What Is Truth?

By Ben Cachiaras

We”ve all played the party game: a jar is full of M&Ms and everyone guesses how many are in there. The one closest to the correct answer wins a prize. I never seem to win that game.

What about another game: “What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?” Everyone gives an answer: rocky road, moosetracks, maybe vanilla. Now, which one of those is the closest to being right?

“Wait a minute,” you say. “Ice cream is a matter of taste and preference. There”s no right or wrong answer!”

So here”s a question for you: When you decide what to believe in terms of your faith, which is it more like? Estimating the number of M&Ms in a jar, a fact that can be verified? Or choosing your favorite ice cream, a subjective decision?

The reality is, most folks today feel the realm of faith is more like choosing ice cream. Truth is a matter of opinion or personal preference, they say. It”s relative. What is true for you may not be true for me. And what I have found to be true is only true for me.

As a result, many are no longer sure there is such a thing as truth, objective reality, or a God who is knowable. Many are scanning the list of options like a menu of ice cream flavors, unaware God has made himself known, and he can be identified””not unlike the way you can objectively identify the number of M&Ms in a jar by counting them.

What is truth? How can you know what is true anymore?

A Solid Foundation

America has enjoyed the blessing of God. Perhaps this is in part because this nation was built on a solid foundation, including the firmly held conviction that all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. The founding documents are based on what the framers considered to be “truths” that for centuries were held to be self-evident. Maybe that”s why we have endured for 229 years, the oldest constitutional republic on earth.

But as we celebrated July 4 this week, as we watched the fireworks and sang patriotic hymns, we have felt a quiet fear: all is not well in our land. The foundations are crumbling, and have been for some time.

When Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, he was very deliberately appealing to the Creator, and with other founding fathers acknowledged an overriding obligation to “Nature”s God,” a universally recognized deity. They never understood truth to be a subjective preference, like what kind of ice cream you like, but rather a divinely ordained condition for which human beings are designed. The quest was to recognize the truth and submit to it. In our best moments, they believed, we could behave as one nation “under God.”

But over the last few decades especially, as Chuck Colson has so eloquently stated it, “legions of skeptics have mounted a massive assault on these “˜self-evident truths.” In prestigious law schools, in the halls of government, and especially in the Supreme Court, God is often banished from public conversation.” The banishing of moral truth to the realm of private opinion has resulted in a nearly insane reinterpretation of our Constitution, in which the freedom of religion has become a zealous quest for the freedom from Judeo-Christian religion. The uncertainty about truth, the commitment to moral relativism, and the reverence for tolerance as our highest virtue have become a sharp ax cutting off the sturdy branch of truth upon which we rested for so long.

Law of the Jungle

So now we are in a free fall, cut loose from objective standards of morality and truth and any basis of ethical or moral judgment. Everyone does what is right in his own eyes. And as we tumble downward toward inevitable ruin, there is still some hope that we will lodge again in the branches of truth. But without God there are no unalienable rights. If there is no truth, then everything hinges on opinion and who is in power at the time.

As you ascend the steps to the U.S. Supreme Court building you can see near its top a row of the world”s great lawgivers. Each one is facing the central character in the middle, prominently featured in full frontal view. And who is that central character? It”s Moses, and he is holding the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments are also hewn into the huge oak doors as you enter the Supreme Court courtroom. Yet despite their prominent display, they seem to have a diminishing impact on the rulings made there.

When a nation is no longer undergirded by immovable truth and moral foundation, that nation, however sophisticated in appearance, has no choice but to revert to the law of the jungle. There everyone writes his own truth. Whoever has the biggest muscles, or most guns, or most legislative power at the time prevails. It is his turn to choose the ice cream and redefine truth. This is the very kind of oligarchy, rule by a few, that Thomas Jefferson feared, and that we once fought so desperately to avoid.

Ironically, as we wrestle for “freedom” worldwide, America is marching straight into a prison cell of our own design. We have believed the greatest lie of all, that there is greater freedom in abandoning truth than there is in seeking and embracing it.

In the comic strip Mallard Fillmore, the main character talks about how public schools are starting a program to instill character into students but “without all the Judeo-Christian” stuff. But the character says, “that”s like trying to teach reading without all that alphabet stuff.”

Full of Truth

And so in the middle of such madness comes Jesus, full of grace and truth. He says more than 30 times, “I tell you the truth,” “I am the way the truth and the life.” “My word is truth.” “If you hold onto my words, you are my disciples, and you shall know the truth and the truth will make you free.”

That”s Jesus.

And this Jesus stands before Pilate, who questions him. Pilate is nervous. He is upset that these Jews can”t solve their own problems. If he doesn”t squash this uprising, he”ll have a revolt on his hands, and the people are demanding that he put Jesus to death. Maybe that”s the truth. He goes to the people to poll them; that”s one way to get at truth. Let the majority define it.

But the facts say Jesus didn”t do anything wrong. Pilate can see through the false charges; he knows there”s nothing to pin on this man. Maybe that”s the truth.

Pilate just knows he”s already in trouble with his superiors, and he can”t afford another mess. So he gives up on the quest for truth. He wants to do what is best for Pilate, to help himself get through this ordeal with the fewest bumps and scrapes. As long as I get my next paycheck and my vacation dates, who cares about truth?

Harvard Business School operates the same way: Ethics? Don”t do anything that will land your name in the newspaper. That”s ethics today. Pilate”s ethics. So we wash our hands of it.

The irony is, Truth was standing right before Pilate. But because he was more worried about what he might lose if he decided wrongly, he never recognized Jesus for who he was. There are people in our churches who do the same thing. They get right up next to Jesus, hear about him, come close to him, but fail to embrace him as the truth that can set them free.

Here is what Christians believe: God has shared himself with us through Jesus Christ, and we are invited to walk in relationship with him, which is to walk in the truth. This truth has a sturdy base, which is the unchanging Word of God. Isaiah 40 says, “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.” It doesn”t come and go with popularity polls. It stands. And that Word has become enfleshed. When many “suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18), exchanging the truth of God for a lie, the One suppressed or exchanged is Jesus, who is full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

Truth Enfleshed

When you go to get ice cream, the flavor right for you doesn”t need to be mine. But when it comes to truth, the realm of ideas, reason, and intellectual integrity require that we treat some ideas as better than others. The view that one person”s ideas are no better or truer than another”s is simply contradictory. All people have equal value in God”s eyes. But in determining the truth, disciples do not look to human hearts or feelings or philosophies. We follow the One who is “the way, the truth, and the life.”

Jesus says, “If you hold to my teaching, then you are my disciples.” Christians have something to hold onto, through the endless waves of opinions and the wash of ideas. Our standard is Jesus. He is the bar by which we measure all truth. When others disagree, we treat them with gentleness and respect, as Jesus would.

Perhaps what is most needed is for us to live the truth, as Jesus did, embodying it. D.L. Moody said the best way to show that a stick is crooked is not by arguing about it or spending time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it.

The truth that our nation may have been built upon, the truth that will sustain us, is the truth we are called to enflesh. When we are truly the body of Christ, others will see truth and embrace it. And that is freedom, indeed.

Ben Cachiaras is senior pastor with Mountain Christian Church, Joppa, Maryland, and one of CHRISTIAN STANDARD’s contributing editors.