No False Witness
Biblical Study
God Of Justice
A Look at the Ten Commandments for the 21st Century
Object:
If a malicious witness takes the stand to accuse a man of a crime, the two men involved in the dispute must stand in the presence of the Lord before the priests and the judges who are in office at the time. The judges must make a thorough investigation, and if the witness proves to be a liar, giving false testimony against his brother, then do to him as he intended to do to his brother. You must purge the evil from among you. The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing be done among you. Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
-- Deuteronomy 19:16-21
"The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God." Everyone is familiar with those words, and they come from the same milieu as this commandment. "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." If the Ten Commandments are, at heart, a social justice document designed to lay out God's basis for a just and decent society, and if that just and decent society is to have a mechanism for settling inevitable disputes -- a court system -- then these words about truthful testimony are the foundation.
We dislike perjury. People who swear to tell the truth but then lie give us a queasy feeling. One might want to say that it depends upon what someone is lying about as to the seriousness of the offense, but, nonetheless, the truth is preferable, and has always been. As one commentator has written, "Primitive men who killed and raped and looted without a second thought regarded a false oath as an offense against the gods, and looked with superstitious horror for a bolt of lightning to strike the blasphemer dead."1
Of course, the prohibition against false testimony in court was not unique to the Jews. Three hundred years before the Ten Commandments, Hammurabi's code said the same. That went so far as to lay out the sentence for those who were convicted of lying in court: one so convicted would have to bear the same penalty as the one who had been originally charged would have borne. For example, if someone perjured himself in a capital trial (where the penalty was death), then the one judged guilty of giving the false testimony was himself sentenced to die. One would surmise that such stiff punishment would have tended to be a good deterrent.
When it became part of the Jewish code of conduct in Deuteronomy 19, the same penalty was laid out.2 But there were even prohibitions attached to the code to prevent people from being tempted to lie in court. Some were not even allowed to testify because they might consider perjuring themselves: relatives, friends, known enemies, anyone whose profession was thought of as in the least disreputable (dice-players, usurers, or slaves). The Jewish legal system was designed to protect the rights of the accused at every turn. Circumstantial evidence was not permitted. So, most certainly, fabricated verbal evidence was despised.
This commandment prohibiting false witness was first and foremost forensic in nature. Its prime focus was testimony before a court. The reason it did not flatly prohibit lying of any sort is that these Ten Commandments are not to be understood as a code of personal conduct. The concern here is justice, for a society that would protect the weak from the strong, the poor from the rich, the simple from the crafty. The opposite side of that coin called for an active defense of those who had been slandered, those who were in the dock because of lies, rumors, or innuendo. As the Jewish law laid it down, "If a person sins because he does not speak up when he hears a public charge to testify regarding something he has seen or learned about, he will be held responsible" (Leviticus 5:1). "False witness" could be given, not just by opening your mouth, but by keeping it shut as well. There is a bias toward truth in assuring a society that is as God intends, not only in this ninth commandment and the rest of the Jewish law, but throughout history.
As to personal truthfulness (not simply judicial), we learn early on. One of the first Bible verses my parents taught me was "Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord" (Proverbs 12:22). And every time I would be tempted to skirt the truth, I would see a wagging finger and hear, "Lying lips...." It's nothing new -- the standard for proper conduct is a strict adherence to the truth. George Washington and the cherry tree and all that.
As to the way folks actually handle truth, though, that cherry tree story is wonderful. It first appeared in Parson Weems' biography, Life of Washington, in the 1806 edition. According to Weems' story, young George was given a hatchet at about the age of six and went around his daddy's farm testing his present out on all sorts of things, including a young cherry tree which was damaged severely. Papa summoned the boy and asked if he knew anything about it, and got the response, "Father, I cannot tell a lie; I cut the cherry tree." Because George was so truthful, his daddy forgot his anger, and all lived happily ever after. We have all heard that story. It has had an enormous effect on the kids of every subsequent American generation and has succeeded in making George Washington the sworn enemy of all young children.3 It certainly has not made them more truthful. Ironically, this story about the virtue of telling the truth is itself not true -- Parson Weems or somebody made it up. O tempora, O mores.
