Australian Marcus Einfeld was a lawyer, former federal judge, prominent Jewish community leader, and was once decorated as a national living treasure for his work. But in 2006, he was given a $77 ticket for speeding. Rather than pay the fine, he began a series of 4 different detailed schemes to “prove” he was not driving the car that day. His original defense (that he had loaned the car to a friend who had since conveniently passed away) was accepted by the judge, but dogged reporting by Sydney's Daily Telegraph revealed that lie, plus subsequent elaborate lies to cover each successive explanation. Curious why he would be so quick to lie, reporters began deviling into his past and found even greater lies. (His college degree was bogus and he had been cheating the government by double billing charges.) By 2009, he was sentenced to prison and his life sat in ruin, all because of one speeding ticket. In reality, it was the all the lies that he assumed he had “gotten away” with that destroyed him. We never “get away” with sin. Someone will always pay the price. As The LORD warned Israel in Numbers 32:23, “be sure, your sin will find you out.” Don’t make the mistake this man did of adding sin onto sin, because it will always fall down and crush you in the process.
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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