What Is Truth?

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I wonder if any of the rest of you have noticed that language changes from time to time. Words mean different things as we go on in life, and sometimes it leads to confusion. This happened a few months ago.

There was a group of men up here one day in the week. They were drinking coffee, and I wandered in to join them and sitting around visiting. And then Jimmy Ann walked in.

No, I’m the one that looks bad in the story. Don’t worry about it. Jimmy Ann walked in and was talking to the group, and she turned to leave and said her goodbyes to everybody.

And so I said something. I said to her a phrase that I picked up from my grandfather, and she turned around and looked at me just kind of speechless. Yeah, yeah, it really happened.

And for those of you who don’t know her, She strikes me as somebody that’s difficult to shock. And she just looked at me for a few seconds, and I think she said, do you know what that means? And my response was something along the lines of, well, I thought I did, but your reaction tells me maybe I don’t.

Yeah, and she’ll probably be glad to tell you what it was afterwards. It wasn’t anything that. .

. it sounded innocent to me on the surface. and knowing my grandfather who grew up on the mean streets of Hugo, Oklahoma back in the 1920s, it probably meant something different to him too.

I’m still not entirely sure what it means and probably don’t want to know what I said to Jimmy. But what I was trying to say to her is apparently not what I said. You can ask her later if you want to know.

Whatever I ended up saying was not what I thought I was saying because words and phrases change over time. Sometimes it happens naturally, sometimes it happens deliberately, that words get changed. I’ve been reading about something called linguistic theft, where people will hijack words and give them new meanings to try to propagandize.

So I’ve been reading about this, and once you start looking for it, you realize how often it happens all around us. And sometimes with some things it’s not a big deal, but it becomes dangerous when it applies to words and concepts from the Bible. Words and concepts that tell us who God is.

Words and concepts that deal with the gospel. It becomes dangerous. And I’ll give you an example.

Because I can think of tons of examples off the top of my head, but an example that I heard about just this week, John MacArthur, last Sunday morning, preached a message from the book of Genesis and spoke for a few minutes of that message about how God created male and female. And YouTube is threatening to shut him down for hate speech. I’m going, wait a minute, that word used to mean something different.

See, I’m old enough to remember when we called hate speech, when we applied that term to like the Ku Klux Klan, actually standing out holding rallies saying, hate so-and-so. Is it the movie The Princess Bride? I’m not real familiar with it, but I remember that one scene where he says, is that the right movie?

You keep using that word? I don’t think it means what you think it means? Okay, somebody’s shaking their head yes.

All right. I feel that way a lot. That’s not what that word means.

It happens so much around us that words are being redefined. There are churches that are now trying to redefine the idea of the cross that they object to the idea Jesus paid for our sins because they say that that makes God brutal to require a blood sacrifice. And so now they’ve redefined the cross to be just an example for us of how we’re supposed to love others.

That Jesus somehow knew the people of Jerusalem needed Him to die because of where they were spiritually. And so He submitted to their thirst for blood. What?

Words mean something. I want to spend the next few weeks talking to you about some of the words that our culture is trying to redefine that have an impact on how we understand God and His Word. Because we need to make sure we come back to a biblical definition of these things or we’re not even speaking the same language.

And a series like this could sound or could be misinterpreted by some people as, oh, it’s political. Because I can give you a list of things. society has redefined marriage society has redefined gender society has redefined baby there’s all sorts of things this applies to but this message is not this series is not political because it’s not even a new phenomenon this has been happening since the beginning of christianity I didn’t realize but friday I was reading a book by a man called irenaeus he wrote a series of five books called against heresy I mean he was he was serious about this irenaeus to give you an idea of far back this goes. Irenaeus was a student of a man named Polycarp who was a student of the apostle John.

And in 180 AD, so 150 years after the resurrection, Irenaeus wrote about a group of people called the Marcionites and the Valentinians, and he talked about their tendency to twist scripture to suit their doctrines. And he wrote this. This jumped out at me because I thought just like today.

He said their language resembles ours, but their sentiments are very different. He was talking about those who would change the meanings of words so they could change the meaning of Scripture. And he said in their language they’re talking just like we are, but they mean something very different by the words that they use.

So, I don’t intend this series as a vocabulary lesson, but it is important we go back and rediscover. As the culture is bombarding us with ideas of this is what love means, this is what hate means, this is what justice means. We need to go back and say, what does God mean by those words and by those concepts?

This morning, I want to start with you with the word truth and the concept of truth. And I’ve mentioned recently how Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, what is truth? Which was an ironic question is what I told you because truth stood right in front of him.

