Four hundred years before the events of the book of Exodus, God said to Abram,

Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. . . . To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates. (Genesis 15:13–14, 18)

And the cricket chirps up to the Lion, “You are God! This is your people. You mean for them to have this land? Then give it to them. Now! Not after four hundred years of affliction.” To which the Lion, with his ten thousand reasons for doing everything he does, 99.9 percent of which this God-counseling cricket knows nothing, says, “They shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16).

“So, yes,” the Lion essentially replies, “I will bring them back. And I will drive out the nations, and I will give my people this land. But I will make it clear that it will not be because of their righteousness, as if they deserve anything good from me, but it will be because of the wickedness of these nations (see Deuteronomy 9:4).

“You see, my dear little cricket, I am zealous for the justice of my punishments, and I am zealous for the freeness of my mercy. When I destroy, it is because wickedness is full, and I am just (Deuteronomy 9:5; 18:12). When I bless, it is because, though stubbornness abounds, my mercy is free (Deuteronomy 9:6–7). Don’t begrudge me several hundred years to teach these things. They are not quickly learned.”

So, for the next almost five centuries, God shows that he is God, and that the nations are wicked, and that his people too are rebellious and stubborn, and that his covenant blessings are free and undeserved — that they are grace.

He brings into being Isaac, as it were, out of two old people, as good as dead, Abraham and Sarah (Romans 4:19). He chooses Jacob over Esau that his purposes of election might stand (Romans 9:11–12). He summons a famine on the land (Psalm 105:16). He sends Joseph into slavery by the hands of his sinful brothers (Psalm 105:17). He makes a despised Hebrew prisoner the lord of all Egypt (Psalm 105:21).

Why? Joseph puts it like this, in one of the most important sentences in the Bible: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Genesis 50:20). Yes, kept alive to serve four hundred years in bondage in Egypt.

Unassailably, Unhurriedly Sovereign

As the book of Exodus begins, at the end of those four hundred years, God is about to do something astonishing. “The people of Israel . . . multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them. . . . The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied. . . . And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel” (Exodus 1:7, 12).

And in the midst of government-sponsored mass infanticide of all the baby Hebrew boys, God rescues one with a jaw-dropping turn of affairs. Pharaoh’s daughter, instead of killing the baby Moses as he floats in the river, pities him, and then unwittingly hires his own mother as a nurse and raises the boy in the very court that he would ruin.

“God is not in a hurry. He has purposes for his deeds, and he has purposes for his pace.”

In eighty years! As you can see, God is not in a hurry. He has purposes for his deeds, and he has purposes for his pace. Eighty years later, God calls Moses to be the deliverer (Exodus 7:7). A bush burns without being consumed (Exodus 3:2). A rod turns into a snake and back again. A hand turns leprous and back. And if needed, a cup of Nile water will become blood (Exodus 4:1–9). “So go, Moses, in my sovereign power. Go deliver my people.”

After all of which Moses replies, “Lord, I am not eloquent . . . but I am slow of speech and of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). That was not a good response. But as so often happens, a foolish response from us gets a glorious statement of God’s sovereignty: “Then the Lord said to him, ‘Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?’” (Exodus 4:11). “Don’t give me excuses about your mouth, Moses. I’m God! I made your mouth!”

Eventually, the reluctant prophet goes. And by his hand, God brings ten plagues upon Egypt, followed by a spectacular deliverance through the Red Sea — and all of it according to God’s inviolable plan. We know it was according to plan because before Moses ever approaches Pharaoh, God says to him,

I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. . . . I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you. Then I will . . . bring my hosts, my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment. (Exodus 3:19; 7:3–4)

And in the midst of these God-planned wonders, God states his purpose to Pharaoh:

For this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth. . . . I will get glory over Pharaoh. . . . And the Egyptians shall know that I am [Yahweh]. (Exodus 9:16; 14:4, 18)

Which brings us now to the main text of the message, and I invite you to turn to it, to Exodus 3:13–15.

All to Proclaim God’s Name

Up until now, the point of the message has been this: from the first prediction of the bondage in Egypt in Genesis 15:13 to the deliverance itself in Exodus 14, God’s ultimate purpose has been to show that he is God, absolute, sovereign, so that his mercies are free and his judgments are just.

