13 February 2019

“How can you say that your truth is better than ours?” – Mumford and Sons, ‘I Gave You All’. 

There are a handful of Mumford songs that I really like, including ‘I Gave You All’, but as much as I enjoy this song, this particular lyric highlights a genuine problem that exists in our world today: ‘truth’ doesn’t really mean truth.

If you are able, look up from your phone or computer screen and glance out of the nearest window. What do you see? If someone now called you and started trying to convince you that something else was on the other side of that window, would you believe them? Probably not, because it isn’t the truth and is solid evidence to back you up. However, the problem we are faced with today is that many people would respond with something like this: “well, what you see out of your window is your truth, and what I see (or want to see) out of mine or your window is mytruth, and that’s ok. We can have different truths.”

That’s just not how truth works. A true fact of our universe is that some things are true, and some are false. Now, if you were to shut your eyes and wish really hard, pull the blind down or put a picture up over your windows to change the view, you could distort the truth, but it would still be there behind the attempt to cover or alter it. The root of the issue that I am raising is that the word ‘truth’ is often used today to define ‘opinion’, and it’s extremely unhelpful!

Now, a lot of people have hugely varying opinions about Jesus and Christianity, and that’s fine. But what’s the truth? Based on unmatchable historical, archaeological and other corroborative evidence outside of the Bible itself, it is an objective truth that Jesus Christ lived just over 2000 years ago, that he went around claiming to be God ‘in the flesh’ and that he was crucified. This isn’t just agreed by Christians. There are many non-Christian scholars who agree that the first four books of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), in which we can read all about the life and death of Jesus, are accurate.This is great news for me as someone who professes to be a Christian. I can be sure that I am not basing my faith and life on something that never even happened, or someone that never even existed. I can be sure that Jesus is not a myth.

However, there is something even more exciting than him simply walking around claiming to be God. The evidence to support the claims that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead three days after his crucifixion are quite staggering, and a complete game changer! If Jesus really did rise from the dead, it would mean he was who he said he was! It would mean that God’s purpose for coming to this earth as the person of Jesus in order that people like me, who have fallen short of God’s standard of living, could be considered blameless and innocent is objective truth. It would mean that God becoming his own creation in order to restore it is objective truth. It would mean that the existence of the God of the Bible and his unparalleled love for us isobjective truth.

If you are to take one thing away from this blog I want it to be the passages below. I urge you to meditate on them and pray that God would reveal the power of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection to you. God loves you enough that he willingly died for you, but he has left you with the choice to either accept or reject him as the truth. And so I will finish simply by saying that if Jesus really is the objective truth he claimed to be, that I believe he is, there’s an incredible adventure waiting for you.

‘Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”’ (John 14:6)

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.’ (John 3:16)

Ryan