Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

For our sermon scripture again this afternoon. Please stand. 1 Thessalonians 4. We’ll read verses 9-12. 1 Thessalonians 4:9-12. But as touching brotherly love, you need not that I write unto you. For ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another, and indeed you do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia. But we beseech you, brethren, that you increase more and more, and that you study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you, that you may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that you may have lack of nothing.

You may be seated. We’ve related everyday life very much to sins of the tongue and the proper use of the tongue. Remember, we said that the passage we just read, Paul gives the proper context of holiness in everyday life. And that context is a relationship to the extension of brotherly love. He says, “I want your brotherly love to continue even more and more.” And as a result of that, he gives them a series of three specific commandments or actually four.

The first is that they command, he commands them to increase in their brotherly love. And then the next three clauses in verse 11 tell them to study to be quiet, to mind their own business, and to perform their vocational calling—that is, to work with their own hands. Basically, holiness in everyday life. These three components, I think, are related to the tendency that we have in the sinful nature to meddle in other people’s business and as a result of that meddling, to then become a tale bearer. As a result of tale bearing, sometimes to slander one another and even to bear false witness eventually.

And so Paul, I think, says that if you keep busy with your own hands, with your particular vocational calling, with the job that God has given to you to do in your home, in the workplace, whatever it is—if you mind your own business in that way, your own affairs, and you’re not meddling in other people’s business very much. And if you’re not meddling in other people’s business, it’ll be easier for you to study to be quiet. That is, to work very diligently to keep your mouth at rest, specifically about other people, about other affairs that are none of other people’s business that you may be talking to.

Now, I think the phrase “study to be quiet” may be a bit broader than that, but it certainly also includes that admonition to be very careful about our speech. And so we’ve decided—I’ve decided—to take a couple of weeks and go through various sins of speech, or sins of tongue, against the body.

And last week we got through, oh, the first maybe third of the outline. We’ll try to finish the whole thing today. The outline for part two of this talk is pretty much the same as last week with one small change that isn’t that big a deal. I rearranged one of the parts. So we’ll just continue on now through an analysis of what the scriptures teach—as a block of scriptures—going through the entire scriptures to find references relating to sins of the tongue and sins of speech, particularly against a brother. And I’ve tried to order them for you here and produce an orderly arrangement of them, and an arrangement that follows the progression that I think is talked about in various New Testament epistles.

And so the first thing we said was that to get our attention, this is a tremendously disastrous sin to covenantal community. It’s one of the seven things that God hates—to stir up trouble, to create disorder, to bring strife to brothers. And so, after we looked at that, then we patterned, and you can see on your outline, A, B, C, and D, which goes from meddling, or idleness rather, to meddling, to tailbearing, and false witness.

And you remember the context for all this is, as I said, brotherly love. Now, it’s important, you know, as a precaution—remember, we said many times that Calvin’s sermons are notorious for saying you want to be careful on this side, but on the other hand, you got to kind of watch it over here. So you got to be very careful that you work diligently to love the brethren. It’s a very important part of the Christian life.

It’s part of Christian reconstruction, because it’s one of the central aspects of how we reconstruct our communities—is by the extension of this brotherly love, as defined by God’s law, not by some sort of pious gush or feelings or whatever it is. So, very important to work hard at that. On the other hand, it’s very important that you recognize that this does not mean that you ignore your own family or that you want to find out about everything else, about everybody else’s life, in the context of your covenant community or your church. You don’t want to do that.

Basically, the Christian life is a life in which you mind your own affairs. And yes, you have extensions of grace to other people. You’re involved in other people’s lives at certain times. But normally, most of your energy should be concerned with the calling that God has given you in terms of your home, your homeschool, your vocational calling, your particular function here in the context of the institutional church, or your calling in terms of the magistrate as well.

Okay, so these things are all sins against love, really, and they’re particularly pernicious because they can be done in the name of love, you know, and we’ve talked about that a little bit.

Okay, so idleness we covered, meddling—the dangers of meddling we spoke to—and then the sources of meddling: hatred, foolishness, and pride. And then the cures: to mind your own business, avoid unprofitable discussions, and engage in sin-covering love.

Remember we said that sin-covering love doesn’t mean just winking at sin. If there’s real sin going on that needs to be addressed, you cover that sin by bringing it under the blood of Christ and his atonement, his covering. And James makes it clear that one of the ways you do that is to win your brother, to go to him with his fault—not to somebody else, but to him. And when he comes to awareness of his sin and repentance, then it says that kind of love covers many sins.

