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| Jesus is the Truth |
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)
“What is truth” is a question that human beings have never stopped seeking answer about, and it is also a question that has cost most brilliant brains on this earth to struggle through their life. Nevertheless, even with today’s super advanced high-tech, no one could have found a simple satisfactory definition about truth. Relativists claim that no absolute truth could be found and every proposition or all the knowledge could be true only relative to certain background conditions. While anti-relativists believe that man could find absolute truth that corresponds to the actual state of affairs, they still could not provide a sound criterion of how to find such truth in general.
Chapter 14 verse 6 of John is a famous biblical scripture. Christians could all understand that Jesus is the way because we could see the Father only through Jesus, and also because many lost people have found their way of life only after they found Jesus; Christians could all understand that Jesus is the life because we could receive eternal life from Jesus, and also because many sick people have been healed and many troubled people have survived their life out of desperation because of Jesus; Christians could all understand that Jesus is the truth because all the truth is from Jesus, and also because many people learned the truth of life from the Bible and from other people who have been inspired by Jesus.
However, because of the lack of a clear understanding about what the truth really is, there is still some confusion among Christians about why Jesus is the truth. Here I would like to share with you what I have been given to understand about this issue.
Human beings would think about what truth is because we need truth. Human beings count on truth to handle natural and social challenges, to survive, and to develop ourselves further. Therefore, the ultimate value of truth for us is to guide us to succeed in our practices. Since from time to time we could be misled by some false knowledge, and when it happens, we would normally suffer from pains, losses and defeats, the quest of “what is truth” becomes an important task for human civilization. For the same reason, some people proposed that truth is the knowledge that has been verified and confirmed by the results of practice. This might sound reasonable but actually might not be as helpful as it sounds because any result of practice is obtained under limited conditions and thus the truth about it might not be generalized unlimitedly.
In fact, the very reason that human beings could not find precise and clear description about “what is truth” is because our own logic and language is defective, which has been demonstrated by Kurt Gödel at the level of mathematical logic.
Then how should we understand why Jesus is the truth? This might sound to be a very simple question to many, but very often we still could hear some confusion in the answers from many people. The biggest confusion about this question might be that many people take human understanding or explanation of the truth of Jesus to be the same as the truth itself, and thus assume that human understanding or explanation of the truth is absolute truth, and then further assume that the teaching given by some human beings or some human social bodies is absolute truth. This kind of confusion could cause a lot of misunderstandings, among which is the denial of the relativity of the truth learned by human beings.
We Christians all believe that the truth of God is absolute, but because many have mistaken human understanding or explanation of the truth as the truth itself, they actually have brought relativity into what to be considered as the truth of God; on the other hand, theoretically this also have made many people reluctant to accept any relativity in human explanation of the truth (including prophecies) of God.
In fact, the meaning of truth to God is different from the meaning of truth to us. This is because that we need to seek and find truth and to express the learned truth in our imperfect human terms, but God creates and knows all the truth! This is a huge difference which determines that the meaning of truth to God is ultimately different from the meaning of truth to us.
Anyone who has the experience of nurturing children would know that grownups could not tell the children 100% what the grownups know as truth for themselves. Or in other words, they should not treat the children like grownups. From time to time they have to tell the children something that they consider being good to the children but not true by their own knowledge. This is because we as grownups believe that we know better than the kids, and thus we believe that as long as the kids do what we tell them to do it would be good for them even though they might not know the true reason why we tell them so. Of course, all parents know that we human grownups are not always right and we make mistakes, which is because the truth we know are relative truth. But God knows everything about us and God would never make any mistake. Without realizing the difference between the meaning of truth to us and the meaning of truth to God, one might not understand the meaning of “Jesus is the truth” clearly.
When we go to church for the sermons or when we read scientific literatures, we might very often find that some messages in the sermons or in the literatures are obviously wrong based on some of our knowledge. But then we might also find that those sermons or literatures that contain some mistakes could often be very helpful in our life and for various practices. They might help people to firm their faith or help people to solve some of their practical problems. When this happens, it might fit the definition of relative truth or might go beyond the meaning of relative truth.
The so called relative truth means something that is true only in terms of certain background conditions. For example, Newton’s second law is a truth in our daily life, but it fails to be a truth for a particle moving at close to light speed. Even though grownups would not tell children all the truth, they would not purposely tell the kids some nonsense that would definitely cause them to make mistakes, and thus what the grownups tell the kids is what they consider to be the relative truth for the kids.
We might very often hear some different church teachings that are apparently in conflict to each other, but the people who deliver the teachings are all very blessed, their prays are all very often answered, and they all live very successful lives even though they might consider each other’s views are wrong. This then go beyond the meaning of philosophical relativity. This is actually a special grace from Jesus. In fact, very often we see the love from Jesus better when we make mistakes than when we think we are doing great. Because God creates all the truth so God could decide not to let us to suffer from what we have done wrong based on what we know about truth.
Therefore, “Jesus is the truth” not only because all the truth we could learn is from Him but also because He could alter any causal relationship that we know as truth, which is the ultimate meaning of truth and is definitely beyond the reach of our human beings. But for us human beings, we still have to pursue all the truth even though we know we could only get relative truth because if we do not do so we will fail ourselves……
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Posted by murongqingcao on 2008-12-25 11:20:37 | Rating: | Views: 107
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