Editor’s note:
This is an excerpt adapted from the book (Nelson Group, 2018), by David Jeremiah.
Nearly two thousand years ago, a Roman governor asked a profound yet familiar question to a man about to be executed: “And what is truth?” (John 18:38). We have no way of knowing if Pilate’s question was a serious inquiry or just a sarcastic expression from an exhausted mind, but minutes later, he would hand Jesus over to an angry crowd to be crucified. R. C. Sproul wrote:
“Pilate judged the Truth. He sentenced the Truth. He lashed out at Truth. He mocked the Truth. He crucified the Truth. The irony is that at the very moment he asked his question ‘And what is truth?’, he was looking straight at the pure embodiment of Truth. He who is the Truth had just told him: ‘Everyone who is on the side of the truth listens to my voice.’
Since then, human beings have asked the same question as Pilate: “And what is the truth?” And like Pilate, they have not been able to find the answer.
The truth is found in God
The truth corresponds to reality; what it is. That is why the truth is found in God, in the great I Am. The philosophical search for truth ends with God himself. Do you remember the story of Joseph in Egypt, how he was falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife and sentenced to go to prison? (Gen. 39). He knew a truth: that of his innocence, and he also knew that God knew that he was innocent. Therefore, in the face of the lies of others, he committed himself to God’s truth, and his faith was vindicated.
He is truth personified. Christ is the definitive revelation of God to man
This is not just a story from the Bible. The same thing happened to Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent thirty years on death row in an Alabama prison for murders he didn’t commit. Falsely accused, falsely imprisoned, and repeatedly rejected by appeal courts, Anthony Hinton kept his faith alive in the God he believed knew the truth… only to be exonerated and released in 2015. He recounts his story in the book The Sun Shines: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row.
How do you live under the weight of a lie when you know the truth? This is how Anthony Hinton survived:
“When all the courts were saying ‘no,’ I believed that God was still saying yes. Somehow, I had to find that faith and reach down to the depths of my soul to believe in the teaching my mother had given me when I was still just a boy: that God can do everything except fail. He sits on top, and looks down. That is the true way in which I was able to survive those thirty years of pure hell…
I can say that God may have put me in prison to save my life. He may have put me in prison to listen to him; to write a book, to help transform the hearts and souls of people and help them understand what authentic forgiveness means, to understand what their true friendship is, to make people understand what the legal system really is . I have to believe that God allowed me to go there in order to show me all those things.”
God is the Truth
There is one thing that is truth, and the God of truth knows what it is: “He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. God is faithful; he does not practice injustice ”(Deut. 32: 4). We may not always recognize or understand the ways in which God chooses to act on his truth, or reveal it at any given moment in time. Even if it takes thirty years, as happened to Anthony Ray Hinton, what we are called to do is trust in the God of truth.
If you want to know the truth of God, it is necessary that you come to know Christ, because only He is the truth.
When the Bible says: “God, in the beginning” (Gen. 1:1), it is defining the ultimate and ultimate reality. God is “the Being that exists in itself; he is the Creator of everything that exists; God is the truth, and all truth is a truth of God. In the Bible he is called “the God of truth.” The Father, the first Person of the Trinity, is true (Ps. 31:5; Is. 65:16).
Jesus Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, who proceeds from the Father, is “full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:14). Because he is God, Jesus justifiably proclaims himself to be “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6). The Bible teaches us that Jesus Christ was and is the communicator of the truth, the witness of the truth, the origin of the truth and the preacher of the truth. The it is truth personified. Christ is the definitive revelation of God to man.
How can you know the Truth?
Truth is not a system or a philosophy, but is a Person. If you want to know the truth of God, it is necessary that you come to know Christ, because only He is the truth. In exactly the same way as the first two Persons of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit is also true (Jn. 15:26; 16:13; 1 Jn. 5:6).
Truth is not some kind of nebulous idea, a flexible concept, or a theoretical assumption; it is a solid entity, clearly defined and unchangeable. It is the ultimate reality, residing in the Triune God of the universe, and not open to reassessment or redefinition.
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