This message was delivered by Pastor Brent at River of Life Church
…Jesus responded, “…All who love the truth recognize that what I say is true.” “What is truth?” Pilate asked. (John 18:37, 38, NLT)
Today we are continue in our series “What a fool believes”. Last week we looked at “fools talk” and we saw how the the way people see meaning in life has changed in the last 50 years. Well, actually, we know that the change started during the Enlightenment and had been slowly working its way through the fabric of culture and society until we arrived in our day with what is clearly a change. Last week we looked at how the gospel addresses the ultimate questions of our world even though to those who are not listening carefully hear it as fool’s talk.
This week we are looking at “Fool’s Truth”. When we think about our place in the world, one of the first passages I think of is John 18:37-38 when
Pilate is interrogating Jesus.
37 Pilate said, “So you are a king?” Jesus responded, “You say I am a king. Actually, I was born and came into the world to testify to the truth. All who love the truth recognize that what I say is true.” 38 “What is truth?” Pilate asked. (John 18:37–38a, NLT)
In this passage Jesus is facing a death sentence and his defence before Pilate is rooted in this idea of the truth. Yet, for Pilate that was a foolish statement — we can almost hear his disdain when he says: “What is truth”. I think the reason I can almost hear the disdain is because it is exactly what somebody would say today if we were having a conversation about truth.
Talking about truth is very much out of sync with our culture. The first step was in the Enlightenment when the lead thinkers decided that God needed to be removed from all our questions about truth. Entire thought systems of ethics and morality were created without appealing to God or his ways.
Ultimately where that led is today — where Western society believes that anything related to God is “unknowable”. It belongs to the category of preference, or opinion — but definitely not things that we can say are true.
Truth without God looks very different than truth with God.
Truth without God
First, without God, truth is about what can be known and since our world has arrived at a place where spiritual things can never be known, spiritual things cannot speak to what is true. This is what our world thinks.
It is not uncommon to hear people talk about the “leap of faith” as if it were believing without evidence or even believing against the evidence. But faith in the Bible is not like that. The leap of faith is still a movement into the unknown, but it is firmly rooted and in line with one’s knowledge and experience of faith. The modern idea of “leap of faith” Dallas Willard calls a “leap without faith”.
Eventually, once faith has been categorized as completely personal opinion that cannot inform real knowledge or what is true, it simply doesn’t matter. Spirituality and religion can say whatever they want to say. Who cares — the world says — it’s all just make believe.
Obviously this creates a real problem for the person of faith. When we speak of truth or of spiritual knowledge — people think of it as “fool’s truth”. Truth based on fantasy and imagination — not on facts.
The thing is, if you rule out that there is a spiritual world. If you rule out God and all the things connected to God — the modern viewpoint makes sense. But here’s the issue. Once you add God into the equation — none of the numbers add up any more. Truth without God, in certain areas of life look very different than truth with God in the picture.
Truth with God
Now, obviously, 2×2=4 regardless of one’s faith. In fact, the great classical mathematicians were pagan Greeks. Later, mathematics and the teachings of Aristotle were preserved and added to by the Islamic Scholars. So much so that our number system is actually based on the Arabic number system. At so many levels of life, faith is not part of the equation. But at another level, it is the foundation of the equation.
Oxford mathematician John Lennox gives the illustration about a beaker of water boiling in a science lab at a university. The professor asks the student, “why is this water boiling?” The student analyzes all the features of what makes water boil — what temperature is needed and for how long and at what specific gravity. The professor says to the student, that’s very good, but the reason why the water is boiling is because I wanted some tea!
Truth includes revelation from God
The hard knowledge of science can give us great and wonderful information, but the spiritual dimension gives us a different layer of information. We treat people well, not just because it adds to social cohesion and creates safe places for humans to develop and thrive — we also do it because every person is made in the image of God. Every person has value and significance. It is not connected to how much you contribute to overall social cohesion or community — you are — at the very core of being — beautiful and treasured by God. It doesn’t matter if you’re a scholar or have intellectual challenges. It doesn’t matter if you’re a criminal or a philanthropist or straight or gay, skinny or fat or anything else — each person carries the image of God in their person and there is something of infinity..of eternity in every person.