Okay. So we’re moving on to tailbearing. And we got just into a little bit of this last week with Leviticus 19:16, which we’ll return to in a couple of minutes when we get to the section on false witness. Tailbearing is prohibited in the case law: Leviticus 19:16, as is false witness. And I want to move on now then to the actions of the tailbearer.

The actions of the tailbearer. In the Hebrew, there are two words—well, there’s three, but two primary words—that are translated “tailbearer” or “whisperer.” And usually when you see “whisper” in the King James version, it’s the same as “tailbearer.” These two words—the first is to be a spy or to do something covertly, and in fact many times it’s translated to “spy out the land,” etc. The second word has its root in a traveling merchant, somebody who would sell goods, as a result travel from town to town, house to house, whatever it is.

And these two correlate very well with what the scriptures teach us in terms of the two basic actions of the tailbearer. The two actions are, first of all then, to reveal secrets. Proverbs 20:19: “He that goeth about as a tailbearer revealeth secrets. Therefore meddle not with him that flattereth with his lips.” Proverbs 11:13: “A tailbearer reveals secrets, but he that is of a faithful spirit conceals the matter.”

Okay? So you’ve gotten information about somebody else. And you then—if you’re going to be faithful to your friend or to the person you heard it about—you’re not going to repeat that matter to somebody else. You’re not going to reveal that secret. You’re going to keep it a secret matter. You’re going to conceal the matter and try to keep the person’s integrity intact. There’s no reason to tell anybody else about sins that a person has done if they’ve been taken care of. And if they’ve not been taken care of, if you haven’t talked to that person, there’s no reason to tell anybody else about it either.

So, first of all, the tailbearer reveals secrets. Bridges in his commentary says you must remember here that when somebody comes to you with a secret—you know, we love to hear secret things. I mentioned how, you know, it’s I think ultimately it’s analogous to breaking into God’s temple. We had a warning from Jeremiah 7 as the call to worship this afternoon. And God doesn’t want people to break into his temple and grab knowledge that he wants to give them on the basis only of covenant, through Jesus Christ. And so the penalty for invasion of the Holy of Holies was death. They threw spears through you if you invaded the temple of God.

We all—that secret knowledge, though—many things, many sins are related to the sinful nature in us. We love the secret things. I might just point out here that you know, we tend to—I think sometimes we tend to forget the vileiness of our sin before God. We seem to think that because we’ve been redeemed and brought into relationship with God, our sins are just sort of not the best of worlds, but they’re not that bad. No, that’s not the way it works. The scriptures repeatedly talk in terms of the old man and new man to the Christian.

I think one of the reasons for that is to help us remember that when we engage in sin, even as a Christian, it still has that vileiness to it as the unbeliever has when he sins. And it’s not to be winked at by ourselves. It’s to be hated and driven out of our lives.

Well, in terms of revealing secrets, Bridges said that you got to remember when somebody comes to you with a secret, you may want to hear that secret, but remember this: just as ready as he reveals your neighbor’s secrets to you, will he reveal yours to him? Very important. Do you ever think about that? When somebody tells you a secret, maybe they’ll tell your neighbor your secret.

Bridges goes on to say that children, servants, and visitors in the family should guard most carefully against revealing secrets that have been talked about in the home. It is vital to our peace that our close friends should be so trustworthy that we don’t always have to be warning them, or swearing them rather, to secrecy. So the idea is that your household is an intact unit, and not everybody needs to know what goes on in your household. Your children should recognize that. They should be warned by you to not be revealing to other people things that you want kept within the confines of the home.

Maybe there are sins of one brother or sister against another. Nobody needs to know about that. If the parents are working with it in the context of the home, we should have that kind of cognizance of the sanctity of our households, and then it would be a great thing. But these sort of friends that Bridges talks about are very difficult to find—those that we don’t always have to swear to secrecy because they have such a sensitivity to our family that they simply will protect our reputation as a matter of course. But that’s the kind of friendships we should develop in the context of Reformation Covenant Church—ones that don’t repeat secrets about our families.

And then the second thing the tailbearer does—he’s like a spy, he’s also like a traveling merchant—and he repeats stories. Okay, these may be things he didn’t learn directly by contact with your family. He’s heard it from one of these people that reveal secrets, and then he repeats the story to somebody else. And this is the second thing that the tailbearer does. And if we find ourselves doing this a lot with other people, watch it. Evaluate yourself and drive the sin out of your life.

Proverbs 17:9: “He that covereth a transgression seeketh love, but he that repeateth a matter separateth very friends.”

