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| The Ministry of Truth, Screenshot from Nineteen Eighty-Four BBC adaption (1954) |
“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.