Lying for a good cause
When I grew up I hated lying and I never wanted to lie ever. As I got older I realized that sometimes I lied for a good cause. And then I thought what is the moral stance of God on that issue? Well in King David's story we see that King David lied to another king that would have killed him otherwise. He pretended to be insane and let drool drip down onto his beard so that he could save his own skin. He also lied to King Saul when he evaded him. He also took bread from the priests and ate and drank so that he could survive. God considered all of these things righteous. For God had said that David was faithful in everything that he did except for in the case of Uriah the hittite. There are more examples but God does allow us to lie if it is for a good cause. Now he wants us to try to be honest at all times, but sometimes we are in an unfair game. For example homicide investigators sometimes lie to their suspects in order to get them to confess to their crime. A woman kidnapped by a serial killer might have to lie in order to distract the serial killer so that she could get away and save her life. Is she wrong for doing so? Absolutely not. Are investigators morally incorrect to get a witness to confess to a murder if they use a lie? No not if they had to do it because they had no other options. Some people are against this no matter what I say. But other people understand that when a game is rigged it's okay to lie to the liar. If management puts on the workers an unfair workload and reprimands those workers for not getting their work done, then the workers may need to lie. Sometimes workers need to say that they did things the proper way to their managers but in reality they did not have enough resources to do things the proper way and so they did things the cheap quick and dirty way. Either way the workers would get reprimanded. So the workers decide to get their work done in the most efficient way but are forced to lie about it to their management in a sense. In that case the fault is not on the worker, but the fault is on the management by putting unfair stipulations in the work environment which slow things down. I have had to lie in order to get my job done and if I had any other option I would have been more transparent but I had to say that I did things prim and proper when in reality that was not necessarily the case. Was I wrong for doing so? No I don't think so. I think that the game was rigged and I had no choice but to just get my work done in whichever manner possible. Of course if the management digs deeper and asked me honestly what I did to get the work done I would say that I got it done the quick and dirty way because there was no way for me to get my work done the proper way. In which case the manager would see there unfair delegation of tasks. Missionaries lie in order to bring the gospel, the goodness of God, into hostile dark Nations. I think it's okay to lie for a good cause but only when you have no other choice. I guess in a perfect world we would never have to do that. I hope I don't have to do it again but I also hope to have optimal working conditions and just support. Probably neither will perfectly happen consistently. So if you find yourself in a situation where you have to lie in order to survive don't worry about it too much. Know that you did the right thing and that you prayed about it and sought the Lord's will in the situation and sometimes trusting in the Lord has to be enough.
