WHAT GETS YOU IN TROUBLE WITH GOD (PART 6)

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

In you are slanderers who are bent on shedding blood.

Ezekiel 22:9a

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Today we continue our devotional series on some of the ways we can sin and get in trouble with God, examining a list of charges that God levied against His people before imparting judgment upon them. Through the first five parts, what we have found in many instances is that we are repeating the mistakes of the past and going down the road of facing God’s judgment ourselves. And that’s not a place any of us should want to be.

Today, we turn to the sin of slandering, something else we find the Old Testament Israelites guilty of as we look again at our scripture verse for today:

In you are slanderers who are bent on shedding blood. Ezekiel 22:9a

Now we have already covered the matter of murder in Part 1 of this series so we know that the Israelite leaders were freely using their authority to sanction murder and bloodshed in the streets of Jerusalem. We could have easily included this verse within that devotion because of its connection to murder but in doing so we would have missed out on addressing the vehicle used to put people to death.

That vehicle was slander.

Looking at other translations of this verse help us gain a richer understanding of what was taking place. Look at these three renderings of Ezekiel 22:9a:

Some of your own people tell lies, so that others will be put to death. CEV

Some of your people tell lies about others in order to have them put to death. GNT

The men in you tell lies to cause the death of others. NCV

Note the common thread here is that people were manifesting lies in order to have others killed and this was in direct violation of another major command God had given His people:

“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” Exodus 20:16

And so essentially, a person would lie which was one sin committed and the resultant sinful murder of the person slandered would fall back onto the person who lied to make it happen. In other words, the slanderer would become an accessory to murder.

The main point here is that nothing good comes out of slander which is simply defined as an “oral defamation, in which someone tells one or more persons an untruth about another, which untruth will harm the reputation of the person defamed.” In the case of the Old Testament Israelites, the defamation led to the death penalty for the person who was defamed. This leads to one truth about the matter of slander:

Someone always gets hurt in some way by it, including the person who manifests the lies, the one that God will target with His consequences.

This is a big reason why slander is addressed in a big way within legal systems today. You may have heard of people filing defamation suits against others. This is because a mistruth someone told severely damaged the reputation of someone else and so the victim used legal means to go after the perpetrator of the lies. That is how the worldly process works but it is not the process one should be most worried about.

This is because God needs no petition from another in order to judge someone’s wickedness and take action. In fact, many acts of defamation are never traced to the source so the person committing the transgressions goes unpunished through the world’s legal system but they are not invisible to the Lord for He sees everything and more than that, He knows the motivations inside a person’s heart before they even commit the sin and give false testimony against another.  

So do you want to get in trouble with God?

Spread falsehood about someone and cause them harm. You will definitely get what you want.

That’s no lie.

Amen

In Christ,

Mark
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