I wish I could say that preachers were innocent of that sort of thing. There is the classic story of the young boy coming home on a Sunday afternoon and asking his minister father about something he heard in the morning's sermon. "Daddy, was that really true, or was it just preachin'?"
What is surely true is that many times we do not think of what we say as lying, whether it be about George and the cherry tree or some quirky little invention for a sermon. But if what we pass on to someone else is less than the whole truth and we do not make that clear, what comes out of our mouth most certainly qualifies as a lie. Worst of all, lots of the lies we tell are not even for our own advantage, so we do not think of them as lies. They are just conversation. We call it gossip, and that can be deadly.
The Salem Witch Trials are instructive. In the summer and fall of 1692, over a hundred people were arrested and convicted for being "in league with the Devil." The only way they could escape the hangman's noose was to confess their awful crime and be granted mercy by the court. Twenty of them refused to confess to something of which they were not guilty and were legally murdered. How could such a thing have happened? Because the ridiculous gossip of some teenage girls got out of hand. In this case, lying lips were an abomination, not only to the Lord, but to the history of civilization.
It would be wonderful to say that such goings on were limited to the unsophisticates of the seventeenth century, but it was repeated in the early 1950s with the Army-McCarthy hearings, the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and the Hollywood Black Lists. In a generation that had just been at war twice within five years, there was genuine terror of anything that could threaten us again. The fear of the "Red Menace" was so gripping that anyone even whispered about as being sympathetic to Communism was in danger of having life and career flushed right down the drain. Many had that happen, and all because of the same kind of gossip that the girls of Salem had spread so many years before. It was wretched excess, of course, and Arthur Miller used the Salem Witch Trial experience as a parable to attack McCarthyism in his wonderful play, The Crucible.
"You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." Good words for the courtroom, good words for any room. It is not a flat prohibition against lying. It would have nothing to say to me if I lied to protect someone. If a man came to me wielding a machete, asking if I had seen his wife, threatening to chop her up into fish bait when he finds her, I would surely tell him that I had not laid eyes on her, despite the fact that she was at that moment hiding in my closet. If the gestapo had come to my door looking for Jews to ship off to the concentration camp, I would have surely lied to protect the Goldberg family cowering in my attic. If a mother hands me her ugly little baby and asks if he is the cutest little boy I have ever seen, I am not going to tell her, "No, he looks like a young prune." If the reason God gave this commandment in the first place was to insure that people would not be wounded by words, you can know that God would never countenance wounding as the price for absolute truth.
One other issue in regard to this commandment: it comes from the Larger Catechism developed in conjunction with the venerable Westminster Confession of Faith. This from the section on how we are to understand the Ten Commandments:
Q. 145. What are the sins forbidden in the Ninth Commandment?
A. The sins forbidden in the Ninth Commandment are: all prejudicing of the truth, and the good name of our neighbors as well as our own, especially in public judicature; giving false evidence, suborning false witnesses, wittingly appearing and pleading for an evil cause, outfacing and overbearing the truth; passing unjust sentence, calling evil good, and good evil; rewarding the wicked according to the work of the righteous, and the righteous according to the work of the wicked; forgery, concealing the truth, undue silence in a just cause, and holding our peace when iniquity calleth for either a reproof from ourselves, or complaint to others....4
And then on and on some more. The phrase "undue silence in a just cause" jumps out. If the establishment of a fair and impartial judicial system for this newly freed nation of Israel is God's mind and motivation for giving this commandment, that will mean more than insuring against perjured testimony.
Consider one facet. True justice means appropriate sentencing, as the Catechism suggests, and unfortunately, in American jurisprudence in our day, that can be problematic. The difficulty is the result of public concern that too many criminals are walking our streets free because of legal technicalities or lenient judges. Politicians have seized on that and passed draconian "sentencing guidelines" that tell judges what sentences must be imposed for particular crimes -- the "judgment" is no longer the prerogative of the judge. The result has been that, occasionally, someone is convicted and sentenced to a punishment that does not nearly fit the crime.
The most notorious of these situations occurs in states with a so-called "Three Strikes" law. These are statutes which require state courts to hand down a mandatory and extended period of incarceration to persons who have been convicted of a serious criminal offense on three or more separate occasions. The practice is not new. New York State, for example, has had a "persistent felony offender" law that dates back to the late nineteenth century, but sentences were not compulsory in every single case, and judges had much more discretion as to what term of incarceration should be imposed.