Now, this is an area that I think is very important—to try to recognize that we must be very diligent in not repeating matters about other people. I said before the scriptures are replete with warnings about how easy it is for us to deceive ourselves and to think that sin is something that isn’t sin. The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can know it? Well, we must be very careful. We may share information with another party in hopes supposedly that it will resolve a conflict about another person, but that’s repeating a story about somebody else. And it’s the wrong thing to do.

One of the reasons why repeating a story is wrong is you can’t get all the details right normally. You’re going to pass the story on with inaccuracies, be they ever so slight. And those inaccuracies can then tend to produce a negative cast upon a person’s character as you repeat that story about an individual. Usually, the repeating of stories occurs with some degree of exaggeration or interpretation. And as a result, that also then brings in your presupposition or a negative cast to the story that you then repeat to somebody else, and ends up maligning somebody else’s character.

Bridges in commenting on this particular aspect of the tailbearer said that if he doesn’t tell direct falsehoods, his dark whispers of slander are plain enough to be understood and sure to be exaggerated. The word or act may be misinterpreted. He has seen or heard probably only a little. He guesses at the rest to make his story complete. And by this report, half true and half false, he plays with his neighbor’s name to his great injury. No wonder that this evil whisperer should be classified as a murderer or thief. That’s in the New Testament. He breaks up the peace of whole families and communities.

Bridges goes on to say: “But if it draws no blood and no outward hurt is shown by repeating these stories, an internal and often incurable wound is inflicted. We may seem to make light of the gossip brought to our ears and wholly to despise it. But the subtle poison rather has worked. We think: suppose it should be true? Perhaps, though it may be exaggerated, there may be some ground for it. Well, they wouldn’t have acted that way, but I wonder what they did do and why do they do things that way?”

You hear a story about somebody else and your mind starts to interpret the data in a negative cast, and you start thinking, “Well, there must be a grain of truth.” Okay, this person, I know they don’t speak truthfully sometimes. They want to hurt this other person, but there’s probably a grain of truth behind every lie. Well, there isn’t sometimes. Sometimes there’s no grain of truth at all, and the truth may be misunderstood or misinterpreted.

So, as Bridges said, we should be very careful, but often times we don’t. The thought indulged only for a moment brings suspicion, distrust, coldness, and often ends in the separation of the best of friends. That’s how dangerous the tongue is without stern, determined control. The gossip of an unguarded moment may cause tremendous, irreparable injury.

The evil humor may meet with a welcome audience in good society, where but for the food which scandal supplies, conversation would drag heavy. But no whitewash can change its real character as an abomination both to God and man. Ah, what? With what power of holy love—opening freely the channels of kindness and forbearance—can overcome this mischievous proneness?

And what Bridges wrote, will bring the spirit of love? But a true interest in Christian privileges and a corresponding sense of Christian obligations. What he says can change all this about except kindness and forbearance. And of course that’s from 1 Corinthians 13. Those are the two basic things that 1 Corinthians 13 enumerates: on the one hand, the need to be kind to one another, and on the other hand, to be patient with each other.

The word for kindness, I’ve said it before, hopefully you’ll remember it and begin to teach your children this as well. The word for kindness in 1 Corinthians 13 means useful. If we have a mind to be useful to our neighbor and to be patient with our neighbor’s faults, we won’t want to hear stories, and we won’t want to repeat a matter that happened between us and them without resolving it with them first, because by doing that, we’re not seeking their well-being.

And then when Bridges says that a true interest in Christian privilege and a corresponding sense of Christian obligation—those are really the very two things that we need to remember in terms of being a tailbearer. If we remember Christian privilege—the privilege we have to know people, and the relationships we have—we won’t impinge on those relationships and misuse that privilege by revealing secrets about people or about people’s families to other people. And if we understand our Christian obligation to love one another, to expand that love, we will be extremely careful about anything we might say that could produce a prejudicial claim against another person’s character in the body of Christ.

So the tailbearer is a spy, and he goes about repeating matters as well. What are the results of this? We’ve already touched on some of them, but Proverbs 16:28 and 17:9 say that the tailbearer—well, in Proverbs 17:9 it says specifically: “He that covereth the transgression seeketh love. But he that repeateth the matter, that is the tailbearer, separateth very friends.”

