What Really Matters? (1)
What’s important to one person may not be important to another person. Cars? Politics? Sports? Fancy food? Specific clothes or shoes? Career? Education? Movies? Music? What’s really important or not important at all? It varies person to person based on a million reasons. But is there one thing that pretty much universally really matters to everyone?
I want to suggest that, although it will be expressed in a variety of ways, one of these things that really matters is truth. It matters because it is important. It is important because so many things depend on people telling the truth and things being true. What can really exist without truth? Airplanes fly, paychecks arrive, food we eat is safe, we trust doctors, marriages thrive, all because people are trustworthy, keep commitments, and tell the truth. Even love, with all its emotional elements, is fake or won’t survive if the other person is lying.
God is a God of truth (De 32:4). Not only does that mean He literally cannot lie (Ti 1:2; He 6:18), but it also means that He is completely dependable. We can trust Him. He has truth, the thing that really matters in life. He IS the thing that really matters.
Before we think more about God, let’s remind ourselves Jesus said of the devil, “there is no truth in him” and “he is a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). He is “the deceiver of the whole world” (Re 12:9), but “disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Co 11:14). He’s deceptive and tricky (Ep 6:11), blinding the eyes of unbelievers (2 Co 4:4). Notice that at the heart of Satan’s rebellion and attack on us is his attack on truth. It doesn’t always look or feel like error, but it is.
In contrast to the devil, God tells us the truth. Even when it is inconvenient truth – that we’re wrong, that we need to repent – He tells us because it is true and always in our best interest. But we have to be interested in the truth, not just interested in what agrees with what we already think or are doing. We have to love truth no matter what the consequences are to ourselves or others. (Note: Rejecting truth because we don’t like it doesn’t change truth into error or error into truth. It makes people temporarily feel better but not based on anything real or true).
When Jesus was before Pilate, Jesus admitted He was a king and said, “...for this cause I have come into the world, that I should witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice” (Jn 18:37). Pilate responded, “What is truth?” (Jn 8:38). There may be times when we feel this frustration. How can we know what is true? How can we be sure? We will study this more next week, but first we need to work on our desire to know the truth. Did Pilate really care? Did truth really matter to him? Not really, so he compromised and accepted what he knew to be a lie.
We need to be lovers of truth. We need to look for, ask for, insist on the truth in every aspect of life. This love for truth will carry over into religion and will direct us to God Who is ultimate truth. And it will lead us to others who reject the lies of this world and love the truth of God. dd