Which is what we just heard in Exodus 9:16: “For this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” Or, to use the language of glory in Exodus 14:4, his purpose is that “I will be glorified over Pharaoh.” Then, back to his name: “And the Egyptians shall know that I am [Yahweh]” (Exodus 14:18). “That is my name.”

What does that mean? Exodus 3:13–15 is the most important text in the Hebrew Scriptures for understanding the personal name of God. That name is translated “LORD,” and it occurs about 6,800 times in the Old Testament (compared to 2,600 times for the word for “God,” Elohim). God chose to reveal the meaning of his personal name on the brink of the greatest deliverance of Israel, a deliverance whose purpose, he says, is to show his power, his glory, his name, so that all the nations would know it.

Three Steps to ‘Yahweh’

Here’s how he does it. Exodus 3:13–15:

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘[Yahweh], the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.”

In three steps, God reveals his name to Moses, and to us.

First, Exodus 3:14a: “God said to Moses, ‘I Am Who I Am.’” He did not say that was his name. He said, in effect, “Before you worry about my name, where I line up among the many gods of Egypt or Babylon or Philistia, and before you wonder about conjuring me with my name, and even before you wonder if I am the God of Abraham, be stunned by this: ‘I Am Who I Am.’” In other words: “I absolutely am. Before you get my name, get my being. That I am who I am — that I absolutely am — is first, foundational, and of infinite importance.” God is.

Second, Exodus 3:14b: “And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: “I Am has sent me to you.”’” Here he has not yet given Moses his name. He is building a bridge between his being and his name. Here he simply puts the statement of his being in the place of his name: “Say . . . ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” He’s saying, “The one who is — who absolutely is — sent me to you.”

Third, Exodus 3:15: “God also said to Moses, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: “The Lord [in Hebrew, “Yahweh”], the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” This is my name forever [the Lord, Yahweh].’”

In those three steps, God has finally given us his name. It’s translated “LORD” (all caps) in the English Bible. But the Hebrew would be pronounced something like “Yahweh” and is built on the word for “I am.”

“God is not becoming anything. He is who he is. Absolute perfection cannot be improved.”

Every time you hear the word “Yahweh” (or the short form “Yah,” which you hear every time you sing “hallelu-jah,” meaning “praise Yahweh”), or every time you see “LORD” in the English Bible, you should think, “This is a proper name, like Peter or James or John, built from the word for ‘I am’” — reminding us each time that God absolutely is.

That All Would Know

Writing the book of Exodus, Moses leaves us no doubt about the aim:

Exodus 7:5: “The Egyptians shall know that I am [Yahweh].”
Exodus 7:17: “By this you shall know that I am [Yahweh].”
Exodus 8:22: “That you may know that I am [Yahweh] in the midst of the earth.”
Exodus 10:2: “That you may know that I am [Yahweh].”
Exodus 14:4: “The Egyptians shall know that I am [Yahweh].”

If I repeated over and over in this message, “That you may know that I am John,” it would mean nothing. But if my name were John Power, and I said (as Ezekiel does with “Yahweh” 72 times), “That you may know that I am Power!” you would understand that this is more than a personal name. It has meaning. It is not just a name — it is reality. So it is with Yahweh. “Say to the people, ‘I Am sent me to you.’” That is, “Say to the people, ‘[Yahweh] sent me to you.’” Because Yahweh means “I am who I am. I am absolute being.”

And what does it mean for God, the God of Israel, our God, to be absolute being — to be “I Am Who I Am”?

1. God has no beginning.

I Am Who I Am means he never had a beginning. This staggers the mind. Every child asks, “Who made God?” and every wise parent says, “Nobody made God. God simply is and always was. No beginning.”

2. God has no end.

I Am Who I Am means God will never end. If he did not come into being; he cannot go out of being, because he is being. There is no place to go outside of being. There is only he. Before he creates, that’s all that is: God.

3. God is absolute reality.

I Am Who I Am means God is absolute reality. There is no reality before him. There is no reality outside of him unless he wills it and makes it. He is not one of many realities before he creates. He is simply there as absolute reality. He is all that was eternally. No space, no universe, no emptiness. Only God, absolutely there, absolutely all.

4. God is entirely independent.

I Am Who I Am means that God is utterly independent. He depends on nothing to bring him into being or support him or counsel him or make him what he is.

