The Ninth Commandment

"You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour."  Exodus 20:16

 

Does this Commandment only deal with what we say about our neighbour, or does it include what we say about God?

It includes what we say about God because he wants there to be a true witness of himself in the earth. So when we discuss bearing false witness it is important that we also discuss true witness, and God is also person and therefor is also out neighbour.

 

Truth about God comes from God himself as his revelation or self revealing through his Word and his creation and the things that he does for us to see.

God is before all things. This is sometimes called the ‘prevenient grace of God’ God has acted upon us first and is always acting upon us. Atheists would say no – you thought God up. I say no to that - he thought us up.

 

What about scientific truth –  Is not that an honest representation of what is?

Yes it is. However science is continually finding that it can observe ‘what is’ far more accurately than it used to. What has been concealed can now be more readily revealed because of new technology and instrumentation especially regarding the observation of the galaxies and the laws of motion. Truth is ‘what is’ The word in the Greek used in the Bible is ‘alethinos’, which means ‘that which is not concealed’, IE, ‘that which is revealed’.

 

What is the difference between scientific objectivity and faith.

The Bible says ‘faith is the evidence of things not seen’ Scientific enquiry would once perhaps scoffed at that statement but it now uses the same framework of enquiry into ‘what is’. Physicists referred to the phenomenon of what appeared to be the possibility of one particle being in two places at the same time (The Higgs Boson) as the "God Particle".  It took nearly half a century and a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator to observe this. In the meantime the reality of this had to be ‘assumed’ as true before it could be seen because of their brilliant mathematical conclusion – so - ‘faith is the evidence of things not seen’.

 

So how does this Commandment relate to the one before it  regarding our relationships with one another?

The best way of linking them is to start with the relational failure that occurs with Commandment eight, being about the devaluing of another person’s possessions and their entitlement to them, and Commandment nine being about the devaluing of another person’s name and reputation and honour - their essential being or nature.

 

Click here to see a chart showing the progression of the Commandments