The focus of this post will be on Romans 1:24-32, specifically verses 25 and 28: "They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator--who is forever praised. Amen.... Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done." Generally, this passage is used to talk about homosexuality and the depravity of man. I'm not going to discuss that in this post, although I think this passage has a lot to say about that topic. I'm choosing to focus instead on the aspects of truth versus lies.
"Truth" is a very common word in the Christian world. We are told to "speak the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15), we are told that Jesus is the Truth (John 14:6), and we are told that the Gospel consists of both truth and grace (Romans 3:23-24). This last one in particular is very popular, and its one of my favorites. Good, Biblical discipleship comes from a balance of speaking truth while extending grace. Truth allows us to see where we have fallen short, and grace allows us to see how God has overcome our shortfalls.
My discipler recently gave me an excellent definition of truth: truth is something you can question, hold up to doubt and examination, and it will remain true. That is the definition of "truth". However, I think there is a big problem that can go overlooked. The problem is that we don't examine our "truth" often enough. And when we don't examine our truth, remind ourselves of it daily, something dangerous can happen. It starts to change. The change can be subtle at first. Maybe just a slight detail gets omitted. But over time, what happens is truth can mutate. It can lose parts, acquire others, and slowly become something unrecognizable. When true truth acquires these additions, these mutations, it becomes a lie, and we can start to believe a lie. Similarly, when truth loses parts of itself, it becomes a lesser truth, and we start to hang our beliefs on lesser truths. And when we are talking about something as vital as the Gospel, lesser truths are, in fact, lies themselves. We either accept the whole truth of the Gospel, or none of it. Anything less is simply a distortion of the truth and is therefore not true at all. And since the Gospel is truth itself, anything less is not simply smaller, but infinitesimally small compared to the full truth. However attractive or complete they may seem at first, these lies and lesser truths never fail to fail. I do not think it is any coincidence that, in the Garden of Eden, there was a vast garden of trees from which Adam and Eve could eat and only one from which they could not.
This can sound a bit theoretical and not very applicable, so I'm going to give a very personal, very recent example from my own life. Like many people, I often think of the Gospel in terms of truth and grace. Two complimentary aspects. The truth is, to put it crudely, that we have all rejected God's perfect plan and therefore find ourselves in a state of sin, deserving of death. The grace, however, is that God has sent his Son, Jesus, to redeem us from this state, and, by paying our debt with his own death, Jesus has made a way for us to return to God's perfect plan. This is obviously a huge oversimplification, but this is, in my opinion, a pretty accurate, two-sentence summary of the grace and truth of the Gospel. Over time, however, I began to let this full reality take a back seat. On a day to day, practical level, I thought of it more like this: "truth tells us how bad we are, and grace tells us that it's okay". Let me say right now, that is NOT, in any way, a good summary or definition of either grace or truth. I know that now, but at the time, that is, more or less, how I thought of it just a few months ago. This is an example of a mutated truth, or a lesser truth. And I will show you how this "lesser truth" functioned just like a lie in my life.
So around this time, I started to experience some hardships and doubts. I was beginning to feel depressed, and my depression caused be to both seek comfort in what I believed while also questioning and doubting if it was really true. Granted, these are hard to do at the same time even in the best of circumstances, but I fully believe the Gospel has power to dispel all doubts and give comfort at the same time. But remember, at this time, I wasn't experience the full reality of the Gospel on a day-to-day basis. I had exchanged the full truth for a lesser truth. So when I sought comfort from what I believed, I was looking for comfort in the lesser truth "truth says you're pretty screwed up, but grace says that's okay". I challenge you to find comfort in that "truth". I couldn't. And so I came to the conclusion that there is no comfort in truth or grace. And from here, I started to wonder. If there is no comfort to be found in truth or grace, then where could it be found? Does comfort even exist? And as soon as I asked that last question, I had started down a dangerous road. Not because that is a bad question to ask. Like I said, I fully believe that the Gospel, being true truth, fears no questions, doubts, or examinations. But, in asking this question, I had already discounted both truth and grace. In short, I began to look for answers outside of the Gospel. And I tell you, friends, if you seek comfort outside of the Gospel, you will be left empty.