5. All else is entirely dependent on God.

I Am Who I Am means, rather, that everything that is not God depends totally on God. All that is not God is secondary and dependent. The entire universe is utterly secondary — not primary. It came into being by God and stays in being moment by moment because of God’s decision to keep it in being.

6. All else is as nothing compared to God.

I Am Who I Am means all the universe is by comparison to God as nothing. Contingent, dependent reality is to absolute, independent reality as a shadow to substance, as an echo to a thunderclap, as a bubble to the ocean. All that we see, all that we are amazed by in the world and in the galaxies, is, compared to God, as nothing. “All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness” (Isaiah 40:17).

7. God is constant.

I Am Who I Am means that God is constant. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He cannot be improved. He is not becoming anything. He is who he is. There is no development in God. No progress. Absolute perfection cannot be improved.

8. God is the absolute standard.

I Am Who I Am means that he is the absolute standard of truth, goodness, and beauty. There is no lawbook to which he looks to know what is right. No almanac to establish facts. No guild to determine what is excellent or beautiful. He himself is the standard of what is right, what is true, what is beautiful.

9. God does whatever he pleases.

I Am Who I Am means God does whatever he pleases. There are no constraints on him from outside him that could hinder him in doing anything he pleases. All reality that is outside of him he created and designed and governs. So, he is utterly free from any constraints that don’t originate from the counsel of his own will.

10. God is the most valuable reality.

I Am Who I Am means that he is the most important and most valuable being in the universe. He is more worthy of interest and attention and admiration and enjoyment than all other realities, including the entire universe.

11. Jesus Christ is absolute being.

I Am Who I Am, God’s absolute being, means that Jesus Christ is absolute being, because Jesus said to the Pharisees, “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad” (John 8:56).

They responded, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” (John 8:57).

Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). He could have said, “Before Abraham was, I was.” But he didn’t. He said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” Because he is the I Am. Very God of very God. Absolute being. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).

12. Absolute being dwelt among us.

I Am Who I Am “became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Absolute Being united with humanity in such a way that we can say, when Jesus died, God purchased us by his own blood (Acts 20:28).

Enthralled with Who He Is

It is an electrifying truth that God simply is. Explosive. Wild. Untamable. Changing absolutely everything.

And that this God, this Yahweh, this absolute I Am Who I Am, came to us in the man Jesus Christ, and made a second Exodus (Luke 9:31) to bring us out of the misery of condemnation into the promised land of God’s happy presence — that is thrilling beyond imagination.

O Lord, make us a God-besotted people. To know you, and admire you, and love you, and treasure you, and make you known, as Yahweh. I Am Who I Am. Jesus Christ. Savior. Friend.

Encouraging young couples to cultivate trust is a bit like exhorting a teenage boy to develop healthy eating habits: it’s rarely front of mind. However, like health, trust takes time, intentionality, and effort to develop and guard. So whether you’re engaged, or early in your marriage (or years in, for that matter), how are you and your spouse deepening and strengthening your trust in marriage?

Traditional marriage vows include the phrase “forsaking all others” as a promise of exclusivity “for as long as we both shall live.” In his book A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken includes an image that offers both a sober warning and a powerful insight into marriage, one my wife and I have benefitted from personally.

As unbelievers, Sheldon and his wife, Davy, so cherished their relationship that they did not want anyone or anything to come between their love for one another. They therefore committed to maintaining a “Shining Barrier” around their marriage to preserve the exclusivity of their love. They vowed to never have children, lest rambunctious little ones invade their shining barrier. Lest death break that barrier, they even promised to one day sail out to sea to sink their sailboat so they could die together. In retrospect, the converted Sheldon judiciously titles the section on their young, distorted commitment to one another’s vows “Pagan Love.” As Christians, we recognize in their marriage a sober warning: a relationship so devoted to itself excludes and replaces God.

Nevertheless, Sheldon and Davy’s commitment to radical exclusivity in their marriage highlights a powerful insight: marriages thrive on trust. Sheldon and Davy prized their “in-loveness” and feared broken trust would destroy it. They therefore sought to cultivate and encourage trust. My wife and I seek to do so too, while wary not to resort to Sheldon and Davy’s extreme exclusivity. We do so by pursuing one another in three distinct but overlapping modes: face-to-face intimacy, back-to-back partnership, and side-by-side friendship.

