“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).
We accept reality to be the physical world around us. Reality is that which we know through our five senses: touch, taste, smelling, hearing, and seeing. Webster says truth is “the quality of being in accordance with experience, facts, or reality; conformity with fact,” also “a particular belief or teaching regarded by the speaker as the true one.” This adds the dimension of a spiritual reality.
However in the area of information, reports, and beliefs passed along by people we often discover deceptive and disappointing results. Claims that people make, recommendations, financial investments, and “news” often do not prove to be good or true. It has been said, in irony, that we should not believe anything we hear and only half of what we see. Cynicism is the result of increasing selfism, deception, and disinformation in society. Who can be trusted?
Where is Truth Found?
There are many voices calling for men’s attention today, saying, “Listen to me, I’m right,” “Here is salvation, health, or riches.” Other voices say, “This is the way to God, the gods, or perhaps to discover that we are gods.” How can we know who is right? With the demise of Christianity in the western world there is a growing new ecumenism. People conclude, “No one is perfect” and “everyone has some truth.” So let’s be receptive to everyone. Who can claim to have “the way”? This was the “open-minded” attitude of the Athenians who “spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.” Yet the majority rejected the “one way” that Paul taught (Acts 17:21-33).
There is a blind faith in the goodness of man, presuming that everyone wants to do right. They believe that no one is bad, everyone has some good, and the main thing is not to offend anyone. With the increase of militant spirits in our world from religions, criminals, environmentalists, down to children, the pressure is to yield to force. More and more the one who holds a standard is considered the offender.
However in the midst of this growing confusion and unbelief in the one true Jehovah God, truth can still be found by the truehearted. God has given a witness of Himself from Heaven and a witness in the earth, and they are in perfect harmony.
These two sources of truth we can be sure about today. They are what God has said and what He has done. This is found first in His revelation of Himself and in history. God?s Word or revelation is recorded in the Bible and His acts are also fixed in the archaeological deposits and geologic layers in the earth.
“Speak to the Earth, and it Shall Teach Thee” (Job 12:8)
About twenty years ago I was surprised to read the above passage from the Bible on a wall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It was on the fourth floor among the reconstructions of mammoths, sloth, dinosaurs, and other extinct fossil creatures found in the earth. I wished they would have also included what follows it in Job 12:8, 9: “Who knoweth not . . . that the hand of the LORD hath wrought this.” The exhibit has since been renovated and the Bible quote removed.
How do we speak to the earth? We study and see what is found there. Then we ask, “What is this? How and when did this happen?”
Job goes on to say, “Behold [look], he breaketh down, and it cannot be built again” (Job 12:14). This is archeology and the fallen cultures of history. Men and kingdoms construct the things that are built. When a society’s “cup of iniquity” is full, God brings them down and no man can save them (Psalm 78:6 8). America will also fall unless righteousness and godly lifestyles return.
This principle is the meaning in that old nursery rhyme, “Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall.” The wall represented strength, stability, and endurance. But when the egg (Humpty Dumpty) fell off the wall and cracked wide open, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again”! It was as hard as unscrambling an egg – impossible! The record of these wicked pagan cultures is found today in the dusty artifacts and inscriptions dug up by archaeologists.
Job 12:15 says, “He sendth them out, and they [the waters] overturn the earth.” This is geology – the sedimentary rock layers, some full of flora and fauna life-forms. These stratified layers from turbidity currents and sedimentation were laid down in the Genesis flood cataclysm that destroyed the first world (2 Peter 3:3-7). This is what the earth (geology and archaeology) teaches us (Job 12:8). A wealth of information has been gathered from this in the last 150 years. God is giving fair warning for the endtime judgment by fire (2 Peter 2:5-9).
How is Truth Found?
We also learn history from records in books. However, all the facts in God?s Word and world are subject to interpretation. Both records can be misinterpreted, but to the truehearted facts reveal truth.
The varied conclusions of people show that extracting truth from facts is more a matter of the will than of the mind (knowing many facts). Jesus was asked the question, “What is truth?” by a man who was in a tight spot (John 18:38). This ruler, Pilate, perceived Jesus’ innocence and authority in his interview with Him, through his wife’s dream, and the chief priests’ envy (Matthew 27:19; Mark 15:10). But it was too costly to his prestige and position to release Jesus so he “stone-walled” when Jesus said, “Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.” He responded, “What is truth?” (John 18:37, 38).
Pride and the cost of standing for truth is the root cause for many who say you can?t know what truth is. Jesus indicated this when He said, “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God” (John 7:17). Self-will is what causes many to look at what God says in His Word and say, “It doesn’t mean that.”
Many also look at the fossils of plant and animal life in the geologic record and say, “That shows evolution.” However, it is unscientific to believe that the billions of bits of orderly information on each genetic code self-organized from inorganic minerals. The child of God has faith-but not that kind!
“Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11: 3). The Christian looks at the same facts and has the advantage of God’s revelation. He sees all the biodiversity about us and the billions of bits of information on the DNA along with its accumulating load of genetic defects. Mutations are always compromises of existing genes. They don’t add the millions of bits of precise information to the genome required for a working fin, leg, or wing. This points back to a perfect beginning when God wrote the original genetic codes at creation. Adam and Eve’s children could marry with no genetic problems.
The secular geologist sees hundreds of millions of years between rock layers. The simple Bible believer sees multi-strat fossils (fossil tree trunks crossing several rock layers). He sees fossilized fighting dinosaurs with their claws in each other, dozens of fish swallowing others, numberless brachiopods and clams closed up tight, fresh unwilted fern and plant fossils in coal. Organisms are not lying down and fossilizing like this in the real world. The believer also sees and accepts the truth of the sudden geologic catastrophe described in the Noahic flood (Genesis 7).
“The Truth Shall Make You Free”!
Thus we see that finding truth is a matter of whether we truly want it or not. The willing heart crucifies his rebellion against God and reality. He listens to that voice of conscience, the Holy Spirit, that leads into all truth (John 16:12-14). The Holy Spirit confirms in our heart that there is an eternal cause and purpose to life. There are absolutes, responsibilities, and accountability.
“Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left” (Isa. 30:21). The child of God has been given the Spirit of truth to lead us into all truth (John 16:13). “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). This truth from God will bring freedom from sin, the bondage of fighting, broken homes, and crumbling social structures.
Through Jesus, every binding chain can be broken and we can experience life, and that more abundantly (John 10:10)! He “hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).
-by Elvin Stauffer