Choice Word: “Emet” (Truth)
Choice Word: “Emet” (Truth).
CAUTION: SKIM AT YOUR OWN RISK. In this era of amazing advances in technology, there are sometimes unexpected consequences that turn out to be harmful to our Christian faith. One of these harmful improvements is the flood of believers who read scripture online, on the smart phone, on the computer screen. I’m convinced there should be a warning label on every one of the online Bibles… CAUTION: SKIM AT YOUR OWN RISK. So many of us now read the Word like we would read our emails or social media or the daily news. We skim the material hurriedly, superficially, carelessly. We skim the Scripture. Skim-reading the Bible doesn’t really bury the seed very deeply, of course. And in our skimming, we would be more likely to just skip over an important word or phrase without thinking, a word that could be vital to the whole passage. The fact is, the Bible is full of single words or short phrases that are too important to simply gloss over as if it wasn’t there. There are times in the Word when single words are intended to feed us, nourish our faith, stimulate us to think at a deeper level about the biblical text.
There are single words in Scripture that are like stop signs asking us to stop and consider carefully, to pause before moving forward in the reading. This series on my blog will try to unpack some of these power-packed words or phrases in Scripture… Words like: Behold; Rejoice; Truly; Woe; Blessed; Beware; Come; If. And I will attempt to also explore the meanings of some short phrases that are single words in the original biblical language, such as “Himeni” (Here I am); “Shema” (Listen and Do’); “Splagchnizonai” (deeply moved with compassion); “pistence” (believe), and “kal-v’chomer” (How much more). If it is poetically possible to “see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wildflower, and hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour,” as William Blake once imagined, then certainly we readers of Scripture can find a world of meaning in a single word, we can grasp something profound in a simple phrase.
“What is truth?” (John 18:38).
Emet = a Hebrew word meaning primarily either truth or faithfulness. Emet has also been translated secondarily as stability, certainty, trustworthiness, constancy. In Hebrew, “faithfulness” and “truth” are interchangeable, and the literal meaning is: True to His word; steadfast loyalty; trustworthy; truthful about promises; reliable; constant and dependable; act in good faith; certain in commitment; His word is His bond. Many Biblical scholars believe that John 1:14, where John states that Jesus is “full of grace and truth,” is an intentional repetition of the phrase in Yahweh’s important self-revelation (Exodus 34:6), “abounding in love and faithfulness.” John 1 no doubt hearkens back to Yahweh’s nature in Exodus 34, flatly stating that Jesus is of the very same eternal nature as Yahweh, the glorious God of the Hebrew Bible. The fact that the Hebrews saw truth and faithfulness as interchangeable points to God’s character, that He is true to His word, true to His nature, that God keeps truth certainly and with stability and trustworthiness. God is literally, truly faithful.
TRUTH: (Hebrew, “emet;” Greek, “aletheia”) Truth is the only absolute in the world. If everything else in the world falls part, only Truth will remain standing; the building blocks of all creation; the framework upon which we build our faith; the true Reality that has established the world’s reality; that which can never be truly altered or changed; that which is universally trustworthy as facts of life; the foundation of what is truly real in our experience; the plumblines from which to measure our lives; that which is common knowledge in God’s mind; that which lines up with God’s perspectives; established facts from God as opposed to a person’s changeable opinions or preferences; that which is solid and certain as opposed to a lie, deceit, an illusion or superstition; the tangible fundamentals issued forth from the intangible mind of God. Truth is always true even when discounted or disbelieved. Since the Almighty God is the ultimate source of all truth, then it follows that the ultimate presence of truth resides in the Trinity of Truth: Father God is Truth, the Lord Jesus is Truth, and the Holy Spirit is Truth.
“One word of truth outweighs the world.” (Alexandre Solzhenitsyn, Russian author, early 20th century);
God is Truth – the One who created Reality and established it on the earth; the universal Fact that founded the world; the divine Reference Point for all that is true; the one fundamental essence of trueness.
God is Faithfulness – the One who is perfectly loyal to His righteous nature; the Being who is purely committed to His trustworthiness; He who is permanently, unfailingly true to His promises.
“This is why I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the Truth. Everyone who is a friend of the Truth, who belongs to the Truth, listens to my voice.” (John 18:37).
Mission Statement of Jesus. What led up to Pilate’s famous question as he stood toe-to-toe with Jesus? What prompted Pilate’s question was the Son of God giving His life purpose in one sentence: to “bear witness to the truth.” Jesus took on flesh in order to reveal the indisputable fact of God’s existence in the world. Jesus testified to the truth by revealing Himself, the Author of truth. Jesus came into the world to show us that truth actually exists. He became incarnate to show the world what God’s living Truth looks like in real life.
