God’s truth, as revealed in the Bible, never changes. It also provides us with an absolute standard of reality by which we must live.

What is truth?

We teach our kids a lot of things, don’t we?  We teach them walk and talk and feed themselves.  Right now, I’m trying to teach my three-year-old to pee in the potty.  But have you noticed we never have to teach our kids to lie?  Lying just seems to come naturally to them.  I’m beginning think we have ghosts in our house, because none of my kids ever do anything wrong!  Something can get broken, for example, but when I ask them what happened, none of them know.  It’s amazing.   

We do come by our inclination to lie naturally.  We got it from our original parents, Adam and Eve.  They fell for the lies of Satan, and then they resorted to lying to cover up their own sin.  People have been doing it ever since. People twist and stretch the truth for many reasons: to get out of trouble, for financial gain, to impress people.  And then there are those that even deny that the truth exists.  So, with all the lies out there, how can we know the truth?  What is the truth?   

The Truth about Truth

God is the origin of truth.

The truth can be defined as that which conforms to reality, or whatever aligns with the way things really are.  That may lead us to ask, what is reality?  God, as Creator, defines reality.  He created reality; therefore, He created truth. 

In fact, God is truth, in all three persons of the Trinity.  Isaiah 65:16 refers to God as “the God of truth.”  In John 14:6, Jesus claims to be the truth.  The Holy Spirit is also called the Spirit of Truth in John 14:17.   So, truth is whatever conforms to God.  Because God is truth, all of His actions and all of His words reveal truth.  God is incapable of lying.  He has chosen to reveal His truth to us through His Word, in the Bible.  

There is such thing as absolute truth.

The Bible, as God’s revelation of Himself, is our standard of truth, although that directly contradicts what the secular world around us is saying.  In the mid-1900s, the post-modern movement emerged.  One of the main tenets of this movement is that there is no such thing as absolute truth.  They believe that there is no overarching truth that is valid for everyone.  Instead, truth is derived for each person from their own experiences. 

Have you ever heard the Buddhist story of the six blind men and the elephant?  Six men had been blind from birth, so they had never seen an elephant.  However, they had heard various reports about elephants, and they wanted to know for themselves what an elephant was like.  So, they were brought before an elephant and allowed to touch it.  One man touched the side of the elephant and thought it was like a wall.  Another touched the tusk and thought it was like a spear.  Another touched the trunk and thought it was like a snake.  One man touched the leg and thought it was like a tree.  Another man touched the ear and thought it was like a huge fan.  The last man touched the tail and thought it was like a rope.  

According to post-modernism, we’re like those blind men.  We can’t see the truth, so we must fumble around, forming our own truth based on our personal experience.

However, Jen Wilkin points out the error with this way of thinking:

The story of elephant finds its origins in Buddhist and Hindu writings.  It assumes that all of us are blind.  But what if there were a sighted person who could step in and edify the blind men as to the true nature of the elephant?  Even better, what if that person were a miracle worker who could grant sight to the blind?  Such a person might then just trouble himself further to assist those formerly blinded with how to properly perceive a world they had once navigated only in darkness.

You see, the blindness of those men didn’t change the nature of the elephant.  It merely hindered them from being able to perceive the truth.  However, the truth remained that the elephant was a huge gray animal with tusks, large ears, a trunk, thick legs, a skinny tail.  Had someone been able to grant them sight, they would have been able to see the truth quite clearly.

That’s what Jesus does for us, and that’s what the Bible does as well.  Without them, we stumble blindly through a dark world trying to do our best without being able to see clearly what’s around us.  But God has opened our eyes to truth, and He guides us in how to live that truth.

The world says that truth varies from person to person, but God’s truth is the same for everyone.

Without Jesus or the Bible, people have no standard of truth.  They are blind, and try create their own ideas of what’s right or wrong, ideas that vary from person to person and from culture to culture.  However, God’s truth is the same for every person in every place during time. 

That’s why there are some things that every culture maintains as wrong.  In fact, the legal system identifies certain crimes as mala in se, a Latin term meaning “wrong or evil in itself.”  This would include things such as murder and rape. 

How can people who deny absolute truth claim that certain crimes are evil in and of themselves?  To claim that anything is evil is to acknowledge that there is a standard of morality.  To deny absolute truth is foolish.  The Bible makes it clear that everyone is accountable to God’s law. 

Paul writes in Romans 2:14-15, “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.  They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.”

God has written His law on everyone’s hearts and has given them a conscience to discern right and wrong.  He has made His truth known to everyone, but many people suppress the truth.   When we deny the truth of God’s Word and try to create our own truth, bad things happen.  What is the result of people denying the truth? We see the results in Romans 1:28-32:

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.  They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.  Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

These people know the truth, but they choose to deny the truth.  That’s what sin is, though, a rejection of truth.  We don’t believe that sin leads to death.  We think God is lying, so we choose to do our own thing rather than obey His law.

Like God, His truth never changes.

Some people read passages like the one we just read in Romans, with their lists of sins, and they claim that those passages were written for a specific audience in a specific time.  They argue that those passages are no longer relevant for us today.  Humans have changed, evolved, or whatever, so we no longer need to trouble ourselves with such old-fashioned morality. 

However, God’s law and His word is a reflection of His character.  If God is truth, then every word He speaks must be truth.  If God doesn’t change, then His word and His standards never change.  What was true 2000 years ago when Jesus was on Earth is still just as true for us today.  What God said was wrong all those years ago is still just as wrong.  God’s truth doesn’t change because God doesn’t change.

Because God’s truth doesn’t change, the meaning of the truth doesn’t change.  This is especially important to remember during Bible study.  Our job is to discover the true meaning of the text, not read our own personal meaning into it.  God, as the origin of truth, had already determined the meaning of the text.  The truth is not based upon our interpretation of it.

Implications of God’s Truthfulness

Jen Wilkin, in her book In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character, lists several ways that the truth should impact our lives.  We should:

• Know the truth (John 8:32)
• Walk in the truth (3 John 1:4)
• Speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15)
• Be sanctified in the truth (John 17:17)
• Rejoice in the truth (1 Cor. 13:6)
• Rightly handle the truth (2 Tim. 2:15)
• Obey the truth (1 Peter 1:22)

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The information in this post was based on the following resources:

In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character by Jen Wilkin

The Attributes of God DVD by Steven Lawson

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.