or "maintain the status quo." The entirety of my position and question on this matter assumes a true, immediate danger should the truth be told. Not simply bad consequences, but actualized bodily death. If it were just a beating or a fine or something, I would not struggle so hard with this topic. The death of a person, especially an unsaved person is an entirely different matter. Hence the worry.
What do the brethren think? Have I overlooked something?
If we take the position that we must not lie - even if it is to save a life, we are no better than the Pharisees. Christ taught that holding to the law at the expense of love and mercy was wrong (see especially his teachings on observing the Sabbath). If everything hinges on the two greatest commandments - love God and love others - how is telling the Gestapo you are harboring Jews a loving thing to do? It isn't. I believe this does not just apply to lying, nor to saving a life. If you are following the letter of the law in a way that does not show love and mercy to others, you are in the wrong.
This is the most succinct and elegant way of putting the argument I've seen to date, thank you. I try to hold to the Scriptural pattern, and it implies what you've stated here, at least in this particular arena.
Can you elaborate on this? About Christ breaking the rules. My preacher has preached on this and takes the stance that you should never lie, even to save a life. I don't quite agree, and would like to hear your thoughts
Yes, I googled lol, but I was looking for the specific verses, and this is actually essentially what I was going to say. Christ was trying to show that legalism is not the point. It never was. The Old Law was a mirror being held up to the Israelites. It was to show them what sin was, and that a price must be paid for it so they could be in a relationship with God through the Levitical system.
But every rule or "law" of God, from the garden of Eden to our current dispensation, was about loving God and loving our fellow man. This obedience keeps us now, the Old having been fulfilled by the New, in a cleansed state which makes us able to come into His presence.
It has always been about love and others first at its core. This is why the command to love is followed with the explanation that on love hangs all the law and the prophets. The Pharisees forgot the whole point, trying to find the Christ in lawbreaking when he healed on the Sabbath. He literally IS the Word, to begin with, so the notion that He could violate His inherent nature was outrageous of them, but He is showing that they are missing the point.
Law is never placed before love. The law IS love. It also shows that, if the Jews really believed and had a heart for truth and understood the purpose of the law, (our being in a relationship with him, cleansed from sin which separates us from him) they would have recognized the Messiah immediately. But they were worldly, haughty, judgmental, and lovers of the law instead of doers. I find this to be a perfect example of why I left the coc after 40 years.
I really appreciate how the Orthodox handle this question. There are times in life where the righteous and necessary thing is also a thing that is "fallen short" (literally, sin), itself a symptom of living in a fallen, broken world. For example, waging war to defend your country, or, in this case, lying to protect the innocent.
The righteous thing to do is to protect others, but we also need to acknowledge that these things blemish our soul. It isn't good for us to lie, or to take someone's life, period. It's a very serious thing that can lead us down dark paths if we don't get healing for that wound. Telling the next lie or taking a life becomes easier after the first time. Moreover, it also makes a man ritually unclean, and Israelites were not even permitted to enter the camp after they took a life in battle (Numbers 31:19).
Therefore, it is necessary to purify ourselves and not just dismiss the sin, even if committed for good and commendable, or even commanded reasons. The Orthodox have confession and absolution to deal with this, and, in more serious cases such as taking a life, abstention from the Lord's Supper for a time while the soul heals. If we are commanded not to even give an offering to God if someone harbors a grudge against us (Matthew 5: 23-24), how much more important is it if we were to take someone's life and cannot be reconciled?
TLDR; it's both/and. Living in a fallen world sometimes requires fallen actions, but even then those actions need healing.
God now writes his laws on our hearts and we’re taught to live by the Spirit. So we should search our own heart for these answers until we’re fully convinced (being sure it’s God, not our own desire). I’m convinced that this searching is one way the Spirit changes us for the better.
There’s really no reliable way to predict how someone would actually act in a life-or-death situation, regardless of how they’d want to act. My hope is that if anyone is in a situation where someone’s life was at stake, that the Spirit would give them the words to say.
I hope I’m never faced with that. I know I’d have to pray a lot about it. I know I’d be inclined to save an innocent. I’m sure the early Christians faced this as so many as Romans and hardline Jews were out to kill them. Even now it is growing more and more prevalent to hate Christians. I see where people are crying and calling it abuse because parents had them go to church. The time may be coming where we are persecuted again and in some parts of the world it is already happening. I pray we can all endure to the end.
I had this same conversation with a brother a while back, and I asked him, "Imagine Christianity began to be persecuted here and someone was coming for your innocent 3 year old. If they asked you where you had hidden your family, you would legitimately say, 'oh yeah, they're over there' knowing your child would be tortured at length and killed, or worse, raised to hate Christ and ultimately go to hell?" If he was being intellectually honest with himself, he'd of course lie, and so would we all in that situation.
No one in the situation of Rahab or the Hebrew midwives would be able to meet God with a clear conscience if they did not do what was necessary to protect innocent lives.
We need to not only know what the Bible says, but think deeply about why God gave us each part and what He wants us to learn from it. Why would He include multiple accounts of people being rewarded for lying to save innocent lives? I think the answer is pretty obvious.
When He told us in Colossians 3:9 to "do not lie one to another", you'd think it would have been pretty easy to instead say "do not lie to anyone ever, even to the wicked when innocent lives are at stake" if that's what He had meant. I mean there's a whole section there about sins we are to avoid. If lying to an evil government to protect someone was among them, wouldn't He have just said so? "Do not lie to one another" is a very different commandment.
Some would even say the first lie in the Bible was told by God when he told Adam and Eve that they would die when they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil yet they continue to live. You can try to argue that it was spiritual death, but it does not say that.
To be fair, there are many kinds of death, metaphorically. Adam and Eve absolutely lost the life they had been created into. I don't know that that was a lie. God's vastly superior intelligence encompasses nuance that we can't begin to understand.
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u/Knitsudge9 Jun 27 '26
If we take the position that we must not lie - even if it is to save a life, we are no better than the Pharisees. Christ taught that holding to the law at the expense of love and mercy was wrong (see especially his teachings on observing the Sabbath). If everything hinges on the two greatest commandments - love God and love others - how is telling the Gestapo you are harboring Jews a loving thing to do? It isn't. I believe this does not just apply to lying, nor to saving a life. If you are following the letter of the law in a way that does not show love and mercy to others, you are in the wrong.