Think of the amazing power that being a tailbearer can have. You can separate the very closest of friends by bringing secrets, repeating matters, half-truths, slanderous statements, etc. into the relationship. You can cause people who are great friends to be driven apart. If you can do that to the best of friends, think what you can do to developing friendships in the context of the body. You can destroy it. And I’ve seen it over and over again over the last 15 years in various churches. I think in this church as well. Tailbearing can destroy relationships before they even get out of the box, and they can actually tear into relationships that are well established.

Friends are a tremendous gift of God. You know, the whole message of communion is our reconciliation to God the Father through the work of Jesus Christ, our savior on the cross and his resurrection. And Ephesians says that reconciliation is worked out into all the world, into our relationships. Because we’re reconciled to God, we can be reconciled to our wives and marriages can be reconciled and parties in marriage can come to a oneness that is impossible apart from the work of Jesus Christ. And friendship, true Christian friendship, is defined by the scriptures also as a direct result of the reconciliation we have to God the Father.

It’s a tremendous thing, and we should be very careful where we separate friends. Very much that work to separate friends is to work against the very gift of God in terms of community. So the results of the tailbearer—it’s this. Secondly, the tailbearer continues strife.

Proverbs 26:20: “Where no wood is there the fire goeth out. So where there is no tailbearer the strife ceases.”

Again, to quote Bridges: “The contentious man does his fish work by tales. The whispering innuendo, the malicious hint, the slandering word often kindle the fire of strife in that circle where peace had long reigned before. As the microscopic sting of a little insect sometimes poisons the blood and inflames the body of a strong man, the mere whisper of a tailbearer will kindle the fire of discord in a whole community. In a whole community.”

We have a tremendous problem in this country with slander. You see it in the papers all the time. You probably know of various public figures who have been slandered. There’s little they can do about it. I mentioned this last week, I think, in the context of the question and answer time. Some of us look at Luther, for instance, in terms of the Reformation, and Luther had a very sharp tongue with those who would come against him, including Christians, when he debated various matters, and we think that’s the way true reformers ought to be. Not true.

The historical context is that the laws of slander had been basically done away with by the time Luther came along, and as a result everybody spoke in a very poor fashion about one another. The whole society had degenerated in the way they treat each other—there’s no civility and no courtesy shown. And Luther’s life shows, to some extent, the remaining vestigiges of that sin in the community about it. And we’ve seen in the context of Christian reconstruction, in its debate back and forth within various members of Christian reconstruction themselves as well as with the wider Christian community, the fallout of a whole culture in America and across the world that sees slander as no big deal, and is completely unable to prosecute the sin or the crime in civil court anymore.

And so because the society has come into a position of being able to say whatever they want about anybody else, they want. So we see that in our own churches as well. We see it in Christian reconstruction, in its relationship to other churches. But slander is a terrible thing. Slander seeks to impugn another person’s character when the other person has not had a chance to present their side at all.

It violates every dictum of Christian and Jewish prudence that we find in the scriptures. You’re supposed to be able to face your accuser. It’s a basic thing in the scriptures. It takes a couple of witnesses to test, to convict a person of large crimes in the scriptures. It takes a court. It takes an impartial judge. And all too often, people aren’t willing to go through that process. It’s seen as too slow or something.

And so slander results, and people’s characters are assassinated with little or no chance to defend themselves, with little or no resort to a court of law, or even an informal court where both parties can talk and discuss whatever matter has been brought up.

Now sometimes these conflicts can be settled—they should be most of the time—between the parties involved. When they are settled that way, the tailbearer won’t let things lay either. He’s not content that things were brought to an amicable conclusion. He continues to stir the pot. Because of this, Lawson said: “The tailbearers are serpents in the way and adders in the path. They are fire brands kindled from hell that kindle a fire among men which spreads from one to another until parishes and counties are in danger of being set afire.”

You know, essentially the tailbearer does Satan’s work. Satan is the accuser of the brethren, and he is the father of lies. And sometimes the big lie is the way Satan works. But more often than not, it’s the half-truth, the twisted truth that Satan uses. And so when we fall into the sin of slander and tailbearing in terms of another brother, we’re falling into the very mode of Satan himself—to accuse a brother without going through the proper means in the scriptures, the proper court, etc.

And we also then do that by means of abandoning honesty and truth, and instead dealing with innuendo and slander.

Now related to this is the fact that he who listens to the tailbearer is also at fault. Baker Lawson said that he that listens to a tailbearer is like he who sees his house ready to be set on fire and uses no means to prevent it. He that turns an angry countenance to the backbiter is a friend to mankind who carries water to quench the burning.

We’ll come back to that reference in terms of the proverbs—the angry countenance of a backbiter—in a little bit later. It’s very important that we understand that the tailbearer needs somebody to tell it to, and that if we don’t do anything about it, we’re like a man watching his house burn down around him.

