P.O. Box 53055    
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CONNIE: We hear a lot about identity theft and ruined reputations these days. But God put a plan in place for dealing with this problem over 3000 years ago. Join us today as we consider His witness protection plan!

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for more than 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko. We thank you for joining us as we continue our review of God’s Ten Commandments. We’re looking at one today that’s particularly important in today’s fast-paced Internet-connected world. One that’s designed to protect our reputations when others might want to tarnish them.

CONNIE: That’s right. I think we’ve all heard the term “Identity Theft” and we’ve been warned about all the things we need to do to protect ourselves against others who might want to take our good name and use it for their own benefit. But I guess I never really thought of this as being something dealt with in the Ten Commandments. I mean, God wrote them on stone. He didn’t post them in an Internet chat room!

LONNIE: It is kind of amazing that a commandment given so long ago has become so important in our modern world, but when you think about it, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” is very applicable to the most modern of crimes. I mean, what is identity theft if it’s not bearing false witness that harms my neighbor? And in fact there are a number of applications of this commandment that don’t necessarily come to mind immediately when you hear it.

CONNIE: Well, I know I’ve had the experience of having someone spread untrue stories about me, and it hurts deeply. I don’t think, unless you’ve experienced it yourself, you can really understand how demeaning it is, or how much it affects you.

LONNIE: We happened to pick up on a story that appeared in the Los Angeles Times recently, of a man who is still going through this type of trauma, and he graciously agreed to speak with us about his experience.

CONNIE: That’s right. You spoke with Dr. Eboni Wilson about his experience and how he’s coping with it. Let’s listen in.

LONNIE: We welcome to our broadcast today by telephone Dr. Eboni Wilson. Welcome!

EBONI: Thank you!

LONNIE: Dr. I really appreciate your willingness to share your story about how a good name can vanish so suddenly. Now you’re upbringing was pretty rough, wasn’t it?

EBONI: Yes! I grew up in South Central, Los Angeles. My mom and my father were addicted to drugs, heroine and crack cocaine, since the age of five, I can actually remember having to beg people to let me pump gas so I could put food in my stomach. I can remember days when brothers and I had to actually go to the grocery store and steal food to feed ourselves. Growing up with that constant, you know, seeing your best friends get murdered, being homeless because your mom can’t pay the rent because she addicted to drugs, living in motels, begging people for clothes because we didn’t have adequate clothes to go to school in. It was frustrating!

LONNIE: But you turned your life around amazingly, unlike many other people. You won a football scholarship to Washington University, but then you went on to get your masters degree and a doctorate in education, so you became a high school principal.

EBONI: Yes! You know, at first I was a troubled kid! I was put in a special education class when I was in elementary and I was getting suspended and I was getting kicked out of school up until the second semester of the 9th grade, when I began to change my life. I got tired of living in poverty, I got tired of being hungry and broke and I just wanted to escape the madness that I was living in. From that I just started to turn my life around.

LONNIE: And here you are now…Dr, a principal of a high school! But then there’s that dark day that will live in infamy forever, April 6!

EBONI: Yes…It was the day I was arrested because a security officer said that they saw me go in one door of the auditorium and a young lady go into another door earlier. The police had come and questioned her and she stated to them up front that nothing was going on; I didn’t even know she was in there; she was hiding because she was skipping class. From that she said on the news that she was pressured into saying something did happen and from that I was arrested, it was fixed.

LONNIE: So here one moment you have a wonderful life and career and the next your in handcuffs being hauled off before television camera’s, jailed, accused of having sex with a 16 year old teenager.

EBONI: Right. Prior to this accusation I was credited as the only person who had turned this school around.

LONNIE: Now, unfortunately the news media frenzy just driven like witch hunts looking for ratings, we’re talking about the eight commandment today, about bearing false witness…What was the result? What happened to your wife and, did they give you back your job finally when she recanted, or?

EBONI: She recanted both verbally, written and on the news in front of millions of people, but because of the controversy that was going on, they didn’t want me to come back to the school, so I never went back to the school.

LONNIE: So the damage had been done. This must be an absolute nightmare!

EBONI: It is! Because, though the charges were dropped, the cloud still hangs over my head and it will follow me.

LONNIE: So how did you, or how does a person get his reputation back?

EBONI: Well I…I have just tried to do the best that I can and follow my passion. I just try not to focus on why God put me on this earth, and that is to help kids who are suffering like I once did.

LONNIE: Like Joseph of old who was accused and thrown into prison.

EBONI: I have just said that I will let my actions speak.