Face-to-Face Intimacy

Face-to-face trust grows when spouses seek to know and be known by one another. Such intimacy may happen on weekly date nights, or during prayer before bed, or on morning walks, or with playfulness around each other throughout the day. And, yes, in sexual foreplay and consummation too. We’re naive, though, to reduce intimacy to sex. For, as lovers come to know, sex is merely part of a much greater beauty. “To be in love, as to see beauty, is a kind of adoring that turns the lover away from self,” Sheldon observes (A Severe Mercy, 43). Thus, face-to-face intimacy is a beholding of the beloved — a looking up from self and away from the world to truly see another.

“Face-to-face trust grows when spouses seek to know and be known by one another.”

Beholding our beloved will look different in different seasons of marriage. In every season, though, intimacy is an opening up of yourself to your spouse emotionally, physically, and spiritually. This requires vulnerability from both of you. In fact, trust and vulnerability run parallel in intimacy. Thoughtfully and consistently sharing your joys and burdens, fears and successes, and then seeking to hear the same from your spouse, engenders the kind of trust out of which healthy marriages are made.

For many couples early in their relationship, emotional and physical intimacy may come easily. A gentle touch. A whispered word. A quick glance. Eros makes us eager to give ourselves heart, soul, mind, and body to our beloved. And in most marriages, you will quickly rack up more face time with your spouse than with anyone else. But it takes work to develop deeper and lasting intimacy.

In his song “World Traveler,” Andrew Peterson describes how his small-town younger self dreamed of traveling the world to discover “the great beyond.” He had “hardly seen a thing,” though, when he “gave a golden ring / To the one who gave her heart to me.” And he became a different kind of world traveler as “she opened the gate and took my hand / And led me into the mystic land / Where her galaxies swirl.” For deep and lasting trust to take root, we must travel each other’s souls with a kind of patient, unhurried attention that is willing to wonder and delight.

In beholding our spouse, we’re seeking to give and receive the true reward of face-to-face intimacy: being both genuinely known and truly loved. We will ultimately find this only in communion with God, and yet he ordains marriage as one picture that points to such a future heavenly reward (Ephesians 5:25–33). Such face-to-face trust, though, is fragile and requires a different kind of posture to guard and protect it.

Back-to-Back Partnership

When couples, knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, seek to guard and protect each other, they develop a kind of back-to-back trust. We all have blind spots, besetting sins, and frailties that our spouse comes to know through the consistent face time of everyday life. And spouses can use those sight lines and their own unique strengths to protect each other. Sin crouches at the door (Genesis 4:7), Satan roars like a lion (1 Peter 5:8), and both seek to devour your marriage. Like two heroes with circling enemies, couples turn back-to-back, trusting the other to call out threats, shout encouragements, and celebrate even the small victories together.

“Sin crouches at the door, Satan roars like a lion, and both seek to devour your marriage.”

Couples, of course, can partner back-to-back without an obvious enemy like sin or Satan. External pressures from difficult circumstances, a challenging boss, high expectations from extended family or friends can all create a setting where a couple needs to practice back-to-back partnership. The in-laws come into town, and their casual, make-it-up-as-we-go style disorients the wife’s thoughtful, well-planned itineraries. Her gift for planning is unwittingly ignored by the husband’s parents, and after day one with them she feels exposed and frustrated. She’s tempted to unload her frustration on him, and he’s tempted to shrug off her concerns as being oversensitive. Both spouses are tempted to start shooting at each other in the very moment they most need to care for the other, building mutual trust by standing back-to-back. In recognizing the urge to attack him, she can instead generously acknowledge the qualities worth praising in her in-laws — while he can initiate a frank conversation with his parents about following the plan for day two.

As we recognize and protect against threats to each other, we reap the fruit of stability and endurance. Back-to-back trust strengthens marriages to bear the heavy burdens we carry together in a fallen world. Yet the intimacy from face-to-face and the strength from back-to-back can both be undermined if we neglect another posture for cultivating trust.

Side-by-Side Friendship

Couples who seek to behold and pursue something together cultivate side-by-side trust. This side-by-side posture is marriage as friendship.

Friendships form around a mutual beholding of a shared delight. When you discover another who shares your interest in something dear to you, you declare, “You too?! I thought I was the only one!” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 248). Your friendship may include many mutual pursuits or only just a few, but any side-by-side time fosters the kind of trust that comes from holding something in common beyond your relationship itself.

