The Christian Life
"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour."
Exodus 20:16
A man can be ruined by a sentence. Not by a blow, not by theft, not by anything that leaves a mark a doctor could examine — by a sentence, spoken in a room he was not in, about a thing he did not do. And what makes this particular injury so cruel is that the victim frequently never learns what was said, cannot answer what he has not heard, and finds only that doors have quietly closed and that people look at him differently and he does not know why.
God has a great deal to say about this, and He says it with a severity that startles the modern reader. It is one of the ten commandments. It carried, under the law, a penalty that could reach as far as death. And it is placed by Scripture in the company of the very worst sins. This article sets out what God has said about the false witness, why He treats it so gravely, and — because this must be said too — what mercy is available to a person who has borne one.
Consider the company it keeps. When God wrote with His own finger on tables of stone, He gave ten commandments, and each of the last six protects something of a neighbour's: his life, his marriage, his property — and then this:
"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour." (Exodus 20:16)
It stands beside thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal. That placement is itself an argument. God evidently regards a man's reputation, and his standing in the sight of others, as belonging to him in the same way his life and his goods belong to him — and a false witness as a species of robbery and of killing.
And notice the direction of the offence: against thy neighbour. This commandment is not primarily about abstract truthfulness. It is about what our words do to a particular person.
Many read this commandment narrowly, as a prohibition of perjury in a courtroom, and conclude that they have never come close to breaking it. But the law itself defines it far more widely:
"Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment." (Exodus 23:1-2)
Four distinct sins are named there, and they widen the commandment enormously.
Raising a false report. To start something untrue. Not necessarily under oath — simply to set a story moving.
Putting your hand with the wicked. To lend your support, your name, your credibility to someone else's false accusation. You did not invent it; you carried it. Scripture makes no distinction — the man who joins his hand to it has become an unrighteous witness himself.
Following a multitude to do evil. The crowd was already saying it, and it was easier to agree than to stand apart. This is perhaps the commonest form of all, and God removes the excuse explicitly. That everyone was saying it is precisely no defence.
Wresting judgment to follow the many. Adjusting your account of a matter to match what the room wants to hear.
So the commandment reaches the man who invents, the man who repeats, the man who nods along, and the man who shades his testimony to suit his company. Very few of us are safely outside that circle.
Now to something that shows how gravely God regards it. The law laid down a procedure for a suspected false witness, and a penalty of a kind found nowhere else in the code.
Where a witness was accused of testifying falsely, the judges were to make diligent inquisition — a careful, unhurried investigation. And if the witness were found to be false, then this:
"Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother; so shalt thou put the evil away from among you." (Deuteronomy 19:19)
Weigh what that means. The false witness received the punishment he had tried to bring on the innocent man. If he had accused his brother of theft, he bore the penalty for theft. If he had accused his brother of a capital crime, he bore the capital penalty. God attached to the lie the exact consequence the liar had intended for someone else.
"And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." (Deuteronomy 19:21)
Thine eye shall not pity. That is a hard sentence, and it was meant to be. And the reason is given in the following verse: that others should hear, and fear, and not do such a thing again.
Nowhere does the law treat any sin of the tongue more severely. God did not regard words as cheap, and He did not treat a manufactured accusation as a lesser class of assault.
The Bible does not leave this theoretical. It records what false witness actually does, and the three accounts have a great deal in common.
A man who owned a vineyard. A king wanted the land; the owner would not sell it, because it was his family's inheritance and the law forbade the transfer. The king sulked. His wife arranged matters. Letters went out over the king's own seal to the elders of the man's own city, calling a fast, seating the man in a place of honour among his neighbours, and setting two worthless men before him to testify that he had blasphemed God and the king. They did it. He was taken outside and stoned, and the king went down to take possession of the vineyard.
Notice the machinery. A religious occasion was used as the setting. Respected local men carried out the sentence. The proceeding satisfied the letter of the law — there were two witnesses, exactly as required. Everything appeared orderly. And an innocent man was dead and his family dispossessed.
A trial by night. When the Lord Jesus Christ was arrested, the chief priests and the whole council sought false witness against Him to put Him to death — and Scripture records plainly that though many false witnesses came, they found none that served. The accounts kept contradicting one another. Eventually two came forward with a distorted version of something He had actually said, twisting a statement about the temple of His body into a threat against the building.
