It's not movies we are watching – people embroiled in lies, cover-ups and deceptions. It's people living in our midst. These individuals grabbed the headlines in the morning newspapers. They upstaged other topics for concerned citizens' conversations, causing the columnists and bloggers to zoom in with their two cents worth.

The cat and mouse game of lies, deceptions and cover-ups, in truth, is as old as Adam and Eve. From the day that Adam and Eve transgressed and hid and attempted to cover up, the human heart has quickly picked up the game.

We see the game played with consummate skills in prophet Isaiah's day in the eighth century BC (see Isaiah 59). As a way of getting away or getting ahead, people were doing what was right in their own eye. Such people, according to the prophet's description, were conceiving mischief, hatching poisons and weaving webs to entangle.

Isaiah also tells us these practitioners of falsehood and treachery used their consummate skills in the courts of law with devastating results: the truth tampered with and the innocence denied of justice.

Though these willful practitioners had mastered the art of concealing and twisting truth, their sin was not hidden from God. How could the God of justice overlook it when the powerful and the cunning twisted truth to their own purposes? How could the holy God turn a blind eye to a system of justice that existed not to hold all up to the same fair standard? To condone it was to shore up the law of the jungle - the survival of the most cunning.

Isaiah declared that practice of falsehood and treachery was the reason the people were separated from God. Their willful sins had hidden God's face from them. Not only were they morally bankrupt, they were spiritually desolate as well.

For those desiring to get close to God, Psalm 24:3 has this to say:"Who may ascend the hill of the LORD? Who may stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false."

ac