But he asked, what is truth? And in Romans, the apostle Paul paints a picture of what it looks like when a group of people become confused about what truth is and what truth means. And so this morning, I want us to look at Romans chapter 1.

There are so many passages in Scripture I could have gone to about the meaning of truth, but I think this one paints a vivid picture of what it looks like when we reject not only God’s truth, but the very idea of truth. So in Romans chapter 1, if you turn with me there in your Bibles, Romans chapter 1, it’ll be on your screen as well. There’s a link in the bulletin if you have that.

And if you would stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, he really gets started talking about the truth in verse 18, but I want to back up to verse 16 so I can show you the importance of the idea of truth, because it reflects on the gospel. So we’re going to look at verses 16 through 25 this morning. The Apostle Paul wrote, For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for For the Jew first and also for the Greek.

even His eternal power and Godhead so that they are without excuse. Because although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.

Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness and the lusts of their hearts to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forevermore. Or forever. Amen.

And you may be seated. Now specifically here, Paul is talking about the idolatry of the Gentiles. But he mentions truth in there because he’s presenting the picture of what happens to a society, to a group of people, when they just sort of jettison the idea of truth.

It’s not so much that our society or any other society rejects truth so much as they reject the idea of objective truth. That there is a truth that we can know, that we can find, and that we can cling to. The culture is moving away from the idea of absolute truth.

The Bible assumes there is absolute truth. It speaks with an authoritative voice. How many times do the works of Scripture, do the books that are in here say, thus saith the Lord?

They are assuming that God speaks and when He speaks it’s with authority and that that’s the way it is and He’s spoken it so that we can know. All throughout Scripture it assumes the idea that there is a truth out there that is unchanging and that God has put there for us to know. But society does not like the idea of absolute truth because when there’s absolute truth we’re accountable to God.

in our flesh. And we as Christians are not immune. Sometimes we feel this way.

We have to renew our minds, the Bible says. We need to get back in line with God’s Word. But occasionally we feel this way as well, that we would rather it all just be our opinion or our feelings because then we’re only accountable to what we want to do.

But in the world today, truth is separated from fact. I remember a professor of mine at OU taught us that truth and fact are not the same thing. And he may have a point there there may be a little bit of a distinction between the two only because facts are things that are true but he was dealing with the idea that there are facts there are things that are certain and then there are truths that you just know that you just maybe derive from the facts and the idea was that truth is just truth to you is just something that you determine yourself and you hold on to that was being taught that was being taught 15 years I haven’t done the math on how long I’ve been out of college.

I don’t want to. It’ll make me sad. But that was, suffice it to say, that was a few years ago.

And I’m sure it’s worse now. And truth is being treated as experiential so that it’s all based on our experiences rather than on reality. See, the Bible ties truth to reality.

Truth reflects what’s real, what’s going on in the actual world. Whereas today, we want to treat truth like it’s all based in our experiences so that the truth is not as important as my truth. Have you heard that phrase, my truth?

Anybody else heard anybody talk about my truth? I don’t even begin to understand that. And I’m not making fun of them.

I just don’t understand that, my truth. I thought there was truth because that’s what my Bible tells me. Now, this is dangerous, especially when it comes to things that impact the meaning of Scripture and the Gospel and our understanding of God.

And as churches all across this country and throughout this culture, we need to clarify again what truth means and what truth is and embrace the biblical concept in the way we live our lives, which means we don’t get to say there’s a truth and then go live like it’s my truth. We need to live like there is the truth. We have to embrace this ourselves and we have to defend this idea in our culture.

Otherwise, we reduce everything to just somebody’s opinion. And if everything’s opinion, then who’s to say that Christianity is more valid than anybody else’s belief system? Who’s to say that your ideas of right and wrong matter more than anybody else’s?

We end up with a distorted view of God. If we can’t take Him at His word that what He says about Himself is the truth, then anybody’s ideas of God are equally valid, and we end up with a distorted view of God. Anytime we distort who God is according to His word, we end up with a false God.

really a God made in our own image. Because if my view of God is not tethered to the truth that’s revealed in His Word, I just sort of make up what I want. I fabricate a designer God that suits my needs.

And we overlook the need for salvation and miss God’s offer. Because if there’s no the truth, then how do we know we’re sinners? Why should I think I’m a sinner if I can’t rely on the fact that there is the truth that God has set up standards of right and wrong?

So do you see why these modern ideas about truth are so dangerous? Because I don’t want this just to be a political message. I don’t want this just to be a vocabulary lesson.

We need to understand that how we understand truth affects how we understand God and His offer of salvation. That’s why this stuff matters. And so we go back to Romans 1.

