Truth Essay #1 “Truth in Word and Deed”
Sergeant Montgomery sat across from me looking downcast and dejected. He and I knew that his promising career as a soldier was coming to an abrupt and ignominious end. He was not overweight. He’d not been passed over for promotion. He was not guilty of driving while intoxicated, or any of the other common career ending infractions. He was guilty of one of the oldest human failures, that of engaging in an extramarital affair and then lying about it to cover it up. I was a lieutenant and his platoon leader. I’d found out about his indiscretion and asked him about it. He’d lied, denying it, even under oath. In my unit we handled highly classified and sensitive information; consequently, I had to suspend his local access to classified materials and forward a recommendation for a revocation of his security clearance. Unable to access classified materials, his career was effectively over. At this time, the Army normally let such soldiers go, and usually with a less-than-honorable discharge. All this was the result of his inability to tell the truth.
Though the Army did not really care about his marital infidelity, it did care about his telling the truth. In our little portion of the Army, trust was paramount and once lost, trust was near impossible to recover. If one could not be trusted to tell the truth in personal matters, then one could not be trusted to tell the truth in military matters. In my short time as an officer, I’d seen more than one senior NCO and officer cashiered due to lying. In an organization with a well-earned reputation for licentiousness I found it rather odd that we took such a stringent attitude toward telling the truth.
In our time, we find the public domain replete with liars. Of course, all of us struggle with this to some extent. We’ve all engaged in the internal struggle when faced with revealing an unpleasant truth. We desperately want to prevaricate, avoiding the embarrassment. Most, if not all, can recall a time in which we failed to win this internal battle; but, there are those in the public arena who engage in serial lying. Almost always, they tell a lie or at a minimum exaggerate. We as Christian men should not engage in similar practices and never countenance such behaviors as they exert an enormous corrosive effect on public discourse in our culture.
Much of the scripture devoted to truth speaks to personal truth, my ability to speak the truth about my own words and deeds; however, in the Zechariah passage, God speaks to the need for corporate truth and the individual role in maintaining it. As we’ve all experienced, continual prevarication in the public arena inhibits clear communication. We see this when we hear someone say, “Well, you know they all lie,” or, “None of them are trustworthy,” or, “Those aren’t my facts.” As believing men, we must be brave, brave enough to critically examine our own cherished political and cultural beliefs and brave enough to make sure that we only speak truth. In our modern on-line media world, too often we tailor our media consumption to fit our prejudices and predispositions. As Christians we need to take a good look in the mirror as it were and prayerfully compare what we think politically and culturally with scripture. We may find that our beliefs do not hold up well when examined in the stringent light of God’s revealed will in His word. We also need to be brave enough to shine the light of truth on our news sources. The proliferation of spurious “news” sources, which are mostly editorial in nature and designed to please a particular political audience degrades our national conversation into a shouting match in which consensus is not reached. As Christian men, we must engage in this battle armed with the truth.
Unfortunately, many of us simply parrot what our favorite talking head says. Are we so weak-kneed that we will not gird up our intellectual and spiritual loins to engage in an honest search for the truth. I fear that all too often we enjoy our comfort and lulled into complacency we do not seek out and share the truth. In this burgeoning age of social media, we all enjoy outsized platforms and audiences when compared with previous epochs. As representatives of and believers in the resurrected Jesus, we bear a responsibility for those things we say and espouse. Failure in our handling truth will place us in the same ignominious situation as Sergeant Montgomery, our lives in shambles with no excuse but our own abject failure.
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