Truth has fallen on hard times. In a Barna research poll that was just completed this month, several troubling facts came to light about where the American public is intellectually and spiritually. The poll examined several different beliefs and found that, “most adults reject the notions of original sin, the existence of Satan, and salvation by God’s grace alone.” It also discovered that “Americans tend to think that the core documents of the world’s major faiths, such as the Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon, are ‘different expressions of the same spiritual truth’ and that praying to the dead can reap personal benefits.” It goes on to say, “Americans are nearly as likely to say that Jesus Christ sinned as to believe that he lived a sinless life.” The research team concluded that, “the United States is the world’s greatest melting pot of cultures, and that diversity is clearly evident in the [religious] beliefs of its people.” In other words, many people order their lives after what they hear from Oprah or Dr. Phil as much as the Bible — if not more. They see no difference between them.
I was in a meeting recently where we were basically told, “No one is really wrong, and everyone is right, and the important thing is that we have unity and all get along.” What was being described, if it had actually been lived out, would not have been unity, but chaos. If you live in a world where no one is really wrong and everyone is right, then the sniper out on the east coast is as right as the police who are pursuing him. If everyone is right, and no one is wrong, then the morals of the serial rapist on the campus of Ohio State University are on equal par with the ethics of Mother Teresa, who selflessly and sacrificially ministered to the lepers of Calcutta.
It may surprise some people to realize that many of our secular universities no longer pretend to believe in truth, let alone values and morals. In a recent magazine from one of our universities in Ohio, a professor is quoted as saying, “We want to prepare students on how to think, not tell them what to think.” On the surface that may sound good, but the philosophy behind it is: “Truth is something you discover in your own mind. There are no facts, no absolute truths, no rights or wrongs, it is up to you to come up with your own truth.” You have to wonder about an academic institution that believes that truth is relative and that people develop their own truth. How could you ever give a test or assign grades in that kind of setting? How would you like to go to a doctor who did not accept the truths that were being taught in medical school, and decided to come up with his own truths?
As Christians we believe that there are important truths that govern life, and that these truths are absolutes. These truths do not come from us, they are beyond us. That is, they are truths that cannot be influenced or changed by human behavior. They are true whether anyone believes in them or not. They are true whether anyone agrees with them or not. They are true whether anyone likes them or not. They are absolute truths because they come from an absolute God, and they are the foundation of life itself. God created truth, and the world has been built upon it. You don’t break these truths, they break you if you fail to follow them. You can disbelieve that there is such a thing as gravity if you want. You can dislike the law of gravity. You can even defy the law of gravity. But if you do, you will not break the law of gravity; it will break you. It is an absolute law that God has built into the world. And when we fly an airplane, we are merely applying other universal laws that we have discovered.
It is always fun to ask those who believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, if they are absolutely sure that there is no absolute truth, and how they know it. This kind of thinking comes from a philosophy called Nihilism. Nihilism is defined in the dictionary as: “The philosophy of extreme skepticism, maintaining that nothing has a real existence.” There are no values, no morals, no meaning or purpose to life, and no truth. Into this darkness the light of the gospel comes with its penetrating good news. There is truth. Life has values which bring meaning and purpose to life. There is hope.
When people ask, “What is truth?”, we have an answer. We say, first of all: Truth is a person. Jesus Christ was the revealed truth of God which came to us in the form of a person. God did not send the world abstract ideas, he sent us a person. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). He did not say that he came to tell us the truth, or show us the way, he said he was the truth. He is the embodiment of truth, and we began to understand that as he lived and taught among us during his time on earth.
You will remember the time a Samaritan woman tried to trip Jesus up on some religious questions. But he said to her: “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:22-24). Notice that Jesus did not affirm her mistaken beliefs out of respect for her religion. No, the truth was too important. Truth was not found in the Samaritan religion — it came from the God of the Jews. Jesus did not believe, like so many today, that all religions are the same. He knew there was one truth, and he was it.
