Pages 2-4: spring 1992

       IMPOSSIBLE FOR GOD TO LIE?

                          Farrell Till 

   "God cannot lie. For this reason alone, we know that whatever he person-
ally has communicated to mankind is true."  This is how Editor Tom Fishbeck 
introduced a pro- inerrancy comment in the April 1991 issue of Bible Answers 
Newsletters (p. 3). It was a familiar bibliolatry tactic. A Bible passage is 
quoted and then supported with the claim that God cannot lie.  The claim is 
often "proven" by citing Hebrews 6:18, which says that it is impossible for 
God to lie, or Titus 1:2, which says that God can
not lie.

   Aside from the obvious circular reasoning taking place here, the tactic is 
flawed by contradictory statements in the Bible about a much ballyhooed 
aspect of God's nature. If it is truly impossible for God to lie, then bibliolat-
ers are going to have to explain some confusing Bible passages.

   One of these is the fanciful little yarn attributed to the prophet Micaiah in 
1 Kings 22:19-23.  Ahab and Jehoshaphat were considering an Israelite-
Judean joint expedition to go against the Syrians at Ramoth-gilead.  Appar-
ently leery of the plan, Jehoshaphat asked for "the word of Yahweh" (v:5) 
on the matter, and Ahab paraded before him 400 prophets who all assured 
Jehoshaphat that the alliance would succeed.  Still unconvinced, Jehoshaphat 
wanted to consult at least one more prophet.  Why the word of one more 
prophet would mean anything if Jehoshaphat was unconvinced by what the 400 
were saying is anyone's guess.   At any rate, Jehoshaphat insisted on con-
sulting at least one more prophet, so Ahab reluctantly sent for Micaiah, the 
son of Imlah.  "There is yet one man by whom we may inquire of Yahweh," 
Ahab told Jehoshaphat, "but I hate him, for he does not prophesy good con-
cerning me but evil" (v:8).

   When Micaiah was brought before the kings, the 400 prophets were put-
ting on quite a spectacle. "Go up to Ramoth-gilead and prosper," they were 
saying, "for Yah-weh will  deliver it  into the  hand of  the king."  Asked 
by Ahab if their armies should go up to Ramoth-gilead or forebear, Micaiah 
said, "Go up and prosper, and Yahweh will deliver it into the hand of the 
king" (v:15). Apparently, this was spoken sarcastically, because Ahab then 
said, "How many times shall I command you that you speak to me nothing but 
the truth in the name of Yahweh?" In response to this, Micaiah told a story 
that implicated Yahweh in a conspiracy to lure Ahab to his death:  

        I saw Yahweh sitting on his throne, and all the host of 
     heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left.  And 
     Yahweh said, Who shall entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall 
     at Ramoth-gilead?  And one said on this manner; and another said 
     on that manner.  And there came forth a spirit, and stood before 
     Yahweh, and said, I will entice him.  And Yahweh said to him, 
     With what? And he said, I will go forth, and will be a lying spirit 
     in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, You shall entice 
     him, and shall prevail also: go forth, and do so. Now therefore, 
     behold, Yahweh has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these 
     your prophets; and Yahweh has spoken evil concerning you 
     (Bethel Bible).

Yahweh apparently had a penchant for putting lying spirits into people, 
because a less detailed, but similar, incident is related in Isaiah 37:7 and 2 
Kings 19:7.  (For reasons known only to Yahweh and Bible inerrantists, the 
wording of these two chapters, Isaiah 37 and 2 Kings 19, is identical.) 
Threatened by a message from king Sennacherib of Assyria whose army had 
laid siege to Jerusalem and other Judean cities, king Hezekiah rent his 


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clothes, put on sackcloth, and went into the house of Yahweh.  The prophet 
Isaiah sent word from Yahweh for the king not to be afraid.   "Behold,  I 
will put a  spirit in him  (Sen-      nacherib)," said the message from 
Yahweh, "and he shall hear tidings, and shall return to his own land; and I 
will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land."

   The chapters end with an account of Sennacherib's assassination by his 
own sons, but that is only incidental to the story.  The important thing is 
that Isaiah, as did Micaiah, depicted Yahweh as a god who dealt with trouble-
some men by putting lying spirits into them to deceive them and lure them to 
their deaths.  How can these two stories be reconciled with the claim that it 
is impossible for God to lie?