LONNIE: How are you these days?

EBONI: Well, I have a loving wife and I have food on my table.

LONNIE: Are you teaching now?

EBONI: Well, I’m not teaching right now, but maybe someday in the future they’ll be a contract where I can pursue my passion once again.

LONNIE: Shakespeare once said, he who steals my purse steals trash, but he who steals from me my good name, steals that which not enriches him, but makes me poor. Thanks Eboni for coming on our show today and sharing your experience with us.,

EBONI: Thanks, no problem!

“It Is Well With My Soul”, Jaime Jorge, from You’ll Never Walk Alone CD.

CONNIE: You’ve been listening to Jaime Jorge sharing the classic hymn “It Is Well with My Soul.” When times are difficult, it’s good to know that God cares, and that in the end He will make all things right.

LONNIE: Connie I have to say I was really impressed with Dr. Wilson, and his upbeat attitude in spite of all that he’s been through. To think that here’s a man who came up a very rough road, begging and stealing to get enough to eat, turned his life around by dint of hard work, then to have all of that taken away from you by false accusations—and the part of the story we didn’t get to in our interview is that it’s probably because he was trying so hard to reform things at his school that certain people took it upon themselves to start the accusations about him.

CONNIE: But through it all, he’s maintaining his faith in the Lord, and I just know that God is going to bless him in the long run.

LONNIE: I really believe that too. Friend, are you going through some hard times right now? Or do you know someone who is? Let me offer you something to help. The book Still Standing True tells the stories of some of God’s faithful witnesses who have stood the test of trials, and it’s a very encouraging book. We’d like to send you a copy this week, at your request. We’ll have complete details on how you can receive a copy after my message today.

CONNIE: But right now let’s listen as Pastor Lonnie shares his message, “God’s Witness Protection Plan.”

God’s Witness Protection Plan

The beloved American author and humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, didn’t put much stock in pomp and pretense. He had a way of cutting through exterior appearances and getting right down to the heart of the person. And he thought that most people were born liars. For his own part, he claimed to have won medals at 13 World’s Fairs in lying contests!

(We’re not certain he was telling the truth about this, but one of the people who knew him best, the inimitable Huckleberry Finn, did testify at the beginning of his book that “Mr. Mark Twain, . . . he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”

And if you can’t trust Huckleberry Finn, who can you trust?

In an essay published in 1900, Twain made an important observation about honesty. He wrote, “almost all lies are acts, and speech has no part in them.”

Twain said that he couldn’t remember the first lie he ever told, but he thought he could remember the second one: “I was nine days old at the time,” he claimed, “and had noticed that if a pin was sticking in me and I advertised it in the usual fashion, I was lovingly petted and coddled and pitied in a most agreeable way and got a ration between meals besides.

It was human nature to want to get these riches, and I fell. I lied about the pin -- advertising one when there wasn't any.”

Well, it’s all written in good humor, but it makes a point, doesn’t it? It’s human nature to be deceitful. To quote Huck Finn one more time, “I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary.”

The prophet Jeremiah put it this way:

“The heart is deceitful above all things,

And desperately wicked;

Who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9, NKJV).

Ever since Adam and Eve hid in the bushes to escape being seen by the pure eye of the Lord, there’s been something hidden deep down inside us that wants to stay that way—hidden, that is. Perhaps because we find it hard to admit what we’re really like. We want to keep it covered up, hidden in the darkness of obfuscation and prevarication.

In an intriguing interview that took place under the cover of darkness on a Judean night, Jesus explained all of this to Nicodemus. Notice, the text I’m about to read begins just three verses after the best-loved verse in the Bible, John 3:16. But we usually stop reading at verse 16. Here’s what Jesus had to say after that, found in John 3:19-21:

“ ‘And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God’ ” (NKJV).

Shades of the Garden of Eden, hmmm….? Up until that fateful day when they ate of the tree of knowledge and took evil and rebellion into their hearts, Adam and Eve were always excited and happy when God would come and walk with them in the garden in the cool of the day. But as soon as there was sin in their hearts—as soon as there was something they needed to hide from God—where were they when He came to fellowship with them?

Hiding in the bushes, covering themselves with fig leaves! As if that could take them out of God’s sight.

Adam and Eve’s fig leaves are typical of our human reaction to God and His call for purity, aren’t they? It’s still natural for us to hide our real selves from God—and from each other.

Friend, today as we look at the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” I invite you to consider what this commandment means to us on its deepest levels.

