5.
Tell
Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies
Let’s go
back to Aaron and the “little white lie” about the golden calf, shall we? (Told you we’d come back to it!)
What do you
do with a child who lies to you? Not what we think of as a “little
white lie”, like what happens when someone leaves the bread out (“I didn’t do it!”), but a BIG LIE.
Like, oh, I don’t know… “The golden calf just jumped out of the vat…”
Of course Moses didn’t believe him. Nobody would have believed him, least of
all God. When a child lies to cover up their screw-up, isn’t your
instinct to double their punishment?
I’ve used that response more than once in my fatherhood: something along the
lines of, “I was going to let the accident slide if you’d been honest about it, but if you’re going to lie
to me, then you’re in deep trouble, mister!” (Hmm. What makes me assume that the liar is a boy? Experience.)
Consider this example from the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah,
often called “the crying prophet” because he grieved for the impending conquest
of the people of Israel, which God had commanded him to tell the Hebrew people,
AND that it was too late to prevent the diaspora.
But at least Jeremiah was a real prophet. Look
what happens when the Lord runs across the false prophets in Jeremiah
14:13-16 à
13 Then I said: “Ah,
Lord God, behold, the prophets say to them,
‘You shall not see the sword, nor shall you have famine, but I will give you
assured peace in this place.’” 14 And the Lord said to me: “The
prophets are prophesying lies in My Name. I did not send them, nor did I
command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision,
worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds. 15 Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who prophesy in My Name
although I did not send them, and who say, ‘Sword and famine shall not come
upon this land’: By sword and famine those prophets shall be consumed. 16 And
the people to whom they prophesy shall be cast out in the streets of
Jerusalem, victims of famine and sword, with none to bury them—them, their
wives, their sons, and their daughters. For I will pour out their evil upon
them.”
So, let’s
summarize that for you: The false prophets made up the fact that “sword
and famine shall not come upon this land.” So in order to punish not
only those false prophets but also
the foolish people of Israel who never bothered to check on the validity of
these prophets, “By sword and famine those prophets shall be consumed. And the
people to whom they prophesy shall be cast out into the streets of Jerusalem,
victims of famine and sword…”
Live by the lie, die by the lie.
But God doesn’t always do that; at least, He
didn’t do that with Aaron. And of all the explanations I’ve read as to why
God didn’t do that, the famed Episcopal Bishop Phillip Brooks (of Boston, Mass,
born 1835, died 1893) expressed the likely rationale the best. (Despite the claims of my children to the
contrary, I’m NOT old enough to have heard him preach this sermon live, but I have
read his discourse courtesy of the magic of BibleHub.com.) His sermon on the Big Lie in Exodus
32:14 can be condensed into four bullet points, as follows:
1)
“We are ALL
ready to lay the blame on the furnaces,” Brooks says. “But, properly
speaking, it can create no character. It can make no truly faithful soul a doubter. It never DID. It never CAN.” His first
point, by my understanding, is that the character-corroding quality of the
lie itself is more punishment than anything the Lord would have put upon Aaron.
A larger issue Bishop Brooks raises is that there
but for the grace of God goes us. We are ALL ready to throw someone – or
something – under the bus if it protected us. And the most important
point is this: had Aaron been a “truly
faithful soul”, he could not and would not have stooped to
the level required to “blame the
furnaces”. He had to have
been a doubter to start with!
(Somehow, for the life of me, I can’t imagine how someone could
have possibly seen all the miracles that Aaron had seen and still doubt.
But that’s exactly why the proof that non-believers demand from us is a
waste of our effort. Even were God Himself to turn your hand leprous, you still
won’t believe in Him if you’ve been blinded by the adversary. )
2)
“The
subtlety and attractiveness of this excuse extends not only to the result which
we see coming forth in ourselves; it covers also the fortunes of those for whom
we are responsible. It is a very hard treatment of the poor, dumb,
defenseless world which cannot answer to defend itself.” We speak ill of
the dead, the absent, and the mute inanimate world if it serves our purposes. That’s not just Aaron: That’s the whole
human race – every one of us “stiff-necked”, sinful people. Take the plank out of your own eye before
you throw Aaron under the bus for his ridiculous response.
3)
“There is
delusion and self-defense in this excuse.” Did Aaron really believe his own excuse? Hitler’s
propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels is reputed to have said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it.” I think Mr.
Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, is the one credited with the
similar statement that “if you say
something often enough, it’s true.” (I remember hearing the number “17
times” in connection with that quote, but I can’t vouch for its accuracy.) But
this was Aaron’s instinctive reaction, not a planned subterfuge. Bishop
Brooks goes on with his explanation thusly: “Very rarely does a man excuse
himself to other men, and yet remain absolutely unexcused in his own
eyes.” Certainly, Aaron had convinced himself he hadn’t done anything wrong, and in justifying his actions to
his brother he was probably continuing to justify it to himself as well. Aaron
could probably have passed a lie detector test – he wasn’t lying; he had simply
convinced himself of the truth of a falsehood.
4)
“If the
world is full of the Aaron spirit, where are we to find its cure? Its source
is a vague and defective sense of personality. I cannot look for its cure
anywhere short of that great assertion of the human personality which is made
when a man personally enters into the power of Jesus Christ.” Remember,
the first step in any of the twelve-step programs so famous for curing
addictions is to admit that a problem exists. If we are so self-deluded
that we’ve repeated the lie often enough to believe it ourselves, we’ll never
get past step one.
†
What did
the Lord do with Aaron’s lie?
What could
He do?
Bishop Brooks hit it on the head – under pressure,
Aaron’s true self came out. And when a parent is giving punishment
designed to fix the problem, but the only possible cure for
Aaron’s deep-rooted issue is “the power
of Jesus Christ”, as Brooks says, His options were limited.
Destroy him? (He eventually did.) Or give him time and exposure to the
glory of God in the hope of his finding his was out of the dark place his mind
and soul must have resided in. (He did
that, too.)
Some
problems, even for God, are so entrenched that they don’t lend
themselves to immediate solutions. For
children whose souls are lost, sometimes all we can do sometimes is love
them, and expose them to God’s love, and to the power of Jesus
Christ.
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