Zechariah 8:16-17

Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour

Truth

Concisely stated, the doctrine of the text is, think truth, love truth, speak truth, and do truth--live in its atmosphere, make it your ruling principle.

Let the clear light which it sheds out throw a radiance on your course, so that your life be transparent as a summer day. The charm of truth is the charm of simplicity. He who knows the value of truth, and strives to exhibit it, bears the mark of God: he cannot be far from the kingdom of God. The text contains two affirmative and two negative precepts--speak the truth, execute judgment, and do not imagine evil in your hearts, do not love a false oath.

I. Presumedly innocent inroads upon the domains of truth.

1. There is innuendo and insinuation. The wise look which says so much, and commits itself to little.

2. Common prattle and gossip, meddling, as it generally does, with the more intimate concerns of third persons, seldom respects the limits of truth. Nowhere is caution more needful than in ordinary conversation.

3. Promises are lightly and readily given, and often as lightly and readily broken.

4. Lack of firmness necessitates sacrifice of truth. One does not like to be singular, one does not like to be disagreeable.

5. In speaking of one’s self or friends, the temptation, not always resisted, is to throw them out in the best light and make great persons of them, that it may be seen how grand, how clever we are, and how choice is the circle of our acquaintance.

6. The species of falsehood commonly called “fibs,” “white lies,” or in the slang diction of the college, “crams.”

7. The unconscientious workman’s dallying with his work is a sin against truthfulness.

II. Flagrant breaches of the law of truth. Open and deliberate lies, intentional and heartless deception. In opposition to all falsehood, whether of the lighter or heavier sort, whether respectable or vulgar, whether in deed, word, or gesture, whether by omission or addition, the Word of God says, “Speak every man truth to his neighbour.”

III. How does Scripture enforce this? By what revelations; by what further precepts?

1. The wrongfulness and fate of untruth are clearly explained.

2. What more would you have to recommend truth than that it is assimilation to the Divine character? He is a “God of truth, and without iniquity.” “Just and right.” If our thoughts, words, and deeds were regulated by the standard of truth this would be heaven upon earth. Be satisfied of a man’s integrity, sure that he ever means to do the right, and would scorn to act meanly, and you may make that man your friend. To work the world out into a society of friends, to transform it into a brotherhood, is, in brief, the aim of Christ. That ideal is the reality of heaven. (A. Hawkins Jones.)

An universal revival of religion

I. The essential prerequisites. Four prerequisites or preparatories for an universal revival of genuine religion.

1. There must be truthfulness in speech. “These are the things which ye shall do, Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour.” Truthful speech is somewhat rare in all social Circles, and in all departments of life. Fallacious statements abound in markets, senates, courts, and even families. Truthful speaking involves two things--

(1) Sincerity. To speak a true thing insincerely is not to speak truthfully. A man must conscientiously believe that what he speaks is true, before he can be credited with veracity. Truthful speaking involves--

(2) Accuracy. A man may speak with sincerity, and yet from ignorance or mistake may not speak according to fact; and unless he speaks according to fact he can scarcely be said to speak truthfully. His speech unintentionally conveys falsehood. Hence truthful speaking requires a strong sense of right, and an adequate acquaintance with the subjects of the speech.

2. There must be rectitude in conduct. “Execute the Judgment of truth and peace in your gates.” In the East the courts of justice were held at the gates of the city; and perhaps the primary reference here is to the pronouncing of judgment on cases that were righteous and tended to peace. But rectitude of life is even more important and urgent than rectitude in judg ment.

3. There must be benevolence in feeling. “Let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour.” We must not only keep our hands from evil, but we must watch over our hearts, that they imagine not any evil against our neighbor.

4. There must be abhorrence of falsehood. “Love no false oath.”

II. The signal manifestations. It is suggested that where these prerequisites are found, i.e. where a revival takes place, three things are manifest.

1. An increased pleasure in religious ordinances. “Thus saith the Lord of hosts; the fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall be to the house of Judah joy and gladness, and cheerful feasts.” “The fast of the fourth month was on account of the taking of Jerusalem” (Jeremiah 39:2; Jeremiah 52:5); that of the tenth was in commemoration of the commencement of the siege (Jeremiah 52:4). The Jews are distinctly informed that these fasts should be turned into festivals of joy.”--Henderson. The first sign of a true revival of religion in an individual or a community is a new and happy interest in the ordinances of religion. Another sign is--

2. A deep practical concern for the spiritual interests of the race. “Thus saith the Lord of hosts; It shall yet come to pass that there shall come people, and the inhabitants of many cities: and the inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying, Let us go speedily to pray before the Lord, and to seek the Lord of hosts: I will go also.” There will be a mutual excitation amongst the people to seek the one true and living God. “Let us go speedily to pray before the Lord.” “Speedily,” there is no time to be lost; religion is for all, and for all an urgent duty. Another sign is--

3. An universal “desire” to be identified with the people of God. “In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men--a definite number for an indefinite multitude, indicating many rather than a few--shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew.” Conclusion--When will this universal revival of religion take place? The signs are scarcely visible anywhere. We can only hasten it by attending to the prerequisites. (Homilist.)

