Here’s the deal: There is either such a thing as Truth or there isn’t. We may also refer to Truth as “reality,” which is what the biblical Greek word aletheia means. If there is Truth, its source must be external to each human being, unless you can make a frog. If you can, you may also make up reality for all the rest of us. But if one can’t make a frog, neither can he make up Truth and think it is right just because he believes it. We don’t do that at a bank, do we? “Hi, I have $10M in my account and I’d like to withdraw it.” And the teller would say: “Get real.”
Today, “postmodernism” absurdly claims that there is no such thing as Truth, and that each person gets to make up his own truth. Huh? Isn’t that claim itself a statement of “truth”? Sure it is. At the root of this fallacy is the inherent human desire to be god, that is, to determine within oneself what is right or wrong, good or evil, etc. I have learned that Pogo was right when he said, “I have met the enemy, and he is us.” My main problem is SELF, as in self-ish, self-centered, self-righteous, self-pitying, self-deluded, etc., etc. ad nauseam. What that means is that “my truth” is bound to clash with, and stomp on, “your truth,” and then what do we do?
My truth may not stomp on your truth quite like Chairman Mao’s “truth” stomped on about 50M Chinese, whom he murdered without a shred of compunction. I’m going to guess that you agree with me that he was wrong in doing that, but WHO SAYS he was wrong? His dialectical materialism told him it was the right thing to do, so who am I to say he was wrong? Does it not make sense that if there is no standard of Truth that comes from beyond the mind of man, life is at best a meaningless crapshoot, and at worst a cruel nightmare with the biggest gun being “right”?
And so we get down to the bottom line of life: WHO SAYS? And God clears His throat: “Ahem, uh, I might have something to say, folks.” Given that the odds of Darwinian evolution accounting for life as we know it dwarf the odds of an explosion in a print shop producing a dictionary, logic dictates that creation’s panoramic plethora of otherwise inexplicable examples must at least give one pause to consider the existence of a Creator. Come on, a freakin’ flagellum with 38 moving parts or whatever, the human eyeball, DNA, a Virginia hummingbird with a yearly winter motel reservation in South America, and a woodpecker who hasn’t bashed in his own brain (plus thousands more such examples) would move a rational person to re-think the “everything came from nothing” fable.
And IF that Creator claimed to have spoken to mankind, the next logical step would be to closely examine the document to see if perhaps it exhibits the same degree of awesome perfection evident in creation. Some years back a Ford Motor Company® commercial boldly (and ridiculously) claimed, “The closer you look, the better we look.” Yo, Henry, give me a break, dude. I put your shiny new bumper under a microscope, and it is full of holes!
The point is that no human being can say that about anything he has made, but God can say it, and He does. He claims to have spoken to about 40 people during a 1500-year period, and they claim to have written what He told them. The idea that those 40 people collaborated to produce the remarkable cohesion that even a cursory glance at Scripture yields is ludicrous. No, there is but one Author of Scripture, and that One is also the Author of Life. Either the Bible is what it claims to be: the only “God-breathed” source of Truth and a manual for human living, or it is not. But how can we say it isn’t without studying it?
And that takes us back to JESUS CHRIST, who is either who he said he is, or he is not. WHO SAYS? He says: “I am the only begotten Son of God…I am the way, the truth, and the life…I am the only way to God.” And God says, “Amen,” which He punctuates with the exclamation point of the Resurrection, His proof that Jesus is who he claims to be. For the record, there is enough historical proof of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that even an average lawyer could make it stand up in any honest court of law, should there be such a thing.
Without Jesus, and the written Word, “God” is only an abstraction. Without Jesus, people have no choice but to make up their own “God,” and it is always in their own image, for that is all it can be. And that is the state of the world today: most people either believing what they made up about “God” or believing what someone else made up.
Simply put, the Bible is the story of Two Men, two “Adams.” Each of them had free will, and the first guy’s choice (“Not your will but mine”) ruined everything God had in mind, that is, a perfect race on a perfect earth. So God implemented Plan B (or “J”), another Adam, and his choice (“Not my will but yours”) to die for all man’s sins guaranteed that God’s original goal will come to pass—but only for people who choose to receive the gift of everlasting life Jesus has made available. God will not force it on anyone.
It is JESUS who separates Christianity from “religion.” Religion is man-made, with man as its subject and God as its object. In contrast, Christianity is a relationship between God, the subject (He was here first) and man, the object of His relentless love. It is Jesus who perfectly re-presented the heart of God to the world, and who showed us not only how much God loves us but also how much He hates evil and loves to destroy it. Jesus gave us “previews of coming attractions,” for when he comes back to the earth, he will do in toto those things he did on a small scale: feeding people, healing the sick, raising the dead, and destroying Satan’s status quo of evil and oppression.
God tells us that His will is for all people to be saved from sin and death, AND to come unto an experiential knowledge of the truth. Should what you read here motivate you in regard to the former, The Living Truth Fellowship can help you with the latter. But regarding salvation, the Word says that anyone who confesses Jesus as Lord and who believes that God raised him from the dead is, in that split-second, “born again of incorruptible seed.” That is, you receive the divine nature of your heavenly Father, and you belong to Him forever, no matter what you do for the rest of your life on earth. Why? SEED. Once you are born into God’s family, you cannot be unborn.
Because of the sin nature we each inherited from the First Adam, the alternative to everlasting life is everlasting non-existence, aka “death,” defined in any language as the end of life (the insanely unjust idea of eternal torment is yet another Satanic lie not found in Scripture). And as the bumper sticker on my car states, “DEATH SUCKS.” Given the magnificence of God’s handiwork that is evident even in this fallen world, what He has in mind for us in the new world to come can be nothing short of indescribably spectacular. I hope to see you there.