   I asked that question in my debate with Mac Deaver in San Marcos, 
Texas, and his response was that God did not lie to Ahab; Satan did.  His 
proof was John 8:44 where it was said that there is no truth in the devil and 
that "when he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar, and 
the father thereof."  As I have pointed out in many prior articles, the pitting 
of scripture against scripture is a logically unsound way to protect the iner-
rancy doctrine, because it is a tactic that seeks to prove inerrancy by assum-
ing inerrancy.  "Your passage can't mean what you are saying it means," the 
argument implies, "because a passage over here very clearly teaches 
thus-and-so."  The inerrantist who reasons like this is saying, "If your pas-
sage means what you claim it means and if mine means what I claim it means, 
then there is a contradiction in the Bible, and that can't be, because the 
Bible does not contradict itself."  As I said, this is circular reasoning or, in 
this case, proving inerrancy by assuming inerrancy.

   Why does it never occur to inerrancy defenders that if one writer made 
statement "A" and another writer made statement "B," which appears to 
contradict "A," then there just might be a real contradiction in the Bible?  If 
both statements had been made by the same writer, the inerrantist might then 
have a sensible basis for suggesting how-it-could-have-been scenarios to 
reconcile the meaning of the two, but when the statements have been made by 
different writers, the most likely explanation for the apparent discrepancy is 
that the two writers disagreed on the common subject they were writing 
about. Obviously, the writers of Hebrews (6:18) and Titus (1:2) thought that 
God  could not lie.   This fact, however, does not exclude the possibility 
that Isaiah (37:7) and the writer of 1 Kings (22:19-23) believed that God did 
sometimes lie.  So to resolve this problem, bibliolaters must explicate the 
story of the prophet Micaiah and the message of Isaiah to king Hezekiah in a 
way that will show that no lie or deception on God's part was involved in 
either case.  I don't think they can do that, but until they do the Bible 
stands indicted for contradiction in the matter of whether God can lie.

   Another problem passage concerns the intertribal dispute between Israel 
and the Benjamites. Outraged at the rape and murder of a Levite's concubine 
at Gibeah by a group of Benjamite homosexuals, the other Israelites demanded 
that the tribe of Benjamin deliver up to them the "base fellows" who had done 
this thing so that they could be put to death (Judges 20:12-13). When the 
Benjamite leaders refused the demand, the Israelites took an army of 400,000 
against the Benjamites, who numbered only 26,700.  It looked as if it were 
going to be a complete rout, so the Israelites, apparently seeing no need to 
send their entire army out to battle, went up to Bethel to ask "counsel of 
God":

        Who shall go up for us first to battle against the children of 
     Benjamin? And Yahweh said, Judah shall go up first (20:18).

Well, Judah did go up first, and lost 22,000 men in a resounding defeat! So 
what happened here?  The Israelites had asked counsel of Yahweh, and he 
told them to send Judah out to battle first.  Although inerrantists may quib-
ble (as I have heard them do) that Yahweh did not specifically say that 


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Judah would be victorious, if the story happened as recorded--and inerran-
tists will argue that it did--then deception was certainly involved.  One would 
have to be completely idiotic to think that the Israelites had asked "counsel of 
Yahweh" to find out which army to deploy in order to be defeated.  Obvious-
ly, they wanted to know what army would secure a victory for them.  So if 
anything like what is related in this story ever happened, we can conclude 
only one of two things: (1) Yahweh deceived the Israelites into thinking the 
forces of Judah could win the battle or (2) Yahweh is not omniscient.  Either 
way the inerrancy doctrine suffers irreparable damage.

   But this story didn't end with the defeat of the Judean army.  In great 
distress, "the children of Israel went up and wept before Yahweh until 
evening; and they asked of Yahweh, saying, Shall I again draw near to battle 
against the children of Benjamin my brother?" And     what answer did they 
receive?  "And Yahweh said, Go up against him" (v:23).  So on this "coun-
sel" from Yahweh, the Israelites went to  battle the next day, and this time 
the Benjamites "destroyed down to the ground of the children of Israel again 
eighteen thousand men" (vv:24-25).