In our interview segment today, we talked to a man whose life has been put on hold by a simple lie. And that’s certainly one application of this commandment. We mustn’t tell lies about others. But I’d like to look at this commandment from a different angle as well.

It’s not just about telling blatant lies. In fact, if you read your Bible carefully you’ll notice that simple false statements—what we would call lies—aren’t always considered a bad thing!

Did you ever think about that? Take the story of Rahab in Jericho for example. You can read it in the second chapter of Joshua. When the Jericho Homeland Security Department contacted her to ask whether she’d seen the Hebrew spies who’d come to town that day, she said, “ ‘Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they were from. And it happened as the gate was being shut, when it was dark, that the men went out. Where the men went I do not know; pursue them quickly, for you may overtake them’ ” (Joshua 2:4, 5, NKJV).

But the very next verse lets us in on the truth of the matter: “(But she had brought them up to the roof and hidden them with the stalks of flax, which she had laid in order on the roof.)” (Joshua 2:6, NKJV).

This woman told a blatant untruth. But does the Bible condemn her for it? No. In fact she gets premier billing in the list of God’s faithful servants in Hebrews chapter 11. “By faith the harlot Rahab did not perish with those who did not believe, when she had received the spies with peace” (verse 31, NKJV). She’s honored. She gets her name up in lights, along with a description of what she did, in this wonderful “Faith Chapter.”

Friend, to me this is a clue that when God commands us not to bear false witness against our neighbor, it involves something deeper than simply speaking untruths. We could wrestle all day with questions about the rightness or wrongness of what Rahab did, but in the end it seems her actions were blessed by God, because they were intended to save the lives of His servants.

But this doesn’t in any way demean the value of God’s commandment about honesty. In fact I believe that in the Ninth Commandment, God is calling us to live our lives on a level of honesty that goes deeper—one that gets down to what Mark Twain was talking about when he said “almost all lies are acts, and speech has no part in them.”

A favorite author of mine, who happened to be a contemporary of Mr. Twain, put what I’m trying to say quite succinctly: “Everything that Christians do should be as transparent as the sunlight.” That’s from the pen of Ellen G. White in the book Thoughts From the Mount of Blessings. And I think it’s powerful. “As transparent as the sunlight.” Notice it doesn’t say as transparent as glass, or as water, or even air; but as transparent as the light itself! It should shine forth in purity, shedding light on everything, letting everything come to the light. Which is what the apostle John urges us to do as well in 1 John 1:5-7:

“This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:5-7, NKJV).

That’s a powerful challenge isn’t it? To walk always in the light. To let the light of God’s truth illumine every corner of our lives—not to hide from God as Adam and Eve did, but to walk with Him and to walk openly with our brothers and sisters in the faith.

My Christian friend, permit me to challenge you with that thought if I may: When you go to church, do you find real, deep, close, caring fellowship there? Do you find kindred spirits with whom you feel comfortable sharing the deepest thoughts and longings of your heart?

One of the biggest challenges in churches today, whether megachurches with thousands of members, or tiny town congregations with only a few members, is the lack of close fellowship binding hearts together in close, Christian love.

A recent survey revealed that many Christians today prefer to get their spiritual food off the Internet, or from cable television, rather than in a local church.

But my brothers and sisters, church is where it’s at for Christians. We all need to be a part of a living, breathing, active body of Christ. Individual body parts scattered over the face of the globe with no connection to each other can never have the same level of impact that an active, coordinated, loving body of believers can.

And that’s what the apostle John is calling us to be. A group where the barriers of darkness and secrecy are broken down and the members have true fellowship with one another. That’s what the Ninth Commandment calls us to be too. It calls us to break down the barriers that stand between us and our neighbor. The barriers of deceit and of hiddenness that keep us separate. “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” Notice it doesn’t say there is no sin in a group like that, but that the sin is dealt with, cleaned away by being exposed to the saving blood of Jesus.

The Ninth Commandment is a call to honesty. But it’s also a call to openness. To transparency. To fellowship with my neighbor. To the kind of honesty that will keep me from harming my neighbor.

Friend, is there something that stands between you and your brother or sister in the church? Is there something hidden about your life that you don’t want anyone else to know about? If so, it may be the thing that’s keeping you from finding true fellowship in the body of Christ. You may be breaking the Ninth Commandment without even realizing it, and it may be hampering you from developing into all that the Lord wants you to be. Open it up to Jesus, and let His blood deal with it, and let the light flood into your life and bring you into fellowship with Him and with your brothers and sisters!

“Nothing but the Blood”, Emily Felts Jones, from I Heard the Voice CD.