Okay, so the tailbearer separates chief friends. He continues strife. And then third, he destroys neighbors. You got the references listed there.

Proverbs 11:9: “A hypocrite with his mouth destroyth his neighbor, but through knowledge shall the just be delivered.” Proverbs 18:8: “The words of a tailbearer as wounds, and they go down to the innermost parts of the belly.”

Now, Proverbs 18:8 in your version is repeated in Proverbs 26:22. Some scriptures translated the words of a tailbearer as “a sweet morsel,” and there’s some discussion over what’s right. And I threw in the Psalm 55 reference because that seems to reiterate this proverb in verse 21, where David said that the words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart. His words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords.

So frequently the words of the tailbearer can be very smooth and silky, but when taken in, they really do not do your soul any good, and they certainly destroy the person that they’re speaking against.

So the tailbearer destroys neighbors. Lawson again, in his commentary on the proverbs, said that an ordinary prayer of King Antigonus was this: “Lord, deliver me from the hands of my friends.” When one of the king’s friends asked him why he didn’t rather pray for deliverance from his enemies, he said that enemies can be guarded against, but that it was very difficult to guard against false friends.

Very important that we recognize the truth of these passages and be very careful in our dealings with one another, and also to be careful to guard ourselves against false friends and the flatterers.

The tailbearer brings terrible consequences to Christian community. The source of the tailbearer is also enumerated in the scriptures, and you’ll see that this parallels the source of the meddler. And you can see this progression from one who meddles to one who becomes a tailbearer.

The source again is hatred, foolishness, and pride. And I won’t take much time to go over that. You can look at the references later if you’d like. But it’s the same basic sources.

One thing here in terms of hatred—in Proverbs 16:27, we read that “an ungodly man digeth up evil, and in his lips there is as a burning fire.” And this seems to relate to anger. When we become angry with somebody, frequently then we can turn to slandering them. If we can’t get at them directly, if we don’t deal with the anger in a godly fashion in terms of evaluating it to see if it’s righteous or not, and then taking corrective action, that anger can become a source then of tailbearing.

One mystic was once told—that a man was once approached by a man who said he wanted to teach him the art of memory, but the mystic said that he would rather be taught to learn the art of forgetfulness. And frequently that’s one of the things that we need to remember that the scriptures teach—is that when we’ve forgiven somebody for a sin, we need to forget that sin and put it behind us.

Sometimes it’s easy to say we forgive—our mouths say it—but our hearts are still wounded and remember those wounds. And those wounds then become the source of tailbearing against that person. Remember that when we spoke about the seven deadly sins in terms of anger and hatred. But anger really results from an improper view of God’s justice.

God’s justice is involved in the universe. God’s justice is always being worked out. If we don’t understand that, we can become very angry. And God’s providence involves and extends itself to all things. And if we don’t understand that, we can get frustrated as well. Sometimes we’re wronged and we just have to suffer by it. We’ll talk about that later. Instead of engaging in tailbearing.

Okay. Okay. The cure for tailbearing.

Proverbs 25:8-10. We just read this responsibly. And here I have in mind what you can do to remind yourself not to become a tailbearer. We’ll kind of do the other side of the coin in a couple of minutes.

Proverbs 25:8-10 says: “First of all, go not forth hastily to strive. Go not forth hastily to strive.” You must recognize the dangers of tailbearing. If you have a problem with it in your life, as most of us do from one time to another, one of the ways to cure it is to acknowledge the warnings of scripture against this sin. To remember what these scriptures we’ve gone over for the last couple of weeks teach. And that is that these activities are hateful to God and destructive to community. It’s not a cute little thing to do with very little effect. It has tremendous effect, and it is a satanic thing to do to involve yourself in tailbearing.

So acknowledge the warning, and acknowledge too, as Proverbs 25:8 gets to—that the end of your tailbearing, the end of the strife that you kick up, may well hurt you. “Go not forth hastily to strive, lest thou know not what to do in the end thereof, when thy neighbor hath put thee to shame.” You know, the tailbearer can’t count on his circle of people that he spells things to not to be a tailbearer also, and not to correct the means of the tailbearer by going to the people that he’s been speaking against. And so you have to be very careful to analyze what you’re doing.

And one of the ways to remind yourself not to get involved in this is to say, “What’ll happen if they hear what I tell them now?” They’re going to come back to me, and they’re going to win the dispute. They’re going to put me to shame, instead of me seeking their shame. That’s the way God’s justice works. It’s Lex Talionis, and we’ll talk about that in a minute as well.

