The Whole Truth, so help me…Who?

By: American Decency Staff

 

It has been said there are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth. We flippantly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Everyone wants to corner the market on truth and they want to sell it with their own spin (especially the media). We’ve gone from either accepting or rejecting the truth to relegating it to a smaller and smaller portion of society with less and less influence. Meaning, we started with self-evident truths which not only brought us to liberty but also moved us to govern our nation by those same truths. These self-evident truths were then relegated to the religious realm; and now, these truths may be true for the individual stating them, but they don’t necessarily have any hold on the hearer. In other words, objective truth has been rejected and replaced with subjective post-truth. Or Scripturally speaking, we’ve gone from “Jesus said, I am the way, the TRUTH, and the life” (John 14:6) to “Every man did what was right in his own eyes. (Judges 17:6)”  Pilate asked, “What is truth?” when the question should have been “Who is truth?” Because Truth is a Person. Truth is God in human form and substance, yet the express image and glory of God, the Divine-man—Jesus Christ.

In the wake of this election period, painfully obvious answers have been given to a question most are not asking. As we stand in amazement at the chaos and unrest which surrounds us, many ask these questions: How did we ever get to a place where college students need Play Doh, safety pins, and counseling—in place of classes—to deal with the election of Donald Trump? When did it become acceptable for large segments of our population to feel that it is okay to block traffic, destroy property, threaten lives, and ignore common civilities?  Why are we such a divided people instead of “one nation under God, indivisible?” Like Pilate, we are asking the wrong question. The question answered by our society, its people, and the church today is “What happens when people reject “True truth” and become “foolishly foolish?” (Thank you Francis Schaeffer for coining these terms years ago.)

Where has this path from true truth to post-truth taken us? We see the extremes and the in-betweens throughout the continuum in every section of the country. We have, by and large, moved from civility to anarchy, rationality to emotional instability, justice to injustice, compassion to self-centeredness, self-control to unbridled passion and wrath, sensible to silly, common sense to nonsense, a stable society to a society filled with chaos, and from sanity to bordering insanity.

We resemble W.W Bennett’s description of the U.S. just prior to the Civil War: “Sincere piety, brazen wickedness; pure public virtue, sordid baseness; lofty patriotism, despicable time-serving; consecration to a sacred cause and shameless abandonment of principle, appeared in every section of the country.”

These vast divisions shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus said of Himself (the Truth), “I didn’t come to bring peace, but division.” The fact is, being at peace with God—which can only be done through Jesus—often brings division with man. The closer we (society) are to accepting true truth, which is God’s truth, the more at peace we can be with one another. When one or more factions reject that truth, the more and stronger division there will be, and the animosity will be aimed at those who side with true truth.

How we (nationally) respond to true truth also decides the speed at which we travel through the “Cycle of Nations,” developed by Sir Alex Fraser Tyler, a Scottish jurist and historian. He describes this cycle as follows:

"From bondage to spiritual faith.
From spiritual faith to great courage.
From courage to liberty.
From liberty to abundance.
From abundance to selfishness.
From selfishness to complacency.
From complacency to apathy.
From apathy to dependency.
From dependency back again into bondage."

Sir John Bagot Glubb (1897-1987) was a highly honored general and historian who also described a common pattern fitting the history of fallen empires in terms of a cycle. His final three stages were labeled as such: 5) The age of intellect 6) The age of decadence and 7) The age of decline and collapse. Glubb also recognized that “military, political, economic and religious developments all influence an empire’s people to act and believe differently over time.” Warning: be careful of who you choose to lead you and who you choose to listen to.

Both Sir Alex and Sir John were scholars, but they confirmed what God had already warned of: Beware, if you reject my truth; if you forget me and don’t keep my commandments; if you forget all I have done for you; you shall surely perish. Just like the nations I destroyed before your face, so I will also destroy you; because you would not be obedient to My voice, the voice of your God. (Deut. 8:11-20)

What is true truth? He is a Person. A Person who showed us the way to humility, the way to service, the way to obedience, and the way to live—“let this same mind be in you…” (Philippians 1:4-11). True truth is the Creator of all people and all that is. He came bringing light to live by, being full of grace and truth (John 1:1-5, 14). True truth is love and empowers men to become the sons of God and to live holy lives of boldness and love (John 1:12; 1 John 4:15-19). He is a Person who calls us to do good to all men especially to those of the household of faith, that men might glorify our heavenly Father (Matthew 5:16; Galatians 6:10).

True truth brings to us, and any society which embraces Him, many good things. With those good things also come division and judgment—division within families and nations, and judgment of all persons and nations. There are natural judgments which we see in Deuteronomy 8 and eternal judgments, of which we must, in love, warn all men.

Francis Schaeffer explains why our nation is in the divisive straits that it is in:

“In turning away from God and the truth which he has given, man has thus become foolishly foolish… Man is left with a position with which he cannot live, and he is caught in a multitude of intellectual and personal tensions.

The Scripture tells us how man came into this situation: Because “although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him”; therefore, they became foolish in their reasoning, in their comprehension, in their lives… It speaks of any period when men knew the truth and deliberately turned away from it.”

Our nation is in desperate need of healing—of division turned to unity—so we must become true truth tellers while showing the love of Christ. In the words of Francis Schaeffer, we need to give “honest answers, observable love.” This can only be done with our focus on Christ; He is truth. Let us strive to know and guard the precious treasure of God’s Word—true truth. This will mean, at times, trading in our own view of God for the Biblical view of God. To give true truth, we must possess true truth; and He must possess us. In answering “what would Jesus do?” we must honestly search the Scriptures to see what Jesus—full of grace and truth—did.

So few in the church seek Truth (Jesus) today. They are caught up in ecclesiastical traditional "truth," caught up in developing a "truth" in their own mind (a self-made truth which may or may not RESEMBLE the truth, but still not be truth), or looking to the world and thinking–"I'm better off than them." But so few seek true truth.

True truth (Who Jesus is, what He says and what He would really do) can only be found in the Bible. As we seek in reading and in prayer, He will be found. As we search for He who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we will find Him and find the only way to the Father.

We must get beyond our sarcasm of safety pins, our natural responses to rudeness and hatred, and our own contribution—where possible—to division. Instead let us be winsome with love, showing the same blessed grace which God has shown to us when we were without power to become what we are—and continue becoming what He would yet have us to be.

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