Truth Exists

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, and welcome. It’s good to see you all here.

There are a couple of announcements that I’d like to highlight from your bulletins.

The men’s group will have a cookout this afternoon at 3:00, all men are invited to attend that.

The men will also be having a prayer breakfast next Sunday morning. That will be at 8:00.

Our Love INC dinner will be this Tuesday, October 24th. You can drop your donations for that meal here at the church by 4:00 Tuesday afternoon. If you can help out or need more information, please give Amy Campbell a call.

Our next outreach opportunity for Love INC will be on Saturday November 11. That’s from ten until noon. If you’re interested in helping out then, please let Della or Sandy Harper know.

And our Trunk or Treat will be happening this coming Saturday. Please be here no later than 5:30 to set up. We still need some volunteers to hand out candy. If you’re able to do that, please sign up on the sheet out here in the hallway.

And with that, let’s have our prelude this morning.

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Father we come to you this morning after another long week filled with small aggravations and tired days. But how refreshing it is to once again gather in Your house. We praise You this day for Your continued work, for Your ever-present love, and for the gift of Your son. And we praise You and thank You this day, Father, for the truth that You are and the truth you give each of us. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Offertory Prayer

Father, as we lay before you these offerings we give you all that we are and everything that you have entrusted to us. Bless these gifts for the sake of your kingdom and glory. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Sermon

We’re going to talk about truth today, and that means we have to get a little deep, so hang in there and try to stay with me because some of this can get confusing. That’s what happens when you start trying to mess with the truth, by the way. What’s supposed to be simple ends up being complicated, and before long it’s hard to know what’s up and what’s down. I’ll give you an example of that.

Last year, President Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the United States Supreme Court. To be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice is quite a process, and one of the most important parts of that process is that every nominee has to be called in front of the US Senate to talk about how he or she interprets the Constitution and the laws of our nation.

During Judge Brown’s confirmation hearing, a senator asked what most of us would consider a very simple and straightforward question — “What is the definition of a woman?” Judge Jackson couldn’t answer that. Or maybe she wouldn’t answer that. The only answer she gave was, “I’m not a biologist.”

Now that seems downright impossible for us, doesn’t it? Even a child knows what a woman is. But in these times, what ten thousand years of human history knew as truth has to take a backseat to what modern society says is truth. Judge Jackson couldn’t say that a woman is a human being with two X chromosomes, or a human being who is biologically capable of giving birth. Because nowadays, anyone can call themselves a woman if that’s who they feel like they are.

Truth, in other words, really doesn’t exist anymore. Or if truth does exist, then it’s up to you to define it for yourself. That idea has been preached in nearly every college classroom and nearly every form of entertainment since at least the 1960s. There’s no such thing as right and wrong for everybody. Right and wrong is determined by your culture, or your environment, or even by your own choices — you decide what’s right and wrong for you. Because, society says, the most special thing in the world is the individual — it’s you.

And you have every right to decide what’s best for you, and how you think you should live, and what you want and don’t want. Because that’s freedom, and to be free is the most important thing. But in order to be what the world calls free, we have to get rid of one thing — we have to get rid of the idea that there is right and wrong for everyone, regardless of who they are. In other words, we have to get rid of truth.

The way we’ve tried to get rid of truth is actually so clever that you have to wonder if it was people who did it or the devil.

Because there are two kinds of truth. There’s what’s called objective truth, and then there’s subjective truth. Objective truth is just facts. Subjective truth is your opinions. If I told you that Chevy made 235,247 Camaros in 1968, that’s an objective statement. It’s either true or false. But if I told you that the 1968 Chevy Camaro is the coolest car ever made, that’s a subjective truth. It’s not true or false, it’s just my opinion.

For thousands of years, objective truth was just called truth. “God exists” was for centuries an objective statement. It’s either true or false.

