A well-known Christian leader once said to me: “All men are liars — the Bible says so!” Well, yes, it does. But he omitted the first part, which reads, “I said in my haste…” That man’s experiences with people who were loose with the truth had made him very cynical.
“I said in my haste, all men are liars.” In other words, David made a snap judgement, and snap judgements, like snap decisions, are often wrong, and especially so when an exception is made to the rule. Not all men are liars, in fact, many are not. We should not allow encounters with those who are liars to prejudice our thinking, because cynicism breeds distrust, and distrust sours relationships and builds monuments to bad memories.
Jacob distrusted his father-in-law, so he built a monument of stones and called it “Mizpah”. His devious uncle Laban dismissed it as “a heap of stones”. But Jacob said, “The LORD watch between me and you, while we are absent from each other.”
I’ve seen this written on pretty wall plaques as a prayerful wish for ongoing good relationships between longtime friends. But it was a witness between a cousin and his uncle that really said, “May God keep an eye on you, when you’re where I can’t see you!”
So, let’s not make hasty judgements about people, because if we do God may surprise us by putting someone in our path who would rather die than lie, and that person’s integrity will make us feel ashamed of the way we’ve erected a monument that is a mental reminder of a past deception or some other bad deed unexpectedly and we have labelled them as liars. Legally, to speak them may be judged as slander, and to write them may be judged as libel. So as Christians, let’s not do either.