[NICOLE STEVENSON]
“Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
When I was a teenager I heard a lot of talk about relativism in the secular world. It was the new “morality”. As society was moving away from the “constraints” of our Judaeo Christian “group think”, our national leaders and secular media began to posit that relativism was the way to embrace the many cultures and religions represented in our nation. The idea that one religion or one body of knowledge was more true than another was targeted as the basis for racism, sexism, hate crimes, prejudice, and abuse.
While, as a teenager, relativism sounded illogical to me, I understood the appeal for secular society as it functioned as an attempt to help society “agree to disagree” and just get along. If truth was defined by the person interpreting it, then perhaps that would remove the hostility from the conversation when people had different interpretations. The consensus thought at that time truly seemed to be to “agree to disagree” and refrain from “judging” those who saw things differently.
To the world, truth was no longer a constant that existed outside of one’s self; it was a perspective that came from within a person as they tried to make sense of reality. To question one’s “truth” was synonymous with devaluing their feelings and life experiences. Asking questions to challenge ideas could still be done if done carefully and with the commitment to affirm the idea in the end, whether or not you agreed with it.
It’s fascinating to me the way worldviews evolve over time. A worldview rooted in deception (no matter how moral it presents itself) never seems to evolve into truth. It merely takes the shape of a new deception with the illusion that it’s simply progressed into “truer truth”.
With the evolution of relativism we find ourselves now living in a post-truth world, and now it’s my teenagers who are being targeted with a new secular moralism on a day to day basis. Today, truth appears to be less about personal interpretation and more about what a person generates as their truth. Gone are the days when it was ok to respectfully disagree with someone else’s “truth”, now it’s expected that we both affirm and defend other’s “truths” without question. The secular moral is no longer about “agreeing to disagree” but about “refusing to disagree”. In my lifetime, society’s concept of truth has gone from being outside of us, to being defined by how we interpret it, and now to being generated by us and defended by all.
Truth is a Person
I was recently asked by a teenager how I can be so sure that of all the people in the world, and of all the religions and philosophers of the world, that Christians are the only group “lucky enough” to have the absolute truth. My answer was simple: we don’t have the truth because we’re so smart or more evolved or intelligent; we have the truth because the truth is a Person.
Christians are not responsible for creating Biblical Christianity. On the contrary, the Bible is responsible for creating Christians. Every believer started their days on this earth just like every other human— fallen. It was truth that changed us, not we who founded truth. Truth is not something a group of people theorized, tested, found confirmation biases for, and felt good about congregating around. Biblical Christians didn’t generate or contribute to truth in any way whatsoever! They, like the rest of the world, desperately needed the truth. The only thing that took them from being just like everyone else in the world to having the truth was meeting the Truth Himself.
In a world like ours it’s not “appropriate” to proclaim that Christians are the only ones who actually have reality— even so, that is the truth. Christians only “have reality” because they are reconciled to and indwelled by the One who created reality! Only when we know the Author of Life (Acts 3:15) can we know that Truth exists outside of us—apart from us.
True believers are called believers because someones outside of themselves presented them with reality, presented them with the truth, and they believed (Ephesians 1:13-14). Belief is a word that describes a response to an external body of knowledge. The gospel was not invented by “believers”, otherwise we would more accurately be called “affirmers”. Instead we are called believers because it describes our response to God Himself—to the truth of the gospel He proclaimed to us (1 John 5:4-13).
In Biblical Christianity truth is to govern us no matter our opinions, motives, emotions, intentions, or desires. We know that the Lord Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We know that all reality must be interpreted through His Word, through His teachings, because God is the author of life, and He is the truth. We didn’t come to truth by being smart or lucky; we came to know the truth because when He revealed Himself to us we didn’t suppress—we responded to Him, and we believed.
Truth is a Law
My son is currently a sophomore in high school. One of his tougher classes this year is physics. We talk about it sometimes on the way to or from school. I loved physics in college. I had a great teacher and I enjoyed the labs, but I didn’t get the best grade in that class. The concepts were tough for me as they often involved formulas and math (if you know me, you know I don’t do numbers). I passed the class with a decent grade, but I recall very little of the details. I simply walked away with a general picture that brings me great delight and peace! I love the fact that there are laws of physics that cannot be broken and that govern how we experience the world around us—that was my absolute favorite thing about the class!
Physical laws are what they are, and we don’t get a vote about it—they just are. I cannot change them by my feelings or desires. They are constant. They were designed by our fixed and constant Creator— I AM that I AM. They are so fixed that we can study them and learn to do amazing things based on what we learn—like going to the moon! We can depend on them in any measure to do what they’re supposed to do and be what they’re supposed to be.
