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09 March 2015

"Tell truth and shame the devil": A Sermon on Ephesians 6

The Ministry of Truth, Screenshot from Nineteen Eighty-Four BBC adaption (1954) 
Preached at Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, on the Second Sunday in Lent. Listen here.



“Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness.” (Ephesians 6:14)

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

These are the three slogans of the Party in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. They are examples of the “reality control” or “doublethink” the Party exercises on itself and the citizens of Oceania. As the protagonist Winston Smith explains it, “doublethink” means “to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them” and “to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.”[1] In the novel, the practical consequences of doublethink range from minor annoyances to the total inversion of moral sensibilities; from labeling a wretched, oily-smelling liquor as “Victory Gin,” to a theater audience loudly applauding footage of the bombing of a lifeboat full of women and children.

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Slogans worthy of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, who said that if you tell them often and cleverly enough, people can be convinced that a square is actually a circle.

History is littered with the horrors born of such sinister manipulations of language.

And our own politics is not exempt from its temptations and dangers—no community is. Our politics today abounds with what the comedian Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness.” And talk of “euthanasia” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” darkens our discourse. But at least we retain morally-freighted terms like “suicide,” which is better than calling the same thing something like “self-life taking.”[2]

No human community is free from the temptation to use the kind of language that is, as Orwell put it, “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”[3]

Doublethink, propaganda, truthiness—such debased language is ultimately the progeny of “the Father of Lies,” the devil (Jn. 8:44). “That ancient serpent” (Rev 12:9) lives in falsehood and spins lies that breed violence and death. He is called “a murderer from the beginning” (Jn. 8:44) because death entered the world through the deception he worked in the Garden of Eden.

“Did God really say…? “You will not die.”

The devil is The Deceiver—with a capital “D”.

The good news is that the devil has been defeated; our Lord Jesus by dying and rising again has crushed the head of that great serpent.

The bad news is that although he’s mortally wounded, the Enemy still thrashes about in his death-throes, just as a great python whose head has been cut off lashes about with its tail. In his slide to nothingness, the devil’s still dangerous; his craft and power remain great.

But against his wiles the church stands.

The church can withstand the death-dealing lies of the devil, because God gives the church everything we need to know the truth and live truthfully. This, I think, is the gist of today's text from Ephesians 6:14: "Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness."

This is the second in our sermon series on the armor God gives his people to enable them to stand against the wiles of the devil. Each Sunday during Lent we’re meditating on the passage from Ephesians we heard a little while ago. We’re examining what God gives the church to enable us to stand, to withstand the devil and all his works.

And what else is the devil than a deceiver? He and his ilk work to make lies seem truthful and murder respectable—to disrupt peace and destroy community. Spreading lies and injustice are his particular forte.

And the people of God are the special target of his fury, precisely because they are called to be a community of peace, a community that witnesses to God's reconciling work in Christ Jesus, a community in which there is no place for lying and injustice, a community that knows the truth and does the truth. In the first chapters of Ephesians, Paul describes the church as the community in which hostility and divisions have been overcome through the blood of Christ. "He is our peace," he says (Eph 2:14). Again and again he calls the Ephesians to "speak the truth in love" in order to inhabit their new identity in Christ, to become the community of peace that they are (cf. Eph. 4:15).

But the devil don't like peace. He never has. And so he attacks what makes for peace. The Enemy, in other words, knows what Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew. Bonhoeffer, the German pastor-theologian who steadfastly opposed the Nazi regime, says, "There can only be a community of peace when it does not rest on lies and injustice." "There can only be a community of peace when it does not rest on lies and injustice." Knowing this, the Enemy sets about making lies seem truthful and murder respectable. And he's damnably good at it.

The book of Isaiah, for example, shows how devastating the devil's handiwork can be. In Isaiah 59, there’s a stark description of a community whose peace has been shattered by lies and injustice: hands drip blood; lips mutter lies. Things have fallen apart, and Isaiah tells it like it is:
"Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off;
for truth has fallen in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter.
Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey." (vv. 14-15)

Notice the connection here between justice/righteousness and truth. It's a connection made throughout Scripture. For example, in Revelation the redeemed sing to God, "Your ways are ways of righteousness and truth, O King of all the ages" (Rev. 15:3). There's a sense in which justice and truth are interchangeable. As John Milton insightfully put it, "Truth is but justice in our knowledge, and justice is but truth in our practice."[4] So we might think of justice and righteousness as truthful living, doing what is right. Righteousness is doing the truth.