Who, Not What. We don’t know if Pilate was asking his famous question, “What is truth,” as a cynic, a skeptic, a manipulator, or an earnest seeker of the answer. But we do know he asked the wrong question of Jesus, didn’t he? Instead of What, he should have asked Who. Tragically, he didn’t realize that he was staring directly into the Answer to his question, standing right there in front of him. Little did he realize that truth is a Person, not an abstract concept. It’s hard to blame Pilate though, because we don’t normally think of an intangible concept as being a tangible, flesh and blood person. When an abstraction turns out to be an actual Person, so much so that the concept is the Person’s identity, that’s difficult to digest. Is it even possible for a human being to be so saturated with something, so in union with and in synch with it, that the person can be identified as that concept? No, that is humanly impossible. It’s difficult enough to try to understand a divine being who contains all the truth in the universe, but to literally be that truth incarnate? Faith needs to be activated, to say the least. When an established fact like a mathematical concept is understood, that’s one thing. But when that concept becomes somehow a tangible reality and takes on flesh? But to believe in God is to accept that this type of impossibility is possible. As it turned out, Pilate, Truth had a pulse, God’s pulse, and you didn’t have eyes to see it. The certain fact is that Jesus was so deeply joined in union with truth, truth is so invested in Him, that God is actually Truth itself.
Concept to Reality. The more we think about it, though, the more we can see this principle that God loves to turn the abstract into something tangible. In His mercy and wisdom, God makes truth accessible to us by taking the impersonal and making it personal. Word became flesh (John 1:14). Wisdom is embodied in Christ (1 Cor. 1:24); the Spiritual becomes personal (John 14-16). Love is an abstract principle until it is fleshed out, put into practice (1 Cor. 13). Tangible creation was just an idea in the Creator’s mind until He made the material world out of nothing (Genesis 1-2). So for truth to become a Person, for God to be Truth itself, maybe this isn’t so foreign an idea. And it follows that if the Trinitarian Godhead is Truth itself, that means that the Father is Truth, the Son is Truth, and the Spirit is Truth.
The Spirit of Truth. The longest conversation that Jesus had with His disciples is known as His Farewell Address, found in John 13-16. There is no doubt that Jesus chose His last words carefully and underlined them with special importance. He spoke of His leaving, among other things, which saddened His disciples very much. But then Jesus sought to encourage His disciples by declaring that when He leaves, He will be giving them a unique gift, the Gift of a lifetime, His Holy Spirit. Significantly, Jesus referred to His Spirit as the “Spirit of Truth” three times in His farewell words. We learned some fascinating and profoundly helpful aspects of the Holy Spirit in these words of Jesus near the end:
(1.) The Spirit of Truth will dwell within us forever. He will be accessible and helpful at all times, and will remain as close to each of us as our next breath;
(2.) The Spirit of Truth is largely unknown in this world, which is blind to the truths of God;
(3.) The Spirit of Truth is sent to us by Jesus from the Father. In other words, in this Trinitarian mystery, the Holy Spirit was commissioned by the Son and given to us directly from the Father;
(4.) The Spirit of Truth can only be released to us if Jesus returns to the Father in heaven. When Jesus goes, the Spirit comes and stays;
(5.) By revealing the Truth of Jesus Christ, the Spirit of Truth, among other things, will convict of the truth of our sinfulness, of our need to look for Christ for our righteousness, and the truth of the eternal judgment of the evil one;
(6.) The Spirit of Truth will guide all believers into all the truth of Christ, into whatever special truths there are to know about Jesus. In this role of guide, He will teach and instruct us, will reveal and remind us of what is to be known of the Lord;
(7.) The Spirit of Truth submits to the Father and the Son and doesn’t even give Himself the authority to speak on His own. The Spirit speaks only of what He has heard from Christ. The Spirit is the ultimate listener, will hear the word of Jesus, and will declare those truths to us;
(8.) The Spirit of Truth is Good News for us! We are not abandoned or left alone to fend for ourselves. We don’t have to stumble blindly through the Christian faith trying to figure out what we are to believe, what we are to do next, how we progress spiritually, how we prepare for eternal life with God, what the Scripture has to say to us. Good News! The Spirit of Truth will live in us to do all that needs to be done, with our cooperation, as He takes us in triumph to the finish line! The fact is we can only understand spiritual truths when we are able to discern them through the Spirit of Truth.
(9.) The Spirit of Truth has already absorbed from Jesus what is in the mind of God by virtue of their intimate fellowship with each other. The Divine Three do not keep secrets from each other, and they all know what is on each other’s mind. They are so intimately in union that they are eternally indivisible, and somehow inside each other. The Spirit knows everything the Son knows, who knows everything the Father knows, who knows everything in the universe there is to know. What a wondrous mystery!
“The wisdom we speak of is the mystery of God previously hidden. It was to us God revealed these things by His Spirit. For the Holy Spirit searches out everything and shows us God’s deep secrets. No one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit. And we have received God’s Spirit so we can know the wonderful things God has freely given to us. We do not use words that came from human wisdom. Instead, we speak words given to us by the Spirit, using the Spirit’s words to explain spiritual truths.” (1 Corinthians 2:7-13).
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” (Blaise Pascal, French scientist, mid-17th century);