Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.” – Genesis 12:13

Today’s Scripture Reading (May 28, 2015): Genesis 12

A recent study provided some good news for parents. According to the study done by McGill University, 98% of kids understand that lying is wrong. Not only that, they understand that lying is evidence of a lack of character, and that they want to be considered or grow up to be people of good character. Finally there is evidence that the parental message is getting through, not just with some kids, but with the vast majority of them. But the study came with some bad news – 98% of the kids surveyed said that they lie, and not just once in a while, they lie frequently. Another piece of unwanted information was that the frequency of lying corresponds with the increase in intelligence, in other words, the smarter your child is, the more likely it is that your child is lying to you. And the study left the researchers wondering openly about the disconnect between what the kids say that they want and know, and their behavior.

Lying also seems to increase with in frequency with age. In fact, the researchers concluded that lying was actually a developmental milestone. Dr. Victoria Talwar, a leading expert on children’s lying behavior makes this conclusion with regard to the study:

Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require.

So maybe it should not be surprising that lying is not something that simply goes away as we get older; it is not something we will eventually that we grow out of. Lying may actually be a defence of our character; when a threat arises to our persons physically, or to just our character and what people might think of us, we lie. The action creates a serious dissonance between what we think that we want to be and what we actually are. And we begin to make excuses to justify our behavior – we begin to explain that we really didn’t have any other choice. We had to lie.

Abram is intelligent and creative – and he apparently lies. If Abram was able to defend himself, he would probably make sure that we knew that what he was saying was not really a lie. Sarai was his sister, at least she was his half-sister. So all that Abram is asking Sarai to do was to highlight that part of their relationship. But his intention is to mislead and, therefore, it is a lie.

Abram’s lie should lead us to see how deeply ingrained the behavior is inside of us – and how hard it is to eradicate. And it might be that to eradicate lying means possessing the ability to see through the lies that we are telling ourselves. Because the person that we may lie to more than any other is the one that we see in the mirror.

 Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Genesis 13