This question is as bothersome as it is perennial. It invariably comes attached to this hypothetical: say you lived in Nazi Germany, and you have Jews hiding in your living room, and the SS guards knock on your door and ask if you are hiding Jews. What do you do? Do you lie?
Let me give you my conclusion, and then try and walk you there with me. First: GOD HATES LYING. So yes, it is always a sin to lie, and no, it is never ok to lie. Proverbs 12:12-13 explains why:
“No disaster overcomes the righteous, but the wicked are full of misery. Lying lips are detestable to Yahweh, but faithful people are His delight.”
Lying lips are one of the seven things that God finds detestable (Proverbs 6:16). Christians are called to let their yes be yes, and lying violates that basic principle (James 5:12). Meanwhile, God is a God of truth (John 14:7), while the devil is the father of lies (John 8:38). Lies are an affront to providence, as they imply that the world would be better if God simply would have worked it out more to our liking. Thus every lie is an attack against the sovereignty of God, and essentially places you in opposition to that which is true. Instead of lying, speak the truth (Col 3:9, Eph 4:22, 24).
It really is that simple.
The philosophical problem
The question is it ever ok to lie comes from a faulty ethical construction. In Christian ethics there are basically two schools: graded ethics, and absolute ethics. Graded ethics says there is a triage to God’s commands, and some are more important than others. When they contradict, always follow the more serious one. For example, they would say the duty owed to the Jews hiding in your living room is greater than the commands against lying. So it is better to lie than to betray those in your living room.
On the other hand, those that hold to absolute ethics (like me, Moses, and Jesus) say that all commands from God are binding, and it is never ok to set aside any of them. God doesn’t grade on a curve, so we shouldn’t view his commands in some kind of order of importance.
Those that hold to graded ethics use verses like Mark 12:31 (where Jesus says that Loving the Lord your God and loving your neighbor are the two greatest commandments) as evidence that God holds some of his commands to be higher than the others. Whereas one who follows absolute ethics would look at Mark 12:31 and say that those commands are greater because the other commands are flow out of them—which to say that violating any command would in some way be an offense to either your neighbor or God, but likely both.
The simple problem with the graded-ethics approach is that it is not taught by the Bible—verses like Mark 12:31 notwithstanding. The first person to be stoned to death in the OT was executed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath, so at the very least that causes some problem for the concept of graded morality. Regardless of absolute vs. graded ethics, the first people God strikes dead in the New Testament are Annanias and Sapphira for lying to the Holy Spirit. The moral of that has to be: if you are going to rate sins in some kind of order of seriousness, lying should be pretty close to the top.
But this takes us back to the Jews hiding in the living room. What then? Well, when scheming up hypothetical ethical dilemmas, you have to remember that hypotheticals are literally problematic. They are contrived precisely because they expose a supposed weakness in a person’s argument.
So if you are going to play the hypothetical game, remember that God is sovereign, and with that comes his promise that every instance of temptation he will always provide a way of escape (1 Corinthians 10:13)… and that escape is NEVER going to involve sinning. God does not open your escape hatch through sin. In fact, in the context of 1 Corinthians 10, sin is the very thing that God gives you an escape from.
Thus, in any hypothetical moral dilemma you need to remember that there is an unstated contingent—namely, God will give you a way out that does not involve sin.
Back to the guards at the door
So we are back to the guards knocking on the door, and the Jews hiding in the living room. The ground rules are that you can’t sin, and that lying is a sin, and delivering people over to their death is unloving, which is to say that it too is sinful. What is left to do?
Well, this decision is really made before you took the Jews in. When you gave them refuge in your house, you did so while taking responsibility for their safety. If you are brave enough to hide them, then you better be brave enough to protect them. How can you hide them but not be willing to physically defend them? If the guards knock on your door, respond by telling them that they have no right to enter your house, and that what they are doing is morally reprehensible—but that Jesus offers forgiveness for their sins, and they need to repent. Then slam the door, and take the hypothetical from there. A person who is brave enough to lie but not brave enough to be a martyr, isn’t brave at all.
What about war time ethics
As absolutist as that sounds, the Bible keeps room in its moral constructs for war time ethics. God uses countries to bear the sword and punish evil doers. It is expected that war includes both deception and violence. An army can fake left and go right, because they are bearing the sword to suppress evil. But that is fundamentally different than a person—a civilian, if you will—who lies because they have a secret moral agenda. Even if their morality is right, it is undercut by lying because (remember) God will never put you in a position where lying is right thing to do.
No conversation on lying would be complete without Rahab sneaking on to the set. “What about her?” you ask. “Didn’t she lie?” Well, yes…but that is hardly the point of that narrative. Rahab sided with Yahweh over and against her nation. She heard of God’s work in the wilderness, and when she met the spies, she was soundly converted by faith alone. That faith immediately manifested itself in her devotion to God and his people (James 2:25).
So the point of the Rahab narrative in Joshua 2 is that an idol-worshiping prostitute was radically saved, and that God then used her to help Israel enter the promised land. Did she lie? Yes. She had been a believer for all of ten minutes, so cut her some slack. Is she in the hall of faith in Hebrews 11? Yes. As shocking as it might seem, there are some believers who were both liars and prostitutes (or Sampson, who was a liar while with a prostitute). Yet somehow the gospel is greater than sin, and salvation comes through faith alone. Rahab is always held out as an example of faith for siding with God’s people, and is never held out as an example of lying for the glory of God.