Sin and Why We Lie

This afternoon I spent some time with a friend looking at Isaiah 14:11-15, a passage that, although addressed (historically speaking) to the king of Babylon, has been found by many to be indirectly aimed at Satan as a paradigm for sin. The passage reads:

Your pomp is brought down to Sheol [the grave], the sound of your harps; maggots are laid as a bed beneath you, and worms are your covers. How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit.

The point being made (regardless of who the passage is ultimately about) is this: sin (in its essence) is elevating something that isn’t God (in this case, ourselves) to the place of God. Tim Keller, using idolatry as an organizing principle, puts it like this: “Sin is taking a good thing and making it ultimate.” Like the king of Babylon in Isaiah 14, our great sin is trying to be god for ourselves—trying to be the sovereign king or queen of our own private kingdoms.

So, if that’s what sin is, then why do we sin?

The basic answer is simple: we sin because we’ve stopped trusting and relying on God to be God and have started to play the role ourselves. As an example, let’s take something as seemingly mundane as lying.

Why do we lie?

All lying is done as an attempt to protect ourselves from other people knowing the truth about who we really are. In other words, we lie to keep people from discovering—from actually seeing—the “real” us. We do this in one of two ways. Either we lie to hid something about us that really is true (something that if other people knew would cause them to think less of us) or we lie to create something about us that’s false (something that if other people believed would cause them to think more highly of us). On the one side, we lie to keep our reputation afloat; on the other, we lie to elevate it. In both instances what we’re doing is trying to control the way other people see us, think about us and regard us.

This means that every external, mouth-lie grows out of an internal, heart-choice that says: “What other people think of me is more important than what God thinks of me. I like them more than I like God. I need their approval more than I need God. I depend on their love and security more than I depend on God’s.”

The antidote for lying then (as with all sin) isn’t to simply buckle-down and just tell the truth. No. The real antidote for lying is to believe that God is God, to trust that what the Creator and King of the universe says about us is what really matters. And to believe that, in union with Christ, what he says about us isn’t rooted in who we are but in who Jesus is.