16 and look at the first few verses here, and we see that truth is rooted in the character of God. Truth is true because of who God is. When the truth is preached, like the gospel, it talks about in verse 16, the gospel which is the power of God unto salvation.

It’s that message of truth that calls people to repent and to trust Christ, that calls them to be saved, calls them out of their sin, out of their rebellion against God, and calls them to be saved. When that message is preached, the righteousness of God is on display for everybody to see. Because it says in verse 17, for in it, that’s the message of the gospel, In it, the righteousness of God is revealed.

When the gospel is preached, we see that there is a God in heaven who is holy, who is perfect, whose standards are higher than our standards, His ways are higher than our ways, His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. We see that there is a God there who holds us to a perfect standard that we fall short of. We see the righteousness of God when the truth is proclaimed.

And that’s because the truth is rooted in who God is. See, this is something else I dealt with in college, and I didn’t have the answer to it for years and years, and it finally came to me when reading Paul’s letters. A professor wanting to use this as a club to try to beat Christianity to death, he said, so is right and wrong, or just take the concept of right, is right and right because God says so, or does God say so because right is right?

And his idea is either that God just makes up the rules as he goes along, it’s all arbitrary, and God could say murder and lying are good if he wanted to, or is God subject to some other law? That there’s some higher standard than God that even God says. And the idea there is that you’ve got either a God who’s arbitrary or not all powerful.

I really struggled with that. There’s a third option. There’s a third option.

Right is right because it reflects who God is. There’s not an outside standard. Because God is a God of faithfulness, faithfulness is right.

He tells us to be faithful. Because God is a God of truth, truthfulness is right. because God cannot lie and cannot deceive.

Lying is wrong. See, it’s rooted in who God is. Righteousness is right because it reflects the character of God.

And that’s why God takes it so personally when the truth is suppressed. He talks about in verse 18. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

He’s talking about those who know the truth and yet want to change it, want to push it down, want to diminish this idea of truth and change it into something else. God takes that personally because we’re not just rejecting an idea. We’re rejecting something about the character of God.

When God’s word says, you shall not kill, or better translation, you shall not murder. And we go murder somebody. We’re not just rejecting an idea that God had.

God says not to kill because God takes human life seriously because He created us in His image, and He takes that image seriously. And so anytime we reject God’s law, anytime we reject God’s truth, we’re actually rejecting who God is. So He takes it seriously, and that’s why it says His wrath is revealed to all those who suppress the truth.

And before it sounds like I’m talking just about them out there, we’ve all been in that boat at some point or another. I’ve been right there. Truth is rooted in who God is.

But not only that, the truth is knowable. So God is the standard of right and wrong. God is the standard of truth.

But it’s not a mystery. It’s not something that God is hiding from us, like a game of hide and seek where He says, the truth is out there, but you better go find it. They’ll never find it.

They’ll never think to look in the vegetable crisper. That’s a good place to hide stuff at our house. People don’t look there.

God’s not hiding it, saying, I’m not telling. Lock it up and throw away the key. no god put the truth out there for us to know and our culture likes to reject the idea that truth is knowable but usually the way culture does this the way you you may hear this from people is self-defeating I’ve heard people talk about the roadrunner test I can’t remember who it was I want to say that it was josh mcdowell but I I’m not sure the roadrunner test do you remember the coyote and roadrunner cartoons okay I love those I can’t find those anymore I’m sure they’re out there somewhere I don’t want to give Charlie ideas, so I haven’t looked too hard to try to find them and show them.

But if you remember the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, the coyote would run off the cliff, and his little feet would just be dangling in midair, and he wouldn’t even realize it until he looked down, and there’s nothing underneath him. See, when something’s self-defeating, it’s like that. You’re just hanging in midair, and you don’t even realize you don’t have any ground underneath you.

And so the world will say, well, all truth claims are meaningless. That’s called postmodernism. So when we say this is true, they say it’s meaningless to say anything is true.

Wait, is that a truth claim? Because you’re saying it’s true that all truth claims are meaningless. You see why that’s a problem?

If their truth claim is true, then it’s meaningless. But if it’s meaningful, it’s false. They’re just dangling with their legs out there.

The relativist will say that all truth is relative. There are no absolutes. There are no absolute truths.

What’s true for me may not be true for you and so on. There’s no absolute truth. If that’s a relative statement, could that statement be true for them and not for me that there are no absolutes?

So you’re getting on shaky ground here. I don’t want to overwhelm you with this. But you can pick these things apart.

Oh, we should doubt all truth claims. I’m skeptical. Well, do you doubt the truth claim that all truth claims should be doubted? And this goes on and on. The truth can’t be known.

