What is Truth? The Lord Jesus is Truth.
What is Truth? The Lord Jesus is Truth.
“This I 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.’ And Pilate said to Jesus, ‘What is truth?” (John 18:37-38).
TRUTH: (Hebrew, “emet;” Greek, “aletheia”) Truth is the only absolute in the world. If everything else in the world falls apart, only Truth will remain; 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 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);
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.
“I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6).
Farewell Discourse. From John 13:31 to 16:33, Jesus engages in His longest conversation in the Gospels. It is His final message, His wrap-up teaching. He knows this is the last night with His disciples, and He has a lot He wants to communicate with His closest friends and followers. There is much that is happening then, and so His disciples are bewildered and discouraged. Jesus just finished washing their feet like a lowly servant. Confusing. He told them He is leaving. Earth-shattering. He told them one of them would betray Him and one would deny Him. Shocking. All of this is distressing to the disciples. So Jesus tried to encourage them many times during this conversation. He tells them to not let their hearts be troubled. I know this is all very difficult right now, Jesus said, but keep the Faith. Keep looking up. Trust me. Be at peace. Have no fear. His final word of encouragement concluded the Farewell Discourse in John 16:33, “These things have I spoken to you that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage. I have overcome the world.”
I AM. In His Farewell Discourse, Jesus twice claims His divinity with an I AM declaration. First with, I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And then with, I AM the True Vine. The most sacred Name in Judaism was Yahweh, I AM What I AM. Jesus claimed with His I AM metaphors to be co-equal with the Great I AM, Yahweh Himself. He revealed His divine Self by claiming the Name of I AM as His own. This is a scandalous claim, because He is claiming to have an eternal kinship with the Father. He thus forces others into a decision… No sane or honest person would claim to be equal to God. Well then, this claim may just be true, because it’s abundantly clear He is neither insane nor dishonest. Because of His good works and His successful exorcisms, Jesus is clearly not filled with the devil. So what’s left to believe? Jesus claimed to be the I AM.. Maybe it’s true after all!
“And the Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth… For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:14, 17).
How could John do this? How could he presume to summarize all there is to know about the eternal Son of God in two little words? Well, he did. Jesus in a nutshell…Grace and truth. Many Biblical scholars believe that John 1:14 and 17 is an intentional repetition of the phrase in Yahweh’s important self-revelation (Exodus 34:6), which included “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. And Jesus is truly Yahweh in the flesh.
“The Jesus way wedded to Jesus truth brings about the Jesus life. Jesus as the way is the most frequently evaded metaphor among the Christians with whom I have worked for 50 years as a North American pastor. The way comes first. We cannot skip the way of Jesus in our hurry to get to the truth of Jesus as He is worshipped and proclaimed. The way of Jesus is how we come to understand the truth of Jesus, by living Jesus in our homes and workplaces, with our friends and our families.” (Eugene Peterson).
“I AM the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” (Revelation 22:13).
This I AM statement of Jesus is different than all seven of His I AM references to Yahweh in the gospel of John. The timing is different, profoundly so. Here in Revelation we have an I AM claim of Jesus that comes after the Passion, after the Resurrection, after the Ascension, after He takes up His post at the right hand of the Father. His bold I AM claims of being co-equal with Yahweh, the Holy One, are now proven true in the spiritual world of divine experience. Jesus is now seated in the heavenlies, the ultimate fulfillment of all the I AM statements He made while on the earth. Jesus is indeed of one substance with Lord Yahweh. I AM is now reunited with the Great I AM. Jesus and the Father are now, have always been, will always be One, united, I AM What I AM, and I Will Be What I Will Be. The Lord of the Past tense, the Present tense, and the Future tense. The Lord of every tense imaginable, the ultimate “to be” verb, the I AM. Not only does Jesus fulfill all the final intentions of grammar, Jesus incarnates the divine alphabet, from the first letter to the last, from A to Z, from Alpha (the first letter in the Greek alphabet) to Omega (the last letter). Jesus is first to Last, Beginning to End.
Jesus is A to Z, because He is eternal. He was there at the beginning, and He’ll be there at the end. He is the originator of all things, and the fulfillment of all things. He was the starting point of history, and He is its destiny. He is the origin of life, and He is the goal of life. He is the prototype of humanity, and its final glory. He embraces all the eternal truth of God’s knowledge, from the first letter of His first word to the last letter of His last word, from the beginning of time to the conclusion of time, from Creation to Restoration. Jesus is the essence of everything in God’s Reality.
Jesus is the Lord of Language. So naturally He refers to the Greek alphabet three times in the Book of Revelation (1:8; 21:6; 22:13). He owns every letter that can form a word that can state a thought. He is every word of truth that those letters communicate, for He is the ultimate truth, conveying all God’s thoughts, giving form to substance. Language is God’s gift to help us understand God’s thoughts, which means Jesus is the ultimate purpose of language. Words are intended to articulate the wisdom of God, and Jesus is the embodiment of wisdom, so Jesus is the goal of all human and divine language.
Jesus is the world’s only complete sentence. He completely spells out God’s being. He was the first Word, and He will be the last Word, on the path to Truth. Any letter forming any word that does not find its eventual home in Jesus does not contain the knowledge of God. Any such word ends up being nonsense, incomplete, pointless. Jesus is the origin and destiny of every true word, for He is the Truth and He is the Word. Jesus is the starting point and the ending point of all divine knowledge and Reality. Jesus transcends the grammar of tense and time. He is a mystery that will be fully revealed at the end of time. For now, Jesus is God’s complete sentence that cannot be diagrammed.
“Christ is God’s Word abbreviated, in the sense that all that God has to say is summed up in Christ.” (Reardon*). The written Word can be summarized in the Living Word. God has even more to say, because His capacity for thought is unbounded. And even His unfettered thought is merely an extended version of one little Name. Christ is the essential thought in God’s mind. Christ is the essential truth in God’s Reality. When thinking of truth, Christ is everything God has to say on the matter. Jesus is the alpha to omega of God’s thinking, the A to Z of human and divine language.
Jesus contains every letter of the whole alphabet of Reality. He embraces all the in between letters, not just the beginning and end. He is our King of Truth during our in-between time when we walk with him after the beginning of our life and before the end of our life. Those in-between letters are a vital part of Reality for us. “Each of us has been cast as the protagonist in the novel that is our life. We’re assured a happy ending to that novel. But whether we become a noble character or a tragic one depends on how we live out the truth of the gospel in the middle pages.” (Eugene Peterson).
[I am indebted to Rev. Patrick Henry Reardon for getting me on to this track of thinking. His article on Ps. 119 in Christ in the Psalms was instrumental to this piece. Thank you, Rev. Reardon].