But in the past thirty years or so, people started treating that objective statement of “God exists” as subjective. Now God is just a matter of opinion. Instead of agreeing or disagreeing, they say something like, “Well, that’s just your truth. God might exist for you, but He doesn’t exist for me.”

And you are the most important thing, remember. Modern society is all about you — what you think and what you feel and what you believe. Everyone is supposed to have their own truth now. If a person embraces “his truth” or “her truth,” then everyone else is supposed to embrace that truth too — maybe not for themselves, but at least for that person. That’s exactly why Judge Brown wouldn’t answer that question about what a woman is, because a man who decides to be a woman is just embracing “his truth.”

But that’s a terrible way to have a society, isn’t it? Because there’s nothing to hold it together. There’s no agreement of right and wrong that we all have in common. If we can’t even agree on something as simple as what a woman is, how are we ever going to agree on the harder things like how to run a government and how to make sure people can afford the things they need? No wonder none of us can get along anymore.

The Christian worldview treats truth as something completely different. To us, truth is very real, very specific, and binding for every single person. We are all held to the same standard of truth. Last week we started this series about the Christian worldview by talking about the reasons we can know that God exists. Truth — especially the truth about what’s right and what’s wrong — is another good argument for that.

No matter what country or culture you study in the world has basically the same moral law of right and wrong. They all hold up certain virtues as good and certain vices that aren’t. Every culture sees bravery and loyalty as good, and cowardice and greed as bad. But if that moral law comes from people, how is it that we all tend to have the same one, no matter whether we live in the United States or a tribe in the Amazon?

The only true answer to that is that there is a moral law put into every human heart, and that moral law was given to us by a lawgiver who is above humanity, and that lawgiver is God.

God is truth. That’s how truth has been thought of all through history. The Greek word for truth is aletheia. It refers to “divine revelation” and is related to a word that literally means “what can’t be hidden.” It means that truth is always there, it’s always available for all of us to see. Truth can’t change because God can’t change, and that’s why we can rely on it.

But a lot of us don’t want to face truth, we want to get rid of truth. We’ll get to the reason why that is, but we all know that’s the case deep down, don’t we?

We want truth to be what the majority says, but it isn’t. Truth is what God says.

We want truth to be what makes people feel good. But that’s not the case either, because the truth sometimes makes us feel pretty awful.

We want truth to be whatever we believe, but a lie that you believe is still a lie.

Truth is a dangerous thing. So dangerous that about two thousand years ago, Truth was put on trial and found guilty.

In John 14:6, Jesus says to Thomas, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Jesus is the truth of God made flesh. And four chapters later in John 18, we find out just how much the sinful human heart is afraid of the truth. Turn with me to John chapter 18. Today we’ll be reading verses 33-38:

33 So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

34 Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?”

35 Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?”

36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”

37 Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”

38 Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, “I find no guilt in him.

And this is God’s word.

It seems so strange on the surface — Jesus, God in the flesh, the Creator of the universe, gets put on trial by the very ones He created. In fact, Jesus actually faced six trials in less than one full day. Three of those were religious, and three were legal.

After being arrested, Jesus is first led to Annas, who was a former high priest. If anyone would know the lawful way to conduct a trial, it’s Annas. But Annas is corrupt, and he breaks three Jewish laws in questioning Jesus — Annas holds the trial in his own house, he tries to get Jesus to incriminate himself, and he has Jesus beaten.

Then Jesus is sent to face the Sanhedrin and the current high priest, a man named Caiaphas, who just so happens to be Annas’s son-in-law. Caiaphas parades in one false witness after another to speak against Jesus, but nothing can be proven, and no one could say that Jesus ever committed even a single sin. Caiaphas is even worse than Annas. He’s so intent on finding Jesus guilty that he breaks seven Jewish laws during that second trial. But Caiaphas gets what he wants. Jesus has said he’s God made flesh. To the Jews, that’s blasphemy.

