“What Is Truth?”
“What Is Truth?”
John 18:38
The Personality of Truth is the great revelation of Christianity—“I am . . . the Truth.” Our Lord did not say He was “all truth” so that we could go to His statements as to a text-book and verify things; there are domains, such as science and art and history, which are distinctly man’s domains and the boundaries of our knowledge must continually alter and be enlarged; God never encourages laziness. The question to be asked is not, “Does the Bible agree with the findings of modern science?” but, “Do the findings of modern science help us to a better understanding of the things revealed in the Bible?”
Again, the Bible has much to say about truth of speech, e.g., “speak ye truth each one with his neighbour” (Ephesians 4:25 rv): but this aspect, important as it is, is not what our Lord means when He says, “I am . . . the Truth.” However, it is well, bearing in mind the deceitfulness and subtlety of the human heart, for us to remember that
The truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
And none of us ever gets beyond the need of the warning that “lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.” But we would not have needed the Bible, or the illumination of the Holy Spirit, or our Lord Himself to come and tell us about these things, our own human wisdom and ingenuity would have taught us.
1. Truth Incarnate
“And the Word became flesh” (rv)—that means not only the expression of the Mind of God, but the expression of the Mind of God Incarnate. God gave His final revelation in Jesus Christ; then He set processes at work for the re-organisation of the whole of humanity. Jesus Christ is the Truth, an Incarnate Ideal; to be “in Christ” means that through regeneration and sanctification that Ideal can become a reality, so that in my mortal flesh there is manifested that which is easily discerned to be “the life also of Jesus.” We are to be incorporated into the truth. The ideal is not a vague end into which we evolve more or less blindly, we “grow up in all things into Him.” There is a danger of seeing the truth and the true clearly with our minds, while the life and character lag woefully behind. In Christian work who has not met with clearness in verbal doctrine, almost dictatorial clearness, and wrong, almost quite wrong, attitudes in life and conduct? “He that doeth truth cometh to the light” (John 3:21). “Everyone that is of the truth heareth My voice” (John 18:37). “. . . that we know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 5:20). These passages make it clear that being “of the truth” refers to a condition of character. Much is written about our Lord speaking so simply that anyone could understand, and we forget that while it remains true that the common people heard Him gladly, no one, not even His own disciples, understood Him until after the Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, the reason being that a pure heart is the essential requirement for being “of the truth.” “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”
2. Truth Interpreted
. . . no prophecy of scripture is of private interpretation. (2 Peter 1:20 rv)
We are never left with a revelation without an interpretation of it. A revelation fact needs a corresponding revelation to interpret it. Just as Jesus Christ is the final revelation of God, so the Bible is the final revelation interpreting Him. Our Lord Jesus Christ (The Word of God) and the Bible (the accompanying revelation) stand or fall together, they can never be separated without fatal results. The words of the Bible apart from being interpreted by the Word of God, are worse than lifeless, they kill (2 Corinthians 3:6). But when a soul is born from above (rv mg) and lifted to the atmosphere of the domain where our Lord lives, the Bible becomes its native air, its words become the storehouse of omnipotence, its commands and prophecies become alive, its limitless horizons brace the heart and mind to a new consciousness, its comforts in Psalms† and prayers and exhortations delight the whole man. And better than all, the Lord Jesus Christ becomes the altogether Lovely One, it is in His light that we see light , it is in Him that we become new creatures. He who is the Word of God unfolds to us the revelation of God until we say in sacred rapture, “I hold in my hands the Thought of God.”
What is needed is a final court of appeal, and this we have in the Bible. It is not a question of the infallibility of the Bible, that is a side issue; but of the finality of the Bible. The Bible is a whole library of literature giving us the final interpretation of the Truth, and to take the Bible apart from that one supreme purpose is to have a book and nothing more; and further, to take our Lord Jesus Christ away from the revelation of Him given in the Bible is to be left with one who is open to all the irreverent slanders of unbelief.
“The Truth” is our Lord Himself; “the whole truth” is the inspired Scripture interpreting the Truth to us; and “nothing but the truth” is the Holy Spirit, “the Spirit of truth,”efficaciously regenerating and sanctifying us, and guiding us into “all the truth” (rv).