Dr. Rodney Plunket

As many of you know, I grew up in the hills of northwest Alabama alongside the Tennessee River and Margaret grew up in the higher hills of eastern Tennessee also alongside the Tennessee River.  To keep in touch with our roots I decided that this year I should send Margaret a Hillbilly Valentine.  It is too long to share in full, but here are some of the better bits from my Hillbilly Valentine.

Collards is green

my dog’s name is Blue

and I’m so lucky

to have a sweet thang like you.

 

Yore hair is like cornsilk

a-flapping in the breeze

Softer than Blue’s

and without all them fleas.

 

You move like the bass,

which excite me in May.

You ain’t got no scales

but I luv you anyway.

 

Yo’re as cute as a junebug

a-buzzin’ overhead.

You ain’t mean like those far ants

I found in my bed.

 

Some men, they buy chocolate

for Valentine’s Day;

They git it at Wal-Mart,

it’s romantic that way.

Some men git roses

on that special day

from the cooler at Kroger.

“That’s impressive,” I say.

 

Some men buy fine diamonds

from a flea market booth.

“Diamonds are forever,”

they explain, suave and couth.

 

But for this man, honey,

these won’t do.

Cause yo’re too special,

you sweet thang you.

 

I got you a gift,

without taste nor odor,

more useful than diamonds . . .

IT’S A NEW TROLLIN’ MOTOR!!

 

Yipeeee . . . Yee Ha!

 

Happy Valentine’s Day

Well, as some of you have already guessed, I did not actually give this to Margaret for Valentine’s Day.  It must have been zipping through Cyberspace, and Anita Neff passed it on to Margaret who sent it to me.  I thought it was too good not to share.  I actually gave Margaret some flowers the day before Valentine’s Day, because I gave her an engagement ring on February the 13^th in 1974.  I could not wait one more day then so neither do I wait one more day now.

Valentine’s Day is primarily focused upon romantic relationships.  And this special day will keep being celebrated because those relationships are very important to us.  Thinking about those relationships caused me to realize again that all of the Ten Commandments are focused upon relationships.  The Ten Commandments begin with three commands that all have to do with the believer’s relationship with God.  The Sabbath command is next, and it has to do with the believer’s relationship both with God and with people.  The fifth commandment has to do with the relationship between children and parents.  The sixth through tenth commandments all have to do with human relationships within a community of people.

This is the final lesson in our series on the Ten Commandments.  We come this morning to the ninth and tenth commandments.  Through the ninth commandment the Lord says, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Exodus [Ex] 20:16).  And the tenth commandment says, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Ex 20:16-17).  It is easy to see that these commands are for the purpose of creating and sustaining healthy relationships within the God’s community of believers.

Let’s look first at the ninth commandment which prohibits the bearing of false witness.  Brevard S. Childs in his commentary on Exodus notes that the language used here makes clear that this command has to do with giving testimony in a legal setting.  Childs then writes,

The commandment is directed primarily toward guarding the basic right of the covenant member against the threat of false accusation.  The original commandment is, therefore, not a general prohibition of lying, but forbids lying which directly affects one’s fellow (Exodus, Old Testament Library [London: SCM Press, 1974], 424).

I have suggested several times in this sermon series that the Ten Commandments served as a foundational summary of Israel’s overall covenant responsibilities.  I see the ninth commandment’s explicit prohibition against bearing false witness as a foundational commandment upon which other commandments regarding honesty are built.  Additional Old Testament passages support that view.

If you have your Bible, please turn to Leviticus 19:11-12.  There we read,

You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.  And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God:  I am the Lord.

Notice the items here that connect to individual commands within the Ten Commandments.  You have a prohibition against stealing just like we have as the eighth of the Ten Commandments.  You have a prohibition against swearing falsely by the name of the Lord which is said to profane that name.  This prohibition is clearly connected to the third commandment which says, “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name” (Ex. 20:7).  And in the middle of these commands in Leviticus you read these words, “you shall not lie to one another.”  So here in a passage that clearly connects to the Ten Commandments we have a generic command against lying rather than the more specific command to not lie in a legal setting.  What I see then is that the ninth commandment’s explicit prohibition against false testimony is a foundation stone for the more generic commandment which prohibits any kind of lying.

Dishonesty destroys trust.  Dishonesty is a cancer within a community.  It destroys reputations, and it makes a mockery of justice.  It devastates the basic relationships/the basic social contract required for people to live together in har­mony and peace.

Possibly no passage in the Bible more powerfully exposes the cancerous effects of dishonesty on a community and the distress it causes God than Jeremiah 9:1-9.  If you have your Bible please turn to that passage and follow along as I read.

O that my head were a spring of water,

     and my eyes a fountain of tears,

so that I might weep day and night

     for the slain of my poor people!

