What is truth?
A couple of months ago the student minister in the church where I serve on staff offered me an unexpected opportunity to address the 6th-12th graders in our student group. The reason it was so unexpected is that I haven’t worked directly with students that age in 37 years and wondered if I could even relate. Since I’m in my early 70s, the student minister said, “Remember they have grandparents.” Having related successfully to my grandsons as they walked through those same years, I decided to take him up on his offer. In preparation I asked myself, “Other than talking to them about how they could be sure they would go to heaven when they die, what one challenge could I bring to them which I felt would make the most difference over their lifetime?”
My challenge that day was entitled “Guard Your Heart” based on Proverbs 4:23 which says, “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.” I explained to them that an essential part of guarding and managing their hearts (an all-encompassing Hebrew reference to not only a person’s emotions, but also all his mental capacities such as: intellect, thinking, wisdom, discernment, reasoning, decision making, will, conscience, moral character, self-esteem, and more) would be to plant the right thought seeds into them. I noted, “As I have reflected on the biggest difference between my teen years in the 1960s and yours in the 2020s, it is that the culture I was raised in had an overall belief in absolute truth and our culture today does not, which makes your life as a Christian teenager today much more difficult than mine ever was.”
I tell you that story because nothing today concerns me more about our American culture than does the demise of belief that there is objective truth which should serve as the moral foundation of individual life, as well as that of shared life lived in community. Much of what we see happening in our culture today that causes us to shake our heads and to wonder what in the world is going to happen next, I believe can be tied to truth’s demotion from “true” truth to relative truth in the lives of many.
What is truth? The best definition that I’ve encountered is a simple one. Truth is that which conforms with reality.1 Reality is “the world or state of things as they actually exist.”2 To merge the two, truth is anything which conforms to the world of things as they actually exist. That being the case, anything which does not conform to things as they actually exist is false, no matter how much someone may claim to the contrary.
As I have pondered the concept of truth once again, this is what I have concluded about most people who say they don’t believe in absolute truth. What I believe they are saying is not that they don’t believe there are absolute truths in life. After all, what thinking person would argue that the law of gravity is not an absolute truth? My conclusion is they don’t believe there is anyone who has ever lived who could put into words an accurate, undistorted description of absolute truth that should determine how they live. Any effort to do so is a distortion of that truth. Therefore, since all such efforts are distortions, then everyone is free to be guided by the distortions of their own choosing. So for them truth is relative – truth is whatever you believe conforms to your perception of reality.
But what if the one who puts that declaration of reality into words is the One Who created the world, the One Who created all those who inhabit the earth and gave them life and meaning and purpose, the One Who not only knows what is true but also is Himself, the Truth? If that were the case, then the words He speaks to describe reality would be absolutely true, and therefore totally trustworthy of being the foundation upon which we build our lives. Thanks to God, that description of reality has already been written. We call it the Bible. And that description of reality has already lived among us in the flesh. His name is Jesus.
As I told those students that Sunday morning, there is no better way to guard their hearts and minds than to fill them with the absolute truth of God’s word and to pattern their lives after the One who is Truth. I recommend it highly to you as well.
1 Gregory Koukl, The Story of Reality, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017)
2 Oxford Dictionaries
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