The Destiny for Dishonesty
September 27, 2006
Pastor Matt Black
Midweek Service
Revelation 21:8
Open your Bible to Revelation 21. The title of tonight’s message is “The Destiny for Dishonesty”. We are looking at verses 1-8.
We read in Revelation 21:1-8, “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. 2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. 4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. 5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. 6 And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely. 7 He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. 8 But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”
Introduction: We come before God even now with great fear and trembling because we all know that we have all told the lie. And yet we are still so hardened to the lies that even now remain in our lives. We make excuses, and we are blind to the dishonesty in our lives. We know that a lie sends people to hell. The destiny for dishonesty is the Lake of Fire. We need to have our eyes enlightened. We need understanding and grace—abundant grace, so that we might see why indeed a lie is worthy of eternal death. A lie is the destruction of the Gospel, and it must be punished with great wrath in hell. The Lord says that “all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”
Why does God send liars, or whoremongers, or murderers, or anyone that transgresses His law into the Lake of Fire? Of course, God is holy. He can have no sin in His presence. He is light and “in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). God is also just, and He must give the just recompense for all sin. We understand that, and that is a legal understanding of the matter. But let us bring it down a bit more to home so that we can understand this teaching. Why do liars go to hell? Why are they separated from God for all of eternity? To trust in the Lord is to not have the need to lie. When you trust in Christ, there is no environment for lying. We say “Jesus is Lord”, and therefore, we do not have to recreate history or shift any facts. Jesus is Lord—He has total control over all things. All history is His story. Therefore I’m going to tell His story truthfully. It will all be revealed on the Last Day anyway. Therefore I’m going to tell the truth. A Christian trusts that God is orchestrating every detail –both good and bad—in his life. Therefore, the Christian does not commit adultery, because he believes that God is perfect and good and loving in giving him the wife of his youth. A Christian has no need to steal. The providence of Jesus Christ who is Lord over all is sufficient to meet every one of my material needs. I don’t need to lust, or steal, or lie because Jesus is Lord! He owns everything. Anything outside of Christ is a lie. The only alternative to lying is Jesus Christ. He’s the King. He controls every little circumstance. To lie is to be bound up in deceit—he who sins is the slave of sin! Jesus said in John 8:32, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Illustration: Maybe this week, the Johnson family was scratching their heads saying, “What next Lord?” At this time, they are feeling a little bit like Job. Their daughter was diagnosed with cancer, their basement flooded with untold damage and no insurance, and also this week, Bro. Gary had a debilitating fall that has him on crutches as we speak. Have you ever had a week like that? You hope that they are every hundred years or so. But they’re more than that aren’t they? And in those times of high pressure, we are tempted to steal and to lust and to lie and to desire things to be different than they are. Why?
What we are prone to do in high pressure times is doubt the Lordship of Christ! We doubt the goodness of God and His love and His mercy. We doubt that Jesus Christ is Lord. Every time you lie, lust, or steal, you deny the sufficiency of Christ and His claim on your life. The message that the transgression of God’s law sends is that Jesus really isn’t Lord, so I have to change His course and lie, lust, and steal to make things different than they are. The lie says that His way is not perfect! Liars therefore must be separated from God forever. They have rejected the only One who is the Truth, and now they have no atonement for their sin. A lie is the rejection of Christ’s way. Every time we lie, we deny the Lord that bought us. Every time we lie, we are saying, “Jesus Christ is not able to handle my circumstances…I have to shift the truth!”
So lying has everything to do with the Gospel. The Gospel stops lies. It brings people face to face with reality.
When we commit any kind of sin we would take God off of His throne and we would usurp that sacred throne, just as Satan wanted to do when he rebelled against the Lord and fell from heaven like lightening.
The way of Jesus Christ NEVER includes lying. How do I know that? Because Proverbs 12:22 says, “Lying lips are an abomination to the LORD, But those who deal faithfully are His delight.”
God delights in those who deal in faithfulness. A Christian may fall into a lie, but he does not continue in it. His is not ultimately a slave to the lie. The Spirit of God within him demands he tell the truth. O that we could rid ourselves of all lies. That day will come, but it has not arrived yet. Lying is everywhere. But where does it come from?
