From the Pastor’s Heart OP-ED BY DR. ROBERT KENNEDY
My wife and I got into “trouble” not very long ago. Yes, I said “trouble” because we found ourselves arguing with a dearest friend in our family about the vaccination.
We know the phrase that says, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still,” but we thought we were being helpful to one who was dearest to us. I heard my wife talking to this friend on the phone, making an appeal for the friend go take the Covid vaccination. My wife was saying, “I do not want anything negative to happen to you and your two children with the aggressive variants.”
But as my wife sought to encourage, I could hear the voice of the friend rising. She was insisting that she and her two children will not take the vaccine. This is their freedom to choose, she argued.
What got me tuned into the conversation was when I overheard the friend stating that she and her two children were about to travel. Then the suggestion that they were carrying vaccination ID cards. I could hear my wife saying, “No, you can’t do that. That is deception.” By then the friend became recalcitrant, “That is my right to choose,” she emphasized.
I then ask if I could make a comment. With the permission, I said “Yes that is deception, you cannot do that.” I wish I had not entered the conversation, because the voice of the friend got a bit hysterical. We said, “Ok, we pause for now.” But after closing we said we trust we have not lost a friend.
We cannot say, for sure, that we handled the situation that well, but after closing. We commented that it is a pathetic thing that our friend and her two grown children are engaging in “deliberate deception” by carrying those cards, despite the fact that they are not vaccinated.
Later in the week I told my wife I am going to write on this because it is evident that a lot of people are doing this, telling people they are vaccinated when they are not, carrying vaccination ID Cards when they are not vaccinated.
I do not know how you react to the above, but I think that anyone whose conscience is alive knows that it is wrong to deceive. According to Wikipedia:
“Deception or falsehood is an act or statement which misleads, hides the truth, or promotes a belief, concept, or idea that is not true. It is often done for personal gain or advantage. Deception can involve dissimulation, propaganda and sleight of hand as well as distraction, camouflage or concealment. There is also self-deception, as in bad faith. It can also be called, with varying subjective implications, beguilement, deceit, bluff, mystification, ruse, or subterfuge.
“Deception is a major relational transgression that often leads to feelings of betrayal and distrust between relational partners. Deception violates relational rules and is considered to be a negative violation of expectations. Most people expect friends, relational partners, and even strangers to be truthful most of the time. If people expected most conversations to be untruthful, talking and communicating with others would require distraction and misdirection to acquire reliable information.”
By expansion on the Wikipedia article is to point out that “deliberate deception” or deception on any sort, is not a game. Deception might be used by government entities, diplomats, politicians and the armies of the world as the major strategy for carrying on their trade. But deception always has a negative impact. The motivation of deceivers might be to win, to gain an advantage, to bring success, but it is corrupting to the soul and society.
Think about how when deception is used in business, or in spousal relationships or in dating or in the workplace how destructive it can be. Think of how children are affected when parents teach them how to lie.
I was a book salesman in a certain country many years ago, long before the computer age. When I sold my ware, I had to return to the homes that people credited to collect the money owed to me. Often when I returned, I would be met at the door by a child who would say, “Mommy is not here.” Sometimes I would linger a little holding the child at the door, because I was sure I could hear Mommy’s voice, inside the house. Then I would leave.
One of my friends became so exasperated with the children meeting him at the door, that one day when he visited a house to collect his money, and a child met him at the door with the “Mommy ain’t (Is not) here.” As he turned to go, he saw the mother’s feet sticking from under the bed, (the beds in those days were high), he said to the child, “Can you tell your mother, the next time she is going to take her feet with her.”
The apostle Paul was trying to give instruction as to how to select leadership for the newly forming Christian church when he quotes the famous Cretan Epimenides said that, “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.” (Titus 1:12) Many other writers concurred with the seventh-century BC poet, prophet, and native Cretan, Epimenides in characterizing the people of Crete as “liars.”
Characterizing Americans today in the way the Epimenides and Paul and all others did in the above is undoubtedly to be considered insultive, although the calculators say that former President Trump told more than 30,000 lies before he left office, and that he brought lying and deception to a new high and has normalized it, to the extent that now lying is accepted across the spectrum of America.
But the question is when lying and deception is still wrong? Without giving an answering with a yes, we simply paraphrase the ninth commandment, which says, “Don’t lie.”
And in conclusion, let me state that it is a tragedy that with the intent to deceive, too many of are carrying “Fake IDs.” Fake Passports. Fake Drivers License. Fake This and Fake That.” Yes, the Bible does describe humanity as “deceivers” (Jeremiah 17:9). But it makes clear that if we are not willing to let God search our hearts and repent of our deception, then we will have to face the condemnation of God and die in our sins.
Yes, deception is evil and we need to attack it at its roots, or it will metastasize in our soul and society.