Truth is very important to our worship. If we have a distorted view of God our worship will be warped. Jesus said that our worship must be done according to the truth. God seeks those who worship him in spirit and truth. Let me give an illustration of what this means. Let’s say that a person has grown up with a demanding and unapproving father. His rules were harsh and his punishments severe. He was abusive, and at the same time did not live up to his own responsibilities as a parent. How would this color a child’s view of God, even after they reached adulthood? Would they see God as loving and kind, or would they still have images of him being like their father? Could they worship a God they believed was capricious and punitive? Could they love a God they believed was out to get them, and whose rules came merely from a desire to control others? No, you can’t worship a god like that. The truth must break through for that person to be able to trust, love and worship the true God. They need to understand at the deepest level the truth that he is a God of love and grace. When Jesus came in person he showed us what truth was. He was the living truth of what God was like. Truth was a person.
When Jesus confronted Pontius Pilate, he said, “Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” Pilate replied, “What is truth?” But it was not a question with intellectual or spiritual desire behind it. It was a rhetorical question. He did not expect nor want an answer. When truth was standing right in front of him, he did not recognize him. When you do not want to see the truth, it is impossible to recognize it, even when it is staring you in the face.
The second thing we need to understand about truth is: Truth is real. Truth is tangible. It is not subjective, or something that is decided by majority opinion. Water is wet, rocks are hard, and grass is green. We could take a vote and agree that rocks are wet, water is dry and grass is red, but that would not change the nature of rocks, water and grass. Truth is not only real, it is knowable. The Bible says that, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32). So we can know the truth, and when we know it, it brings freedom into our lives.
It is important to know that truth is real, because without it we cannot live in the real world. If truth is not real then the world is not real, and we find ourselves living in a world of illusion where we delude ourselves and each other. This was never more clear to me than when I went to England and went through the Tate art exhibit in London. Walking to the exhibit we passed a man sitting on the sidewalk asking people to put money in his hat. He held a sign which said, “Abducted by Aliens.” It was as good an excuse as any I suppose, and it was a hint of the disconnectedness we were about to see when we got into the art exhibit. I was unprepared for an art gallery with some things so grotesque I would not dare to describe them to you this morning. The better pieces of art were boxes full of trash, or the one with a board with books glued to it by their spine. We walked by a video playing incoherent babblings as distorted images appeared on the screen. Another artist had placed rocks on the floor in a random pattern. One room had piles of elephant dung and some geometric figures fastened to each other. For me it was a picture of just how lost the human race is when it abandons God’s truth. When there is no real truth, nothing is real, whether we are talking about art or life.
We have a real God who sent a real Savior, into a real world, to save real sinners, from real sin, that they might experience real forgiveness, in order to live real life, and inherit a real heaven. No other religion makes exactly these same claims. That is why one religion is right and the others are wrong. They cannot all be right, because they contradict each other. If there is a real God, he wants us to know the real truth. If he wants us to know the real truth, he must have provided a way for us to know the truth. He would give us a book. He would come in person. Why would God confuse us with contradictory truths? That is what Satan attempts to do. The Bible says that he comes to deceive. Jesus said, “For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect — if that were possible” (Matthew 24:24).
Steve Scott, in his book Like a House on Fire has written, “The stable foundations have been dismantled in this culture of free-floating signs and images, of circulating signifiers with no final resting place. The Good News is still good news; we have something to say that is beyond our culture and has a solid foundation. And for many, the selected sounds and images that fill them may be all they know — for them, the gospel may not only be good news, but new news.”
The third thing we need to understand is: Truth is eternal. Truth is not something that the human race made up. It did not begin with us. Truth is eternal. It existed before the world began. It is bigger than us and is beyond us. Truth is transcendent and unchangeable. Why is it then that people have so much trouble understanding the truth? The Bible explains it with these words: “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. . . . For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:3-4,6). The god of this world, the devil, has blinded the minds of people who do not want to know the truth, in order to keep them from seeing and understanding the truth. Jesus said this about the devil: “. . .there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). He is the father of darkness. But for those who seek the truth, God shines his light in the darkness and gives them the ability to see and understand. But you have to want to know. You have to believe there is truth. You have to ask before you are answered, seek before you find, and knock before the door is opened.