Many couples’ relationships initially form around something they pursued together. Perhaps you two met because of a love for music, or a shared academic interest, or a business venture. Often, however, the demands and trials of life act over time like a centrifugal force, pushing those once-shared pursuits to the periphery. I’m suggesting that, as much as you can, pursue interests held in common, whether old or new, in the regular rhythms of your life together.

Perhaps you host the annual fall festival in your backyard, or serve on the worship team together, or play Terraforming Mars with those other board-game fanatics. Whatever the common pursuit, invest in it together. And if you object that you do not share the same interests, then find one of your spouse’s interests that you can learn too. Sheldon loved literature; Davy excelled in music. Out of love for the other, they “became at home in both worlds” (A Severe Mercy, 38).

Finding Intimacy on the Way to God

Investing in side-by-side trust is essential because a “creeping separateness,” Sheldon and Davy rightly warn, is frequently a “killer of love” (37). And as they later discovered in their conversion, the greatest resistance to that centrifugal force is no mere common pursuit but the greatest pursuit: beholding God together. So even if shared hobbies and interests feel sparse, seek always to go in a Godward direction together. For Christian marriages are built not around mere eros or philia, but around a shared receiving and giving of agape love for God and one another. Therefore, together as a couple we must prize worshiping God at home and with God’s people.

The beautiful thing about these three postures for cultivating trust is their mutually reinforcing nature. You can’t grow in intimacy if you are not working to protect each other from temptation and sin, disappointment and burnout — or just simply protecting your own time together. The reverse is true as well. You can’t grow in your ability to help each other see your blind spots if you do not grow in face-to-face fellowship. And both face-to-face and back-to-back trust flourish in the consistency of a side-by-side friendship set on God.

ABSTRACT: The two major positions on lying (lying as communicating contrary to neighbor love and lying as communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows), while offering helpful insights, do not fully account for the biblical data. A Christian ethic of truth-telling begins by defining truthfulness and lying in conformity with God’s character as the primary principle, allowing the previous emphases on love for neighbor and conformity to thought to function as regulating principles.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Daniel R. Heimbach (PhD, Drew University Graduate School), retired senior research professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, to explain how Christians have approached the ethics of truth-telling and to assess how those positions align with the complexity of biblical testimony.

Augustine once said, “Whether we should ever tell a lie if it be for someone’s welfare is a question that has vexed even the most learned.”1 And that is because, while the Bible shows that God demands truthfulness (Exodus 20:16; Zechariah 8:16; Ephesians 4:25), it also shows that God expects less than complete candor in some circumstances (1 Samuel 16:1–5; 2 Kings 6:14–20), that he uses lies for divine purposes (1 Kings 22:19–23; 2 Thessalonians 2:11), and that he commends people who demonstrate faithfulness to God by misleading enemies of God (Joshua 2:4–6; Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25).

These anomalies have led Christians to formulate two quite contrary positions on how best to interpret what the Bible says on the ethics of truth-telling: the first, formulated by the early church, views lying as communicating contrary to neighbor love; the second, first formulated by Augustine, views lying as communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows.2

The first position holds that communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows is sometimes right and true, because what makes communicating wrong and untrue is betraying a relational trust. According to this tradition, communicating in ways driven by neighbor love is right and true even if one’s words do not always align with what one thinks or knows is true.

The second position holds that communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows is necessarily wrong because inconsistency between what is communicated and what one believes to be true is always wrong. According to this tradition, speaking in line with what one thinks or knows is always right, even at the cost of betraying good people and allowing bad people to do wicked things.

I believe both traditionally held positions are partially right but also fall short of what the whole word of God says about communicating faithfully. In this essay, I aim first to review what the Bible says on this important subject and then argue for a position that helps resolve some of the tension between the traditionally held views.

Six Observations from Scripture

We can make at least six important observations concerning what the Bible says about communicating truthfully and being true.

1. God is the standard of truth.

First, the word of God identifies speaking truthfully with God and speaking untruthfully with opposition to him. God declares, “I the Lord speak the truth; I declare what is right” (Isaiah 45:19). God not only speaks truthfully but is the source and measure of truth. God is essentially “righteous and true” (Deuteronomy 32:3–4 CSB). He does not measure up to truth but rather is Truth Itself. When the Bible says God is “the God of truth” (Isaiah 65:16), it means not just that he is truthful, but that he is the standard to which everything true aligns.