Pol Pot and Stalin had very scientific ideas about the worth of single life. One doesn’t have to look at nature very long to see that the strong prey upon the weak in every species. They just have to observe the male lion killing his male cubs to understand that staying powerful requires radical violent behaviour. And yet once we bring God into the equation, we see Abraham bartering with God to spare Sodom and we see Jesus reaching out touching the outcast-leper. In this we see an alternative point of view that is very different at its core.
As soon as we allow God into the conversation, we have to account for what God says. What God’s opinion is on a particular matter becomes an important part of the equation. Dallas Willard makes this comment:
The “double-minded” person is someone with a reality problem. The New Testament writer James, brother of Jesus, precisely describes the life of such a person. He says that individual is “unstable in every way” (1:8). That is what lack of knowledge at the worldview level does to you. It destabilizes your whole life. (Willard, Dallas. Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (Kindle Locations 726-728). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition).
We don’t want to have our whole lives ‘destabilized’ because we fail to accept the reality of God and allow God a place in our discussions. Once we let God into the mix, we quickly see that…
We can know spiritual matters
Once we accept that God has spoken to specific matters and just generally about a lot of areas, we begin to see that spiritual matters shape what we know. This doesn’t mean that the bible speaks to how old the earth is. Anyone who reads the bible will tells you God doesn’t spend a lot of time dealing with modern scientific questions. The eternal matters – things that ultimately matter — that’s what comes out as important for us to see.
I remember seeing one-zero-zero and thinking one hundred. I was taught this in school and never doubted. What I was not taught was that that actually depended on what base number system I was using. In a decimal system, where after nine, you start over in the one’s column and place bump up the tens column, one-zero-zero was one hundred. But what if I were using a binary number system? In binary one-zero-zero represents four. I remember how excited I was when I learned about different number systems. I was 20, Lise and I had just moved into our first apartment — the basement of former school teachers. In our storage room was a box of old school books. Our landlord said if we wanted any of them to take them. The one I was interested in was a math text (and a Latin text). Reading that book — it was chapter one that they taught about number systems was the first time in my entire life that math was interesting to me. It was a result of reading that one chapter from an old high school text book that made me buy more math books and relearn math that I never really understood as a student.
Why do I tell that story. Because science can’t tell you if one-zero-zero is one hundred or if it is four or some other number — several could be true depending on other information. In the computer age, we can’t even say that normally it would be one or the other because base-2, base 8, and base 16 systems are commonly used. Someone needs to give us some more information — information from outside — so we can interpret properly. Once we know it’s binary, we know it is 4. If we learn it is decimal, we know it is 100.
When it comes to learning why the water is boiling — God gives us information from outside. God reveals to us important pieces of information that helps us understand and make decisions about our world. God is the key that unlocks our understanding about the deep questions of life.
What is reality?
Who is well-off or blessed
Who is a truly good person?
How does one become a truly good person?
(these worldview questions are from Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (Kindle Locations 876-878). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. )
These are the deep questions that are of ultimate importance and require information from outside our bubble to answer them. Because God has revealed the answers to these questions (and others) our …
Faith is rooted in evidence.
But it is evidence that is disallowed by an unbelieving world.
Perhaps most importantly, we need to understand that because
Faith and truth are connected, we must act on it.
Pilate asked Jesus: “What is truth?” Many people are cynically asking that question today. People were asking that same question in the early church. The early centuries saw the church grow exponentially. People were accepting the ‘truth’ of Jesus. But why? One reason was that so many christians lived authentically. What God said was truth. What was true was lived — at times — died for.
Yes, there were fakes and phonies — but mostly there was authenticity. They were not doubled minded people but were single-minded in their love for Christ and their commitment to live as kingdom-of-God people.
This is a big deal. When we look at the Western world today, what passes as Christian is often a sad mess of moralistic violent nationalism. This is the realm of the zealots of Jesus day. They were invited into his circle, but they were called to change. To love their enemies not kill them. To be generous with their money and their time. To give value to those on the margins of life and to hunger and thirst for the just way of life what was called in those times – righteousness.
Our truth is rooted in God and his ways. To our world this is seen as a fool’s truth and weakness — but as Paul said long ago to people not unlike us — Christ is both the power of God and the Wisdom of God. (1Cor 1:24)