Reading Robert Conquest’s biography of Stalin1 has opened new lines of meditation on Paul’s command in Colossians 3:9. But before turning to that, let me briefly indicate what Paul is not saying. He is not saying that there is no such thing as righteous deception, such as Jael practiced on Sisera (Judges 4:17-22) and for which Deborah praised her in song (Judges 5:24-27). It is not merely permissible to deceive a wicked enemy; it is righteous: Jael is pronounced “most blessed of women!”
Neither is Paul calling on us to be bluntly candid about our culinary evaluation of the dinner just served by our friend. Unless we are food critics whose opinion our friend requested, a simple polite response without details or appraisal is sufficient. Various other polite “lies” are also not in his purview.
The kind of lie Paul has in mind is clear in the context, though it might be missed by an inattentive reader. The command to “lie not” — perhaps even “stop lying” — is followed by explanation in the rest of verse 9, continuing to verse 11: “since you have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him, where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all.”
The Colossians had undergone a fundamental change. The old man — Adam and themselves as under him in the old covenant — had been “put off” like a filthy garment. They had been given a new garment “the new man” — Christ and all that is in Him in the new covenant. When did this transition occur? Since baptism was being “buried” with Christ (Colossians 2:12; Romans 6:3-4), it would be in baptism that the old man had been crucified and had died. The old clothing was taken away, just as Aaron’s garments were removed so that he could be washed and ordained by Moses (Leviticus 8:5 ff., cf. 16:23-24). Aaron’s new priestly robes signified his right to draw near to God. We have been clothed with Christ Himself in baptism, for He is our priestly garment opening access into the Holy Place in heaven: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27).
In both Galatians (from the mid-AD 40s, Paul’s first epistle, though not the first New Testament document, which would be Matthew in AD 30) and Colossians (probably written around AD 60 from prison in Rome), Paul’s logic follows the same course. Baptism is putting off the old man, the death of the old man, and putting on the new man who is Christ. By baptism we are adopted into the family of Abraham, and therefore in Christ, heirs (Galatians 3:27-29).
That change in our relationship to God obviously demands appropriate changes in our lifestyle. We can no longer live like men who do not know or believe in God. In Colossians Paul singles out lying but he is not thinking of everyday lies — though I do not mean they are permissible. He is targeting a big lie, one that could undermine the Gospel and the churches.
As the quotation of Colossians 3:9-11 above makes clear, as well as the similar passage in Galatians 3:26-29, Paul is thinking about the fact that in the New Man, Christ, there is no longer Jew and Gentile. He has in mind the judgment of the tower of Babel, which divided and separated humanity, with only Abraham and his descendants appointed as God’s priestly people. The cross overcame that judgment by putting the old humanity to death. The resurrection brought new life. The gift of the Spirit at Pentecost actualized all that Christ had done, creating a new humanity indwelt by the Spirit as God’s new temple.
What then is the lie? It is the lie that Peter perpetrated in Antioch when he acted hypocritically by withdrawing from table fellowship with Gentiles (Galatians 2:12-13). I say he “lied,” because Paul said they were not walking according to the truth of the Gospel (Galatians 2:14). If the Gospel creates a new man in Christ, a new humanity in which the curses of Eden and Babel are overcome, then for Christians to reintroduce divisions within the people of God is a denial of the Gospel itself. It is a lie that threatens to undermine all that the Gospel proclaims. From one perspective, Peter’s error was minor. He only changed tables, separating from Gentiles and moving to the table reserved for Jews only. But his actions deserved public rebuke from Paul because he was, in effect, contradicting the truth of the Gospel which announces that Jesus has created a new humanity.
The situation in Colossae was not as serious as that in the Galatian churches, but the problem remained: the danger of denying the Gospel by not accepting both Jews and Gentiles, Scythians and barbarians, as one in Christ. The big lie is the lie that denies the Gospel. We can tell that lie by what we do and do not do, by what we say and do not say. The Christian life is a fight for truth, beginning with fighting for truth in the way we think (Romans 12:1-2), and embracing all that we say and do (1 John 1:6).
