1 Sam 28:3-20
(Living with deceit)
This
evening, as we continue to think of various issues we have to handle in
our
lives, we come to think of deceit; of deception. We all come across it.
It pays
first of all to think of what deceit is, what it isn’t. It is
very much tied up
with lying, or of being as we tend to put it today, of being economical
with
the truth. But deceit is a more directed
matter than untruth is. Lying to somebody else; speaking an untruth to
somebody
else, and speak it to their harm or their disadvantage- or else
speaking it to
avoid personal pain, personal exposure or personal loss. We want to get
something over somebody, to hide something from somebody which we
don’t want
them to know; maybe something which would cause their standing in our
eyes to
go down of we knew this or that. So we lie to them, we deceive them. We
make
people think we’re better people than we are; make people think
that what we
suggest will be for their good when it wouldn’t be.
Lying, of
course, is something which is dealt with directly in the Ten
Commandments. You shall not bear
false testimony
(false witness) against your
neighbour. Lying
is directed against your neighbour, so deceit is a direct offence
against that
ninth commandment. The Bible is definitely saying that deceit and lying
are
fundamentally of sin in God’s eyes.
Jeremiah 17
and verse 9 very directly addresses the matter of deceit when Jeremiah
says, The heart is deceitful
above all things,
and beyond cure. Who can understand it? Then in verse 10: I, the Lord,
search the heart and examine
the mind to reward a man according to his conduct. The idea is
that by
deceit we try to avoid the deserts of our misdeeds, of our sins. But the Lord searches the heart; he knows what
goes on. The Bible says God is
not
mocked. God can’t be deceived. We may deceive other
people, we will never
deceive God. And…he rewards us according to our conduct;
according to what our
deeds deserve.
David
speaks of deceit in Psalm 5. He says this:
Not
a word from their mouth can be trusted,
their heart is filled with destruction, their throat is an open grave
and with
their tongue they speak deceit. Declare them guilty, O Lord, let their
intrigues be their downfall, banish them for their many sins, for they
have
rebelled against you.
The ‘they’
David is speaking about are the ‘arrogant’ (a term we come
across often in the
psalms)- or those who exalt themselves against God; those who are full
of
intrigue. Their characteristic- these ‘arrogant’,
self-exalting people is
deceit, lying, and destruction. They are the ones who will be
destroyed. They
will have their downfall.
Of course,
even the great characters of the Bible have deceit in their lives. Even
in the
infant church we see it. At the end of Acts chapter 4, we read how all
the
disciples sold their land and gave the money to help the needs of the
church;
the
needs of
the brethren. There, for instance, Joseph
the Levite,from
Destruction
coming to the deceiver.
In
tonight’s reading from 1 Samuel 28 we heard of Saul’s visit
to the witch of
Endor. Now it is his dealings with the occult that is the main focus of
that
passage, but we do read that Saul, fo rather devious reasons goes in
disguise,
not wishing to be recognised as who he was; not recognised maybe as the
king.
When Saul asks for the spirit of Samuel to be called up, and Samuel
appears.
Saul had said to her as surely as
the
Lord lives, you will not be punished for this. So, when the
woman saw
Samuel, she cried out at the top of her voice Why have you deceived me? You are Saul.
Saul, who
had started so well, anointed king by Samuel, becomes jealous and
filled with
rage after David kills Goliath. The desire to have done with David
consumes
him. He resorts to all kind of cunning and scheming to be rid of David,
and
becomes no stranger to deceit, and deceit marks very much the end-point
of a
man whose life has spiralled down out of control. He must protect his
slender
reputation come what may.
The
greatest deceit in all the Bible is the one in Genesis chapter 3, when
the
serpent persuades Eve that what God had said that if she ate the fruit
of the
tree she would die, was not really the case. The serpent deceives Eve.
Eve
takes the fruit after being deceived by the serpent, gives to her
husband and
then they come under God’s judgment. But the one who will come
under the most
terrible judgement at the end is the Devil, who is the
‘serpent’. He is the one
who will ultimately be destroyed. He is the arch-deceiver and by deceit
will
take as many as possible to destruction with him. The Bible has various
titles
for Satan, and on is ‘Father of lies’ All deceit, all lying
is, at root, the
work of the Evil One. His Temptations of the Lord Jesus Christ were
based
around deceit.
What does
all this mean to us as Christians in our daily living? How do we deal
with
deceit? How do we make sure that deceit does not take hold of us? How
do we
deal with deceivers?
Paul,
writing in Ephesians chapter 4 says this:
for
we are all members of one body. In your
anger do not sin, do not let the sun go down while you are angry, and
do not
give the Devil at foothold. (vv27-28)
Do not give
the Devil a foothold. And we can trace the same pattern of anger
leading, by
allowing the Devil in, going into deceit. . Here lies the key. We must
act with
truth, with integrity. We must know that God is not mocked and that if
we allow
these things into our lives then we come under God’s judgment.
So: Keep
close to God; do not grieve his Spirit.
And
remember those commandments given 3 500 years ago on
You
shall not bear false testimony against your
neighbour