Basic Christian
Doctrines 4
1.
God is Truth.
Truth is an important doctrine found throughout the Bible and is basic to the study of other doctrines. But truth is not an impersonal concept or idea. God is the final and ultimate truth. He is truth itself. He is "the God of Truth" (Psa. 31:5). He is "the true God" (Jer. 10:10). The Greek philosophers asked three main questions: What is justice, what is beauty, and what is truth? Pilate asked, "What is truth?" Jesus Himself is the incarnation of truth, for He said "I am the truth" (John 14:6). Truth is in Jesus (Eph. 4:21). God is the source of all truth, facts, existence, reality and law. All truth is God's truth. God is truth, speaks truth, defines truth. Someone said that God is the truth, the Bible is the truth about the truth, and fundamentalism is the truth about the truth about the truth. The Bible is the "Word of truth" because it is God's Word.
2. There is No Such
Thing as a Brute Fact.
Cornelius Van Til popularized the theological statement that there is no such thing as a brute fact. He was right. No "fact" just simply exists in and of itself. All facts are true because God made them so. Whatever is true finds its source in God. For example, 1 + 1 = 2. Why? Not, "Well, it just does, that's all." No. 1 + 1 = 2 because God made it like that. God is higher than all facts. Even the laws of mathematics exist because of God. Gordon Clark meant this when he said "All the laws of science are false", meaning that they do not exist of themselves but because God made them so. God does not say something because it is true; it is true because God says so. Facts are but little glimmerings of what God makes true.
3.
Truth is Not Determined by Man.
Since God
alone is truth, truth is not determined by Man, for Man is not God. Truth is
not determined by human vote,
opinion, observation, science or feeling. It is our job to discover
truth, not invent it. Man has personal tastes and opinions, but these are
merely subjective feelings. Humanism would make Man the measure of all truth.
This is but to deify Man and de-throne God. How then does Man discover truth? By
receiving it from God. God reveals truth through Nature partially and through Scripture definitively. . Man's part
is to believe it on the basis of God's authority.
4.
Wisdom is Seeing Things as God Sees Them.
The
first step is faith. We must believe whatever God says, otherwise we are
calling God a liar (I John 5:10). To believe God is to submit our minds to Him
(2 Cor. 10:5). It is to recognize that God is truth and He alone has the right
perspective on His Creation. This is a truly awesome thing to do. "The
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Psa. 111:10). Because we are
finite and sinful, we do not see things as they really are. We need God to
teach us. God's Word makes us truly wise. The opposite of this wisdom is what
the Bible calls folly - foolishness, insanity, nonsense. Sin is the very
epitome of folly. It is spiritual insanity to believe one's own faulty
perspective rather than God's.
5.
Discernment is the Ability to Distinguish Between Truth and Error.
One key
aspect of wisdom is discernment. It is the ability to tell truth from error,
good from evil (Heb. 5:14). Adam and Eve lacked it when they believed Satan and
themselves rather than God. We need God's Word to be able to "distinguish
things that differ".
6.
Truth and Error are Different.
Truth
and error are opposites. They are irreconcilable enemies. They are as different
as light and darkness. God is truth and light; in Him is no darkness or error (I
John 1:5). Among other things, this means that a statement can be true or false,
but not both. A statement cannot be true and false at the same time in the same
way. We call this "The Law of Non-Contradiction". "A" cannot be the same as
"non-A". God has made things the way they are and does not play tricks with us.
It is not true to say, "The exception proves the rule" (exceptions disprove the
rule, and show that the rule was faulty), God is not a God of contradiction. The
Bible has no contradictions. It is Satan, not God, that is the father of error
and lies (John 8:44). Modern Man greatly errs when he fails to see this
difference.
7.
Truth is Reality.
The
fundamental definition of the word "truth" is reality. A true
statement is one that corresponds with reality. If we say, "The sentence,
'The dog is white' is true", we mean that the dog really is white. The
Greek word is ALETHEIA. The Hebrew word is EMET, which also has the implication
of trustworthiness, reliability. Truth makes sense. Error is non-sense. Truth
is real. The so-called Christian Science cult denies all this by saying that
"All is illusion". No, God has created things as real. It is sin that
makes them illusions. We need to see things as they really are.
8.
Truth is Absolute, Not Relative.
Modern
Humanism teaches that truth is relative. Each person invents his own truth.
This is wrong, dangerous and sinful. It simply is not true that "You make
your own truth." We are created, not creators. We cannot create reality.
To say that we can is to say that we are gods, which is what the Father of Lies
wants us to believe (Gen. 3). Truth is absolute, not of itself, but because it
is rooted in God. God is the final absolute and He does not change. The angels
laugh and weep at the utter folly and nonsense of modern Humanism's philosophical
error that says, "That's your truth. Mine is different." Until all
this is seen from God's perspective, we are lost in a jungle of Man-centered,
sin-dominated blind insanity.
9.
Truth is Sometimes a Paradox.
Truth is
not contradictory to itself, but to error. Nevertheless, we are finite and do
not generally see all the relationships between the things God has said and
made. God has revealed some things as paradoxes. A paradox is an enigma, like
"He that loses his life shall find it, and he that would save his life
shall lose it" (Mark 8:35). An antinomy is an apparent contradiction, or
two statements which are equally true but we can't resolve how both can be
true. For example, divine sovereignty and human responsibility are both
revealed truths, but we do not grasp how they are both true. There are also
mysteries, or things partly revealed and partly hidden (cf. Deut. 29:29). The
Trinity is the mystery of mysteries. We know there is only one God and that He
has three persons or aspects. But we cannot fathom the depths of this great
mystery.
10.
Profundity Lies in Simplicity.
One final
thing about truth is important. The deepest theological truths are not the
complicated ones, but the basic ones. A theologian once said that the most profound
truth he ever learned was, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible
tells me so." Often the deepest and most profound truths are stated in
only a few words, like "God is love" or "Christ died for our
sins." So, truth is to be received by childlike faith, which has a kind of
naive innocence to it. This is to be truly wise.