Note: Shultz, Please see the ~~~~~ for an answer to the question you asked in your comment. Hungry Guy, I'm still working on it, but don't give up on me:) . I bet you're thinking of a scenario where you anticipate being questioned about something important by an authority figure. You can either tell the truth and get an unpleasant reaction, or lie about the whole thing and stay in the questioner's good graces. Until the truth comes out, of course, and it usually does. So you'd like to know if asking for God's forgiveness before you lie will be beneficial, somehow. Something along those lines, right? I'm not sure God listens to, much less answers, prayers that ask Him to condone sin in any form, including the major sin of lying. It's almost like saying, "God, I know it's wrong and everything and I'm REALLY sorry, but can you please cut me a little slack this time and let it go? I know what's going on here as well as anyone and believe me, coming clean is not in my best interest. I am really sorry that You won't like it, though, so will You please forgive me?" You can safely assume those words didn't come out of nowhere, or just roll off the top of my head as I typed. In other words, I've pretty much found out for myself that premeditated sin that's been acknowledged and regretted before commission is still sin. Timing on asking for forgiveness is secondary. I always felt it was a little arrogant to tell God I knew it was wrong, but I was going to do it anyway - like my limited, flawed, pea brain of human intelligence was more reliable and trustworthy than the perfect judgment of the omniscient Creator of the Universe, who always had my best interests at heart. It did always provide an amusing mental picture of a bratty little kid ( me) arguing about quarks and leptons with every particle physicist from Caltech to MIT. (A pale representation of God, but you get the idea). You never score points when you go outside the will of God, whether it's lying or anything else. Asking for forgiveness ahead of time doesn't help anything, really. Speaking for myself, I eventually felt like such a weasel about asking, that I'd either scrap doing the thing to begin with, or idiotically forge ahead and take my chances. The one real good that might come from asking probably occurs when you discuss the issue with other people and gain spiritual insight. In asking for God's forgiveness, aren't we supposed to approach Him with reverence, and humility, in the spirit of genuine repentance? If you know God abhors lying, and you, yourself, realize that lying has caused immeasurable misery for the human race, but you plan on lying anyway, then how remorseful can you be, really? At least when the lie pops out of your mouth before you even realize you had the thought, you could maybe plead some kind of case, but what we're talking about is not the unexpected squeeze. I wonder how God sees it. Repentance means not only that you're genuinely sorry about committing the sin, but also, with God's help, that you're not going to do it again. If you proceed when you know it's wrong in the first place, aren't you negating "It won't happen again."? God already knows when a lie is deliberate and pre-planned vs. the "caught off guard, went with whatever popped into my head", so the timing of your request isn't truly relevant, is it? That's more of a diversion from the core issues of trust and faith in God than anything else. For example, if you make the same mistake repeatedly and you're preoccupied with details about the days and times it happens, you can't concentrate on getting to the root of the problem and then stop it from taking place again, right? You can imagine who or what, would like nothing more than to make sure you get so sidetracked on details that you lose sight of the bigger picture. It's important to note that if you're a believer, God has already forgiven your past, present, and future sins anyway, not that you're off the hook for any deliberate, willful, unacknowledged bad behavior while you're in this world. In any case, He's not going to stop loving you. Most people feel uncomfortable with lying. Nobody likes being on the receiving end, yet we all know sometimes lying is easier or less painful than being upfront and honest and then accepting responsibility and /or the fallout - like irritated or angry parents. On a deeper level, and worse, lying makes the avoidance of fear and pain SEEM as though it's more important than your relationship with God. That's the deception of the dark side, in my humble book. The First Commandment of the well-known Ten, instructs us to put God above everything else in our minds and hearts. ("You shall have no other gods before Me.") Trying to avoid pain and fear with false explanations or stories ( aka, telling the questioner what they want to hear) instead of turning the whole mess over to God, is a recipe for even greater.pain, no matter when you ask for God's forgiveness. Truly, I hope you find this helpful. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ To Shultz: In the comments area, you asked, "... What if someone DOES plan on revealing the truth, but months or years down the road?" I've thought about this question many, many times. Yet no matter how much I ponder the point, it all comes back to this: If you're a believer, God has already forgiven your sins, past present and future. His forgiveness is not dependent upon your actions. One of the basic tenets of Christianity is salvation based on faith, not faith and works. The truth is, even the best, most upstanding, most moral person who's ever lived, will never be able to do anything on his own to make himself acceptable and sinless in the eyes of God. God's grace - the undeserved kindness and favor of a loving God to sinful humanity - and Christ's death on the cross and resurrection from the grave three days afterwards makes all the difference, not your promise to do something. So, no, I don't think the plan to eventually reveal the truth in a few years changes anything. And on a personal note, you're kidding yourself if you think telling the truth is going to be easier in, say, ten years. If it's difficult now, oh brother. Wait until your resolve to come clean sits under a few years' worth of complacency. The easiest promise in the world to make is the promise that gets you what you want today, without having to pay for it now. Of course, you're dead serious about keeping your end of the bargain. Ten years is comfortably in the future. Over time, however, "going to tell" evolves into "Let sleeping dogs lie" when you re-think the plan and conclude that it's not necessary to bring up something that happened a decade ago. After all, you like dogs, even the metaphorical kind. Far be it from you to roust them into wakefulness. Over the course of ten years, anything can happen. You may not even be alive by then. Or, the love of your life could steer you onto the straight and narrow in the next six months. Maybe you'll spill the beans five years from tonight. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Lied_To suspect something's not quite right and tell you that whatever it is, they just don't want to know. For that matter, on the night you plan to confess, everyone on Earth might be glued to CNN, watching live coverage of the Man in the Moon as he hops on a moonbeam and glides down to terra firma. An understandable distraction necessitates the plan's postponement. The promise that was so easy to make, becomes the one that's impossible to keep. Face it - if you don't tell now, you probably never will. Whatever you do, though, as a believer, you can be assured of God's forgiveness.

Huge difference. If you ask forgiveness beforehand, you are basically asking permission to do wrong. That won't fly in the sight of God OR the courts.

intereting question i think no becuase u are fully aware you are diong wrong as apposed to diong something without realizing then feeling remorse and asking god for forgivness