"You shall not give a false report; do not join your hand with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not follow the masses in doing evil, nor shall you testify in a dispute so as to turn aside after a multitude in order to pervert justice; nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his dispute.” (vv.1-3)
Simply put, we are to tell the truth, in court and in all of life. We are to follow God; not follow, join, conspire or buy into "the crowd" in doing evil. We are not to repeat, spread or even listen with interest (as people often do) to a false report, but instead we should discourage and reprove the reporter of it. (Proverbs 25:23) Finally, the Lord tells us that if you are ‘partial to a poor man’ in a dispute and thus bear false witness, that this is wrong as well.
While we sometimes cannot avoid hearing a false report, we must not receive it, nor hear it with pleasure, or easily give credit to it, for there are consequences for joining yourself to evil. So often false or misleading information is picked up and spread by others on social media today without a second thought. It is then spread throughout the network, passed off as truth, at the expense of truth to further an agenda that is anything but truth. Thus, giving a false report.
Though God's laws for Israel were tailor-made for her 3,500 years ago, many continue to apply to you and I today. So much evil could be avoided in this world if man would simply be truthful.
The Truth: “Now the men whom Moses sent to spy out the land, who returned and made all the congregation complain against him by bringing a bad report of the land, those very men who brought the evil report about the land, died by the plague before the Lord. But Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh remained alive, of the men who went to spy out the land.” (Numbers 14:36-38)
