Dishonesty - Proverbs 11v1

Now if he’s a dodgy shopkeeper what he’ll do is he’ll make his set of weights too light. He’ll have these big weights that say 1 Kilo on them, but he’ll have made them slightly hollow or something. So you ask for kilo of figs, and you pay for a kilo of figs, and he pops the 1 Kilo weight on the scales, and it looks like he weighs out a kilo of figs – everything balances nicely. But actually you’re only getting 700 grams of figs. And, the proverb says, God hates it. He really hates it.

It’s a bit like poison. If someone poisoned me with cyanide I wouldn’t care that much whether they’d used a teaspoonful or a whole ladleful. The quantity – well, maybe it matters slightly. If it was a whole ladleful it might end up infecting other people too.

But frankly, measuring the amount of cyanide used would be a long way down my priority list. The question I’d be most interested in is simply whether or not someone was trying to use cyanide on me.

It’s the same with dishonesty. Large scale dishonesty is worse than small scale dishonesty. But any dishonesty is really bad. It’s like poison and God hates it. Honesty, on the other hand, God loves that. He delights in it.

So a good question for each of us to ask ourselves is, “Do I delight in honesty? How much is my honesty worth to me? How much would I sell it for?”

Just the other day I came across one of these surveys they’d done in America. I have to say, I’m nearly always terrified by the results they come up with in these surveys. I’d kind of like to think, “Surely it’s just Americans who’re like that – it’d be different if you surveyed British people.” But I suspect, actually that’s just wishful thinking.

But perhaps a lot of us would still be able to say “No”, no matter how much money was involved. Perhaps even 100 000 wouldn’t be enough. That situation might be one where our honesty is worth a lot to us. We don’t want to become thieves or robbers or pickpockets, no matter how much money is involved.

Well there’s at least 5 ways we could react to that statement. Let’s start with the least likely first:

1. Actually, no I think they’re quite reasonable prices
2. Yep, they’re overpriced, but I’m going to buy them anyway
3. Yep, they’re overpriced, so I’m not going to buy any computer software. (That might seem quite a shocking and unrealistic suggestion, but folk older than myself have told me that there was a time before Windows, and that people seemed to manage OK)
4. Yep, they’re overpriced, so I’m going to go with their competitors (Linux or Lotus or whatever)
5. Yep, they’re overpriced, so I’m just going to copy them from someone else.

Five options at least. There’s actually quite a lot of choice. And so we have to make a decision about which one we go for. Don’t buy anything, buy something else, buy it full price, or get a dodgy copy.

But this is where I find that for myself something really odd starts going on. On the pickpocket honesty thing, I think I’d be pretty safe even if 100 000 pounds was on offer. I know pickpocketing is illegal, I know it’s wrong, I know God hates it. 100 000 just isn’t enough. Being honest is worth far more than that.

Now James Bond films aren’t normally the first place you’d go for lessons in morality. But actually, this time Bond is spot on. What’s your price to murder, what’s your price to steal, what’s your price to cheat? Or like in the proverb, what’s your price to fiddle with the weights on your scales? What’s your price to betray God? Ten thousand? More? No. The whole world is not enough for that.

But when it comes to dodgy software, my honesty suddenly might be for sale at bargain basement rates. How much does a copy of Office cost? A couple of hundred quid? That’s way too much, so let’s just copy it. Honesty is suddenly for sale for 200 quid.

Or maybe even cheaper – why pay 15 quid for a CD when you can just burn a copy for next to nothing? The world might not be enough to make Bond betray his country. But saving a tenner could be enough to make me dishonest about CDs.

Why is that? After all, it’s still illegal, it’s still dishonest, it still displeases God. But I know I’d be much more tempted to give my honesty over a little thing like that – maybe to save 10 quid on software – I’d be far more likely to do that than I would be to gain 10 thousand quid by robbery.

After all, people might say, “No body gets hurt. It’s just the company that pays out.”

“No body gets hurt.” Well, that’s not really the place to start. The place to start is, Does it delight God, or does he hate it? We’ll come back to that it a moment. But it might be worth noticing that the “no body gets hurt” thing isn’t even true anyway. Let’s pick a different example for a moment. Insurance fraud. I saw a documentary a week or two ago about a dodgy claims company that had eventually gone bust. The company was called the Accident Group. Some of the stuff they came up with was almost laughable.

There was this one person who had made a work-related personal injury claim for a “significant paper cut” they had sustained at their place of work. And I think there was another husband and wife pairing who made a total of about 40 claims over 18 months. The majority of them to do with back injuries they’d sustained due to tripping over paving stones on the footpath outside their house. 40 times, apparently.

After all, when somebody makes a dodgy insurance claim, who do they think they’re ripping off? Some faceless insurance company? Not at all. All that happens is that the insurance company passes the cost back on to the general public. One of the reasons insurance is as expensive as it sometimes is, is because the companies are covering themselves against dodgy claims.

But anyway, when it gets down to it, the “no body gets hurt” attitude is just the wrong mindset. The question our Proverb gets us to ask as Christians is, “Is God delighted by this, or does he hate it? Does this honour God?”

That’s the question we need to learn to ask ourselves when we’re faced with temptations to do something a bit dodgy. Does this please God? Does this honour God?

Cos if we’re asking questions like that, it will make things a lot simpler for us.

And actually, the proverb in v4 also makes things a lot simpler for us. It focuses right down on what really matters at the end of the day: Wealth is worthless in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.

Righteousness is what matters. Righteousness is what saves us. Now the verse doesn’t go into it in detail here, but the Bible as a whole makes the point that our own righteousness is never up to scratch. It’ll never be good enough. We depend on Jesus’s righteousness counting towards us. As it does if we trust him and follow him.

But if we’re following him that means we are to be like him. We’re to grow in righteousness and become more like him. In particular, we are to grow in honesty and so become more like him.

Jesus Christ, the son of God – he was not the sort of person who would have used dishonest scales. He wouldn’t have tried to rip off insurance companies, or fiddled his tax, or been involved in software piracy. The Son of God would not have done that.

And that’s us. So let’s be people of honesty – people who delight God, not people who anger him.