The Liar's Armory
Introduction: Words are Weapons
In our therapeutic and sentimental age, we like to pretend that words are soft things. We treat them like pillows or puffs of air. We have a children's rhyme that has lied to generations of children: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." This is a lie straight from the pit, and it is a lie that has disarmed the saints and made them careless. The Bible, which is the ultimate book of reality, knows nothing of this flimsy sentimentality. The Bible teaches that words are weapons. They are foundational. God spoke, and the universe leaped into existence. Christ, the eternal Word, upholds all things by the word of His power. And Satan, the ancient liar, spoke a word of rebellion in the garden, and the world was plunged into ruin.
Words are never neutral. They are either instruments of creation and life, or they are instruments of destruction and death. Every word you speak builds up or tears down. Every sentence is a trowel or a wrecking ball. There is no middle ground. And in our text today, Solomon provides us with a stark, visceral image of the destructive power of a particular kind of speech: false witness. He doesn't say that a liar is an annoyance, or a nuisance, or a social inconvenience. He says a man who bears false witness against his neighbor is a walking armory. He is a one-man demolition crew.
This proverb is not just a pithy observation for personal morality. It is a foundational principle for civilization. A society that does not take the Ninth Commandment seriously is a society that is committing suicide. When truth is no longer valued in the courts, in the marketplaces, in the pulpits, and in the homes, that society has lost its immune system. It is vulnerable to every infection, every tyranny, every form of chaos. And we are living in such a society. We live in an age of industrial-scale false witness, from our media to our halls of government. But before we point the finger outward, we must allow the Word of God to do its work inward. The church is the pillar and buttress of the truth, and if we are casual about the truth in our own midst, we have no gospel to offer a dying world.
The Text
Like a club and a sword and a sharp arrow
Is a man who bears false witness against his neighbor.
(Proverbs 25:18 LSB)
The Arsenal of Deceit
Solomon uses three distinct images to describe the man who lies about his neighbor. Each one illustrates a different facet of the damage that is done. This is not poetic flourish; it is a precise diagnosis of the violence that is being committed. A false witness is not engaged in a "speech act." He is engaged in an act of brutal violence.
"Like a club..."
The first weapon is a club, or a war hammer. The Hebrew word here refers to a maul or a mace, a blunt-force instrument designed to shatter and crush. This is up-close, personal, and brutal. A club is not a sophisticated weapon. It is a weapon of brute force. This is the kind of damage a lie does to a person's reputation. A reputation is a fragile thing, built over years of consistent character and action. A single, well-placed lie, a slanderous accusation, can shatter it in a moment. It is a crushing blow. Think of the man accused of dishonesty in business, or the woman accused of infidelity. The lie, even if later disproven, leaves a fracture. The reputation is bruised, broken. The damage is not clean; it is messy and concussive. The club of false witness crushes trust, pulverizes relationships, and leaves its victim reeling and disoriented.
This is the lie that is told in the heat of an argument, the slander that is dropped in a moment of envy. It is not subtle. It is designed to inflict maximum blunt-force trauma to a person's standing in the community. It is the verbal equivalent of taking a sledgehammer to a man's good name.
The Piercing Blade
The second weapon in the liar's arsenal is the sword.
"...and a sword..."
If the club is for crushing, the sword is for cutting and piercing. A sword is a weapon that divides. It severs relationships, cuts covenants, and divides what was once united. The false witness drives a sword between friends, between a husband and wife, between a pastor and his congregation. The book of Proverbs is full of this imagery. "A whisperer separates the best of friends" (Proverbs 16:28). That separation is a clean, sharp cut, inflicted by the sword of a lying tongue.
Unlike the club, which is often a crime of passion, the sword can be wielded with more precision and malice. It is the carefully crafted insinuation, the half-truth that is more damning than a full lie. It is the "I'm not saying, I'm just saying" that cuts a man off from his allies. The slanderer comes between you and your neighbor, and with his words, he severs the bonds of fellowship. He leaves you isolated, cut off. The psalmist laments this very thing: "My companions and my friends stand aloof from my plague, and my relatives stand far off" (Psalm 38:11). Why? Because the swords of false witnesses had been at work, cutting him off from his support.
This is the treachery that cuts to the heart. It is a betrayal that pierces deeply. And we must see that this is not just a horizontal sin, man against man. It is a sin against the covenant community. When you bear false witness against your neighbor, you are taking a sword to the body of Christ. You are dividing what God has joined together.
The Distant Threat
The third weapon is the sharp arrow.
