“Unhearing” Those Words

 

 

You cannot “unhear” slander. Once an innocent person has been accused, it is hard to forget the charges against him.

God hates slander! Ponder these verses:

• You shall not go about as a talebearer (translated “slanderer” in the ESV) among your people; nor shall you take a stand against the life of your neighbor: I am the LORD.  Leviticus 19:16
• And whoever spreads slander is a fool. Proverbs 10:18b
• Remind them… to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing all humility to all men. Titus 3:1-2
• Do not speak evil of one another, brethren. He who speaks evil of a brother and judges his brother, speaks evil of the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. James 4:11

R.J. Rushdoony teaches that, “Slander is a form of murder: it seeks to destroy the reputation and the integrity of a man by insinuating falsehoods. The reason the rabbis regarded it as worse than idolatry, incest, and murder was because its moral consequences are fully as deadly if not worse, and it is a crime easily committed and not too readily detected.” (Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 1, page 596).

Often, a third person is brought into the sin by their repeating of what they believe to be true. From our conversations one on one to our social media posts, as Christians, will we please start to search for truth before we pass on a false report?

Matthew 18:15-17 gives us clear instruction regarding how to approach a brother or sister we believe to be in sin. It does not begin with telling someone else. It begins with going to the person in sin. If they refuse to hear us, then we may take a witness.

This process is given to us so that we can confront sin within the church. When we start by telling people who are not involved, we increase the sin and are complicit in the slander.

There is another side to this that is also something we need to be careful of and watch for. It may be that someone has, in the past, done something sinful (Romans 3:23) or perhaps just  an error in their theology and it was well known at the time. By the posts on Facebook one would assume that there is no forgiveness in Christianity. We criticize articles and arguments that are twenty years old without checking to see if these things are still true. Is this a form of slander to a repentant sinner or mistaken brother?

Many of us just dismiss these slanderous remarks when we have spoken them and learn they are not true. What we fail to do is repent and seek to restore the reputation of the person we slander. This is an evil before God and a terrible blow to the reputation of the one slandered.

God does, in His Word, give us still another way to deal with someone we believe is in sin. James says, “Brethren, if anyone among you wanders from the truth, and someone turns him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins (James 5:19-20).

God’s ways are higher than our ways. He wants us to approach one another to deal with sin – not approach others and spread it. Whether this is a social media post, in our families, in the Church, or in our communities, let’s check for whether what we are saying could be slander before God. The result will (hopefully) be that we speak only those things that others will not need to “unhear.”