Great Question II

           Here is another question from one of my Good News Club kids that I got:

If you are acting in a play or a TV show and your character has to lie is that sinning?

     Here is how I answered her (I started out giving the answers in written form):

     If you are acting in a play or a TV show it is not necessarily wrong to lie. You are being a character in a show and everyone knows that in real life you are not that person. The only time it would be wrong for someone to lie in this instance is if a Christian was playing the part and in the story lying was portrayed as being something good and something that people should be ok with doing. If lying is shown in the story as having consequences then it would be fine for anyone to play the part.
     People do movies, plays, and even TV shows which do stories from the Bible. When people tell the story of Jesus is it wrong for them to play a Pharisee? In order to do justice to the story you have to show people who the Pharisees were and how they are described in the Bible. They hated Jesus so much that they wanted him dead. If God doesn't shield us from these things in His word then there is no reason to not include the Pharisees when telling the story of Jesus.
     There are other stories in the Bible like the story of Jacob and Esau (Gen. 25:28-34, 27:1-43), where Jacob lies and it wouldn't be right to do a play or a movie without having him lie.  The story of Joseph (Gen. 37) where his brothers lie to their father in order to cover up what they did. If you left out lying in these stories you wouldn't be true to the story and it would take away some of the impact that these stories have. There are lots more but these are just a couple of stories that I could come up with as examples.