I would like to begin this morning by addressing the most notorious if not the most important.

In fact, I don't believe it's the most important issue in regard to falsehood namely the question is it ever

right to lie and I'm going to address the issue, though perhaps not answer it as directly as you might like.

What I want to say is this, it is possible to be a godly person who walks by faith and yet in extreme situations that are life-threatening, feel constrained to lie in order to obstruct wickedness.

And on the other hand, I want to say that it is possible to be relatively free from intentional

lying in your life and be a godless, unregenerate, wicked person.

Now the reason I say it is possible to be relatively free from lying and still be unregenerate is because there are all kinds of personal and social forces in the world that might cause a person to have a strong desire to want to be known as dependable,

to want to have the reputation that their word is as good as law

without having any relation to God at all.

And on the other hand, the reason I say that it's possible for a person to be walking by faith and to be godly, and yet in those extreme situations that seem life threatening to feel at times

constrained to lie in order to oppose wickedness is because I find instances of that in

scripture and I want to show you at least two of them.

If you want to turn with me, you can turn to Exodus, chapter one.

These are familiar stories.

But it may be helpful to remind ourselves of the implications they may have on this issue.

The second book of the Bible, chapter 1, the situation is that the Egyptian Pharaoh is threatened by the growing number of Israelites in his land.

And so he hits upon a scheme by which to deplete their forces.

Namely, he tells the midwives who deliver their babies to kill all the boys, to strangle them so that

it looks like a stillbirth probably, and not to kill the girls. But what happens? In verse 17, it says the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the

male children live.

And the king of course is upset at this and asked why they did it and they answer in verse

19 because the Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women for they are vigorous

...