Lying and false oath

s:--Honesty and policy cannot live in the same heart. Who can make anything of the liar? He is the worst of all men. He has lost the higher qualities of manhood, yet the base deceiver can shudder when he sees a poor drunken man who may be a saint compared with himself. The liar cannot be converted, unless it be by the whole force of the Deity. He is hollow, he has killed his conscience, he has sold his honour. Never allow a liar to come into your house. The liar is a composite sinner; he sins all round, or would sin in any direction and every direction if it would serve his purpose so to do. Have faith in every man that loves truth. Though he fall seven times a day he shall stand at eventide. Any sins that lie along the line of passion are nothing as compared with sins of deliberation, plan, scheme, thoroughly wrought out, purposed. I have known many a soul overborne by gusts from the bottomless pit, not wanting moral beauty and fine quality, but I have never known a liar that was worth being touched by the point of the longest instrument ever fashioned by human hands. Lying is so subtle, too. It is not vulgar deception in all cases. There is a falsehood that is calculation, a very fine process of putting things together and totalling them up into certain results and considering whether those results are worth realising. Lying may be speechless. It is a mistake to say that lies are always “told”: lies are acted, lies are suggested, lies are inferential. Christ came to give us the spirit of truth. Truth is a spirit. It is not a mere way of stating facts. A man may contradict himself in his statement of facts and be true at the soul. Verbal discrepancies are nothing: the meaning of the heart is everything. When an honest soul corrects itself there’s nobility in the very act of self-correction; you see the candour, you appreciate the withdrawal or the addition or the modification of former statements, as the case may be. A truthful man never thinks of his own consistency; a truthful man cannot be inconsistent. So called inconsistency in his case is accidental, superficial, transient, explicable. The man’s consistency is in his soul: what he means to be, that he is. Of all liars perhaps the young liar is the worst. It ought not so to be. The boy, the young man, should not lie. He should be so heroic and fearless as even to blurt out the truth when he does not tell it in sequential order. It should not occur to his young soul to falsify. Yet if one were to write the history of young hearts in any family and in any city, society could not live; we would fly away from one another as men fly from suddenly disclosed serpents. “Love no false oath,” saith the text. “False oath”--what ironies there are in expression I “False balance”--what an affront to geometry! “False oath”--what an offence to righteousness! “False prophet”--what a shock to the spirit of the sanctuary! “False brethren”--who can live? The Bible grows upon our conscience and our whole moral nature by the sublimity of its criticisms and the loftiness of its spiritual appeals. The Bible will have truth everywhere, because it will first have truth in the soul. Do not treat the symptoms of your case: get at the radical disease. It is poor curing that is done by mere plasters. Only the cure that starts from the centre and works out towards the circumference brings with it summer redness to the cheek, summer brightness to the eyes. God condemns sin and all evil things in detail because they are ruinous to the man. They are spoiling the work of God’s hands, they are overturning the purpose of God’s heart. The sinner is a suicide. “He that sinneth against Me,” saith the Scripture, “wrongeth his own soul.” Think of a man committing plunder upon his own nature, stealing from himself every element that makes him a man! I have known liars that succeeded for a few months; I have before my mind at this moment three liars, all under five-and-twenty years of age, who lied and robbed and did evil with both hands, and tonight they are refuse; they are avoided by all who know the rottenness and pestilence of their character. Thus sin takes a man down line by line, faculty by faculty. Sin sucks the Divine juice out of a man. You cannot allow one evil thought to pass through your sensitive brain without leaving that brain weaker and poorer. The temptation came and left ruin behind. The temptation itself is not sin unless it is yielded to, but if the temptation have hospitality one moment in the brain it takes off some fine film, some subtle veil through which the brain saw somewhat of God. The poet can drink himself into idiocy; the genius, the master magician of words, can so treat his body that his soul will not think for him. It will give up and abandon the altar where once it burned. God sees therefore that sin ruins the man. The sinner himself goes down. The things are not only hateful to God, they are ruinous to the people who practise them. You cannot over eat yourself, and pray; you cannot soak your body in evil liquids, and then sing, you can sound the notes, but the subtle, spiritual, Divine music is gone. When fire has left the altar what is the altar? (Joseph Parker, D. D.)