Notice that detail, because it is instructive. The most effective false witness is rarely a pure invention. It is a real sentence, moved out of its setting, with its meaning changed. That is far harder to refute than an outright fabrication, because the accused cannot say I never said it.
A deacon before the council. When Stephen preached, his opponents could not resist the wisdom by which he spoke — so they suborned men, which means they procured them, arranged for them, and set them up to say that he had spoken blasphemous words. And they stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes first, so that a climate existed before the accusation was ever heard. He was stoned.
Set the three accounts side by side and the same pattern appears each time.
In every case, the false witness was organised rather than spontaneous — someone arranged it. In every case, it was clothed in legality and often in religion; the forms were observed. In every case, the atmosphere was prepared before the accusation was made, so that the hearers were ready to believe. And in every case, the target was a person whose existence was inconvenient to somebody with power.
That last point deserves attention. False witness is very seldom about truth. It is a tool, and it is picked up when someone has a result they want and cannot get honestly. The accusation is not the goal; the removal of the man is the goal.
Scripture gives us the reasons, and they are worth setting out plainly.
Because the damage cannot be recalled. Stolen goods can be returned; a false report cannot be. Once a thing is said, it travels, and it lives in the minds of people who will never hear the correction. A man may be cleared entirely and still find that the accusation outlives the acquittal.
Because it destroys what a man cannot rebuild alone. A person can recover from financial loss by working. He cannot restore his own reputation by any effort of his own, because the thing lost is in other people's minds and he has no access to it. This is a wound the victim is powerless to treat.
Because it harms far more than the target. Families are divided by it. Children hear things about a parent. Friendships of decades end without either party fully knowing why. The blast radius is enormous, and none of the additional casualties were even the intended target.
Because it corrupts the ones who repeat it. A false report requires carriers, and everyone who passes it on has taken a share in it.
And because of whose method it is. The Lord Jesus Christ said of the devil that he was a murderer from the beginning, that there is no truth in him, and that when he speaks a lie he speaks of his own — for he is a liar, and the father of it. That is a solemn thing to weigh. When a man manufactures an accusation, he has not merely broken a rule; he has taken up a particular tool, and it is not God's.
"Lying lips are abomination to the LORD: but they that deal truly are his delight." (Proverbs 12:22)
Note the pairing once again: abomination and delight. The straight dealer is not merely tolerated by God; he is a pleasure to Him.
Because God knew this sin would come, He built protections into the judicial process, and they are worth knowing because they apply wherever people must weigh an accusation.
Never on one testimony.
"One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established." (Deuteronomy 19:15)
Not should not. Shall not. A single accusation, however confident, however sincere, establishes nothing whatever. This principle is carried straight into the New Testament, where the apostle Paul instructs that an accusation against an elder is not even to be received except before two or three witnesses. Notice: not merely not acted upon — not received.
Diligent investigation. The judges were to search the matter out carefully. Not a quick impression. Not a decision taken while feelings were high.
Both parties present. In the procedure for a disputed testimony, both men were to stand before the priests and the judges. Both. The accused was to be in the room and able to answer.
And a warning about first impressions. Scripture observes drily that the one who states his case first seems right, until his neighbour comes and searches him out. Every one of us has formed a settled opinion on the strength of one account, delivered persuasively by someone we trusted. The Bible treats that as a known human failing and warns us about it directly.
Most people who bear false witness would deny it sincerely, because the forms it usually takes do not feel like lying.
The true fact with the context removed. He did say it — but you have not mentioned what he was answering, or that he withdrew it an hour later, or that he was quoting somebody else in order to disagree.
The omission that changes everything. Everything you said was accurate. What you left out was the part that would have explained it.
The confident guess about motive. You reported the action correctly and then supplied the reason — because he wanted, because he was trying to — as though you had access to his heart. You do not. Nobody does.
The question that is an accusation. I don't know, but doesn't it seem strange that...? No claim has been made, and so nothing can be refuted, and yet the hearer walks away with the impression fully formed. This is one of the most effective methods there is, and one of the least likely to be repented of.