The big lie changes shape in different eras. In our day, circumcision and related concerns are not central to the big lie. What is? The 19th century introduced an influential satanic trinity of big liars: Marx, Darwin, and Freud — though the Enlightenment had already released hordes of frogs from hell. Together they taught that man’s basic problems are not sin and its results. Together they taught that God is not the creator of the world and that it is not true that all men are descended from one man and one woman. They could say nice things about Jesus after they reconstructed him in their own image, but the stories of creation and the fall were myths which had no historical or factual meaning, certainly not the basis for a worldview.
The big lie that denies the Creator promiscuously multiplies in little lies too many to count. What George Orwell ironically depicts in Animal Farm actually drew an accurate picture of Soviet reality. Stalin exemplifies the big lie applied through a million little lies: “Beyond the crudely economic, the delusions of the epoch included, as we have seen, the idea that a ‘new man’ would emerge, a concept much stressed by Stalin. Did he think of himself as an exemplar, a forerunner embodying the qualities of the new man? At any rate, his socialist order would, on Marxist principle, produce a higher type of human being: moral, responsible, subject to none of the vices imprinted on earlier humanity by capitalism or feudalism. The effects of the ‘mode of production’ would, indeed, be assisted by a massive effort of re-education. But in so far as a ‘new man’ emerged he was a denouncer, a terrorist, a conformist, a bureaucrat, an anti-Semite.”2
Again,
It seems that for Stalin these inventions were more real than the reality. And the enemies who thus confessed had, however reluctantly, confirmed the fantasy, separately brought useful validation to Stalin’s conception of the world. What this, and so many similar incidents, seems to show is that a peculiar disjunction between fact and invention flourished not only in the public sphere, but also in Stalin’s own mind.
Stalin’s whole career in power may be in fact seen as an attempt first to force the real world to fulfil his fantasy; and then, when this had failed, to impose the belief that the fantasy world had actually been achieved. Pasternak wrote that the ‘unexampled cruelty’ of the Yezhov terror was due to the fact that collectivization had been a disastrous failure and that this could not be admitted. In a more general sense, the whole of the physical and mental devastation wrought by Stalinism may be seen in terms of the stresses and pressures and distortions produced by the massive grinding of unreality upon the hard materials of fact.3
When men believe the big lie, they — like their father Satan — seek to persuade others. In Stalin’s case, his mode of persuasion was unexampled cruelty. The truth is that only Jesus can make a “New Man.” The Marxist lie does not deny that mankind needs to be remade, it denies that Jesus is the Way. Freud’s lie denies that sin is the problem and together with Darwin denies that man is God’s image. The cross and Pentecost cannot be the Way of salvation in the world of purposeless evolution where the “rational animal” struggles with his id, ego, and superego.
The Galatian and Colossian lies implicitly denied that through baptism Jesus had united Jews, Greeks, Scythians, and all other believers into one New Man in Him. When Paul says “lie not,” he is commanding us to stop telling the lie that the judgment of Babel has not been removed by the cross and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost. But as Galatians shows, he is not just speaking of what we say. We deny Pentecost when we act as if the body of Christ is not one.
We can begin to affirm Pentecost by accepting all who are baptized to fellowship at the table with Jesus in the Spirit, recognizing them as brothers in Christ and fellow heirs of the kingdom.
Ralph Smith is pastor of Mitaka Evangelical Church.
- Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991). From the cover: “Of all of the despots of our time, Joseph Stalin lasted the longest and wielded the greatest power, and his secrets have been the most jealously guarded — even after his death. Robert Conquest’s Stalin is the first book by a Western author to draw on the vast amount of material that became available in the aftermath of glasnost, along with earlier official and unofficial sources, to produce a living portrait of this paranoid leader. . . . Robert Conquest is without doubt our leading scholar-historian of the Soviet Union. In Stalin, he has distilled a lifetime’s study, weaving detail, analysis, and research into an extraordinarily powerful narrative.” ↩︎
- Conquest, p. 321. ↩︎
- Conquest, p. 323. ↩︎