Thus, everything God says is necessarily true (2 Samuel 22:31; Psalm 119:160), everything he reveals is necessarily true (Proverbs 30:5), everything he does accords with truth (Deuteronomy 32:4; Psalm 25:10; 145:17), and he can never be untrue (Numbers 23:19; Titus 1:2). When God says he delights in truth (Psalm 51:6) and commands us to speak truthfully (Zechariah 8:16; Ephesians 4:25), he calls us to be like him (Leviticus 19:2; 1 Peter 1:16).

2. The Bible sometimes commends misleading speech.

Second, while the Bible stresses the sanctity of truth and condemns what is untrue, it also includes passages in which communicating contrary to what is known so as to mislead bad people is treated either without disapproval or with commendation.

The Hebrew midwives deceive Pharaoh to save babies (Exodus 1:15–21).
Rahab deceives a king to save spies (Joshua 2:1–7; 6:17, 25; Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25).
God orders Israel to ambush the men of Ai (Joshua 8:3–8).
Jael deceives the Canaanite general Sisera (Judges 4:18–21; 5:24–27).
God develops a cover story to deceive Saul (1 Samuel 16:1–5).
Michal deceives Saul to protect David (1 Samuel 19:12–17).
David tells Jonathan to cover his absence by deceiving Saul (1 Samuel 20:6); Jonathan then deceives Saul to protect David (1 Samuel 20:28–29).
David deceives Ahimelech the priest about the mission he is on (1 Samuel 21:2).
David deceives the people of Gath by feigning madness (1 Samuel 21:13).
David deceives Achish about where he was raiding (1 Samuel 27:10).
David deceives Achish about his real allegiance (1 Samuel 29:8–9).
David tells Hushai to deceive Absalom by giving bad advice (2 Samuel 15:34); Hushai then deceives Absalom this way (2 Samuel 17:5–13), and God ensures Absalom is ruined by Hushai’s deceitful advice (2 Samuel 17:14).
A woman deceives Absalom’s men to save David’s men (2 Samuel 17:19–20).
Elisha deceives Syrians sent to arrest him (2 Kings 6:14–20).
Jeremiah deceives people to keep secret God’s message to Zedekiah (Jeremiah 38:24–27).
God says he will himself deceive false prophets (Ezekiel 14:9).

In these passages, bad people are misled, and Scripture treats these episodes either as if nothing wrong happened or as if the deceptions were good. While God never is false and never wants us to be, the Bible shows that God sometimes wants good people to mislead bad people.

3. God’s speech fits the worthiness of the recipient.

Third, God himself is not always straightforward. In several places, the Bible refers to God sending “a lying spirit” or “strong delusion” by which bad people are led to think and believe something untrue (1 Kings 22:19–23; 2 Chronicles 18:20–22; 2 Thessalonians 2:11). In such scenarios, theologians debate whether God uses the sinfulness of bad people against them or whether he deceives them himself. However these passages are interpreted, Psalm 18:25–26 indicates that God adjusts how he communicates to fit the worthiness of those addressed.

There David says, “With the merciful you show yourself merciful; with the blameless man you show yourself blameless; with the purified you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you make yourself seem [something else].”3 Translators struggle with that last word. The Christian Standard Bible and the New International Version use “shrewd,” the English Standard Version uses “tortuous,” the New American Standard Bible uses “astute,” the King James Version uses “unsavory,” and the New Revised Standard Version uses “perverse.” No English word easily captures what it means.

“The Bible never separates communicating truly with being true.”

But the core idea is plain: God communicates clearly with people who want to hear and accept what is true, and he communicates in ways hard to grasp when speaking with people who do not want to hear and accept what is true. Some people, it would seem, are not worthy of receiving clear communication. Nothing God says is untrue (Psalm 25:10), but he adjusts how he communicates to fit the worthiness of those to whom he speaks.

4. God’s ways transcend our comprehension.

Fourth, the Bible insists God’s ways are beyond human ability to fully comprehend. God is infinite. Everything he does or says has dimensions transcending human comprehension. For God, communicating truly is not the same as communicating exhaustively (and that is true for us as well). So, when interpreting what the Bible says about the ethics of faithful communication, we accept what we read, even if it does not fit what we expect or what we think it should say.