The first true "three strikes" law, with virtually no exceptions provided, was not enacted until 1993, when Washington state voters approved it. California followed a year later, when that state's voters approved "Proposition 184" by an almost four-to-one margin. The concept swiftly spread to other states and by 2004, 26 states and the federal government had "three strikes" statutes on the books (although none were quite so strong as California's). Some states require all three felony convictions to be for violent crimes if the mandatory sentence is to be pronounced, while others -- most notably California -- prescribe it for any third felony conviction so long as the first two felonies were deemed to be either "violent" or "serious," or both.
Some unusual scenarios have arisen, particularly in the Golden State. California punishes shoplifting and similar crimes as felony petty theft if the person who committed the crime has a prior conviction for any form of theft, including robbery or burglary. As a result, some defendants have been given sentences of 25-years-to-life in prison for such crimes as shoplifting golf clubs, videotapes, or even a slice of pepperoni pizza. In one particularly notorious case, Kevin Weber was sentenced to 26 years to life for the crime of stealing four chocolate chip cookies.5 As you can imagine, sentences like this have prompted some criticism.
During the time I served a congregation in North Carolina, we heard about a young man named Kwame Cannon,6 a young African-American man who, in 1986, as a seventeen-year-old, committed and was convicted of six "cat burglaries." He broke into people's homes while they were sleeping, never with a weapon, never injured anyone, and, in total, stole less than $500 worth of goods. His sentence? Two consecutive life terms!
One year before Kwame's sentencing, his mother had played a major role in a successful $300,000 lawsuit in which Greensboro Police, the Ku Klux Klan, and American Nazis were found liable in the wrongful deaths of five protesters in what became known as the 1979 Greensboro Massacre. Mrs. Cannon was well known as a social activist on issues pertaining to poor people and African Americans. Whether or not her son's sentence was at all related to that fact is only surmise.
Two consecutive life terms was the harshest sentence for comparable crimes in the history of North Carolina. Kwame Cannon committed crimes and deserved to be held accountable, as he himself willingly admitted. He publicly apologized for his burglaries. Kwame was a model prisoner. He made the effort to rehabilitate himself, took correspondence courses, studied to take the SAT (and one of his burglary victims served as his tutor). He served as "counselor" to other prisoners. He was praised by prison officials, ministers, political officials, and virtually everyone who saw this young man turn himself around.
Simple justice demanded that something be done to overturn the outrageously excessive sentence. Over 5,000 letters were written to North Carolina's Governor Jim Hunt requesting Kwame's release. The majority of the Greensboro City Council, including the mayor, requested his release. A former state supreme court justice and congressman, the 100-plus members of the Greensboro Pulpit Forum, as well as hundreds of people from all walks of life in Greensboro, asked that this young man be freed. Even the district attorney and the Greensboro chief of police said they did not oppose the release of Kwame Cannon.
In spite of all this, Governor Hunt did not appear to want to respond. If this ninth commandment demands not only an adherence to truthful testimony in our administration of justice, but as the Catechism insists, is a prohibition against "undue silence in a just cause," something had to be said. People spoke ... and spoke and spoke and spoke. Finally, a year later, the Governor signed the release and Kwame Cannon came home.
God cares about justice. That is the message, not only of the Ten Commandments, but of the entire corpus of scripture. God's aim is a society where there is fairness and equity for all, where judicial decisions are based on truth, where gossip has no place, where the sentence fits the crime, and where voices do not remain silent while injustice is done. To help us along that road, God gave us these good words, words to live and live well by: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."
Study Questions
1. Is it possible for a complex society to exist without a court system? Why or why not?
2. If a court system is deemed necessary, what safeguards are needed to insure its fairness?
3. How do you feel about "sentencing guidelines" for judges?
4. Does it matter whether people take an oath to tell the truth in court? Are those who swear to tell the truth more truthful than those who do not?
5. What instances of "undue silence in a just cause" can you think of?
6. People lie. Why?
____________
1. Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), p. 107.
2. See Exodus 23:1 and Deuteronomy 19:16-21 for the penal code equivalent to this commandment.
3. Clifton Fadiman, Gen. Ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1985), p. 571.
4. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Part I, Book of Confessions (Louisville, Kentucky: Geneva Press, 1996), 7.257.
