Who wants to build their life around a lie?  No one, I expect—at least if they are serious.

God has given each of us a natural desire for truth.  It is part of how He has made us in His own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26-27).  God is a God of truth, and He has given each of us a desire to know what is true.

Our culture has—at least historically—been built around a commitment to truth.  For example, witnesses in a court of law have normally been asked to swear to the following statement: “Do you swear that the evidence you shall give to the court in this matter shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth [so help you God]?”  (Italics added.)

Years ago, when I was a college student, it took me three different majors to make it through.  One of these was being a philosophy major.  It was my longest major in terms of length of time, but it was not the one I graduated with.  As a philosophy major, I had courses in two areas that were both new concepts to me:

            Epistemology as a study of how we can know the truth.

            Metaphysics as a study of what is ultimately real. 

I personally believe in a correspondence view of truth.  What is true accords with ultimate reality.  So for me, there is a natural connection between metaphysics with its focus on the nature of ultimate reality and epistemology with its attention given to how we discover what is true. 

But I also know that not everyone buys into these views of truth and reality.  Still, I believe that there is at least some common ground we can all agree on.  For example, as finite human beings I think we can all agree that as finite creatures none of us know everything.  But I also believe that each of us also believe that we can know at least some things truly.  In other words, we can’t know everything, but we can at least know a few things—and know them truly.  For example, we can know whether we prefer vanilla or chocolate ice cream—or if you are like me, black raspberry and mocha fudge.

So far so good—but things are not really as simple as we may have assumed so far.  Present-day culture is built around at least two relatively new and controversial assumptions:

            (1) There is no such thing as absolute truth.  The one exception to this principle is that many people are dead sure that there is one absolute truth: namely, that there is no such thing as absolute truth.  And many people claim that they know this absolutely.

            (2) Consequently, the argument goes, we each need to create our own truths in the form of what we believe is true for us. Thus, the assumption is that in the absence of any absolute or universal truth, we can each create our own personalized individual truths of what we believe is true for us.  Increasingly these self-generated truths are true for people in such areas as self-identity and gender.  The key question for many is not what our birth certificates may tell us, or how our parents brought us up, or what other people around us may think.  Rather the question is how do we feel about ourselves deep down inside.  We also often find something similar in the contemporary push for critical race theory where again one’s own personal experiences and feelings trump everyone and everything else in creating our sense of personal identity.

The question I raise is whether truth can at the end of the day really be as relative and self-generated as some believe.  Are individualized truths really how the universe around us functions?  Does the speed of light vary for different people, or the gravitational constant, or the value of the mathematical concept pi?  Aren’t there at least some things that are constant for everyone?  Isn’t there an objective reality out there somewhere that we can either accept or reject, but we can’t ignore?

How do we make sense of all this?  John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion postulated that our knowledge of ourselves and our knowledge of God are intimately interrelated.  We can only truly know ourselves if we know God, and if we know God, we are in a position to know at least some true things about ourselves.

Now as human beings we are still finite beings, and none of us can know as much as we might hope or want to know.  At the same time, God knows us far better than we could ever know ourselves.  David expressed it this way in Psalm 139:1-4:

• O LORD, you have searched me and known me!

• You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar.

• You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.

• Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.

Jesus tells us that God knows even the number of “the hairs of your head” (Matthew 10:30).  If you are like me and growing bald, this number of hairs is steadily decreasing, but God still knows the number—and He knows the number for each one of now almost eight billion people.  But the point here is that God knows us inside and out.

Here are some principles for us to consider as we reflect on this topic of our quest for truth:

            (1) God is a God of truth.  In other words, His character is one of truth.  It would be a mistake for us to assume that there is some external standard of truth that we all (God and ourselves) need to measure ourselves up against.  Rather, God Himself is the measure of truth.  Truth is being in conformity with God, His character, and His actions.  If something measures up to God, it is true, and if it doesn’t measure up to God’s person and work, then it is not true.

            (2) God has made us to be truth seekers.  God tells us He has made us as human beings in His own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26-27).  Part of this likeness is making us to be truth seekers.  We all have a natural affinity to discover what it true—even in a fallen world where many deny the existence of truth.  The quest for truth is simply part of how God made us.

            (3) We are all susceptible to deception.  We can believe lies we thought were true.  The Bible tells us that our believing lies is often evidence of God’s judgment in our lives.  The Prophet Jeremiah warned God’s Old Testament people of the false sense of security they had leading up to the Babylonian captivity: “This is your lot, the portion I have measured out to you, declares the LORD, because you have forgotten me and trusted in lies” (Jeremiah 13:25).  Then the Apostle Paul warns us about how people reject God and believe lies when “they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever!” (Romans 1:25).

            (4) We hear and believe what we want to believe. There is often an element of human will and desire operating in this area of our truth seeking.  A few decades ago, an atheistic philosophy called Existentialism popularized the value of a heroic quest for truth to give meaning and purpose to life even in a world where they believed there were no universal truths to be found.  Isaiah, for example, describes this reality during a time when God’s Old Testament people “made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter” (Isaiah 28:15).

            (5) We need outside help.  Who are we really?  Who are we deep down inside?  The only way this instinctive quest for truth will be successful is if we have outside help.  We are too limited in what we can see for ourselves.  Life is like walking in a dense forest where we can’t find an overlook to help us see the broader lay of the land.  As John Calvin suggested, we need God’s help.  God is a God of truth and what He thinks is true.  But we need access to His help in order to see things we would never discover on our own.  Only God, His Word, His Son, and His Spirit can help us.

            (6) In particular, we need Jesus.  Ultimately, we need an encounter with Jesus Christ, God’s Son, to come to a knowledge of the truth.  As we study God’s revelation of Himself in Scripture, we discover that truth isn’t so much a quality as it is a Person.  Jesus is Truth personified.  He tells us this in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).  We need His help to discover true truth. 

(7) We need His deliverance.  In particular, we need salvation from ourselves and our own faulty thinking as well as from all the faulty thinking found in this crazy, mixed-up world in which we live.  We need a new mind and a new heart to see and value the God of truth.  Jesus told a Pharisee named Nicodemus in John 3:3, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”  We need both new birth as this verse tells us, and we also need to grow as God’s people where we are “transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2).

At the end of the day, this quest for truth will turn out to be the most important thing we will ever do.  We need God who is the God of truth.  He is both the One who is the standard of truth and the One who reveals His Truth to us.  As Jesus warns us in His Sermon on the Mount, we need to “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.  For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13-14).  And this way to truth is through Jesus.