“Debate thy cause with thy neighbor himself,” verse 9. “And discover not a secret to another.” This is the biggest cure for tailbearing, of course—is just to simply talk to the person that you’re concerned with directly. In other words, debate thy cause not with your neighbor’s neighbor. If your problem is with your neighbor, don’t go to somebody else and say, “Well, look at what this person did to me. Da da da. Or what do you think about what this person did to me, da da da.” Don’t do that. You go to your neighbor for clarification. You go to your neighbor with a cause or a charge—not to somebody else.

Matthew 18—we don’t need to review that, do we? What does it say? If any man is caught in a fault, then you go to the brother, you convince him of his sin, and if he repent, you’ve won your brother. It’s a good thing. If not, what do you do? You bring a couple more. You begin to widen the circle. And if he won’t hear the two more, then you go to the church. You get the church involved.

All too often, you know, I know it’s a really difficult thing to go to somebody directly. That’s one of the things we hate to do, and probably properly. There are a lot of things we shouldn’t go to each other about. We should just let it rest. No big deal. Let it go. But you got to decide: Is it important enough, where you can’t let things rest? If you’ve got a problem with what your neighbor has done, can you let it rest? If you can let it rest, let it go. Forget it. Don’t talk to him about it.

And if it isn’t important, if it isn’t small enough—if it’s so important it must be attended to—don’t do it by going to somebody else. Go to your neighbor. Either way, you don’t go to a third party about problems. Either way.

Now, again, I don’t expect any of us in this church to walk over to each other, to a neighbor’s neighbor, to somebody else in the church, and say, “Do you know what this turkey did?” Speaking of somebody in the church, “We’re not going to do that normally.” But I think all too often we can fall into this trap with the best of intentions.

“I got a problem. I don’t really want to approach them. Gosh, that’d be really uncomfortable. Maybe it’s my fault. And maybe I’ll go talk to a friend about this person and see what they think about what they would do if they were in my situation.” But see, what you’ve done then is you’ve repeated a matter to somebody else, who’s not involved, and you’ve opened up the first person, your neighbor, to possible damage and slander.

What if the friend you talk to says, “Yeah, they were really wrong in that.” Well, see, you’ve completely violated Matthew 18. Then you’ve talked about another neighbor’s sin to somebody else, to a third party who isn’t involved. Don’t do it.

Now, if you’re really struggling with, “Is this proper or not?”, another alternative, of course, is to use a hypothetical situation with your counselor. You got a good friend who you like to get counsel from? Fine. And this works with your wife too, by the way. I talked last week about how it can be dangerous to tell your wife specific problems you’re having with specific people, because she can—you know, in very much the wife wants to protect the husband, wants to guard his reputation as well. They can hang on to things for a long time.

So you can tell them in a hypothetical situation. “Suppose this event were to occur, suppose this event were to occur. What would you think about this?” Making sure you don’t give clues that they know who it is. Okay, that’s one way to do it.

Don’t talk to a third party about somebody else unless you’ve talked to the other person first and you still can’t resolve it. Then the best situation is to get the third party there. Isn’t that what Matthew 18 says? It doesn’t say if you go to your neighbor and they won’t hear you, then go talk to two or three other people and get up a good case against them. No, it says get the third party—they’re with you. See? See, all three of you are there.

Now, what’s the importance of that? So that any mistakes in communication between the two of you repeat itself. Communication is difficult under the best of circumstances. In a fallen world, it’s extremely difficult. And with Satan in there trying to stop things up, it’s very difficult. And so communication is tough. It could be a problem in communication. And a third party can help resolve that. It can be pure rebellion. The third party then also can hear both sides and say, “Well, I think it’s like this.”

And if that doesn’t resolve the situation, you can go to the church then—to the church officers. All too often, we go to a counselor first, and we’re going to go to a counselor frequently. Some of you will want to use church officers. That isn’t right either. Just because a person is a church officer doesn’t mean they should hear all this stuff without you going to the other party. Absolutely not. That’s just as wrong. Church officer in Matthew 18 is the third person to get involved.

You know, you don’t want to make a big deal out of it if you don’t have to. So you want to go to your neighbor first. Really simple solution. Don’t let your mind rationalize your activity and end up talking to somebody else about a problem with somebody else that you haven’t talked to them about. Don’t do it.