The unchecked repetition. You did not invent it and you did not verify it. You passed it on, perhaps with a genuine sigh of concern. But a report you have not checked is a report you have no right to move.
"He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but he that repeateth a matter separateth very friends." (Proverbs 17:9)
Observe what that verse says about the effect: it separates very friends — not enemies, but people who were close. That is the characteristic damage of the repeated matter.
And silence when you know better. If a false report is circulating about someone and you are in a position to correct it and say nothing because it is awkward, your silence has become a form of testimony. The law required a man who could testify to speak.
Now a particular case, and it deserves its own section because it is common and because it is where an ordinary failure becomes something worse.
Suppose an accusation has been made and then found to be untrue. The evidence collapses; the witness is discredited; it becomes plain to everyone involved that the thing was not so.
What ought to happen is obvious. The accused should be publicly cleared — as publicly as he was accused — and the false report withdrawn by those who advanced it, and an apology made.
What often happens instead is a quiet decision to move on. Let us not dwell on that. Let us put it behind us. In any case, there were other concerns. The charge is dropped without ever being retracted; the cloud remains over the man; and a new grievance is produced to justify the position already taken.
That manoeuvre is not neutrality. It is the completion of the false witness rather than the repair of it. Consider what has actually occurred: the accusation did its work, the damage stands, and the accuser has been spared the cost of admitting it. Meanwhile the innocent man carries the residue for years, because everyone remembers that there was something, and nobody remembers that it was disproved.
The law required the opposite. When a witness was found false, the matter was not dropped quietly for the sake of peace — it was dealt with openly, precisely so that others would hear and fear. God's concern was not merely that the accused should escape punishment, but that the truth should be publicly established.
And moving to a new accusation because the first one failed is itself an admission. An honest person who discovers he was wrong about a man does not go looking for a different charge. He revises his opinion of the man.
Scripture does not leave the false witness with the impression that he has succeeded.
"A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall not escape." (Proverbs 19:5)
Note the two halves, because they anticipate the obvious objection. What if he is never found out? What if the false witness dies respected, and the man he ruined dies under the cloud? Scripture answers: he shall not escape. Not that he will always be exposed in this life — often he is not — but that there is no escape, which is a longer statement than it first appears.
The same book names the false witness in its short list of things God hates, and places beside him, in the emphatic final position, the man who sows discord among brethren. And when the New Testament describes those who are shut out at the end, it does not confine itself to the violent:
"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." (Revelation 21:8)
And all liars. Placed in that company, without apology, at the end of the list where the weight falls. Whatever else this verse teaches, it forbids us to treat lying as a minor and rather human failing.
Scripture also speaks of a great house containing vessels of gold and silver, and also of wood and earth — some to honour and some to dishonour — and says that if a man purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified and fit for the Master's use. The point is not decorative. What a man does with his tongue helps determine which kind of vessel he becomes, and a vessel of dishonour is still in the house. It is simply not used for anything the Master values.
Here this article must do what the previous one did, or it becomes a weapon instead of a mirror. An article about false witness, read in order to think about somebody else, has been read badly.
So let each of us examine himself, and the questions are uncomfortable by design.
When did I last pass on something about a person that I had not verified? When I describe a disagreement, do I include the parts that weaken my side? Have I ever supplied a motive I could not possibly know? Have I asked a leading question in order to plant an impression I did not have the courage to state? Is there anyone about whom I have said something I would not repeat with them in the room?
And the hardest: is there someone alive today who is thought of less well because of a thing I said?
The writer of this article stands under those questions with every reader. No one who has ever spoken about another person is comfortably clear of this commandment.
This is the practical part, and it matters more than the analysis.
First, confess it to God plainly, without softening the word. Not I may have contributed to a misunderstanding. Say what it was.
Second, go to the person you spoke against. This is the part everyone wishes were optional, and it is not. Tell him what you said, and to whom, and that it was untrue.
Third, correct it with the same reach it had. A report spread to twenty people is not repaired by an apology to one. The lie travelled; the truth must travel the same road.
Fourth, accept the cost. You may lose standing. People may think less of you. That is the price of the thing you did, and paying it is the beginning of being an honest man.