The third trial takes place the next morning, when the Sanhedrin pronounces that Jesus should die. But there’s a problem, because the Jewish council has no legal right to carry out the death penalty. That’s only for the Roman government to decide. So Caiaphas has to bring Jesus to the Roman governor, who’s a man named Pontius Pilate.

And if you notice back up in verse 28, the Jewish leaders won’t go into Pilate’s headquarters. Jews couldn’t go into a Gentile building with a roof without becoming ceremonially unclean. They think they’re keeping God’s truth, but they’ve just condemned the actual Truth of God to death. So Pilate has to go outside to meet them, and then Pilate goes back inside his headquarters to question Jesus.

As Jesus stands before Pilate, even more lies are brought against him. In Luke 23:2, his enemies say that Jesus misled the whole Jewish nation, and that he forbids Jews to pay taxes to Caesar. Both of those aren’t true. In fact, in Matthew 22:21, Jesus tells everyone to pay their taxes. He never once spoke of being a challenge to Caesar.

But now a very interesting conversation takes place in starting in verse 33 of John chapter 18. Pilate comes back into his headquarters from speaking to the crowds who want to crucify Jesus, and he flat-out asks Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Jesus answers in verse 34, “Do you want to know because you really want the truth, or are you just saying what those people outside told you?”

Pilate says he doesn’t care one way or the other, he just wants to know what Jesus has done to stir up all this trouble.

Jesus tells him in verse 37, “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world — to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”

Jesus came to deliver truth, God’s truth, because Jesus is God. Jesus is truth.

And what Pilate says in verse 38 sounds like something a lot of people today would ask — “What is truth?”

Now you can take that a couple of different ways. Maybe Pilate’s asking that question sincerely — he really does want to know what truth means. Or in this case, who Truth is.

Or maybe Pilate’s just a man of the world and doesn’t have time to care about something that can’t ever be answered. “Truth? What’s truth? I don’t care about the truth, I care about running this country for the emperor. I don’t have time for the truth.”

If that’s what Pilate is really saying in verse 38, then it’s pretty ironic. Because he’s the one who’s job it is to determine what the truth is between Jesus and these Jewish leaders, and the truth incarnate is standing right in front of him.

But Pilate decides that Jesus isn’t a threat at all — at least not to the Roman empire. To him, Jesus is just a teacher of some strange philosophy, and the empire is full of those. Let the philosophers and the eggheads talk about truth. Who cares?

And that’s the attitude a lot of people have now. There was a time when it was our job as Christians to show people the truth of our Savior, our faith, and the Bible. But that job is a lot harder now, because now before we can even start talking about the truth of our faith, we usually have to convince people that there’s such a thing as truth to begin with, especially when it comes to religion.

Because the world’s changed now, and to say you have the truth is judgmental. Everything’s been turned upside down. You can say, “This is true” — we still have that, at least — but you can’t say, “This is true, and so that is wrong.”

Being judgmental is the worst thing you can be — or at least the next-to-worst, we’ll get to what’s the worst in a minute. To be judgmental is offensive. That’s why our culture is ruled now by two philosophies, relativism and skepticism.

Relativism says that when it comes to truth, the best we can do is to say that what’s true for one person doesn’t have to be true for another person. There’s no such thing as absolute truth that goes for everybody everywhere at every time.

Skepticism says that you have to doubt all truth because you can’t know any of it for sure.

Everywhere you go in our culture, you run into one of these two philosophies. But the problem is that neither of them have a leg to stand on. They don’t hold up.

Relativism says all truth is relative. Truth is whatever you want it to be, because there’s no such thing as absolute truth. But that’s the same thing as saying, “It is an absolute truth that there is no such thing as absolute truth.” So if you’re a relativist, all you’re doing is contradicting yourself.

And it’s pretty much the same thing if you’re a skeptic. A skeptic says you have to doubt everything. But if you’re a real skeptic, that means you have to doubt your own doubt. An agnostic says you can’t know the truth. But that has to be wrong, because that’s the same as saying, “I know at least one truth: that you can’t know the truth.”