Okay. So those are two cures for tailbearing. One: consider what you’re doing. Think through the warnings the scriptures give. Secondly, go to the neighbor himself directly. And then if you do that, you’re not going to become a tailbearer.

And then, and then, third, of course, if you know that this is a sinful area that you’re having problems with, confess the sin to God, of course, and seek to truly repent of that sin. You may want to have people around you to support you in your attempt to move away from a particular sin.

Now, I think, you know, we’ve talked before about an individual in California, a well-known preacher, who I heard speak a couple years ago, who had a problem several years ago with pornography. And he developed a friendship with a fellow, and he knew that this fellow could be trusted. He wasn’t the tailbearer. He wouldn’t reveal a matter. Whenever this particular pastor had a problem with going and buying a dirty book or something, he would call up his friend and confess his sin to him, and his friend would rebuke him and counsel him and get him back on the right path. So he had somebody that he could go to, confess that sin. And some of you may need that as well, in terms of slander.

You see, we tend to think of pornography as really getting its hooks into people, and it does. It’s a terrible sin. But I think that in the context of good Reformed churches, much more prone to get hooks into us is the improper use of the tongue relative to one another in the context of the body. Okay? And so it’s a hard thing to root out of our lives when we have these long-established patterns that we’ve learned from pagan society.

So you may very well want to not simply deal with the matter. You may want to use God’s secondary means—a support group, a person or two—who will assist you to not do those sorts of things, will rebuke you if necessary, if they know that you’re involved in that kind of activity.

Okay, fourth. Let’s see. Okay, so that’s tailbearing. We’re moving now to the concept of false witness.

And remember, this is a progressive cycling down of what can happen in terms of sins of the tongue. You begin to meddle. You begin to become a tailbearer and repeating secrets. And then you become actually involved in false witness. We touched on it already, but now we’re talking about false witness in an explicit sense of the term.

Exodus 20:16, of course: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” It’s one of the Ten Commandments. It’s one of the five commandments that tell us how to love our neighbor. And what we don’t want to do is bear false witness against them.

Leviticus 19:16. Don’t go up and down as a tailbearer, neither stand against the blood of thy neighbor. That means in a court situation. Don’t testify falsely in civil court against your neighbor.

Deuteronomy 19:16-20 gives us an extended set of verses here about the false witness. And here’s what it says: “If a false witness rise up against any man to testify against whom that which is wrong, then both the men between whom the controversy is shall stand before the Lord, before the priest and the judges which shall be in those days. And the judges shall make diligent inquisition. And behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother, then shall you do unto him as he had thought to have done unto his brother. So shalt thou put the evil away from among you. And those which remain shall hear and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.”

Now, that last verse, by the way, means that if you follow this law correctly, it is a deterrent to this sin. The concept of deterrence in the scriptures is sound biblical. Deuteronomy 17 talks about deterrence in terms of the death penalty. This talks about deterrence in terms of the Lex Talionis principle—eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

False witness comes up to the court officer and says, “I saw this guy kill somebody else.” And he’s doing it. He’s lying through his teeth for whatever reason. I don’t care now. He hasn’t killed the other person that’s dead. Okay, let’s say he just wants to get this other guy in trouble. This passage says that when the judges discern that this man has made a false witness, that he’s actually made a false claim in court, what’s supposed to happen?

What’s supposed to happen is what he wanted to happen to the other person. And if he brought a capital crime before the court, and he wanted that guy executed, then the penalty according to Deuteronomy 19:19 is execution. You see how you can suffer for the sin of slander—suffer bad at the hands of God—execution. It becomes a capital crime if it was a capital crime he was falsely testifying to.

And so the basic principle here is that the false witness is legal or prohibited, and there is a specific penalty attached to it. What he intended to have happen to the other person should happen to him.

Now, in most cases of slander and backbiting—that is, what happens. There’s no civil court who hands down the penalty, but God does. More often than not, the false witness, the slanderer, in terms of personally attacking another person’s credibility, they’ll be found out. And what happens then? Well, you don’t trust him anymore. His integrity is shot. Her integrity is shot. See, God’s principle works itself out normally, even if there’s no civil offense involved. The tailbearer, the slanderer, is seen to have lost face, loses integrity in the context of the covenant community, if people are doing things right and not letting sins just slide.

Now, this biblical restitution principle here can be seen also—and we’ll talk about Ephesians 4 a little later—but in terms of using the tongue to defame somebody else, to tear down their character: well, if the scriptures tell us that the thief is to no longer steal, but is to work with his hands to give to them that don’t have anything. He’s not supposed to—he’s supposed to give restitution twofold, or if it’s been a habitual crime, I think that we can apply that principle to the tongue, to say if you use your tongue to tear somebody down, and you’ve come to repentance for that sin, that repentance will be demonstrated by using your tongue to build that person’s reputation back up—to build up what you tore down.

