John 18.38 38 Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” (ESV)
Well, what is it!?
Truth, to many, is just a state of flux – a fluidity of thought or perception that
keeps on changing and changing like the surface of the water on a rushing
stream. There’s the stream; there’s the water; there’s the surface, but the
surface keeps on changing in variations on a theme, but never the same way
twice. Truth to them is fluid.
How would/do you define truth? What is it to you? If your
version of truth isn’t founded upon the standard common to man, then your truth
remains like most everyone else’s: fluid.
Truth however, is static, never changing. Truth is the
stream that never runs dry. Truth is a constant thought or perception based
upon a single standard and despite the changes in circumstances and time – and perception
– truth remains. It our time and space, gravity is truth, there is no changing
it and it is founded in the specifics of physics – the revelations and
knowledge of things in our physical state in this universe. What goes up must come down.
So when Pilate (I’m thinking sarcastically, cynically)
asks Jesus, “What is truth?” he was asking with a resigned heart, a heart that
could not comprehend what truth really was to him. To him there was no truth.
To many the thought of truth is simply this: there is no truth; there’s no way out, and things are always going to
come to some miserable end… (unless, of course, I win the lottery).
Preceding Pilate’s sarcastic rebuke was Jesus’ statement:
“For this purpose I was born and for this
purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who
is of the truth listens to my voice.” In other words, truth is only found in God. And Jesus told a hard-hearted man that
very thing and the hard-hearted man retorted: What the (bleep) is truth!?
Pilate knew Jesus was in deep weeds with the priests and
Pharisees but he didn’t recognize his own peril and cynically denied the truth:
there is a God and I don’t know Him.
Some don’t know to know – all they know is what they’ve been told and they have
no means of measuring the validity of the information they’ve come into contact
with. That was Pilate – all he knew was what he’d been told and Jesus rebuffed
it: “Everyone who is of the truth listens
to My voice.”
Either you’re of the truth or you’re not, and the only
way to be of the truth is to respond to the encounters with God. That happens
through our interactions with nature. That happens with our interaction with
the Bible; and that happens with our
interaction with God. And God is interacting with us all the time.
Truth is only from God and it could be called a divine
perspective that is only given to those who listen to God in the general ways
of nature, or the specific ways of the Bible, or bumping into the Holy Spirit –
note: when you bump into Him you usually know it…
Father, thank You for the truth that You are God and we
are not. Help me to hear the truth, to live the truth, and to share the truth
with those I encounter every day. Starting today. Amen.
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