The Truth
John 18:38
Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?”
Throughout the Old Testament, Israel’s greatest challenge wasn’t foreign armies, plagues, or droughts. It was idolatry. The holy nation wasn’t ever beset by circumstances that would destroy it except as a consequence of her own betrayal of the real and true God.
Jesus came to testify of the supreme truth to the world – that God calls all men everywhere to repent and repent they must precisely because it is God who calls them. This isn’t a truth that makes sinners comfortable. It’s mocked and ignored and cast aside. Pilate says exactly what contemporary men say, “Ah…it’s all rubbish…this talk of absolutes. No one believes that anymore. That’s just silly thinking.” We’ll note, if we look deeply, and if we aren’t afraid of ridicule, that there’s no argument presented. Pilate just moves on from the subject. Like everyone else, he’s not comfortable discussing absolute things.
But Jesus is always talking about the big issues. How often are we told never to talk about religion in “polite society?” Jesus obviously doesn’t follow that school of thought. He hits Pilate with the biggest one of all: that he is the King and that his entire life testifies to the truth. What a statement! There is nothing more important ever to be said by a man, in fact. C.S. Lewis once remarked that we couldn’t have Jesus as a passive, meek and great moral teacher alone. No, said Lewis; Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. Pilate, like everyone else in the world that hears Jesus’ voice through the gospel, is confronted with the same statement of fact. “I am the King of kings.” This leaves no wiggle room whatsoever.
“Ah, but all the world’s religions are the same,” some may cry. This protest to Christ shows not only an ignorance of all the world’s religions, but it especially shows how little the protestor knows of Scripture. The truth that Jesus came to declare obliterates all such feeble attempts to defang his gospel. Scripture says that all men everywhere are without an excuse for unbelief (Romans 1:18-20). Scripture says that all men and women everywhere know God and that nature declares His glory (Psalm 19) – it doesn’t suggest it, hint at it, or make you wonder. No, nature declares that it has been created and points to its Creator and his eternal power and divine nature. But, just as well, like Pilate, we actively suppress this obvious fact. Everywhere we turn – and there is no escaping it – there is overwhelming evidence of God’s existence. Sinners suppress this truth.
Romans goes on to say that we exchange the truth for a lie. What is this lie? It’s the first and most basic lie of life: that God isn’t God and hasn’t revealed himself. This is the start of sin: the refusal to honor the obvious God of creation and give thanks to him. Pilate, like all rebellious sinners everywhere, doesn’t bother to ask the better questions such as “where did I come from?” and “why do truth and error matter in the first place?” No, these inquiries make no sense to the person starting from flawed premises so they shun them altogether and say, instead, things like, “what is truth anyway?”
But we are God’s creation – made to worship. We will worship something – either the true and living God or various parts of creation. We will either honor God or exchange the glory of the immortal God for some earthly idol. Oh, no, I know that here in the sophisticated west we don’t bow before the knickknack gods made by hands but we still run off after various masters. And, the terrible thing is, in this exchange we are invariably played for a fool. No man can start with a flawed presupposition and end up in a good place. To not honor God and give thanks causes us to run off after that which is false and we become, therefore, futile in our thinking. Claiming to be wise, our thoughts descend into intellectual absurdity and moral madness.
We worship science and, therefore, must affirm that all things came from nothing – a literal impossibility and a destruction of the very science we lift up. We worship personal freedom and commit murder (abortion) to defend it. We worship money, success and leisure so we become ravenous for these things to the point of destroying our political systems and businesses. Oh, and yes, we worship sex and reap a horrible harvest of venereal disease, alienation, divorce, and heartbreak. Some even worship romance and become horrified and bitter when the object of their adoration doesn’t fulfill what only God can fulfill.
This exchange is what ails mankind. There is poverty, loneliness, disease, war, tragedy and death because of man’s rejection of the true and natural order. Christians are the true naturalists. Christians are the true lovers of what is natural because to deny God is the supreme unnatural act. In fact, all of creation groans until the day when God sets all things right again. Our rebellion is the problem. This is the one part of truth that Jesus came to bear witness to that day. Fortunately there is more. He is also our Savior. God has sent His only Son to live a perfect life and to die a sacrificial death and be raised in order that we might be saved through faith. This is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is the gospel of God.
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