Back now to Ephesians and the belt of truth and breastplate of righteousness: Truth, we might say, holds it all together. God gives us everything we need to know and do the truth, in order to keep us from being undone by the death-dealing lies of the devil. God gives us what we need to shame the devil.

"Tell truth and shame the devil." It's proverb found in Shakespeare's first Henry IV play: "Tell truth and shame the devil." Commenting on this proverb the essayist Alan Jacobs says, "When we tell the truth...the Father of Lies...is deprived of his children." "Every time we tell the truth," Jacobs continues, "we put [the devil] in his place. And because he hates his place, and wants more than anyone has ever wanted anything to assume the place of God, he is deeply grieved and shamed when our truthfulness shows the world just how un-Almighty he is."[5] The devil seeks to make lies seem truthful and murder respectable. But our truthfulness brings his dark deeds into the light and exposes him for what he is: a death-dealing huckster. When we tell the truth and live truthfully, we shame the devil, we show "just how un-Almighty he is."

Want to stand against the wiles of the devil? Then don't lie. Ever! Practice telling the truth every day in matters big and small. "Speak the truth in love." Don't gossip. Avoid truthiness and doublethink. Learn to stand in the truth. Practice standing before the truth.

Remember the dramatic encounter between Jesus and Pontius Pilate in John's Gospel? Jesus tells Pilate that he's come to bear witness to the truth, and that "every one who is of the truth hears my voice." Pilate answers flippantly and evasively, "What is truth?" (Jn. 18:37-38) Pilate is not willing to listen to Jesus, not willing to hear the One who bears witness to the truth. And so he ends up colluding with the most massive miscarriage of justice the world has ever known. Pilate precisely did not stand against the wiles of the devil.

So, don't be like Pilate. I mean, don't give up on the truth; keep seeking the truth. Ask, "What is truth?"—but, unlike him, stay for an answer! Stay to listen to the voice of Jesus, who is the truth in person. Allow yourself to be addressed by the truth.

Here's a concrete way to do just that: Memorize Scripture. As Rowan Williams says, when we hear the words of the Bible, we hear what God wants us to hear.[6] We learn to listen to the voice of Jesus the Word by listening to the words of Scripture. Memorizing the words of the Bible is a practical way to write the truth on your heart, to learn to stand in the truth. “Abide in my words,” Jesus promises, "and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (Jn. 8:32).

Now, not only do we shame the devil by telling the truth, but also by doing the truth, by living according to the truth, by doing what is right and good and true. Job provides a good example here. Job, we read, is "a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil" (Job 1:1). The Adversary, Satan, accuses Job of fearing God only because of the good things he has received from God. Remove those things, sneers Satan, "and he will curse thee to thy face" (1:11). But Job proves Satan wrong—and so shames him.  Job loses everything—his children, his possessions, his health—but he refuses to turn away from God, he persists in living righteously, in doing the truth.

You see, one of Satan's most subtle schemes is to tempt us to leave off doing the truth when things get rocky; to tempt us to be more concerned with protecting our lives than about seeking to do the truth regardless of the cost; to tempt us to doubt that Jesus is telling the truth when he says, "Seek first [the kingdom of God] and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well" (Mt. 6:33). This is why Jesus reacts so strongly to Peter in today's Gospel lesson. When Peter rebukes him for speaking of his suffering and death, Jesus turns and says, "Get behind me, Satan!" (Mk. 8:33) Jesus rebukes Peter, because Peter is inadvertently voicing a demonic temptation: "Save your life, live for yourself." By refusing this temptation and remaining obedient even unto death, the Lord Jesus has definitively shamed the devil. Christ Jesus has "disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them" in the Cross (Col. 2:15).

By his grace we are also able to triumph over every evil, to withstand the devil by our truth and truthfulness. We do not stand in our own strength; the Lord is our strength. Stand clothed in the armor with which God himself opposes lies and injustice (cf. Isa. 59:17). Stand clothed in the righteousness and truth with which Jesus the Messiah girds himself (cf. Isa. 11:5 LXX). Clothe yourself in his truth and his righteousness. In Jesus, the truth in person, God has given us everything we need to know and do the truth, and so to withstand the death-dealing lies of the devil. "Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness."

Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and shame the devil.





[1] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, II.9; I.3
[2] Cf. Hauerwas, “Casuistry in Context: The Need for Tradition,” The Hauerwas Reader, p. 277.
[4] Milton, Eikonoklastes.
[5] Alan Jacobs, Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling, xi-xii.
[6] Rowan Williams, Being Christian.