Is Lying Always a Sin, or Is It Sometimes OK to Lie?

Hi, I’m glad you asked this, because, don’t get me wrong, it is wrong to lie, but there are some loopholes to this in the Bible pertaining to lying. Let me explain:

While teaching some teens one night about the 10 Commandments, we came to the one that tell us not to lie. Now, the text actually says not to “give false testimony against your neighbor”. Some translations have actually gone so far as to translate this to say, “don’t lie”. But my teens asked about this with this example:

‘Say a gang is chasing our friend Michael, and he asks if he can duck into our house for protection, and I let him. Now, if the gang members ask me if I saw Michael or know where he is, do I tell him the truth so as to keep from sinning?’

Teenagers have great questions, don’t they? To be honest, I didn’t know the answer for this, so I said I’d pray about and study it, and get back to them. Here’s what I found:

When Lying Was Blessed

There are (at least?) 2 other places in the Bible where somebody lied, and it was not considered a sin:

1. Exodus 1:15–21, where the Egyptian midwives were ordered by Pharaoh to kill all the sons born to the Israelites. They didn’t kill the boys, and when asked, they lied to Pharaoh, saying that the Hebrew women were too fast for them and would snatch the boys out of their hands. But they were lying, and God blessed them for protecting the children.
2. Joshua 2:2–6, where Rahab lied to the soldiers of Jericho to protect the Israelite scouts. God not only blessed her for doing so by protecting her from the destruction of Jericho, but also included her in the lineage of the Messiah.

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