PREVARICATION PROPENSITY

I Was Just Thinking About - - - 

We live in a day when unvarnished truth is held in obeisance and deceit, deception, lies and falsehood are easily embraced. For some, prevarication (a false or deliberate misstatement, lie) comes too easily. Those who have become easy prey for prevarication begin to manifest a propensity (a natural inclination or tendency) to perpetuate something other than truth. Within any culture, there will peaks and valleys regarding justice, righteousness and truth. Isaiah 59:12-15 (NASB) may be an apt description for our contemporary culture: “For our transgressions are multiplied before You (the Lord), and our sins testify against us; for our transgressions are with us, and we know our iniquities: Transgressing and denying the Lord, and turning away from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving in and uttering from the heart lying words. Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the street, and uprightness cannot enter. Yes, truth is lacking; and he who turns aside from evil makes himself a prey. Now the Lord saw, and it was displeasing in His sight that there was no justice.”

If you take the time to search the internet for submissions about truth, you will find that many are content with it being subjective. It allows that it is more a philosophical approach and one persons truth may be deemed better to someone else’s truth. The subjective truth opens the door for everyone to do whatever they subjectively embrace as being truth for them. It has become too easy for some people to have no qualms when it comes to looking directly into your eye (or a television camera) while their mouth is spewing deceit, misstatement and lies. There is an old statement attributed to Sir Walter Scott that indicates: “O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!” Any parent can identify that statement as they endeavor their child (or children) to be a person of good character and integrity. However, with wide-eyed innocence, our children will spin a yarn about some misdeed or misleading statement in their attempt to get the parent to believe their prevarication. 

Where did this prevarication propensity originate? At the creation of the world, God created a man and woman, placing them in a perfect atmosphere where they could willingly comply with just one command/directive. Even in that perfect atmosphere, since the man and woman were created with a will and conscience, there was the innate possibility for making a wrong choice. When Paul wrote a letter to Timothy, he included the following (I Timothy 2:9-15, NASB): “…A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness…For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression…” Paul did not elaborate on the perfect atmosphere of The Garden of Eden nor the presence of the serpent who instigated the temptation to which Eve succumbed. 

Throughout various stages of Biblical History, the following is recorded about God: Hebrews 6:17-18, “In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us.” In a similar way, in Titus 1:1-2, “Paul, a bond-servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the faith of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth which is according to godliness, in the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago…” There are other references to consider: Numbers 23:19, I Samuel 15:29 and Romans 3:4. In a very basic way, Jesus declared (John 14:6), “I Am the way, the TRUTH, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.” John 18:37-39 demonstrates how easily men can avoid the truth, even when the One Who is TRUTH is standing in direct proximity to the interrogator. How sad when one, either philosophically or pathologically, would persist in asking: “What is Truth?” You must believe in Jesus Christ Who is the only way, the on;y truth and the only life! Consider these things with me.