That’s repentance. Repentance in the scriptures is not saying, “I’m sorry.” It includes a godly sorrow for sins, but it also includes actions to move away from what’s wrong—stop—and a turn to do what’s right. I try to teach my kids, never very successfully, this hand signal: You know, this is rest. This is repentance. It’s a turning. It’s not just not doing what’s wrong. It’s positively doing what’s right with your tongue. Then use your tongue to build up.

Of course, in the context of the slanderer, the difficulty, particularly when you have people that are not putting the kibosh on the slanderer, the problem is the stories can multiply out to a wide group of people. And now the slanderer must go back to all of those people and make sure he puts right that person’s reputation that heard. So restitution involves positively building up the other person’s character, but it also involves confession of sin to those who have been affected by your sin of slandering.

So if you told people in the context of other people, they need to hear about it too. And if you told people who then turn around and told other people, you got to go out that same circle and say: “I want this spread down the same grapevine that this was wrong of me to do this. And this person is a good person, and that I slandered them unnecessarily, unjustly.”

That’s the biblical penalty attached to use of the tongue improperly.

Potential damage of Proverbs 25:18: “A man that bears false witness against his neighbor is a maul and a sword and a sharp arrow.” These are strong words. And if you bear false witness, even if you don’t do it intentionally, but simply by repeating matters to people that have no original interest in the matter in such a way as to hurt your neighbor’s reputation, you have been to your neighbor as a mall, a sword, and a sharp arrow.

And this is another way to combat our own involvement in this sin—to remember this. Lawson—and this was actually quoted by Bridges in his commentary as well. He thought so highly of it—Lawson said: “Consider for a moment whether you would treat your neighbor as Joab did to Abner. Would you shrink with horror at the thought of beating out your neighbor’s brains with a club, of piercing his heart with a sword or a sharp arrow? Then why do you indulge in such sharp savagery, destroying, as far as you can, his reputation, which is as dear to him as life, and of wounding all his best interest by tearing down his reputation?

A man can outlive and overcome physical injuries, but slander, regardless of all efforts to heal the wound, too often leaves a scar to the man’s dying day.”

There are so many cases of this in the scriptures. David and Mephibosheth: David showed kindness to one of the house of Saul. Mephibosheth gave all of Saul’s holdings, and he gave Ziba, Mephibosheth’s servant, charge over Mephibosheth’s land to take care of him. And then when the Absalom revolution occurs, Ziba told David that Mephibosheth was actually planning on being put back in the throne when Absalom returned, after conquering David. David believed it. I don’t know why David believes such a thing. Why he thought Absalom would give the throne over to Mephibosheth is beyond reason.

But in any event, he believed that false report, and then he took away all Mephibosheth’s holdings and gave to Ziba the slanderer instead. Ziba pierced Mephibosheth’s life, as it were, his reputation. Now, later David made some repentance for that and gave Mephibosheth back his property in conjunction with Ziba. But it’s time and time again. David himself said to Saul, “Why are you doing these things to me? Who told you that I’m an enemy of the king?”

David believed that was slandered. It was at the basis of Saul’s actions against him. Now, we know that Saul stands alone for his sin. He’ll stand before God for that in terms of his persecution of David. And he was definitely a picture of fallen man and of the non-Christian, the unregenerate, man who strikes out at God’s anointed. But the means that brought Saul to that, at least David so believed, was that somebody had talked to Saul without going to David and saying, “I don’t think this David guy can be trusted. I think he’s out to get you.”

See, slander—a sword and a sharp arrow.

And consider that when you start to talk about somebody else, maybe you think, “Well, I’m not going to slander them.” But maybe you should think through very carefully how you present material so that you don’t slander them. Why talk about your neighbor at all to somebody else? If it’s a problem, go to them directly.

Shakespeare said: “Who steals my purse steals trash, his something to nothing, to his mine to his, and has been slave to thousands. But he that filters from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed.”

You see, now none of us would think of stealing money from each other or possessions. But all of us have probably at some time in our lives used our tongue to steal somebody else’s good reputation—to hurt it, to tarnish it—at no help to us but a tremendous cost to him. Shakespeare was correct. Our reputation is extremely valuable and must be guarded.

The Christological context of all these sins and we’re talking about a progression here as we talk…