When should Christians lie?

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Rahab and the Emissaries of Joshua
Rahab and the Emissaries of Joshua (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Three common systems of ethics Christians subscribe to:

1) Graded ethics. E.g. when lying to save a life, a lie is clearly the lesser of two evils.

2) Situational ethics. E.g. when lying to save a life, if the life is an innocent one and the person you are lying to doesn’t deserve the truth, then in that situation the lie is not evil at all, but justified by the situation.

3) Absolutism. E.g. God never permits us to sin, a lie is always a sin, and your only responsibility is to refrain from sinning; thus either refuse to co-operate with the request and deal with the consequences, or tell the truth and deal with the consequences.

Here is a Bible passages that seem to contradict absolutism.  The Hebrew midwives (Exodus 1:15-20). If you read the account carefully you will notice that Shiphrah and Puah did not lie to save the lives of the Hebrew babies, they lied to save their own skin. They had already saved the boys, and lied only when called to give an account of their actions. When God commends them, it is for choosing to protect the Hebrew babies in godly defiance of Pharaoh’s command to sin.

Rahab (Joshua 2:1-5). This gutsy lady chose on the spot to side with the true God and his people rather than the pagan city in which she lived. She did this by hiding the Israelite spies. When the king demanded she give them up, she lied about seeing them flee the city. We’ll never know if refusing to co-operate would have been rewarded by God’s intervention to spare her… because she chose to lie instead. Rahab is commended for her faith in the true God by hiding the spies (Heb 11:31; James 2:25), but not specifically for the deceptive way she chose to buy them more time.

Samuel (1 Samuel 16:1-5). The prophet’s fear of the sociopathic Saul was preventing him from travelling to anoint David as king of Israel. Technically he’d be staging a coup d’etat and warrant the death penalty for treason. So he was understandably nervous.

God accommodates his jitters by instructing Samuel to take an animal with him as a safety blanket, so that if anyone asks, he could reply “I’m going to sacrifice this animal.” As it turned out, Saul never asked. Why? Because God is omniscient and knew he wouldn’t. But God also knew Samuel needed to feel like he had a safety net. Was this a lie? Obviously not: God is the one who commands it; and Samuel did sacrifice the animal. All he would have done is omitted the full purpose of the sacrifice, because God did not authorize Saul to be privy to that revelation.

In conclusion, none of these three scenarios presents an argument against absolute ethics.

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