Jesus as the Truth
Quickly run through a mental list of your friends. Some are even-tempered and calm regardless of the circumstances. Others seem to enjoy intense emotions. They feel things strongly and can be touched deeply with joy, grief, anger, or fear. That’s not to denigrate our emotions. Our subjective feelings can be useful and motivate us to do what is right when channelled properly. However, there’s more to life than our emotional responses.
A sense of something that is fixed, firm and unchanging outside of ourselves gives us security and allows us to enjoy our own shifting emotional responses to things because we know that our changing feelings are not changing reality. We would really want reality to track with our emotions. Besides it would be a logical impossibility. The same external event can produce a wide variety of responses in different individuals.
When a large corporation builds an office tower which blocks my favourite view of the sunset, I am sad. Yet the manager of the project is thrilled to have work for himself and his crew. Municipal politicians will be gleefully counting the tax dollars the project will generate. Prospective employees will be filled with hope. At the same time, owners of small local businesses of the same type will experience intense fear. One event, a variety of emotions.
While our spiritual experiences are often subjective, the reality of our spiritual life is not built on our perceptions. Truth is the external reality which anchors our experience. The Bible sheds a light on the usual meaning of our concept of truth which is different from the common understanding. We think of objective truth as something that can be proven empirically through scientific experimentation. The Bible reveals the Truth as a Person.
The apostle John takes a philosophical bent in his writing. In the first chapter of his gospel, we read that the Lord Jesus Christ “became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) Later on, he recorded the words of Jesus as He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John14:6)
Jesus, whom we recognise as the Son of God incarnated as a man, is revealed to be the Truth - not just an illustration, example, or manifestation of the truth, but Truth, itself. We don’t usually think of anyone in these terms, so it’s acceptable to be surprised by this. Yet, the idea that Truth is embodied in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ is clearly stated in the Bible.
In his second letter, John wrote of a local church and his response to its members, then he included all other Christians with Himself when he addressed his letter to “the elect lady and her children, (a specific local church) whom I love in truth, and not only I, but also all those who have known the truth, because of the truth which abides in us and will be with us forever. (2 John1:1-2) Here, John gives us this picture of the truth living in us as believers. He’s not talking about a set of theological propositions, but the indwelling presence of Christ.
When I think about the Lord Jesus Christ as “the Truth,” I respond in several ways. Firstly, I see that there is a relationship involved. The truth is not about a set of laws to obey, but the Son of God to love.
Secondly, I see that there is an external absolute in the spiritual realm. For Christians, that external absolute is the Lord Jesus Christ, Himself. This makes a lie of the rather bizarre concept that all religions are the same; they just have different names for God. Pick up any newspaper from the last four or five years and you’ll soon see that the God of the Bible is different in Character from the gods of other religions and that He has quite different expectations for His followers.
Thirdly, I see that the Truth is not something that humans come to by consensus, even if that consensus is based on scientific observation. Truth first and foremost is spiritual in nature. That spills over into the physical world and scientific observation of nature can help, but it is limited in that all it can observe is the world as it exists after sin spoiled God’s original perfect creation.
If we need Truth as the foundation for our lives, it is equally safe to say that we need Jesus as the foundation of our lives. After all, He is the Truth.
Ron Hughes
© July 2006
