"Your Word is Truth"

"Truth is so obscure in these times and falsehood so established, that unless we love the truth, we cannot know it." - Blaise Pascal

"Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth". - our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ (John 17:17)

I can't remember the whole quote or who said it but I remember reading something like: "By the time falsehood has traveled around the world, truth has just put it's boots on". Error, myth, superstition and all things deceitful - whether subtle or obvious - always seem to find their way into the minds of men without having to knock. But when truth gets to the door - and knocks loudly - some people are too busy to answer; others will not let it in. Well what is truth and what is error? I am no epistemological guru or master of philosophy but I do have the confidence and the reassurance that I do not have to be any of those things to know and understand truth. While many are quick to ridicule the source of truth that I subscribe to - and still more are wont to avoid it - I stand firm on that source, God's eternal Word. In addition, and to clarify, I don't believe for a minute that God's Word is one truth out of many to pick from. In other words I do not believe in religious pluralism or moral or epistemological relativism. Objective truth exists and is found manifest for our faith and practise in the fully and irreducibly sufficient words of God on the pages of the Bible. Further to that, while truths exist that are not written on the pages of the Bible, these truths can not contradict the Word of God. Any truth claim made that contradicts the clear meaning of a scriptural truth is, in reality, a claim made in error.

Truth is not relative and is not changing - it is an eternal, objective foundation of fact found on the pages of the Bible and confirmed, not usurped or paralleled, by many sources found outside it's pages. While some truths can be found within the walls of a synagogue, inside the confines of a mosque, or within the halls of a buddhist temple it is by the presence of so many errors and denials that these truths are rendered null. The presence of truth is never an impetus by which the totality of it's source should be embraced. In other words, just because a body of laws and principles - or a religious institution - contain truth undisputed, it does not follow that the entire corpus of that institution is free from error and should be followed.

Ah, but when it comes to the Word of Alimighty God, the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, we have a corpus free of error and abounding in eternal truth - the stuff of which to surely follow. The psalmist praising God in Psalm 119:160 says this: "The sum of Your word is truth..."; and our Lord echoes this in His prayer for all believers in John 17:17: "Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth". May God continue to sanctify us in the Truth of His Word! We have the faith that His Word is eternal and it will not and can not fail. Many will call our faith a blind faith, laughing at it's apparent simplicity and criticizing what they think is a conclusion reached in haste with no discernment. But we as Christians should know full well that our faith is not blind and that the source of our faith demands us to be discerning. God tells us in Hebrews 11:1: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen". Our faith has both substance and evidence - giving us hope for things we can not see.

Scoffers will come ridiculing the 'foolishness' of our faith and mockers will take pleasure in vain attempts to shipwreck it. Skeptics will sit in their houses built on sand, resting unwittingly on the errors of human reason, trying to discredit and disprove the God who made them. But might we, standing firm on the Word of God, never waver, never hide, never give in, and never be ashamed. Laughed at, spit on, avoided or criticized, may we stand firm on the Word of God, and the promises that come with it, knowing that we have built our houses on the Rock of Truth.