Is All Truth God's Truth?

Tom:  We are continuing with the gospel. We’re going through the Gospel of John. We’re in John 17, and we’re going to pick up with verse 17. John:17:17Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.
See All.... Dave, this is a verse we could probably talk about for a month. It says, “Sanctify [this is Jesus speaking] them through thy truth, thy word is truth.”

Dave:  He’s talking to the Father, of course. This is the real Lord’s prayer. The other one that they call the Lord’s Prayer is not the Lord’s prayer. That’s the disciple’s prayer.

Tom:  Right. And this term “truth,” our biblical understanding—tis is the only truth there is, isn’t it?

Dave:  Absolutely. The truth. We know that. “You continue in my word, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” There are a lot of things that are true, maybe even scientific facts, but that is not the truth. They won’t set anyone free, okay? And Jesus said to Pilate, “I have come to bear witness to the truth.” And when he says, “Thy word is truth,” He doesn’t mean “thy word is part of the truth.” Truth is something special.

Tom:  Dave one of the reasons this is so important—we are in a world—the term people use today, they call it “post-modern.” There is no truth. There are no absolutes.

Dave:  Absolutely no absolutes.

Tom:  Right. Your truth is your truth, and my truth is my truth, and all truth is God’s truth. I mean how confusing can it be?

Dave:  Tom, I—probably we haven’t mentioned it on the radio. My eldest son is a philosophy professor—did we mention that? And in his introductory philosophy course, he takes a poll. How many students believe that truth is absolute? He says it hardly varies—about 80 percent deny it and about 20 percent say no, we think it’s absolute. He says, “If you can come up with a truth that is true for you and not for me, that’s true on this planet and not somewhere else, and that was true yesterday and won’t be true tomorrow, I’ll give you an A in this course. You don’t have to do anything else. He says by the end of the semester, it has flipped. About 80 percent believe truth is absolute, and about 20 percent still aren’t convinced.

But we’re not talking about some truth, or something that’s true. There’s an eight-volume set on philosophy, I believe, that I recall looking at, and you look up in the dictionary “truth.” I think they had three lines about truth. What are you going to say? What is truth? When Jesus said, “I’ve come to bear witness to the truth,” Pilate said, “What is truth?” 

Good question. You could think about it for quite awhile. But this is not some scientific fact, so in John 14, where we just were not too many months ago, Jesus said, “I’m going to go away, but I won’t leave you orphans. I’m going to send the Comforter.” He calls “the Comforter”—He says, “even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him,” okay?

Tom:  The Holy Spirit.

Dave:  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, and the world knows nothing of His truth, all right? John:16:13Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.
See All...: “Jesus said, When he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will lead you  [not into some truth, not into part of the truth] into all truth. So we have the Spirit of truth, who leads into all truth, and the world cannot see Him, cannot know Him, knows nothing of His truth, then we know that Freud, Jung, Rogers, you know, the Christian psychologists today say, “Oh, all truth is God’s truth. Well, Freud had some, and so forth, we’ll pick up a little bit here and a little bit there.”

Well, when Jesus says in John:8:45And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.
See All..., I think, somewhere around there, “Because I tell you the truth, you believe me not.” Now that tells you conclusively that the truth is something that the world cannot receive, that the world does not want, and will not believe. You couldn’t substitute for that. “Because I tell you that E=MC²,” or “because I tell you that 10x10=100, you don’t believe me”?—no, Jesus says this is the truth of God that comes through the Holy Spirit revealing God’s Word and the world cannot know it and cannot receive it. “And that is why you don’t believe me, because I am telling you the truth—you continue in my word you will know the truth.” Well, I’m trying to emphasize it, Tom.

Tom:  Well, you need to. Jesus said in 17:17, right here, we just read it: “Sanctify them through thy truth.” Separate them. So, Dave, how do we make truth popular? I mean we’re trying to be popular. We’re trying to do all kinds of things to win the lost and reach out to a community. We take surveys among the lost to see what they want. How much is truth a part of that?

Dave:  Contemporary Christian music—we were just talking about. This is presenting the truth—that the world can’t receive; that the world hates—but that sets free. In fact, Jesus said, “I am the truth,” okay? Well, you pointed out Tom, “Sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth.” The Catholic Church as you know, as an ex-Catholic, they have a certain category of people that they call saints. And you become a saint after you’ve been canonized and long after your death, sometimes—

Tom:  It’s a process, right.

Dave:  Right. And I guess the Congress of Cardinals finally approves it or whatever, the pope makes this declaration. But the Bible is written to saints. The saints at Ephesus, the saints at Colossi, the saints at Corinth. A saint is a person who has come to faith in Christ, has been born again by faith in Jesus Christ as the one who died for their sins, paid the full penalty, rose from the dead, and has come to live His life in them because they’ve opened their hearts to Him, okay?

Tom:  Right, and worship Him in spirit and in truth.

Dave:  Exactly. So, they are sanctified, set apart for God. The world hates them; they’re different from the world. They live for God; they live Christ, okay? And how does that come about?

It comes about, as you pointed out, through the Word of God. It is the Word of God that separates the believer from the unbeliever. Not just to quote it, or paraphrase it please!  No, don’t do that!  And that is one of the things I guess we’ve mentioned that just staggers me. That someone like Eugene Peterson, for example, who wrote The Message, that purports to be a translation of the Bible and actually perverts—takes God’s word [I guess I got a little upset about that on our last program]—but would dare to take God’s Word and change it with his own words! It is the “Word of God, by which we’re born again, by which we live,” and so forth. Here Jesus says, “Thy word is truth,” and that sanctifies people. That sets them apart. You follow the Word of God, you are not of this world. You are living for Christ.

Tom:  Dave, verse 18, “As thou has sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.” With what? To take a survey? To go around and see what people like and what—we’re trying to dilute something so that they’re not immediately offended? By what? By truth.

Dave:  Or we’re going to dialogue, try to come to some consensus—

Tom:  Dave, doesn’t truth bring conviction? When Peter spoke to the multitudes at Pentecost—

Dave:  You can’t argue with truth. You don’t change truth. You don’t massage it around and you don’t revise it and you don’t bring it up to date. Truth is true. By the way, Tom, it proves that we are nonphysical beings. Truth—what does it smell like? What does it taste like? How much does it weigh? What’s the texture, and so forth? Truth—you know, I know, the world knows what we’re talking about when we say “truth.” It has nothing to do with this physical universe. It is a nonphysical concept that cannot arise out of physical activity in a physical brain. It comes from the Spirit of God, first of all, and man, who was created in God’s image, can therefore understand what this is, and it transforms us, and so we’ve been sent into the world to bring God’s truth, and that is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And then, Jesus says, “For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.” Again, the truth is mentioned over and over. It is vital. It is important, and Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man comes unto the Father, but by me.” You don’t come to the Father except through the truth of the gospel. And, Tom, this is powerful. It’s powerful, but it’s not accepted by the world, or by the ecumenical movement, or the mega churches today, who obscure it so as not to offend anyone.

Tom:  Dave, with regard to how we present the truth—we have to do what the scripture says, with meekness, humility, and so on. We can undermine in our presentation the truth, but it’s the truth that sets people free. You said it, the scriptures says it, that’s what’s critical. We cannot compromise on that. We can’t dilute it, we can’t water it down to make it palatable. We just have to present it with meekness and humility.

Dave:  Amen.