This is hard, and most people who read it will not do it. But there is no other route back, and the person who takes it will find the load lighter than the one he has been carrying.
And now the thing that must not be left out, because without it this article would drive a guilty person to despair rather than to God.
There is forgiveness for this sin. Full forgiveness.
Consider that the man who wrote much of the New Testament had stood consenting to the death of Stephen — the very execution procured by suborned witnesses. He held the coats. And he became the apostle Paul, and God used him more than almost any other man who has lived.
Consider that the leading apostle denied his Lord three times with oaths and curses, on the same night that false witnesses were testifying against Him — and was restored by name, and fed the sheep.
If God can forgive that, He can forgive what you have said.
"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23)
"For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 6:23)
"But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:9)
"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." (John 1:12)
And there is a further comfort, for the other side of this. If you are the one who has been falsely accused, and there is no court that will hear you and no way to clear your name — remember who else stood in that position. He was silent before His accusers, and He committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously. Nothing is lost. God has the whole record, and He does not lose evidence.
God's people are to be recognisable by this: that what they say can be relied upon, about friends and about opponents alike, when it helps them and when it does not.
"He that speaketh truth sheweth forth righteousness: but a false witness deceit." (Proverbs 12:17)
It costs something. It will cost you the satisfying version of a story, and sometimes the approval of a room that wants to hear something else. But God has set truthful speech among the things He delights in, and the man who deals truly with his neighbour is doing something God notices and loves.
A sentence can ruin a man. It can also defend one. Both are within your power today.
"Lying lips are abomination to the LORD: but they that deal truly are his delight."Proverbs 12:22
Our gracious heavenly Father, we come before Your throne of grace through the precious name and perfect merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone has opened the way into Your presence.
We thank You for Your beloved Son, and for Him who, when He was reviled, reviled not again. We praise You for Your preserved Word, which declares "Lie not one to another" (Colossians 3:9), and which cannot be broken.
We confess before You of every word we have repeated without knowing whether it was true. Forgive us, we pray, and cleanse us, for You are faithful and just to forgive us our sins.
We beseech You for every soul reading these words who is yet without Christ. Send forth Your Holy Ghost to convince them of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; open their understanding; and draw them to Your Son before this day is done.
Strengthen Your people who read it. Comfort the discouraged, establish the wavering, and let none go away empty. And use this message to make every reader a person whose word can be trusted, for Your glory and not for ours.
We pray all of this to You, O God, our Holy and Heavenly Father, in the precious name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by the power and anointing of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Before you close this page, one question matters more than everything you have just read: if you died tonight, do you know where you would be?
You cannot be saved by joining a church, by being baptized, by giving money, or by living a decent life. Salvation is not a wage that is earned; it is a gift that is received. Every one of us has sinned, the wages of sin is death, and there is a real hell prepared for sin — but the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross in the sinner's place, was buried, and rose again the third day.
If you know yourself to be a sinner, and you are willing to turn from your sin and trust Him alone, then speak to God now. There are no magic words — but if these words are the cry of your heart, pray them and mean them:
Dear Holy and Almighty God, I come to You just as I am. I confess that I am a sinner. I have broken Your law, I have gone my own way, and I deserve the judgment and the everlasting fire that my sin has earned. I cannot save myself, and I bring You nothing.
I believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is Your Son; that He loved me and died on the cross in my place, shedding His precious blood for my sins; that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day.
Here and now I turn from my sin, and I trust Him alone — not my works, not my religion, not my goodness — to save me. Lord Jesus, come into my heart, forgive my sin, and be my Saviour from this moment and for ever.
In the precious name of our Lord Jesus Christ I pray. Amen.
1. Tell somebody today. "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9).
2. Begin reading the Bible. Start with the Gospel of John, then Acts, then Romans. Read a little every day. "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:2).
3. Talk to your Father every day. You may now come boldly, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. No appointment is needed and no man's permission.
4. Find a Bible-believing church and be baptized. Not to be saved — you already are — but in obedience, and as the public confession of what has happened to you.
5. Rest in this, and do not be shaken by your feelings. "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24). You will still sin; when you do, confess it and go on — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).