Last year I found out that people were saying I believed Christ was a sinner. I found it out the hardest way there is. A dear pastor friend of mine walked up to me at a public meeting and said it to my face. He did not ask me. He told me. "You believe Christ is a sinner." And I stood there and denied it to his face.
He did not mean that I had worded something poorly. He did not mean that I had pressed an old doctrine harder than he was comfortable with. He meant that I believed Christ was a sinner. That I had looked at the spotless Lamb of God, the One who knew no sin, and called Him corrupt. I have spent my whole believing life resting in nothing on this earth but the holiness of that Lamb. And a man I counted a friend had just looked me in the eye and told me I was against it.
I want to tell you what an accusation like that does, and why it works, because I have come to believe it works for the very reasons it was reached for. And I am not going to write this as a man who has only ever stood on the receiving end of such things. In my younger years I swung truth like a club. I was fast, faster than I will ever be proud of, to believe a damning thing about a man whose doctrine I disliked, and faster still to pass it along. So I am not describing a stranger's sin here. I am describing one I have held in my own hand.
Here is the thing about an accusation that horrifying. It is the easiest weapon there is.
The first thing a monstrous charge does is travel. A careful doctrinal disagreement does not travel, because it has to be explained, and explaining is slow, and most people will not sit still long enough to be walked through it. But "he thinks Christ was a sinner" needs no explanation at all. It lands in the stomach before it ever reaches the mind. The man who hears it has taken a side before a single fact has been checked. My own friend proved it. He had the man he was accusing standing right in front of him, and he did not ask him a single question. He delivered the verdict instead. Horror does not need a ticket. It rides for free.
The second thing it does is the cruel thing, and it is the reason for the title over this article. The horror of the charge makes people believe the accuser. They reason without knowing they are reasoning, and the reasoning runs like this: nobody would invent something that grotesque about a brother. Surely no one would simply make that up. And so the very monstrousness of the lie becomes the evidence for it. The bigger the accusation, the more it seems to vouch for itself. Nobody would make that up.
But they did.
That is the whole point of this article, and I want it sitting in plain sight. The thing everyone assumed was too horrible to be fabricated was fabricated. The reflex that says "no one would say a thing like that unless it were true" is simply wrong. And a man who understands that reflex, whether by cold design or by sheer instinct, has been handed a master key.
There is a third turn, and it closes the trap. The same horror that makes people believe the accuser makes them disbelieve the accused. When I say plainly that I have never believed Christ was a sinner, that I never have and never will, that denial sounds like exactly what a guilty heretic would say to slip the noose. The monstrousness that recruited them against me had already poisoned my defense before I opened my mouth. The charge was built, in effect, so that it could not be answered. It locks the door coming in, and it locks the door going out.
Then add the last thing, which is the worst thing. A weapon like this does not even need wicked people to carry it. It does not run on malice. It runs on reverence. The reason "Christ was a sinner" is so horrifying is that the holiness of Christ is precious, and it ought to be. So the men who spread the charge did not have to recruit anyone's hatred. They only had to trip a congregation's love for the holiness of the Lamb and aim it at a man. Some of the people who picked the accusation up and carried it were not being cruel. They were being reverent. Their reverence was the thing that got used. That is how a slander can travel through a hundred mouths and not one of those mouths ever feels like the mouth of a slanderer.
I have made my peace with something hard. You cannot out-argue a reflex. I could write the careful explanation a hundred times, and I have written it more than once, and it will still never run as fast as the horror ran. The explanation has to be read. The horror only has to be heard.
But I am not without comfort, and I will tell you exactly where it is.
When they came to destroy the Lord Jesus, they did not come with the truth. Matthew records it without flinching: "the chief priests, and elders, and all the council, sought false witness against Jesus, to put him to death." They sought it. They went looking for a lie, because the truth would not serve their purpose. And even then the false witnesses they found could not keep their stories straight. The holiest man who ever walked the earth, the only one against whom no honest charge could ever be laid, stood and was lied about all the way to His death.
So when a false thing is said about one of His people, He is not far off, and He is not unfamiliar with it. He knows the weapon. He felt it in His own trial. And He keeps a record that no whisper can edit. The accusers have their version, and it travels fast, and it may well outlive me. But it is not the version written down where it counts. "The Lord knoweth them that are his." He is not deceived by the size of a lie. He never was.
So if you are a believer and a monstrous thing has been said about you, hear this much and let it be enough. The reflex that made people believe it is not the voice of God. It is only a reflex. And the One whose verdict is the single verdict that finally stands was Himself the most lied-about man who ever lived. He will not be fooled. Wait on Him. Tell the truth plainly, as plainly as you can manage, and then leave the record in the hands of the only One who has ever kept it accurately.
Nobody would make that up. They did. And the God who was Himself falsely witnessed against knows the difference, and He always will.
Grace and Peace,
Brandan
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