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_strikes_law.
6. The Prism, via Internet, http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/prism/apr98/seventy.html.
-- Deuteronomy 19:16-21
"The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God." Everyone is familiar with those words, and they come from the same milieu as this commandment. "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." If the Ten Commandments are, at heart, a social justice document designed to lay out God's basis for a just and decent society, and if that just and decent society is to have a mechanism for settling inevitable disputes -- a court system -- then these words about truthful testimony are the foundation.
We dislike perjury. People who swear to tell the truth but then lie give us a queasy feeling. One might want to say that it depends upon what someone is lying about as to the seriousness of the offense, but, nonetheless, the truth is preferable, and has always been. As one commentator has written, "Primitive men who killed and raped and looted without a second thought regarded a false oath as an offense against the gods, and looked with superstitious horror for a bolt of lightning to strike the blasphemer dead."1
Of course, the prohibition against false testimony in court was not unique to the Jews. Three hundred years before the Ten Commandments, Hammurabi's code said the same. That went so far as to lay out the sentence for those who were convicted of lying in court: one so convicted would have to bear the same penalty as the one who had been originally charged would have borne. For example, if someone perjured himself in a capital trial (where the penalty was death), then the one judged guilty of giving the false testimony was himself sentenced to die. One would surmise that such stiff punishment would have tended to be a good deterrent.
When it became part of the Jewish code of conduct in Deuteronomy 19, the same penalty was laid out.2 But there were even prohibitions attached to the code to prevent people from being tempted to lie in court. Some were not even allowed to testify because they might consider perjuring themselves: relatives, friends, known enemies, anyone whose profession was thought of as in the least disreputable (dice-players, usurers, or slaves). The Jewish legal system was designed to protect the rights of the accused at every turn. Circumstantial evidence was not permitted. So, most certainly, fabricated verbal evidence was despised.
This commandment prohibiting false witness was first and foremost forensic in nature. Its prime focus was testimony before a court. The reason it did not flatly prohibit lying of any sort is that these Ten Commandments are not to be understood as a code of personal conduct. The concern here is justice, for a society that would protect the weak from the strong, the poor from the rich, the simple from the crafty. The opposite side of that coin called for an active defense of those who had been slandered, those who were in the dock because of lies, rumors, or innuendo. As the Jewish law laid it down, "If a person sins because he does not speak up when he hears a public charge to testify regarding something he has seen or learned about, he will be held responsible" (Leviticus 5:1). "False witness" could be given, not just by opening your mouth, but by keeping it shut as well. There is a bias toward truth in assuring a society that is as God intends, not only in this ninth commandment and the rest of the Jewish law, but throughout history.
As to personal truthfulness (not simply judicial), we learn early on. One of the first Bible verses my parents taught me was "Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord" (Proverbs 12:22). And every time I would be tempted to skirt the truth, I would see a wagging finger and hear, "Lying lips...." It's nothing new -- the standard for proper conduct is a strict adherence to the truth. George Washington and the cherry tree and all that.
As to the way folks actually handle truth, though, that cherry tree story is wonderful. It first appeared in Parson Weems' biography, Life of Washington, in the 1806 edition. According to Weems' story, young George was given a hatchet at about the age of six and went around his daddy's farm testing his present out on all sorts of things, including a young cherry tree which was damaged severely. Papa summoned the boy and asked if he knew anything about it, and got the response, "Father, I cannot tell a lie; I cut the cherry tree." Because George was so truthful, his daddy forgot his anger, and all lived happily ever after. We have all heard that story. It has had an enormous effect on the kids of every subsequent American generation and has succeeded in making George Washington the sworn enemy of all young children.3 It certainly has not made them more truthful. Ironically, this story about the virtue of telling the truth is itself not true -- Parson Weems or somebody made it up. O tempora, O mores.
I wish I could say that preachers were innocent of that sort of thing. There is the classic story of the young boy coming home on a Sunday afternoon and asking his minister father about something he heard in the morning's sermon. "Daddy, was that really true, or was it just preachin'?"