"...and a sharp arrow..."
The club is for close-quarters brutality. The sword is for intimate, personal betrayal. The arrow is for destruction from a distance. The arrow is the weapon of the coward. The archer can hide, he can conceal his identity, and he can strike from afar without ever facing his victim. This is the anonymous email, the gossip whispered three people removed, the rumor that spreads through a community with no identifiable source.
The victim is struck, but he doesn't know who shot him. He feels the sting of the wound, the poison of the lie spreading through his relationships, but he cannot confront his accuser. The psalmist describes the wicked this way: "who sharpen their tongue like a sword, and bend their bows to shoot their arrows, bitter words, that they may shoot in secret at the blameless" (Psalm 64:3-4). This is the very essence of cowardly warfare. The false witness who operates like an archer is a sniper. He hides in the shadows of plausible deniability and fires his poisoned barbs into the heart of the community.
This is why gossip is so pernicious. It is an arrow. It wounds from a distance, and the one who first loosed the arrow is often nowhere to be found when the damage is assessed. But God sees the archer. He knows who bent the bow. And as another proverb warns, "Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on him who starts it rolling" (Proverbs 26:27). The arrow of slander has a nasty habit of boomeranging back on the one who shot it.
The Neighbor and the Covenant
Notice the object of this violence: "against his neighbor." This is not just any person. In the covenantal framework of Israel, your neighbor was your brother. He was a fellow member of the covenant community. To bear false witness against him was an act of high treason. It was a violation of the family bond. This is why the Ninth Commandment is so central to the health of a people. It is the law that protects the fabric of trust that holds a community together.
For us, in the new covenant, our neighbor is preeminently our brother or sister in Christ. When we lie, slander, or gossip about a fellow believer, we are not just being unkind. We are assaulting a member of Christ's own body. We are taking up weapons against a child of God, for whom Christ died. Paul is emphatic about this: "Therefore, putting away lying, 'Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor,' for we are members of one another" (Ephesians 4:25). The reason we must speak truth is because we are part of the same body. To lie to your brother is as insane as your right hand taking up a club to smash your left hand.
A church where false witness is tolerated is a church at war with itself. It is a place of friendly fire, where the soldiers of Christ are wounding each other instead of fighting the enemy. This is a satanic inversion of our calling. We are called to be an army, but a lying tongue turns the barracks into a bloody free-for-all.
The Gospel for Liars
As we consider this trifecta of verbal violence, the club, the sword, and the arrow, every honest one of us must confess our guilt. Who here has not wielded one of these weapons? Who has not used a club of angry accusation, a sword of sharp-tongued division, or an arrow of whispered gossip? We have all been false witnesses. We have all broken the Ninth Commandment, and therefore we all stand condemned by the law.
Our mouths are, by nature, arsenals of unrighteousness. James tells us the tongue is a fire, a world of evil, full of deadly poison, set on fire by hell itself (James 3:6-8). Our natural condition is that of a false witness. We have borne false witness against our neighbor, and more grievously, we have borne false witness against God. We have, by our sin, called God a liar, claiming that our way is better than His, that His commands are burdensome, and that His promises are not true.
What is the remedy for a man armed with a club, a sword, and an arrow? The only remedy is total disarmament and unconditional surrender. And this is precisely what the gospel accomplishes. The ultimate false witness was borne against the only true and faithful Witness, the Lord Jesus Christ. At His trial, "the chief priests and the whole council were seeking false testimony against Jesus that they might put Him to death" (Matthew 26:59). He stood silent as the clubs, swords, and arrows of their lies rained down upon Him. He, the Truth incarnate, was condemned by lies so that we, the liars, might be justified by His truth.
On the cross, Jesus absorbed the full, crushing, piercing, and poisonous impact of all our false witness. He took the club of God's wrath against our slander. He was pierced by the sword of divine justice for our divisive words. He endured the poisoned arrows of our gossip. He did this so that He could disarm us. He takes the weapons out of our hands and puts a new song in our mouths, a song of praise to our God.
The gospel does not just tell us to stop lying. It transforms us from false witnesses into true witnesses. It takes liars and makes them martyrs, which is the Greek word for "witnesses." By the power of the Holy Spirit, our tongues, which were once weapons of destruction, become instruments of healing. Our words, which once crushed, cut, and poisoned, now have the power to build up, bind together, and bring life. This is the miracle of regeneration. God takes the liar's armory and turns it into a treasury of grace, all for the glory of the one who is the Amen, the faithful and true witness, Jesus Christ our Lord.