To Harm for Gain

Proverbs 19:9; John 8:44

The 1828 presidential election campaign seethed with heated, hateful innuendoes. President John Quincy Adams was the bull’s-eye. After the election, which Martin van Buren won, the new president admitted Adams’s absolute integrity. “Adams was an honest man,” he wrote, “not only incorruptible himself, but an enemy to venality in every department of the public service.”

For political gain, Van Buren had taken the lead in smearing Adams. He was the first to unleash charges of outrageous corruption. Apparently, honesty to Van Buren was relative. If being honest about Adams would lose the election, Van Buren preferred to lie. Later, in his autobiography, he declared Adams scrupulous honesty, perhaps as a means of apologizing for the scurrilous tactics he had employed to defeat him in 1828. However, a later apology is a poor substitute for original honesty.

Situational ethics offers nothing substantial to competition or personal relationships. It’s as fluid as mercury and as impossible to grasp. Moral ethics result from faith in God; situational ethics occur in the absence of faith. Obviously, when 90 percent of Americans affirm belief in God to a Gallup Poll, yet situational ethics have never been more pronounced in our culture, either we have lied about our faith or we haven’t taken seriously its demand for moral rectitude.

Courtesy of Speaker’s Sourcebook of New Illustrations by Virgil Hurley copyright © 1995 by Word, Incorporated. Used by permission.

Man Shall Not Live By Bread Alone!
But By EVERY Word That Comes From God Above!

Proverbs 19:9, A false witness will not go unpunished, And he who speaks lies shall perish.

John 8:44, “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.

FAVORITE QUOTES

Ay, sir: to be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of a thousand.-Shakespeare

The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else. -Shaw

A liar is not believed even though he tells the truth.-Cicero