Do you see how many knots we tangle ourselves up in trying to deny that the truth exists? And I’m not even talking about the truth of Jesus yet. I’m just saying truth, simple truth, truth like “What is a woman?”.

But here’s where we as Christians with a Christian worldview run up against the most popular worldview there is in our country right now — pluralism. Pluralism says that everybody’s truth is true, no matter what it is. Of course that’s just plain stupid. How can one person say, “That woman is pregnant” and another person say “That woman is not pregnant” and they both be right? They can’t.

But we say it is, because we have to make sure we’re not the absolute worst thing we can be in today’s secular world — we cannot be intolerant. We cannot say to anyone, “You’re wrong,” because that’s not being tolerant of the way they see the world.

Now tolerance is a good thing. Our faith and our country are built on the idea that every person is valuable. Every person has a right to live their life the way they see fit because every person is free, and every person has worth for the simple reason that they’re a person.

But our society has taken the idea of tolerance to a level it was never supposed to have. When you hear people say their truth is just as real as your truth and you’re intolerant if you think otherwise, that just means they don’t understand what the word tolerance means. Society says we have to be tolerant, we have to agree, but you can only be tolerant of someone if you disagree with with them.

What people really mean when they go on and on about tolerance is that we have to accept people’s lifestyles and choices. And as Christians, sometimes we just can’t do that. Sometimes we’re faced with the choice of either accepting what we know is wrong or going against the truth of what our faith teaches, and we can never go against that truth.

Our society has confused the idea of everyone having equal value with every truth having equal value, and that’s simply wrong. All people are equal in the eyes of God, but not all truths that people believe are equal.

But here is Jesus in front of Pilate himself, the symbol of the greatest empire the world had ever known, and he says in verse 37 that “I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”

He just cuts right through all these ideas about my truth or your truth or some truth or no truth at all.

“There is truth,” Jesus says, “absolute, complete, unbendable truth. And that truth is me.”

But people don’t like that. They say thinking that there’s only one true religion and only one true God and only one true way to reach Him is narrow-minded. But truth is narrow, isn’t it?

“Enter by the narrow gate,” Jesus says in Matthew 7:13-14. “For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

Truth has to be narrow. Two plus two equals four. Two plus two can’t equal any other number. So does that mean that believing 2+2=4 is narrow-minded?

But people say, “It’s arrogant to say you have the truth and other people don’t, or that you’re right and they’re wrong.” But is it arrogant for a math teacher to say there’s only one answer to a math problem? It’s not arrogant, it’s just the truth.

“But saying there’s only one way to God and one way to eternal life just excludes people. God should want to include everyone.”

Well, of course God wants to include everyone. That’s why He made a way for everyone to come to Him, no matter who they are or where they live. All it takes is faith in Christ. But again, let’s just put that aside for a minute and go back to our little math problem. If 2+2 can only equal 4, then that excludes any other number as the right answer. That’s what truth is.

“But it’s offensive to say that you alone know the truth. All that matters to God is that people are sincere.”

We hear that one a lot now, don’t we? It doesn’t matter what God you have faith in. All that matters is you believe sincerely.”

But it doesn’t matter how sincerely you believe a wrong key will fit a lock, that key still won’t open the door. It doesn’t matter how sincerely you believe a bottle of poison is just water, you’re still going to die if you drink it.

Truth is truth. Period. Thinking otherwise only leads to trouble. And that’s where we are now as a society.

A poll came out just this week from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. You all take a deep breath, because this is what happens when a nation sets aside the truth of God for the truth of man.

The poll surveyed 2,008 registered voters — these are actual voters. Here are the questions and responses.

Should a different political system other than democracy should be tried in this country: 24% of Biden supporters said yes, along with 31% of Trump supporters.

Is violence acceptable to stop political opponents from attaining their goals: 41% of Biden supporters and 38% of Trump supporters said yes.