What is surely true is that many times we do not think of what we say as lying, whether it be about George and the cherry tree or some quirky little invention for a sermon. But if what we pass on to someone else is less than the whole truth and we do not make that clear, what comes out of our mouth most certainly qualifies as a lie. Worst of all, lots of the lies we tell are not even for our own advantage, so we do not think of them as lies. They are just conversation. We call it gossip, and that can be deadly.
The Salem Witch Trials are instructive. In the summer and fall of 1692, over a hundred people were arrested and convicted for being "in league with the Devil." The only way they could escape the hangman's noose was to confess their awful crime and be granted mercy by the court. Twenty of them refused to confess to something of which they were not guilty and were legally murdered. How could such a thing have happened? Because the ridiculous gossip of some teenage girls got out of hand. In this case, lying lips were an abomination, not only to the Lord, but to the history of civilization.
It would be wonderful to say that such goings on were limited to the unsophisticates of the seventeenth century, but it was repeated in the early 1950s with the Army-McCarthy hearings, the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and the Hollywood Black Lists. In a generation that had just been at war twice within five years, there was genuine terror of anything that could threaten us again. The fear of the "Red Menace" was so gripping that anyone even whispered about as being sympathetic to Communism was in danger of having life and career flushed right down the drain. Many had that happen, and all because of the same kind of gossip that the girls of Salem had spread so many years before. It was wretched excess, of course, and Arthur Miller used the Salem Witch Trial experience as a parable to attack McCarthyism in his wonderful play, The Crucible.
"You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." Good words for the courtroom, good words for any room. It is not a flat prohibition against lying. It would have nothing to say to me if I lied to protect someone. If a man came to me wielding a machete, asking if I had seen his wife, threatening to chop her up into fish bait when he finds her, I would surely tell him that I had not laid eyes on her, despite the fact that she was at that moment hiding in my closet. If the gestapo had come to my door looking for Jews to ship off to the concentration camp, I would have surely lied to protect the Goldberg family cowering in my attic. If a mother hands me her ugly little baby and asks if he is the cutest little boy I have ever seen, I am not going to tell her, "No, he looks like a young prune." If the reason God gave this commandment in the first place was to insure that people would not be wounded by words, you can know that God would never countenance wounding as the price for absolute truth.
One other issue in regard to this commandment: it comes from the Larger Catechism developed in conjunction with the venerable Westminster Confession of Faith. This from the section on how we are to understand the Ten Commandments:
Q. 145. What are the sins forbidden in the Ninth Commandment?
A. The sins forbidden in the Ninth Commandment are: all prejudicing of the truth, and the good name of our neighbors as well as our own, especially in public judicature; giving false evidence, suborning false witnesses, wittingly appearing and pleading for an evil cause, outfacing and overbearing the truth; passing unjust sentence, calling evil good, and good evil; rewarding the wicked according to the work of the righteous, and the righteous according to the work of the wicked; forgery, concealing the truth, undue silence in a just cause, and holding our peace when iniquity calleth for either a reproof from ourselves, or complaint to others....4
And then on and on some more. The phrase "undue silence in a just cause" jumps out. If the establishment of a fair and impartial judicial system for this newly freed nation of Israel is God's mind and motivation for giving this commandment, that will mean more than insuring against perjured testimony.
Consider one facet. True justice means appropriate sentencing, as the Catechism suggests, and unfortunately, in American jurisprudence in our day, that can be problematic. The difficulty is the result of public concern that too many criminals are walking our streets free because of legal technicalities or lenient judges. Politicians have seized on that and passed draconian "sentencing guidelines" that tell judges what sentences must be imposed for particular crimes -- the "judgment" is no longer the prerogative of the judge. The result has been that, occasionally, someone is convicted and sentenced to a punishment that does not nearly fit the crime.
The most notorious of these situations occurs in states with a so-called "Three Strikes" law. These are statutes which require state courts to hand down a mandatory and extended period of incarceration to persons who have been convicted of a serious criminal offense on three or more separate occasions. The practice is not new. New York State, for example, has had a "persistent felony offender" law that dates back to the late nineteenth century, but sentences were not compulsory in every single case, and judges had much more discretion as to what term of incarceration should be imposed.
