Truth that can be depended on
Meditation for the week of September 14, 2008
John 17:17, “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.â€
The Lord didn’t make His promises with his fingers crossed behind his back. We used to do that as kids so that our promises didn’t really count as promises. The Lord keeps His promises and tells the truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth. When Pilate asked “What is truth? (John 18:38)â€, he had the truth right in front of him. Jesus had said to his disciples in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.†Of course, Pilate didn’t believe that.
Some people think that truth changes. Truth doesn’t change but what we think is true often changes. The law of gravity will never change. Things that go up must come down. They will never go the other way until the rapture of the church. Black and white will always be black and white as long as the sun rises in the east and the sun will always rise in the east until this world is destroyed by fire (2 Peter 3:10).
People often tell us that what we believe is “true for youâ€. That makes it sound like truth is relative and that humans have the final say as to what truth is. Unfortunately, that not only isn’t true, it isn’t even good reasoning. If the Bible says that the Lake of Fire exists, either it is true or it is not. My believing it is true will not cause it to exist and my not believing it is true will not keep it from existing. The truth does not change over time or from one individual to another.
We can know that there is a God through Creation. But the only way we can really know God is when He talks to us and tells us about himself. He did that verbally through prophets and he has done that through the writing down of the prophetic message for us in the Bible today. Communicating truth to us is so important that in John 1 the Lord is presented as the Word. He not only is the messenger with a message, He is the message itself. He conveys the Truth to us.
Truth is what sets the Christian apart or sanctifies them. Since words are powerful motivators, those who trust in the Lord reverence His Word. We study it, memorize it and try to understand it. We try to let the Bible guide the way we live. Christians don’t always understand the Truth, but we will defend it and we will always trust it. The truth of Scripture is what convinces us that there is a heaven and a hell. It assures us that Christ died for us and it is because we are confident in the promises of the Scriptures that w e can say that we know we have eternal life (1 John 5:13).
A Christian would never pick and choose what they want to believe in the Bible. We know that the old testament illustrates new testament Truth so we don’t feel the need to offer animal sacrifices or to keep the Feasts of the old testament. But we believe that those ceremonies were given by God to Israel and that they teach us Spiritual Truth today.
I know people who claim to be saved or born again, and when I ask them what promise of Scripture gives them a sense of peace on that issue, they haven’t even thought about it. They couldn’t have trusted in the promises of God because they don’t know what they are. People are saved only if they “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 16:31)†and we believe on Him when we trust Him and His promises.
Our attitude toward the Word of God is what sanctifies or sets a true disciple of Christ apart from the rest of the world. The truth will make us different.
Bruce Collins