What is truth?
"What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and did not stay for an answer." Thus begins Francis Bacon's celebrated essay On Truth. In our exceptionally busy lives, two thousand years after Pontius Pilate washed his hands, few of us, perhaps, ever take time to consider this question. So we are liable to jump to one of these positions: either there is no such thing as truth - everything is subjective and relative; or truth is simply God's revelation to man - which is perceived as objective and absolute.
The word "truth" in the Bible, however, does not refer simply to objective propositions. This is not to say that objective propositions are unimportant. Indeed, John devotes much of the rest of this letter to the importance of sound teaching and the dangers of error. We need to be held firm by the mooring ropes of the great facts of God's sovereign acts and purposes in creation and redemption.
But John writes that the truth "lives in us and will be with us for ever". Biblical truth finds its source in the multi-faceted character of God. Indeed, truth is of the essence of God. "We are in him who is true", John writes at the end of his first letter, "even in his son Jesus Christ." In Christ - who claimed I AM the truth. In Christ, who makes sense of everything, who speaks into our joys and sorrows, who enriches our understanding of others, who inspires our creativity, who makes us truly human.
So can we, this week, live out the truth that God is love in our relationships with our awkward colleagues in the workplace? Can we reflect the utter truthfulness of God in our speech and our business dealings? Can we subject our attitudes, our preferences, our prejudices, to the searching light of Jesus, who is the truth?
The truth that lives in us has to be lived out.
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