Should elections should be suspended in times of crisis: 30% of Trump supporters and 25% of Biden supporters said yes.

Forty-one percent of Trump supporters and 30% of Biden supporters said they favor either conservative or liberal states seceding from the union.

And when asked whether the government should restrict the expression of views considered discriminatory or offensive, almost half of Biden supporters, 47%, and 35% of Trump supporters said yes.

Folks, if that is where we are as a nation, we are in trouble. Because if we see stop seeing truth as something that comes from God and start seeing it as something that we define ourselves, then truth becomes whatever those in authority decide it is. And when that happens, life as we’ve always known it in this country is over.

We have to be intentional about our allegiance and submission to the God of truth and never place other goals above it, especially when it comes to politics. It so important that we understand that absolute truth exists, that truth comes from God alone, and that we will each be judged by that truth, because there are consequences for being wrong. There are consequences for this life and in this world.

We’re seeing that played out right now every night on the evening news. Paul says it best in 2 Thessalonians 2:11–12:

Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

But there are consequences for the next as well. And believe me, those are a lot worse. Eternity is an awful long time to be wrong.

During those six trials of Jesus, the battle between truth and lies was plain. There stood the Truth being judged by those who lived by lies. The Jewish leaders broke just about every law in place that protected somebody from being wrongly convicted. And when they couldn’t find any evidence at all to sentence Jesus to death, they just made some up. Jesus the Righteous was being judged by the unrighteous. Truth was being persecuted by lies. That’s how it always goes in this world, ever since Cain killed Abel.

Even Pilate saw that. Pilate saw right through what was happening, but in the end he didn’t do anything about it. “What is truth?” he asks, and he never stops to consider that truth has to come from somewhere. A lot of things in this world have truth, but only Christ can be truth.

Not long before Jesus was arrested, he makes this simple statement in John 14:6 — “I am the truth.” How can a man be the truth? He couldn’t, unless he was more than a man.

In a couple weeks we’re going to be talking about how we can know the Bible is truth. I’ll give you a sneak peek, though — it is true, because this is God’s word for your life. This is your instruction book, and this book has come under attack too.

And sadly, a lot of that has come from Christian pastors who have decided that going against what scripture teaches is okay if it means people still come to Christ. They think the truth can be bent and shaped however they like it because they’re still working for God. Don’t you ever fall for that. Saint Augustine once said that if you believe what you like in the Gospels and leave out what you don’t like, it’s not the Gospel you believe in, it’s yourself. It’s not the truth you’re holding onto, it’s your own.

The world is going to convince you over and over to leave what you know is right for it says is right. You have to pick one or the other. You can’t have it both ways. Pilate tried. Look at what he does here, because Pilate’s doing what a lot of us do.

Up in verse 29, Pilate goes out to listen to the Jewish authorities.

In verse 33, he goes back inside to listen to Jesus.

In verse 38, he goes back outside to the Jewish authorities again.

Then in chapter 19 verse 1, he goes back inside.

In 19:4, he goes outside.

In 19:9, inside.

Out, in, out, in, out, in. Listening to the truth as the Jewish leaders saw it, and then listening to the Truth with a capital T in the person of Christ. Whatever Pilate believed about the truth depended on where he was standing at the time. And in the end, he listened to the wrong voice. Don’t ever make that mistake. Stand firm in the truth you’ve been taught, no matter how much the crowds scream at you.

In 2 Timothy 4:3-4, Paul warns of a time “when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”

The cure for those lies, Paul says, is truth. Truth preached faithfully and truth lived out every day of your life. That’s the only way to endure. And if you’re in need of that truth today, I invite you up here as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father in a world that goes to such lengths to deny Your truth, give us a spirit hungry for that truth. Give us the strength to seek out that truth. Give us the faith to cling to that truth in spite of all things. And let each of us be a light of that truth to those who would rather choose darkness, pointing them the way to You and the blessed assurance You offer. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.