"Does comfort even exist?" There can only be one of two answers to this question, and I had yet to see evidence of one of them. So I began to consider the possibility that maybe it doesn't. Maybe there is no comfort, no peace, no help or relief. There is only the search. And then I caught a glimpse of true despair.
If true comfort doesn't exist, then surely God can't exist. "Can that be so?" I asked. I had asked this question before, and in the past I had come to the conclusion that He does. So, to convince myself, I decided to walk through my previous line of thought. For the most part, it centered around the following quote from C.S. Lewis:
The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.That was my proof: my inner desires for something greater than this world; a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy. That was my reasoning, and that was also my problem at this point. I ached for comfort and acceptance, and had found none. "But it must exist, right? If I desire it, surely there must be a satisfaction for such desire, else the desire would not exist. The theory of evolution supports this, as do most other theories about the origins of the world as we know." These were my thoughts. But then, as I must do to be thorough, I considered the possibility that maybe satisfaction for these desires did not exist. "Could that be so? What would that mean?" I will tell you what it means.
Take the theory of evolution, and the field of evolutionary biology, which says, in short, that nearly all biological processes and facts can be traced to a need or advantage; that, somewhere along the way, natural selection has favored this trait because it conferred on a creature a slight advantage in some way. For example, hunger causes discomfort because that is a surefire way to ensure that an organism eats when it needs nutrients. Take away the discomfort, and the creature will likely starve to death because it doesn't know it needs sustenance. Now, how could nature ensure that a creature will continue to improve, to get better, and never simply level off? What would be the ultimate trait that would cause a creature to never accept failure, but to always try to improve itself? We have already heard the answer. What if in each of us is a deep rooted desire for something more, something bigger, something larger than life? What if this desire is the strongest of all our desires? So strong that all the food, shelter, and sex in the world can't quench it? A desire that demands to be satisfied, yet offers no clues as to what will sate it? If such a desire existed, it would force us to constantly run faster, strive harder, work tirelessly day after day after day, trying to find something that can quench this thirst of the soul. But, I thought, what if such a satisfaction does not exist? It's genius: instill in a creature an insatiable lust for something that doesn't exist, thereby forcing it to search out every nook and cranny of the known and unknown world. I thought, maybe the sick joke of life is that we spend all of it, every waking minute, chasing something, running after something, striving for something that doesn't exist, all the while chasing our tails. And at this time, I saw full well the depths of despair that causes people to look at life and say "Goodbye, cruel world." For what a cruel world that would be, that we desire something beyond this world, but that this world is all there is.
Or is it? I told all of this to my discipler. He didn't dismiss it, and he didn't argue it. He only asked me one question: "How does Jesus fit into that picture?"
I thought about it for a while. Considered it. Mulled it over. We know from history Jesus existed. He lived, he taught, and we have reason to believe the Bible is an accurate account of the life of Jesus. That means that, at some point in time, 2000 years ago, a man walked the earth, displaying wisdom and power nobody could explain, was killed by the rulers of the day, then came back to life.
I remember the moment vividly. The best way I can describe it is this: I had a picture of life as I thought it to be. All at once, that picture was shattered by the truth of Jesus.
What had started out for me as a mutated, lesser truth became an outright lie. And what I realized was that I had willingly ignored the one person I had been taught all my life not to ignore. I exchanged the truth of God for a lie, or a lesser truth, for hopefully you see by now that the two are one and the same. But praise be to God that Jesus shatters all of our pictures of lies and lesser truths. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the single, earth-shattering fact that proves that this earth and this life are not all there is. There is something more, something, or rather, Someone, far greater out there.