I. The Fountain of Lying. Where do lies come from? We like to say, “The devil made me do it.” No, the devil doesn’t make anyone do anything. The devil’s a salesman. The devil’s a marketer. He says, “Buy my wares. This will make you healthy, wealthy, and wise.” That’s what he did in the Garden. He didn’t force Eve to eat of the fruit. He was marketing. He was a salesman. The devil doesn’t make us lie. Lies are manufactured by our own heart. Jeremiah 17:9 tells us clearly, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
The heart, your heart—my heart—is the fountain of all wickedness. Wickedness finds its beginning in a lie. Your heart is a lying machine. Here Jeremiah says the heart is “desperately wicked”. It is incurably wicked. It is so desperate a situation as to be incurable. Man does not have the solution to the problem of sin and deceit. In other words, we cannot save ourselves. When we are saved, we are saved from something. We are saved from sin—from its power, from its penalty, and one day we’ll be saved from the presence of sin. There is one solution though. When a person receives Jesus Christ as Lord, the incurably wicked heart becomes curable through Jesus Christ. I love what Ezekiel says in Ezekiel 36:26, “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.” Jeremiah says in another place, “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33). This is the only way that lying can be cured. The fountain of lying can only be stopped through the work of the Spirit of God and the power of the Word of God! You must be born again. We need “the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5). That fountain of the lying heart can only be stopped by Jesus Christ who is the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). He is truth, and in order to stop lying, we must abide in Him (John 15) through His Word (John 17:17). So how do we stop lying? We need to turn to Christ! “Turn your eyes upon Jesus!” Sing, “I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold!” I don’t need to lie or lust or steal. I’d rather have Jesus and nothing to show for it on this earth than to die as a liar who owned the world.
It is amazing that any one of us can know the Lord. We are from birth infected with sin from our mother’s womb. Psalm 58:3 records that “The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.” We are conceived in iniquity, and it is only God’s mercy and love and grace wherein He visits us, wherein He deals with us according to His loving-kindness.
Illustration: We are incorrigible. Have you ever had a son or a daughter cross their arms and stiffen their neck? Maybe you are correcting them, and they refuse to cry. Their pride stands up inside of them. You ask them to sit, and they outwardly obey, but they are standing upright on the inside! And that is how we all are by nature. We are incorrigible and with a wicked incurable deceitful heart. The heart is incurable—we are left for God to intervene! In our natural state without Christ, we like Adam flee from God until the day we hear the voice of the Lord calling to us “Adam, where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9).
II. The Forms of Lying. How do lies manifest themselves in us?
A. You can lie with your life.
1 John 1:5-6, “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 6 If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth.” The believer’s life is a transparent life that basks in fellowship with God. The moment we find ourselves out of fellowship with God, we enter the deceitful life of the hypocrite. Many times we can be like the Pharisees. If we say we know God, our life must match it. Jesus had harsh words for people like this. Matthew 23:27, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” Like the Pharisees, we make everything just perfect on the outside, but on the inside we have spiritual deadness and uncleanness.
Application: We call ourselves Christians, and yet, when the door closes, and supper’s not right, we complain, don’t we? Or we might have the morning that we wish would go away. The dog bites you, and you trip as you’re on your way out the door only to soil your nice pressed clothes. Then you realize you can’t find your keys because you’ve locked them in the car. And of course there’s that meeting you need to get to in about 15 minutes, and you know you’ll be late. Everything is going wrong—pressure fills the air. It is at this time that we must stir up our hearts to remember the promises of God and walk in the strength of the Lord. But what do we do? We live the spiritually lazy life of a hypocrite. We sin against God in our worry. We say He’s not sovereign as we display our frustration and even anger.
Has this ever happened to you? That’s hypocrisy! We day that God is in control and that we trust Him. And yet we’re not trusting Him. We worry instead of pray. We complain instead of rejoice. We backbite and gossip instead of gently dealing with the person that has offended us. Why do we do this? Because we are cowards. We insist on fighting in our own strength all the while hearing the voice of the Saviour prodding us, “My grace is sufficient!” We ignore His voice to our own peril.
So we can lie with our own life, and we do it all the time. We say that we believe that every creature should be evangelized. And we close our mouths when we have the perfect opportunity, and the divine appointment is so obvious, and we turn away. So we can say that we love the Lord all we want, but if our life doesn’t show it, we are hypocrites; we are liars. So you can lie with your life.
B. Secondly, you can lie with your lips.
1 John 3:18, “My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.” We are so prone to lie when we open up our mouths that John says here keep your mouth shut. Let your life speak! We open our mouths when we should keep them quiet, and when a brother needs encouragement or rebuke, we say we don’t want to be the Holy Spirit to them! We have a false piety—a false spirituality. What are some ways we open our mouths in lies?
1. Slandering your neighbor—Gossip. This is a sin against the ninth commandment. Thomas Watson said, “The scorpion carries his poison in his tail, the slanderer carries his poison in his tongue.” David said, “They laid to my charge things that I knew not” (Psalm 35:11). Gossip is a lie. It is an exaggeration of the truth many times. It is a fluffing up of a flaw, and as kind as we try to be when we present that prayer request, it is malicious, that is, it is meant to do harm by feeding our carnal curiosity. We say we need to have ethics in business, but we have no ethics in the church! We gossip, and we say things that are not quite true or that we haven’t checked out—that are second or third or fourth or fifth hand information. Gossip is a type of slander. The Scripture calls slandering, smiting with the tongue in Jeremiah 18:18. The enemies of Jeremiah used a very dangerous weapon against him. They said, “Come, and let us smite him with the tongue.” James 3:6 tells us that “the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.” Gossip is a smiting with the tongue without investigation, without giving that person due process. Gossip says this person is guilty until proven innocent. We must as Christians do all that we can to give our brethren due process because Jesus says “with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you” (Mark 4:24). If you say your brother is guilty until or unless he’s proven innocent, and that is how the Lord will judge you! No, go to the brother if there is an offense and if he will not hear you, go with two witnesses, and if he will not hear you and the witnesses, take it to the church. And if he will not hear the church, treat him as a heathen and as a publican. He does not deserve to bear the name of Christ. There is a way to deal with things that you hear! Go to the source.