Do you know that claim to be true? See, the world wants to reject the idea that the truth is knowable and that it’s out there. But every time we try to open our mouths to do that, we defeat our own idea.

God says He’s made the truth available for us to know. He wants us to know what His truth is. And that’s why it’s so egregious in God’s sight when we suppress the truth like verse 18 says.

Because He says we’re not doing it in ignorance. In verse 19 it says we know we are rejecting what God has put right in front of us. He says what may be known of God in verse 19 is manifest in them.

What God has chosen to reveal what it’s possible to know of God, He’s put right there in front of them and shown it to them. And God’s been revealing Himself to mankind since the beginning of the world. God has not been hiding.

It says in verse 20, since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes were there. And people have been rejecting it ever since, verse 21 tells us, because they knew not God. They knew God, but they chose not to know Him as God.

Meaning God showed Himself to the world, and the world looked at it and said, I know that’s God, but I’m not going to recognize Him as God. It’s like the people who every four years, every four years, it doesn’t matter who gets elected, they say, not my president. It happens on both sides.

They know who the president legally is, but they refuse to accept that person as the president. Mankind knows inherently who God is, but chooses not to recognize Him. He began revealing Himself by His works.

Verse 20 says, by the things that are made. The Scriptures describe how we can look out at creation and recognize that there’s a Creator. I know a lot of people reject that idea, but the more I look at the complexity of the world around me, I’m not an expert on this by any stretch, but just knowing what I know, looking at the complexity of the world around me, how everything works together, looking at the complexity of things down to the cellular level, and looking at the complexity of things through a telescope, I walk away from that each time more convinced that it’s the work of a creator who knew exactly what He was doing.

God’s works have been on display for us from the very beginning. And to those who recognize Him as God, He reveals more. We saw that last Sunday night in Mark chapter 4 when He talked about the truth and those who accept the truth, He doles out more.

But there are those who, it says in verse 21, knew God but did not glorify Him as God and nor were thankful. And as they rejected God, as societies reject what they do know of God, they receive less and less truth. Sometimes we’ll look at the world around us and say, God’s Word says this, why isn’t it obvious to the world around us?

Why aren’t the things that we see obvious? How do they just not see it? It’s because as you reject what you do know of God, you become blinded to the other things.

God doesn’t just keep throwing out more truth for you to reject if you’re going to reject what you do know. And that’s why it says in verse 21 that they became futile in their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened. And God says that they are without excuse.

God says that the world is without excuse. When God puts His truth right in front of our eyes, you and I, I don’t want to just put it on people outside, because as I said again, we’ve all been in this same boat. We all get in moments where we know what God’s Word says is true, but we want to do the opposite, and so we kind of push that down.

We do not, you and I do not have the luxury of having God said his truth right before our eyes and us covering our eyes and hoping God will think we just didn’t know. Right? Like when I tell a child to do something, and I’m not thinking of a specific instance.

This is just hypothetical. But I tell a child to do something and I know they heard me, but an hour later it’s still not done? Oh, I didn’t know. Yes, you did.

Because I saw you stop what you were doing when I hollered your name. You just chose to pretend you didn’t hear me. That’s what so many times we do with God’s truth.

But just because we pretend we don’t know what God’s truth is doesn’t mean we don’t actually know or can’t know what God’s truth is because He’s put it right in front of us. God, and folks, this is what we need to understand. Because unless we understand this part, then this message sounds very harsh.

God wants us to know His truth because He wants us to know Him. He doesn’t want us to know a caricature of Him. He doesn’t want us to know a parody of Him.

He doesn’t want us to know a funhouse mirror version of Him that we’ve made up in our own minds to suit our own ideas and our own desires and our own prejudices. He wants us to know Him. And so He’s put the truth out there for us to know because it reflects who He is.

And the truth does not change according to our preferences. Sometimes I wish it did, right? I said last week not everything that the Bible tells us to do is easy or convenient or pleasant.

There are some things that if God had consulted me, I would have said, no, God, that sounds a little hard. Can we mark a red line through that before we send this thing to the printers? But that’s not how it works.

What God says is true is true whether I like it or not, whether I accept it or not, whether it’s fun for me or not. And he says in verse 22, professing to be wise, they became fools. Now, not only do people sort of tie themselves and intellectual knots trying to get rid of the idea of truth.

Like some of those things I told you about the roadrunner test. If you think about those things too long and hard, it will mess with your mind. I had more in my notes about that, but that’s why I moved on. Because I’m going to lose you and I’m going to lose myself if I keep down that road.

