"Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."--_John viii. 44._
"Sin has many tools, but a lie is a handle which fits them all."--_O. W. Holmes._
Satan opened his propaganda with a slanderous lie; this lie was believed by the innocent parents of the race. Simple and modest as this lie seemed to be, it opened a crevice in the moral government of God. Confidence, fellowship, and filial relations were destroyed by the breach. The nature and character of a lie may best be understood, and we can get the estimate God places on it, by carefully studying the damages it wrought. Eden was lost, God's favour lost, peace and plenty lost, innocence lost; humiliation, fear, banishment, toil, sweat, suffering and death took the place of Eden's pristine glories.
Nothing so reveals the depths to which Lucifer had fallen--and his great intelligence, losing none of its acumen, exercised in a way fitting to his depravity of character, as the launching of a lie. He has done nothing since--which more clearly exemplifies the Being our Bible teaches that he is. An egg was laid and a lie was hatched; this lie has gone out spreading at a geometrical progression until the infinitude of God's footstool has felt the discordant jar.
A lie, and the Father of it; think of this tremendous statement. The thought will overwhelm our intelligence. Suppose all the peoples that have lived on the earth were lined up: to simplify matters--consider the billion and a half supposed to be living on the earth to-day; just a small part of the number belongs to civilized, christianized nations. What is the situation? Under all the light of education and moral standards, justice, full and untrammelled, can scarcely be had, because of false swearing. An eminent authority says nine-tenths of the race has a price; this means that only one-tenth will rigidly adhere to the whole truth. How few will swear to their own hurt and change not.
Let us study this gigantic proposition from another view-point: every unregenerated heart is full of deceit. In every unregenerated heart there is a germ of all the sins of the Decalogue; lying is one of the "shall nots." A close student of men will agree with the Apostle Paul, when he said: "I have no confidence in the flesh." Carnality will not swear against its own interests; the status of civilization, whether in religion or morals, does not seem to control this matter. When we consider the falsehood and false swearing which obtain among the _best_ people, socially, financially, and so often religiously, then think of the millions living without moral standards, we can begin to appreciate the amount of lying carried on in this world.