So, if someone explains the biblical truth ethic in a manner that makes perfect sense to us, we do well to suspect either that the explanation is wrong or that it distorts how God defines truth-telling in some way. When Scripture says, “God is not man, that he should lie” (Numbers 23:19), it suggests that God’s definition of truth and the truth ethic is not affected by human conventions and that none of the ways humans define or interpret truth-telling on their own are entirely correct.

5. Truth is practiced, not just spoken.

Fifth, the Bible never separates communicating truly from being true. God not only communicates truly but is Truth Itself. He is the essence, measure, origin, and definer of truth. He is the one without which nothing is true. As we communicate truly, we become more godly; as we become more godly, we communicate more truly.

First John 1:6 expresses this reality: “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” John later adds that “when [Jesus] appears we shall be like him,” and “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:2–3). In other words, the truth ethic is something practiced, not just verbalized.

6. Communicating accurately is sometimes wrong.

Sixth, in two places the Bible treats communicating accurately as morally wrong. The first is where Doeg the Edomite betrays David (1 Samuel 22:9–10), and the second is where Judas Iscariot betrays Jesus (Matthew 26:21–25). Each speaks in line with what he has in mind and states facts accurately, and yet the way each speaks is viewed as untrue in the sense of being morally wrong.

As James explains, communicating truthfully the way God defines it depends more on a speaker’s heart condition than on mere self-consistency or neighborliness. “If you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. . . . For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice” (James 3:14, 16). A bad heart can make what one says ethically false even if it is factually correct, aligns with what one thinks, and is considered neighborly in some way.

Anthropocentric Divide

Although both traditional explanations are able to account for some of the above observations, neither has been able to draw all of them into a coherent ethic of truth-telling. The reason seems to be that both approach the matter from an anthropocentric posture. One measures truth by consistency with human neighbors and the other by consistency with what a person has in his own mind.

By contrast, the Bible treats truthful communication in a theocentric manner and assumes that anything else distorts the biblical norm. Thus, in order to account for all six observations, we could describe lying not as communicating contrary to neighbor love or communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows, but as communicating contrary to God. This third position understands that what biblically true communication requires cannot be grasped apart from God. In this view, truth is not something by which we measure God, but something by which God measures us.

Division between the inherited traditions reduces to different ways of conceiving the wrong that occurs in untrue communication. If truthfulness means preserving relational trust (position one), the wrong of untruth occurs in betraying a trust relationship, as measured by others trusting us. If truthfulness means accurate alignment of words with thoughts (position two), the wrong of untruth arises in discord between them. If truthfulness means fulfilling a mission assigned by God (position three), however, the wrong of untruth occurs in hindering a divine mission or purpose, however words align with thoughts and however they affect those trusting us for their own reasons.

The main difference between the first and second positions has to do with how communicating truly and lying are defined. What Christians held before Augustine was not precise, but they generally aligned communicating truly with neighbor love, thus making it relational. During the early years of persecution before Constantine (AD 35–313), they justified communicating contrary to thought in order to save innocent people. The weakness of this approach is that neighbor love can be interpreted in subjectively sentimental terms.4

Augustine meant to purge the church from ethical relativity and generally did so by applying Scripture. But when it came to interpreting the sanctity of truth, he started with definitions of truthfulness and lying that came from Greek philosophy and not actually from the Bible itself. Thus, neither of the traditions dividing Christian ethics on this point actually defines truthful communication in biblically grounded, God-centered terms.

Theocentric Solution

Although Christianity has historically been divided on the ethics of truth-telling, God’s ethical reality is not. The coherence of God demands a single, coherent answer, and there are just three possibilities: (1) lying as communicating contrary to neighbor love; (2) lying as communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows; or (3) a category that transcends both — one that defines truthfulness and lying in ways that are neither neighbor-focused nor self-focused, but rather God-focused.

Ultimate Truth is a person (John 14:6); therefore, the sanctity of truth is ultimately personal and relational, not abstract and impersonal — not a concept, principle, or rule standing off by itself over and against God. All truly true truth comes from, relates to, and serves God (Romans 11:36); therefore, the obligation to communicate truly and to be true reduces to fidelity to God. In other words, moral communication primarily concerns fidelity to the One who is Truth Itself.