Even so, one might say we each experience these constant laws differently. We each have a bit of a different relationship with these fixed laws of physics. Ask any one of the team captains who groaned when they learned they were stuck with me on their team in PE growing up. Some kids had such a confident awareness of spacial distance and speed they had no trouble stepping right into the line of a ball to crack it with a bat and send it well pass second base! Send that same ball toward me growing up, and I was so fearful of it that not only did I fail to hit it with the bat, I often failed to even open my eyes and see it coming at all! Same ball, same bat, same distance, same speed, different relationship with it, different outcome.
The Fixed Nature of Truth Protects Us
One year during the Friday night question and answer session at the annual Former Adventist Fellowship Conference, a very normal question for an Adventist to ask was read to the panel up front. “What’s the point in believing in Hell?” If we guessed at the motive or trajectory of the question, we might guess that the one who wrote it was driving at the “manipulative fear mongering nature of the doctrine of hell”—as many Adventists think of it.
The answer that came from the front, however, didn’t let the conversation go down that path. Pastor Gary Inrig, seemingly taken back by the question, responded with another question, “What’s the point in believing in gravity?”. The response from the audience was mixed between affirming laughter and silence as people pondered the answer to Gary’s deep question.
Believing in the law of gravity protects us and orients us. It lets us know our limits. It keeps us from jumping off of high surfaces and plummeting to our death. It prevents us from throwing hard and dangerous objects into the sky without regard for where they will land. It keeps us oriented to reality and informs far more decisions about our day to day than we even give consideration. We believe it because it’s true, it’s proven, and it informs how we navigate this world.
Hell is as true as the law of gravity. The point in believing in hell is the same as the point in believing in gravity. It is. It just is—and knowing that it is informs us in ways that will impact our relationship to it now and in the future. Spiritual laws are as real as physical laws. They are as fixed and even more significant to one’s life and death than are physical laws.
Truth is Impartial
Often when we seek to judge between truthful and deceptive people we want to talk about the nature of a person’s motives or their perspectives that drive their actions. In an attempt to think the best of others and give pass to people who are deceived or misguided we let the nature of truth become relative to the heart of the person handling it. While there is a place for compassionate responses for the misguided, the reality is that we are all held accountable in the most fixed possible ways for what we do with the truth. Truth will not bend for the sinful human heart— not matter how “moral” it’s trying to be.
Motives, personal understandings, or personal intentions, have nothing to do with the nature of truth, and they don’t remove guilt from those who don’t have a right relationship with it. Let’s look at a few examples of this in Scripture, beginning with motives and understanding.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-23
The people Jesus speaks of here had a specific understanding of what it looked like to please God. That understanding motivated them to accomplish miracles in His name, and it emboldened them to defend themselves to God by recounting their deeds. Even so, their motives did not help them. They were not obedient to the will of the Father expressed in Scripture. The outcome of their relationship to the truth was that they were in fact workers of lawlessness unknown by God and sent away from His presence.
Another example of religious men acting against truth on the basis of their personal understanding can be read in John 5:39-40. Jesus tells the Jews:
“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.”
Certainly it wasn’t wrong for the Jews to have a high view of Scripture or to believe that the way of salvation is revealed in it. However, they were so blind and legalistic that they didn’t know the truth when He sat in front of them and revealed Himself to them. Their depraved humanity blinded them, but their personal expectations and national hopes suppressed the truth even when He sat right in front of them revealing Himself to them.
What about intentions? Can our intentions impact truth or lessen our guilt? One of the most chilling examples of the fixed nature of truth even in the midst of evil intentions can be seen in the prophetic words of the High Priest in John 11:47-53.
So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all. Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So from that day on they made plans to put him to death.
Caiaphas spoke with the intentions of a murder, but he spoke truth. His words were not of his own accord. God spoke through him because of his office, and the words Caiaphas spoke prophesied the truth that Jesus would die for the nation and for the nations! Truth was fixed regardless of the evil intentions of Caiaphas.
Jesus said that He could cause even the rocks to cry out. God has used crooked priests, pagan kings, and the mouth of a mule to communicate truth. None of these were worthy of their words— even so, God is the author of truth and nothing about us, “good” or bad, will change the nature of truth or lessen our guilt before the God who calls us to respond to it.
Truth is Fixed; Our Relationship to Truth is the Variable
One of the sins we were raised to indulge in Seventh-day Adventism was that our interpretations lived above the Scriptures. While they wouldn’t say it so clearly, their concept of “the truth as it is in Jesus” is the best evidence for this. Based on their own Fundamental Belief about The Word of God described in the book Seventh-day Adventists Believe, Scripture by itself is not sufficient for knowing the true will of God. The “truth as it is in Jesus” is the superior means for knowing truth. After essentially dressing down sola scriptura they describe “truth as it is in Jesus” as being the only view that allows for supernatural interaction with God and His truth.