You have to come up with bizarre philosophies and turn yourself in knots to try to get away from the idea of truth. The idea of truth will get you. I mean, you can convince yourself that, you can convince yourself as some philosophies do, that the physical world is just an illusion, but the truth is like a bus that comes flying down the road and is going to get you if you don’t get out of the way.

You can’t escape the truth. But not only do people embrace some really bizarre ideas to try to get around the idea of truth, but once they do convince themselves that they’re past the idea of truth, once we do that, we live in destructive ways. We live in ways that will hurt ourselves and hurt other people.

And Paul describes how mankind acts once we abandon truth. He lays out in verses 23 and 25 when he talks about changing the glory of the incorruptible God into an image, and he talks about exchanging the truth of God for the lie and worshiping and serving the creature rather than the creator. He says when we abandon God’s truth, we will worship anything and everything but God.

If we let ourselves give up on the idea that there is truth, that it’s out there, that it’s knowable, that it’s for us, when we let ourselves get away from that idea, we will worship anything. And we will fall for anything. And not only that, verse 24 tells us that when we get past that idea of truth, we will be driven by nothing but our own instincts and our own desires.

He says, God also gave them up to uncleanness and the lusts of their hearts to dishonor their bodies among themselves. Now in particular there, he’s describing sexual immorality. but that also I mean it applies to anything that’s outside of God’s standards when you get to that point of rejecting truth God says at some point it’s not that God becomes okay with it but God says okay I’m gonna let you have what you want see how you enjoy it and I know that for a lot of people the idea that there are no restraints there’s no truth we can just do whatever we want to a lot of people that sounds great but look at some of the places in the world where people have been able to do whatever they want anytime they want.

Somalia comes to mind as one example. I have not seen any of the Purge movies, nor do I have any desire to. I’ve seen the trailers and that’s enough, thank you very much.

But that looks like a nightmare. Wait a minute, it’s 24 hours or whatever that you can do whatever you want to whoever. That does not look like a good way to live.

We see all throughout the Old Testament when people cast off the restraints that they just treated each other in vile ways. We think the world is a brutal place now. Reject the truth of God, live however we want according to our instincts and desires, and see what happens.

Paul said, the farther you get away from God’s truth, the more we become like the animals and the more we worship the animals. And he says that once they exchanged the truth of God for a lie in verse 25, God gave them up to uncleanness. So he let humanity have its way for a little while, but it didn’t stop becoming a lie.

It doesn’t say they exchanged the truth of God for their own truth. it says they exchanged the truth of God for a lie. If something is not the truth, it is a lie.

And folks, no matter how anybody feels, no matter how the vote goes, no matter what I can convince myself of is okay, no matter how long it’s gone on and it’s become tradition or it’s become part of the culture, no matter how well something seems to work, the bottom line is that what you and I want, what I want does not determine what’s true. If it’s not God’s truth, it’s a lie. And it’s not even a pleasant lie.

It’s a lie that leads to destruction. It is a lie that will hurt us. It’s a lie that will hurt others.

It is a lie that will drive us further and further from the God who made us and loves us and wants us to be reconciled to Him. God has given us the truth. God has given us truth because He wants us to know Him.

He wants us to know who He is. He wants us to understand that He’s holy. He wants us to understand that He is God, that He is the righteous judge, but He also wants us to understand that He loves us.

He wants us to understand that our sin is deadly and separates us from Him. All of our disobedience, all of our wickedness, all the times that we reject His truth and go our own way, He wants us to know that that separates us from Him and that is a bridge that we cannot cross. That is a canyon that we cannot get across on our own.

And that Jesus Christ was the only payment for our sins. See, if we reject the idea of truth, how can we ever know for sure that Jesus has reconciled us to God? If we reject the idea of truth, why would we even think that sin matters and that we need to be reconciled?

God wants us to know what’s true because He wants us to know Him. And He wants us to be reconciled to Him through Jesus Christ. He doesn’t want us to have a relationship with a counterfeit. He wants us to have a relationship with Him.

He wants to protect us from the lies that will lead us astray, that will hurt us and will hurt others. He wants us to know the joy of being reconciled to Him. And that’s why He tells us the truth that the world won’t tell us.

He tells us that sin is deadly. He tells us that judgment is real. He tells us that we need forgiveness. And He tells us that only Jesus Christ can provide it.

And this morning, you can have forgiveness of every sin, of every time that you’ve rejected Him, of every time that you’ve suppressed the truth, of every time that you’ve walked away and gone your own way when you knew what God was calling you to do. you can have every bit of that forgiven. Not because of any good thing you can do this morning.

Not because of all the good things you could ever do in life,