What Is Truth?
Word-Of-The-Day: ‘”What is truth?” retorted Pilate <responding to Jesus’s claim as being the King of Kings>…’ (John 18:38a); ‘Jesus answered <the Apostle Thomas>, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”’ (John 14:6)
My Dad was not a ‘pillar of Faith’ as I was growing up, though he was a man of principle and honor. Though he would not seem to be wise based on many of his decisions and actions, he did have some sage tidbits of wisdom that I still use today. One of them was, ‘there are three sides to every story – my side, your side, and somewhere in between is the truth.’ When you are that person on the outside looking in – what is Truth; person #1, person #2, or some point in between the two? How do you determine the Truth?
Pontius Pilate faced a similar quandary when Jesus was turned over to him for the crime of treason, or being against Caesar Augustus by claiming He was ‘King’, as the Pharisees saw that while they believed Jesus was a heretic to their cause (as they did not believe Jesus was the Messiah and thus He was against them), they could not pin that on Him, so their next big idea was to turn Jesus over to Pilate for him to punish Jesus as a traitor to Rome.
What Pilate got from the Pharisees were half-truths. Jesus was not a heretic, but was against the religious practices of the Jewish priests who perverted the Laws the Covenant for their glory at the cost of God’s glory. Jesus was also never a traitor to Caesar or the Romans; Jesus showed respect to Rome whenever confronted with the choice, whether it was helping the Roman centurion (Luke 7:1-10) or by paying taxes (Matthew 22:15-22). But Pilate asked the question to Jesus, ‘What is truth?’, as Pilate, who did not know Jesus as the Son of God, saw both the Pharisee’s claims upon Jesus, and Jesus’ claim as the eternal King of the Jews as perspectives. What the truth was, Pilate likely deduced, could be found in between those two viewpoints, the Pharisees’ and Jesus’.
It is not known whether Pilate did further investigations later to seek the Truth. If he did, Pilate would have discovered that Jesus was telling the Truth as He is the Truth, and that His claim as being King was not a perspective, but a fact. (It is hoped Pilate did so, and if so we’ll be able to discuss this with him one day in our future.)
I have been a proponent of the adage, ‘facts, not feelings’, as feelings are not truthful unless they are grounded in facts. Our society has become one that judges on perspectives based on feelings and not facts, and that is why facts are now ignored. Gender, behavior, and morality are now feeling-based abstracts that used to be factually-based truths, as are the heretics of today (like the Pharisees before them) assigning characteristics of Jesus based on their desires and not of the facts that are spelled out in the Bible. The True Jesus is often not found in today’s Christian churches, based on the number of denominations turning toward secular norms and not Biblical ones in teaching, preaching, and leadership.
Take news, declarations, comments, and viewpoints as perspectives, then use the power of Jesus (through the direction of the Holy Spirit) and Scriptural reference to seek the Truth, as it will set you free from the sin of the falsehood of perspective (per John 8:31-32). This goes for the news as well as sermons, Bible studies, and commentaries. As Ronald Reagan once offered, ‘trust but verify’. Verify with what Jesus provides us to secure the Truth.