The first true "three strikes" law, with virtually no exceptions provided, was not enacted until 1993, when Washington state voters approved it. California followed a year later, when that state's voters approved "Proposition 184" by an almost four-to-one margin. The concept swiftly spread to other states and by 2004, 26 states and the federal government had "three strikes" statutes on the books (although none were quite so strong as California's). Some states require all three felony convictions to be for violent crimes if the mandatory sentence is to be pronounced, while others -- most notably California -- prescribe it for any third felony conviction so long as the first two felonies were deemed to be either "violent" or "serious," or both.
Some unusual scenarios have arisen, particularly in the Golden State. California punishes shoplifting and similar crimes as felony petty theft if the person who committed the crime has a prior conviction for any form of theft, including robbery or burglary. As a result, some defendants have been given sentences of 25-years-to-life in prison for such crimes as shoplifting golf clubs, videotapes, or even a slice of pepperoni pizza. In one particularly notorious case, Kevin Weber was sentenced to 26 years to life for the crime of stealing four chocolate chip cookies.5 As you can imagine, sentences like this have prompted some criticism.
During the time I served a congregation in North Carolina, we heard about a young man named Kwame Cannon,6 a young African-American man who, in 1986, as a seventeen-year-old, committed and was convicted of six "cat burglaries." He broke into people's homes while they were sleeping, never with a weapon, never injured anyone, and, in total, stole less than $500 worth of goods. His sentence? Two consecutive life terms!
One year before Kwame's sentencing, his mother had played a major role in a successful $300,000 lawsuit in which Greensboro Police, the Ku Klux Klan, and American Nazis were found liable in the wrongful deaths of five protesters in what became known as the 1979 Greensboro Massacre. Mrs. Cannon was well known as a social activist on issues pertaining to poor people and African Americans. Whether or not her son's sentence was at all related to that fact is only surmise.
Two consecutive life terms was the harshest sentence for comparable crimes in the history of North Carolina. Kwame Cannon committed crimes and deserved to be held accountable, as he himself willingly admitted. He publicly apologized for his burglaries. Kwame was a model prisoner. He made the effort to rehabilitate himself, took correspondence courses, studied to take the SAT (and one of his burglary victims served as his tutor). He served as "counselor" to other prisoners. He was praised by prison officials, ministers, political officials, and virtually everyone who saw this young man turn himself around.
Simple justice demanded that something be done to overturn the outrageously excessive sentence. Over 5,000 letters were written to North Carolina's Governor Jim Hunt requesting Kwame's release. The majority of the Greensboro City Council, including the mayor, requested his release. A former state supreme court justice and congressman, the 100-plus members of the Greensboro Pulpit Forum, as well as hundreds of people from all walks of life in Greensboro, asked that this young man be freed. Even the district attorney and the Greensboro chief of police said they did not oppose the release of Kwame Cannon.
In spite of all this, Governor Hunt did not appear to want to respond. If this ninth commandment demands not only an adherence to truthful testimony in our administration of justice, but as the Catechism insists, is a prohibition against "undue silence in a just cause," something had to be said. People spoke ... and spoke and spoke and spoke. Finally, a year later, the Governor signed the release and Kwame Cannon came home.
God cares about justice. That is the message, not only of the Ten Commandments, but of the entire corpus of scripture. God's aim is a society where there is fairness and equity for all, where judicial decisions are based on truth, where gossip has no place, where the sentence fits the crime, and where voices do not remain silent while injustice is done. To help us along that road, God gave us these good words, words to live and live well by: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."
Study Questions
1. Is it possible for a complex society to exist without a court system? Why or why not?
2. If a court system is deemed necessary, what safeguards are needed to insure its fairness?
3. How do you feel about "sentencing guidelines" for judges?
4. Does it matter whether people take an oath to tell the truth in court? Are those who swear to tell the truth more truthful than those who do not?
5. What instances of "undue silence in a just cause" can you think of?
6. People lie. Why?
____________
1. Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), p. 107.
2. See Exodus 23:1 and Deuteronomy 19:16-21 for the penal code equivalent to this commandment.
3. Clifton Fadiman, Gen. Ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1985), p. 571.
4. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Part I, Book of Confessions (Louisville, Kentucky: Geneva Press, 1996), 7.257.
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_strikes_law.
6. The Prism, via Internet, http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/prism/apr98/seventy.html.