   To believe that this ridiculous tale is part of the verbally inspired, iner-
rant word of God is too absurd to deserve comment, but to argue that if it 
did happen as recorded no deception was involved on Yahweh's part would be 
even more absurd.  In profound anguish, the Israelites had asked their god 
Yahweh if they should again go to battle against the Benjamites, and he told 
them to go. If that was not deception, then someone should explain why it 
wasn't.  

   Usually, when the Israelites experienced military defeat, pestilence, fam-
ine, or other calamities, the Bible attributed it to some sin or disobedience. 
When Joshua's army was routed at Ai, for example, it turned out that Yahweh 
was punishing his people for the sin of one man who had kept some of the 
spoils for himself after the battle of Jericho (Josh. 7). David sinned in 
numbering Israel (2 Sam. 24:1-10), but Yahweh punished all of Israel for it 
by sending a pestilence that killed 70,000 people (vv:15-16).  As unjust as it 
is to punish someone for the "sins" of another, that was clearly the practice 
in Old Testament times, and bibliolaters dutifully defend it as justification for 
Yahweh's having on occasion retracted his promises.  There is nothing in 
Judges 20, however, that even suggests the Israelites were guilty of some 
offense that would have "justified" Yahweh's retraction of his implied promise 
of victory.  To the contrary, the Benjamites were the offenders. They were 
harboring a group of men who had committed a despicable crime.  Yet the 
Israelites were losing all the battles--and that after they had asked "counsel 
of Yahweh" and had been told to go against Benjamin!  It had to be either 
deception or a pathetic lack of foreknowledge on Yahweh's part.

   After their second defeat, the Israelites went up to Bethel again "and 
wept, and sat there before Yahweh, and fasted that day until evening; and 
they offered burnt-offerings and peace-offerings before Yahweh" (v:26). 
None other than Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, was the 
priest who stood before the ark of the covenant while all of this counsel-
seeking was going on, and for the third time the Israelites asked Yahweh, 
"Shall I yet again go out to battle against the children of Benjamin my broth-
er,  or shall I cease?"  The answer?  "And Yahweh said, Go up; for tomor-
row I will deliver him into your hand" (v:28). They went to battle the next 
day, and, by luring the Benjamites into an ambush, finally defeated them, if 
suffering 40,000 casualties in order to kill 25,000 Benjamites could in any 
sense be considered a victory.  Maybe it was the fasting and offering of 
sacrifices before the third battle that finally brought victory to the Israelites, 
or maybe it was just that the third time was charmed.  At any rate, the 
Israelites finally won, according to the story, but at the cost of considerable 
damage to Yahweh's reputation for honesty.

   An inerrantist once told me (with a straight face) that Yahweh did not 


                           3
specifically say until the third inquiry was made (v:28) that he would deliver 
the Benjamites into the hands of Israel.  So to his warped way of reasoning, 
there was no deception in the answers that Yahweh gave to the first two 
inquiries of the Israelites.  He had just told them to go to battle without 
indicating either way how the battles would go.  Can you imagine an inerran-
cy defense any lamer than that?  If I absolutely knew that John Jones had 
infallible ability to look into the future and see what was going to happen 
and, knowing that, I asked him if I should buy stock in company A, would 
Jones be guilty of deception and lying if he said, "Yes, buy it," and then, 
after I had bought the stock, the company went bankrupt?  To ask the ques-
tion is to answer it.

   There are other stories in the Bible that are inconsistent with the claim 
that God cannot lie.  In "Yahweh's Failed Land Promise" (Winter 1991, pp. 2-
6),  for example, I examined the numerous OT passages in which Yahweh had 
unconditionally promised that he would without fail give all of the land of 
Canaan to the Israelites but then failed to make good his promise. In the 
same issue, a fundamentalist writer tried to rebut the central premise of the 
article and couldn't. In a future issue, we will notice that Yahweh once 
promised (2 Sam. 7:8-17) that he would establish the throne of David forever 
and then failed to make good that promise. All such stories as these are 
devastating to the claim that God cannot lie. In many places, the Bible teach-
es that God not only can but does on occasion lie.  This is just one more of 
many contradictions in the verbally inspired "word of God."                              

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