Does God ever lie or deceive?

In none of these passages does God himself speak a falsehood. Each describes his judgment on people who had already rejected the truth, giving them over to the deception they preferred.

Ahab had four hundred prophets who told him what he wanted to hear, and he hated Micaiah because “he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil” (1 Kings 22:8). Micaiah’s vision of the heavenly court shows God giving Ahab up to those flatterers, and then Micaiah tells Ahab the whole thing to his face: “the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee” (22:23). God’s own word to Ahab was true and plain; Ahab chose the false one, and died in the battle. Second Thessalonians 2 gives the reason for the ‘strong delusion’: “because they received not the love of the truth” (2:10). As in Romans 1:24, where “God also gave them up”, the judgment is to let people have what they insisted on.

Ezekiel 14 concerns people who set up idols in their hearts and then come to consult a prophet (14:4). The verb in verse 9 is pathah (H6601), ‘to entice, persuade’: a prophet who lets himself be drawn into giving such people a comforting answer is himself under God’s judgment, and he and the enquirer bear their guilt alike (14:10).

Jeremiah 4:10, “thou hast greatly deceived this people”, is the prophet’s cry of grief, and the comforting words it quotes, “Ye shall have peace”, were the false prophets’ message, as Jeremiah 14:13–14 shows, where God says of those prophets, “I sent them not, neither have I commanded them”. Keil and Delitzsch compare the verse with Micaiah’s vision, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown with Ezekiel 14:9 and 2 Thessalonians 2:11. In Jeremiah 20:7, “thou hast deceived me”, the verb is again pathah, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note the rendering ‘persuaded me’, a good sense the word has elsewhere (Proverbs 25:15; Hosea 2:14): God had persuaded the reluctant prophet to take up a calling that was harder than he had expected.

The Bible speaks of God as doing what he permits or uses in judgment, but it never says that God tells a lie.

Permission or active judgment

The church fathers and many later writers read these verses as God permitting deception. Keil and Delitzsch argue for more than permission: God actively sends deception as a judgment on unbelief, yet in a way that leaves human freedom intact, since a person who is ‘persuaded’ could have refused. Both views agree that God himself never speaks falsely.