The apostle Paul admonishes us: “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more” (Ephesians 4:17-19). What Paul is saying is, truth is impossible to know if you are living in willful ignorance. And when you deliberately avoid the truth, your life is headed for ruin. God has built into this world universal principles which govern life. Your acceptance or rejection of the truth will determine the direction of your life. You need to deliberately be a seeker of truth and reality, because your acceptance or rejection of the truth will determine the kind of person you become. If you base your life on a lie, then your life will end in ruin. But if you base your life on the truth of Jesus Christ, and live according to his plan for you, then your life will be abundant and rewarding — even if you face difficulties. The truth will transform your life.
I have known many people who want help with some difficulty they are facing. They want you to fix them. They want you to be sympathetic, but they do not want you to present them with the truth. They want their lives to work, but they do not want to see the truth about themselves, and they do not want to change. When you refuse to see the truth, you are never wrong, and everything is always someone else’s fault. Understanding the truth is important because it has to do with whether or not you understand the basic principles of life.
I was standing in line at WalMart one day, and a woman and her young son were ahead of me. He was unhappy because he saw something he wanted and his mother was not allowing him to get it. His disappointment began to crescendo, and she suddenly blurted out: “What can I tell you, Billie? Life sucks, and then you die.” Imagine having that as a truth on which you were operating your life! The kind of truths we tell ourselves, and our children, are molding us and the future generation. The truth is that God created a good world, and life is good, when we live it for God and base our lives on his Word. When we live away from God, “life sucks and then you die.” When you live your life for God life makes sense because it is based on the truth, and because your life is based on the truth, it works. The Bible says of believers: “. . .everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away” (Isaiah 35:10).
J. P. Moreland, in his book Apologetic Reasoning and the Christian Mind, tells of an experience that illustrates the importance of truth: “One afternoon I was sharing the gospel in a student’s dorm room at the University of Vermont. The student began to espouse ethical relativism: ‘Whatever is true for you is true for you and whatever is true for me is true for me. . . . But no one should force his or her views on other people since everything is relative.’” Moreland says, “I knew that if I allowed him to get away with ethical relativism, there could be for him no such thing as real, objective sin measured against the objective moral command of God, and thus no need of a Savior. I thanked the student for his time and began to leave his room. On the way out, I picked up his small stereo and started out the door with it. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ he shouted. . . . ‘I am leaving your room with your stereo.’ ‘You can’t do that,’ he gushed.” But Moreland said, “I happen to think it is permissible to steal stereos if it will help a person’s religious devotions, and I myself could use a stereo to listen to Christian music in my morning devotions. Now I would never try to force you to accept my moral beliefs in this regard because, as you said, everything is relative and we shouldn’t force our ideas on others. But surely you aren’t going to force on me your belief that it is wrong to steal your stereo, are you?” Moreland looked at him and continued: “You know what I think? I think that you espouse relativism in areas of your life where it’s convenient , say in sexual morality, or in areas about which you do not care, but when it comes to someone stealing your stereo or criticizing your own moral hobbyhorses, I suspect that you become a moral absolutist pretty quickly, don’t you?” The story has a happy ending, for Moreland says, “Believe it or not, the student honestly saw the inconsistency of his behavior and, a few weeks later, I was able to lead him to Jesus Christ.”
Truth is a person. It is real. It is eternal. Truth is a real person who gives us eternal life.
Rodney J. Buchanan
October 13, 2002
Mulberry St. UMC
Mt. Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
Questions for October 13, 2002
1. Try to imagine what it would be like to live in a world where there was no truth.
2. Why is it wrong to say that all religions are the same?
3. Think of examples of how the truth, or lack of it, in a person’s life affects the way they live.
4. How does our acceptance or rejection of the truth affect the truth? How does it affect us?
5. Read John 14:6. What is this saying about Jesus?
6. Read Matthew 24:24. What is our spiritual enemy’s plan, and what does this say about the importance of truth?
7. Read 2 Corinthians 3:17 and John 8:32. How does this operate in practical ways in our lives?
8. Read John 4:22-24. Why is truth important in worship?
9. Read John 8:44 and contrast it to John 14:6. Why are many people so easily misled by the lie, instead of drawn to the truth?
10. Read 2 Corinthians 4:3-6. What happens when we are not interested in the truth?