Through her supernatural interactions with God, Seventh-day Adventist prophetess Ellen G. White taught her followers what moral perfection (not progressive sanctification) looked like in every area of life; including dress, food, extra curricular activities, how to spend the Sabbath, how to enter the sanctuary, marital sex, child rearing, etc. Matters that should have been fixed because they were held to the standard of an immutable God and were revealed already in Scripture were decreed and defined by the evolving opinions of a woman who did not know God. That was our model and it’s Adventism’s legacy—even absolute truth evolves.
Not only did her ideas of moral perfection evolve, but doctrines as important as the nature of God shifted (never becoming orthodox) as she aged. Nothing was fixed, truth was truth only in the “present”. Hence, “Present Truth” — an Adventist publication and a common term used by Adventists. (This kind of “Present Truth” is the Adventist definition of the Christian term “progressive revelation”. However, biblical progressive revelation speaks of fixed eternal truths revealed over time in the canonized pages of Scripture.)
How could any of us know that we could actually come to a knowledge of the truth? We lived in a religious sect that believed it had “the most truth” and that more would be revealed with the passage of time. For many of us, our only hope was that God would be merciful in his judgement of us, because even grasping the “truth” we allegedly had usually proved to be an impossible task! I personally had hope that God would grade on a curve.
Even today in Adventism, truth is determined by the “great minds of our day”. I remember reading an advertisement for a Seventh-day Adventist “camp meeting” this last summer in our local city newspaper. The speakers for the various religious talks were described as “leading thought influencers”. In Adventism, truth is treated as a if it’s yet to be discovered and the passing of time gets us ever closer to finding it if we’re looking and smart enough to catch it. This worldview is why when I told my family I was saved one sibling said, “So you’re saying that even with all the scholars we have who haven’t yet figured it out, you have discovered the truth!”
The relativism, legalism, and gnosticism of Adventism is so similar to that of the world because even though it dresses up as moral, it is still man-made deception. In both instances “morality” is shifting based on “best understandings” and most agreed upon ideas of what constitutes as “good” or relevant to the human experience.
When you know the Truth, when you know the fixed and immutable Lord Jesus, the Word of God comes to life, and we are not left without reality or answers! We don’t need to squeeze our eyes shut at home-plate and fear the laws of reality. We can stand firm and interact boldly with the laws of truth and reality. We can live and move and have our being in reality because we live and move and have our being in Christ. We don’t need to hope God will “grade on a curve”, we don’t need to seek after visions and dreams, we don’t need to pursue human perceptions of moral perfection— because we have all we need in the Scriptures and in God Himself. Truth is a fixed law, immoveable and unmanipulated by how we relate to it— and we’re accountable to that. As believers we have chosen to live in, through, by, and for the Truth; that is our relationship to it.
Bear Fruit in Keeping with Repentance
Friends, when we meet Jesus we have to repent of the sin of seeing truth as slippery or ever shapeshifting as time progresses. The cannon of Scripture is closed and Scripture is sufficient. That doesn’t mean “good enough”; it means it’s all we need.
We also need to repent of the idea that it’s not important for us to tell our families the truth because “God knows their heart and intensions”. Fear of disappointing our loved ones is often what causes us to hold tightly to the idea that saving faith is relative because truth is hard to know. Brothers and sisters, saving faith is not relative. Salvation is based on the object of our faith, and that object in only ever going to be the Jesus of Scripture (Galatians 1, 2 Cor. 11:4, 14).
I know we don’t always know how to have these conversations with loved ones, and we certainly don’t always get the outcome we hope for, but if truth is fixed, and it is, then perhaps “breaking their hearts” is the only loving thing to do. When we bear fruit in keeping with repentance, we refuse to interact with the lie we repented of, behaving as if it’s okay for anyone to live peacefully in its deception. Repenting means to turn away from one thing and toward another. Our relationship to Adventism is changed when we repent of it and that’s why it feels so awful inside when we put on airs and pretend we aren’t concerned for our family while in their presence. We have to tell them the truth. We have to introduce them to the Truth.
These conversations will look different for different people. The Lord will lead in His timing and way. I think, though, that we need to begin the process by refusing to believe it’s not important to tell them. Next, we can pray that God would lead, that He’d open their hearts and reveal Himself to them and show them their need. That He would give them eyes to see and a heart that believes. In these ways, and in our abiding in His Word, we can live always ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us, speaking the truth in love, loving them for Jesus, and trusting Him with the outcome.
I can do nothing about my relationship with physical laws when it comes to sports trust me. However, I pray that as long as I draw breath on this earth that I will always respond with trust and obedience as the Lord teaches me truth. That I will always seek to know and obey the will of the Father no matter the personal cost, and that I will always speak well of Him to those who need to know the only fixed truth in all of time and space— the man Christ Jesus. May we all be faithful to love others well by responding to them and to the world around us with truth. †
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