Psalm 15:1-5, “LORD, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill? 2 He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. 3 He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour. 4 In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoureth them that fear the LORD. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not. 5 He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be moved.”
The Christian will tell the truth even if it hurts us. Gossip will not survive in that kind of an atmosphere. If we will tell the truth one to another, gossip will die. I love how Matthew 18:15 puts it, “Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone.” Alone! Alone! Gossip cannot survive when you go to the source, and to him or her alone! There’s no need to trudge up so many things that we trudge up. It’s wickedness; it’s wrong; it’s evil. Do you want your sins poured out before everyone? Then don’t display the sins of others, especially if what you are saying may very well, and probably is a lie in the first place. Gossip will kill your spiritual life and it will injure the church. You go ahead and gossip, and one day you will find out you will be the object of derision and gossip. You will reap what you sow.
2. Speaking that which is false. 'Lying lips are abomination to the Lord.' Proverbs 12:22. To lie is to speak that which one knows to be an untruth. There is nothing more contrary to God than a lie. The Holy Ghost is called the 'Spirit of Truth.' I John 4:6. The character of a man that shall go to heaven, is that 'He speaketh the truth in his heart.' Psalm 15:2.
3. Lying for someone else. “Which justify the wicked for reward.' Isaiah 5:23. He that seeks to make a wicked man just, makes himself unjust.
III. The Friends of Lying.
A. The first thing that pushes us to lie is Fear.
1. Man is Big (Fear of Man)
John 12:43 For they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.
· Do you often feel like other people are taking about you behind your back?
· Do you always need to defend yourself?
· Do you feel you have to maintain the controls in most situations?
· Do you get mad easily if things don’t go your way?
· Do you lack courage when you know you should talk to someone about Christ?
· Are you overly sensitive when someone gives you correction?
· Do you have trouble being open to God in public or private worship, not wanting to feel too vulnerable?
· Are you self-conscious?
· Are you critical or judgmental of others?
· Do you feel like people would not accept you if they really knew you?
You know if you don’t lie, you don’t have to hide. If you live a transparent life fearing God and not man, you will care very little about what men can do to you. We must say with David in Psalm 118:6, “The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?”
We need to live transparently. The enemy of the lie is this transparency that trust God to protect your vulnerability. If you are transparent, a lie cannot ultimately survive. If you show everyone who you are and live a transparent life, lies cannot live. We need to have clean hands and a pure heart. If there’s nothing to hide, then there’s nothing to lie about.
2. God is Small (a lack of Fear for God). Look at this. God is small in the liar’s mind. Verse 18 of Romans 3 says it plainly, “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” How is it manifested? A few verses earlier in verse 13, Paul had exposed their unbelief in the fruit of their hear and lips, “Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit.”
Look at the entire context: Romans 3:10-18, “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: 11 There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. 12 They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. 13 Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: 14 Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: 15 Their feet are swift to shed blood: 16 Destruction and misery are in their ways: 17 And the way of peace have they not known: 18 There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
A lie is an assault on the Lordship of Christ! It is treason against the providence and goodness of God.
B. The other thing that tempts us to lie is Greed.
Ananias and Sapphira: Acts 5:1-11. We think of greed only in the material realm, and of course that was the case for Ananias and Sapphira. But they were also greedy for spiritual position, which wasn’t spiritual at all. They wanted position in the church, they wanted to be looked up to, and they were willing to lie to get it. This type of covetousness is deadly to your spiritual life and will lead to lying.
Now it is important to notice that Ananias and Sapphira did not simply lie to the Apostles. Who did they lie to? They lied to the Holy Ghost, and when we lie or lust or covet or steal, who do we sin against. We may be sinning horizontally against men, but ultimately all our sins are vertical against God.
Conclusion: Liars shall have their part in the Lake of Fire. They will not be in heaven. Revelation 21:27, “And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” If you make a lie, you defy the Lordship of Christ. You cannot continue in this as a Christian. The Spirit of God won’t have it. If you continue in the lie, you reveal that you have no fruit of repentance. A Christian cannot bear to continue in sin! We may sin, but we cannot continue in it. So that person whose life is characterized by lying is simply one who denies that Christ is Lord and Saviour in the first place. And all these kinds of people… “all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death” (Revelation 21:8). Jesus is Lord. Let all who love Him depart from lying and all iniquity!
Closing Hymn: 400 Take My Life and Let it Be