Does God Lie?

Anyone who does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because he has not believed the testimony God has given about his Son.

1 John 5:10b

One of the most common experiences of life is to act upon the word or testimony of another person. We will do the most amazing things in response to the simple declaration of a person we have never met before. I had the privilege of leading a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land. We were innocents abroad. Most of us had never been there before, and we did not know what we would run into. But we had been given assurance, by means of a letter from a person in New York, that someone would meet us at every place we landed and would help us to get through all the intricacies of entering a foreign land. On the strength of that letter, some twenty-five of us committed ourselves to the tender mercies of a stranger and discovered that it all proved true. The word of that letter proved true, and on the basis of it, we committed ourselves to a considerably risky venture.

Is not God more dependable than people? If you will take the word of a stranger and act on it, can you not believe the Word of God, especially when He has caused the testimony to be written down by the eyewitnesses of these events? In addition, when faith is exercised on the basis of that objective testimony, a confirmation of the Spirit is given within that makes it wholly believable. Can you not exercise faith on that basis? John says, If you refuse to do that, then you are treating God as though He were a liar.

Dr. H. A. Ironside used to tell of a man who had doubts about whether he was a Christian. He got down on his knees and said, Now, Father, I want to settle this question. Show me whether I have eternal life or not. And opening his Bible, his eyes fell on this verse from 1 John 5. He said in his prayer, Father, I don't want to make You a liar, and it says here that if I don't believe the testimony that You give about the Son, I'm making you a liar. I don't want to do that. What is the testimony? And he read the next part, And this is the testimony, and he stopped right there. He was so overwrought that he put his thumb over the rest of the verse and said, Lord, it says here that if I don't believe the testimony that you gave concerning your Son, I'm making you a liar, and I don't want to make you a liar. I believe that I have what that testimony is right under my thumb here, and I'm going to take my thumb off and read it, and Lord, help me to believe it, because I don't want to make you a liar. With great trepidation he raised his thumb and read, God has given us eternal life, and this life is in the Son (1 John 5:11). All of a sudden it came home to him. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life (1 John 5:12). No matter what else he may have, no matter how religious he may be, if he has not received the Son, he does not have life. He entered into peace and became a preacher of this great truth.

Thank You, Father, for this powerful reminder that my salvation is secure because You cannot lie. Grant to me the faith to take Your promise at face value.