How this communication relates to neighbors, thoughts, or facts is secondary. While fidelity to our neighbors, our own thoughts, and to facts makes good sense, this fidelity is not an absolute in its own right. What it means and requires in any given situation depends on what the word of God says. After all, God is he who “[declares] what is right” (Isaiah 45:19), and fearing God is the only way to avoid “perverse speech” (Proverbs 8:13 CSB).

Jesus declares that he is himself “the truth” (John 14:6), and John says he is “full of . . . truth” (John 1:14). Jesus did not measure up to any humanly conceived notion of truth. Rather, being God, he was and is the source, measure, and end of everything true, including truthful speaking. He is not an instance of truth conceived in terms other than himself, but rather is Truth Itself.

When Jesus said, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice,” Pilate asked, “What is truth?” (John 18:37–38). Pilate understood Jesus to be saying something momentous. Jesus was claiming that all true communication and being true, all accuracy and meaning, all genuinely reliable existence, behavior, understanding, and conveying of information one to another is of and through himself — and that conceiving otherwise is false.

The lying as communicating contrary to God position subordinates, but does not discard, the traditional positions. It allows the other positions to serve subordinate roles. That is, loving neighbors and self-consistency can be viewed as regulating principles pointing toward what faithful communication most often requires. Pleasing Christ is the only absolute governing the biblical truth ethic. The regulating principles tell us what that ethic usually requires. But where the word of God says otherwise, we must follow. The primary principle of cohering to God himself supersedes the regulating principles of loving neighbors and self-consistency.

In the Bible, obligation to communicate truly and be true has two dimensions: one vertical in relation to God and one horizontal in relation to others. Communicating truly and being true involves both God and others. They are unconditional in relation to God, but they are conditional in relation to others, always depending on how they affect fidelity to God. The Bible refers to this condition as “the fear of God.”

Scripture tells us that “to fear the Lord is to hate . . . perverse speech” (Proverbs 8:13 CSB), and then it also tells us the Hebrew midwives and Rahab communicated as they did because they “feared” God (Exodus 1:17–21; Joshua 2:9–11). Because of this, and because Scripture regards the act by which Rahab protected the spies as a good example of faith pleasing to God (Hebrews 11:31), we should stop treating these accounts as “difficult” and should instead accept them as places where God explains how the way he defines communicating truly and being true differs from what we expect.

God uses these accounts to show that communication must be unconditionally true and faithful to himself and conditionally true and faithful to anyone or anything else. The midwives and Rahab demonstrated truthful communication the way God defines it.

The God Who Is Truth

Ethics is, at heart, a matter of worship that leaves two options. We can worship God or some guise of the devil; there is no middle ground. “Whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4). We communicate either in step with God or in step with the devil. Conceiving of truth any other way skews or ignores the essential ethical questions at the heart of all truly true truth: “True by what measure?” or “True to whom?”

You cannot be true to the devil and to Christ at the same time, and you cannot communicate truly with both, in reference to both, or with the emissaries of both at the same time. Fidelity to ultimate truth requires infidelity to ultimate falsehood. Which is to say, communicating truly comes from Christ (1 Peter 3:15–16), and communicating untruly comes from hell (James 3:6).

This third position resolving the divide between self-consistency and neighbor love agrees with Allen Verhey’s caution: “God is Truth, but truth is not a second god.”5 There is a connection between God and truth, but it is not reciprocal. What we know of truth says something of God. But what we think of truth does not define God. Our understanding of truth does not limit God; at best, it only reflects God. To know truth truly, one must focus on God as he has revealed himself. Faithful communication depends on him and centers on him, not on us.

This study of the truth ethic reveals how God’s ordering of ethical reality is at once highly complex and united by a deep simplicity centered on God himself. It also demonstrates the paradoxical nature of revealed ethics. The biblically revealed ethic of communicating truly and being true, while consistent, absolute, universal, and unvarying, also runs contrary to human expectations. It is not self-contradictory but has marks of a mind transcending our own. It is not what most people think because it is more complex, deeper, and measured by a higher standard than most expect.

Yet at the same time, it is easy enough for anyone believing in the One who transcends human understanding to grasp, plain enough to convict sinners of deserved judgment, and sufficient to guide what we say and do in all situations arising in this fallen, fallible world.