O that I had in the desert

     a traveler’s lodging place,

that I might leave my people

     and go away from them!

For they are all adulterers,

     a band of traitors.

They bend their tongues like bows;

     they have grown strong in the land for falsehood, and not for truth;

for they proceed from evil to evil,

     and they do not know me, says the Lord.

 

Beware of your neighbors,

     and put no trust in any of your kin;

for all your kin are supplanters,

     and every neighbor goes around like a slanderer.

They all deceive their neighbors,

     and no one speaks the truth;

they have taught their tongues to speak lies;

     they commit iniquity and are too weary to repent.

Oppression upon oppression, deceit upon deceit!

     They refuse to know me, says the Lord.

 

Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts:

I will now refine and test them,

     for what else can I do with my sinful people?

Their tongue is a deadly arrow;

     it speaks deceit through the mouth.

They all speak friendly words to their neighbors,

     but inwardly are planning to lay an ambush.

Shall I not punish them for these things? says the Lord;

     and shall I not bring retribution

     on a nation such as this?

The truth of these words is clear.  You can feel moral darkness descending upon the community.  You can feel the suspicion and the fear ripping apart the social fabric and destroying even the possibility of true fellowship and love.  And most important of all, you can feel God’s anger getting near the boiling point because of the injustices that are so evident among the people.  Punishment is coming.  In time, as we noted last week, the city of Jerusalem with its temple was destroyed; the people were taken away into exile because of their injustice and evil––injustice and evil fed by much dishonesty and deceit.

God is no less angry today when people are fast and loose with truth.  God through the ninth commandment is calling us to verbal integrity.  Let’s be a people of honesty.  Let’s be a people who obey the command to love others as we love ourselves by being honest in all of our relationships.  No one likes being lied to.  If we love others as we want to be loved then we will not be dishonesty.  Our word will be our bond, and all will know that “you can bank on it.”

On Monday, April 13, 1998 I was in my car listening to National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” when a commentator named Jim Sollisch was introduced and said the following:

The correct answer to the following quiz could be worth $11 million.  All you have to do is interpret the meaning of this sentence, which was printed in bold letters at the top of a mailing received by a Florida woman named Ina Brown.  Here’s the sentence:

“Ina Brown, you stand alone at the top, you’ve swept past 200,000 other winners with our first $11,075,000 prize in history.”  Did you assume that this could be the winning letter in one of those publisher’s sweepstakes, . . . ?  After all, it doesn’t say, “You may already be a winner.”  It says, “You stand alone at the top,” which is usually where the winner stands.

Ina Brown, a 76-year-old Florida woman assumed this was an honest to goodness winning letter.  And when she found out it wasn’t, she sued American Family Publishers.

David Carlin, a lawyer for the publisher defended the misleading mailing saying in a New York Times interview, “Most people understand these mailings.”

Now this statement may sound innocuous, but it gets my vote, in a very crowded category, of most cynical statement uttered by a lawyer.  What Mr. Carlin is really saying is that everybody knows you can’t trust what a company puts in print to be what they really mean.  He’s acknowledging the death of the old social contract, whereby words had meanings similar to those listed in the dictionary, or defined by a reasonable 12-year-old.

A society that places no value in the common meaning of words, is a dangerous place to live. . . .  It’s a place whose capital is the courtroom and whose religion is litigation.

By settling the class action suit against them, American Family Publishers may have paid the price for deceptive advertising practices.  But they certainly got off easy for aiding and abetting the destruction of the social contract by which a civilized society operates.

Dishonesty is becoming a practice of so many within our nation that if all you have is a person’s word then you can feel extremely uneasy and insecure.

People, let’s take hold of the command to love our neighbor.  And let’s realize that we cannot do that unless we value and practice honesty.  Let’s take hold of this ninth commandment and live it out everyday!  In this world of so many lies, God can shine through us radiantly as we show to the world a people who love others by “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15a).

Now let’s turn to the tenth commandment.  It prohibits coveting.  To covet is to desire something that belongs to another person.  This is a command that digs deep.  It digs into the heart.  It goes all the way inside us to where immoral desires live.  This command makes clear that God is not just interested in words and behaviors; God is equally interested in the desires that motivate those words and behaviors.  Evil actions and wicked words are driven by evil desires hidden inside of us.  The tenth commandment calls us to a purity of heart that stands firm against those internal evils.

This commandment connects to the words of Psalm 51:6a where we read, “[God] desire[s] truth in the inward being.”  And Proverbs 21:26 says, “All day long the wicked covet, but the righteous give and do not hold back.”

Instead of turning our eyes and our hearts on things that it is not right for us to desire, let’s turn our eyes on Jesus.  Let’s become transfixed by the wonder and the glory of His majesty, holiness, and love.  Let’s fall in love with Him, and the attractiveness of the things of this world will fade away.