While the shattering was definitely a sudden change, it took a while for the full reality to sink in. But as it did, I started to realized, just in time, that I had stumbled upon the meaning of Christmas. As I said, the person of Jesus is the definitive proof that there is so much more going on here than what we see. Thus, the birth of Jesus is a huge deal! The Bible is clear that Jesus is the revelation of mystery long since hidden (Ephesians 3:6, Colossians 1:26), the fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham (Genesis 12:3, 17:3, 28:14), and the consummation of the Davidic line of kings (2 Samuel 7:16). Until the coming of Jesus, Israel had seen a steady decay in God's favor from the golden age of Solomon's rule, through multiple exiles and increasingly depraved kings. It was not clear how, if at all, God would rescue his people, much less all the peoples of the earth. Then, after 500 years of silence, the answer came like the sun rising over the mountains: Immanuel. God With Us.
Immanuel. O blessed thought! Not since the Garden of Eden had mankind enjoyed the company of the Lord of Hosts. Only the High Priest could enter into the presence of God in the Holy of Holies, and even then but once a year after extensive cleansing rituals. Moses saw God's back, and the resulting light that shone from his face blinded all those who did not turn away. These are not signs of God being simply too proud to deal with humans; rather, it is evidence of humanity's depravity and therefore our inability to exist in God's presence. That which is dark cannot coexist with light. The light will dispel the darkness. Indeed, that is exactly what happened anytime someone broke the careful protocols God had put in place to allow man to continue to commune with him (Leviticus 10:2, 2 Samuel 6:6). As C.S. Lewis says in his book Till We Have Faces, "I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer.... How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
And yet we have Immanuel. God With Us. Perhaps the full weight of this word was best expressed by Max Lucado's imagining of the following scene from A Cosmic Christmas playing out in Heaven:
The King walked over and reached for the book. He turned it toward Lucifer and commanded, “Come, Deceiver, read the name of the One who will call your bluff. Read the name of the One who will storm your gates.” Satan rose slowly off his haunches. Like a wary wolf, he walked a wide circle toward the desk until he stood before the volume and read the word:Satan has the reaction we all should, because he knows what miracle this plan really implies. Light Himself is about to descend into Darkness, not to destroy it, but to save it. The source of Life will commune with the dead. This is what Christmas means. This is why it gives us such hope and joy. Christmas is a time when we celebrate this great, miraculous act. We relive the joy that Israel felt upon realizing that their God had not left them to rot in their own iniquity. Christmas is when we remind ourselves that, when we had fallen too far to get up, God descended from Perfection into wretchedness to save us.
“Immanuel?” he muttered to himself, then spoke in a tone of disbelief. “God with us?” For the first time the hooded head turned squarely toward the face of the Father. “No. Not even You would do that. Not even You would go so far.”
“You’ve never believed me, Satan.”
“But Immanuel? The plan is bizarre! You don’t know what it’s like on Earth! You don’t know how dark I’ve made it. It’s putrid. It’s evil. It’s…”
“IT IS MINE,” proclaimed the King. “AND I WILL RECLAIM WHAT IS MINE. I WILL BECOME FLESH. I WILL FEEL WHAT MY CREATURES FEEL. I WILL SEE WHAT THEY SEE.”
“But what of their sin?”
“I will bring mercy.”
“What of their death?”
“I will give life.”
Satan stood speechless.
There is a lesser known Christmas song called "Hallelujah (Light has Come)", by Barlow Girl. The chorus reads: "Hallelujah, we've been found / a child is born to save us now." To me, this expresses what Israel must have felt at Jesus's coming. This is the fullness of Truth. Not some trite phrase, or some way to make it all more manageable. It is Jesus Himself. Jesus is the Way God has made for us to commune with him again, to reclaim the fellowship lost at the Fall. Jesus is the fullness of Truth, with no room for lies or lesser truths. And Jesus is the hope of Life when all we can see or imagine is death and decay. All of the Old Testament writings become clear, their full meanings finally revealed, their prophecies fulfilled. No more lies, no more lesser truths. Jesus shatters them all.
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