“What is Truth?”
Ephesians 6:14a
John 18:37, 38
Point: Truth is found in meeting the person, Jesus, as Paul did. His world was shaken, but still he found truth and the purpose to his life when he met Jesus.
Not so long ago, the world was flat, and then Columbus discovered America, and it’s all been downhill from there. And then Galileo proved mathematically that the earth was not the center of the universe but the earth actually sailed around the sun along with the other observable planets. Then came Voltaire, the age of reason and the enlightenment. The scientific method took hold and Freud dissected the underlying world of the human subconscious while Charles Darwin proposed a theory of origins that allowed for the creation of the world and the human race without the need for God. Humankind’s quest for total independence from God was taking shape. Our inward rebelliousness towards our Father was showing itself in our striving to develop a truth that would exclude Him from our lives. We developed technology to increase our independence. We developed ways to control and manipulate our environment so we could produce food without concern for the weather and ultimately without being dependent upon God. All through the history of civilization, we have been working towards developing our own truth apart from divine intervention. We, as a people, want a truth that we control, a truth that we can manipulate, a truth that we can determine, not God.
The upshot of it all is that we have ended up with a relative truth. Not dependable honest truth but a truth that is not the same for everyone. We believe that what is true for someone else, is not necessarily true for me and vice versa. We believe that what is true today may not be true tomorrow and you have to be very careful what you put your faith in because more than likely, it too is unreliable. For the most part, absolute truth is an antiquated term for something that society no longer believes to exist if it ever existed at all. Absolute truth, that something that is true for everyone, is a concept that if you talk about it seriously, you are likely to be called closed minded and intolerant especially if you talk about specifics. Absolute truth has been redefined by modern society to mean certain aspects of morality, specifically sexual issues, rather than what it should mean in referring to the truth found only in God.
Now don’t get me wrong. God certainly is concerned with how we live our lives. If you want to call that morality, go ahead. How you live your life, however, is not going to lead you to God. I believe that truth, absolute truth, is much more than a list of dos and don’ts that get shuffled about, misinterpreted, and wrongly prioritized by what amounts to be religious fad and fashion. Remember when playing cards was sinful and evil? No longer. Remember when dancing was from the devil? No longer. Remember when everyone had Sunday clothes? Most high school boys these days don’t know how to tie a tie. By making these types of things issues, the church undermined its ability to speak on the things that really are issues. Jesus was very clear that you can follow all the rules, you can do everything by the book, and you can still miss the point. It makes perfect sense that if breaking the rules got you into trouble in the first place, then following the rules should get you out of trouble yet that is not the case. Completing a biblical checklist like it is some kind of divine scavenger hunt, does not lead you to the truth of God through Jesus Christ. You must at some point deal with the person of Jesus. It’s like playing soccer. You can know and follow all the rules of soccer and still not be a soccer player. What is maddeningly frustrating about most of our modern thinking, both in and out of the church, is that it really is a desperate search for what is ultimately true. What happens is that most of the truth we end up holding on to, is man made and therefore ultimately unreliable.
A couple of weeks ago, we started talking about the armor of God found in Ephesians chapter 6. What we found was that Paul was telling us to put on God’s armor so that we might stand firm in our faith, that we might withstand the attacks on our faith, and that we might be left standing when the dust clears. He names six pieces of a warrior’s armor and today we are going to talk about the first one. That which for politeness sake we call the belt of truth. He writes to us in verse 14, “Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth…” The Greek actually says that you are girding your loins with truth. You are putting on what in an actual battle would be a very important piece of equipment as it is protecting very important parts of the anatomy. Is it not? In contact sports, men wear a cup. Medieval knights called it a codpiece. Soldiers of this time period wore leather skirts much like what I have on, only theirs were reinforced with iron rings. What they were wearing was far more than a belt. Belts are not essential in today’s fashion, especially for boys. How some of their pants stay up, I do not know. But, in the armor of God, protecting yourself with the belt of truth is absolutely necessary.
Now, what is truth? That’s a great question. Listen to any two people tell a story about the same event and you will know exactly what I mean. When Luke Skywalker finds out that Darth Vader is his father in the epic Star Wars movies, he is angry and bitter towards his mentor Obi Wan Kenobi for telling him that his father was dead. Obi Wan’s reply is, “The man who was your father no longer exists. He is more machine now, so in a sense what I told you was the truth. Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.” In today’s reading from the gospel of John, that is exactly what Pilate is saying when he asks Jesus, “What is truth?” Having pretty much conquered the civilized world and seen as many gods and religions as there were people, the Romans believed that truth was very much in the eye of the beholder and their society degraded to reflect that. Anything, absolutely anything became alright and corruption at all levels of society was accepted as the norm. Sound familiar?
Writing in Ephesians about what is necessary to stand firm in our faith, Paul tells us that we must put on truth like a piece of armor to protect us against that which would make us stumble and fall. Remember, you wear armor to keep yourself from getting killed. You wear armor to defend yourself in combat. The truth was so important to the apostle Paul that he lists it as the first bit of armor that we must put on.
What is the truth to Paul? It is very important to look at Paul’s journey to finding Christ in order to understand the answer. Paul was a devout Jew. He followed the rules. He enforced the rules. He was what we would call today, a fanatic. Very recently, a young woman in Afghanistan was shot and killed in a drive by shooting for allegedly sharing her Christianity with Muslims. Paul would have been the shooter. In Acts chapter 7, we read that Paul participated in the killing of Stephen and in Acts chapter 9 when Paul meets Jesus, he is on his way to the city of Damascus to arrest and persecute those who believe and follow this Christ. That was Paul’s truth. Then something happened. He actually met Jesus. It would actually be better to say that Jesus introduced Himself for Paul did not seem to have any intentions of becoming a Christian. Quite the opposite, he seemed intent on wiping out this Christian threat to Judaism, this aberration. This heresy of what Paul thought and held to be true.
This heresy revealed himself to Paul in a very spectacular way. In a way that only God can get away with without being overly dramatic, Paul was enveloped in what scripture describes as divine light. And in that light Paul met the truth. The truth was not a set of doctrines, the truth was not a written code of some sort, the truth was not relative or true from a certain point of view. The truth was a man. The truth was Jesus. Paul found what is the ultimate truth, the answer to all the ultimate questions, the absolute truth, in the person of Jesus Christ.
You can know the Bible inside and out and not know this person. You can follow all the Christian creeds and not know this person. You can be the most law abiding, morally perfect person that ever lived and not know this person.
Alister McGrath writes that pews of our churches are occupied by many Christian agnostics. An agnostic is someone who neither believes nor disbelieves but states they are willing to accept something if it can be proven to be true. According to McGrath, a Christian agnostic is someone who believes that faith is believing in something for which there is no rational or logical evidence and sometimes in the face of the evidence. Many Christians believe their faith fits into this category, that there is no rational or logical reason to believe but still they believe. By definition, that is not truth. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life . . .” Jesus said, “I was born to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” Paul reminds his readers continually to hold to the truth and finally to wear it as a piece of spiritual armor. The truth is the man Jesus Christ.
We will shortly approach a moment of truth. Like Paul when Jesus introduced himself to him, we meet Christ here at this table. We meet Jesus here in the representation of his sacrifice for us. We meet Jesus here, in truth.
