Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Does It Matter Which “Truth” I Believe? (John 8:30-36)
Date: October 22, 2023
I am not a big fan of Minecraft. I don’t have anything against the game itself or those who play it. I have three fairly active players living under the same roof as me, and I regularly admire the things they have built in the game. Their creativity in there is simply amazing to me. But while I do enjoy video games every bit as much as the next boy born in the early days of the video game era, Minecraft doesn’t represent my gaming wheelhouse. My personal creativity lends itself to different applications.
That all being said, Minecraft does allow for some pretty creative minds to play relatively freely in a pretty large sandbox. One of the boys was watching a video the other day from a guy who had built detailed, to-scale models of the tallest building from every state, from the 124-foot Decker Towers in Burlington, VT, to the 1776-foot One World Trade Center building in New York City. It was awfully impressive. One of the features of Minecraft’s building parameters, though, is the fact that you can build something that is totally suspended in the sky. You could build yourself a relaxing retreat complete with every spa feature you can imagine that sits at a nice and peaceful 500-feet off the ground where none of the busyness of the world below can bother you. You could design an incredible treehouse…without actually needing a tree to get it up in the sky. There’s just one caveat to this, though. You can’t simply place a brick in midair. Once you get one put there, you are free to add to it to your heart’s desire, but you can put it there by itself. In the beginning, that floating palace has to have some sort of a connection to the ground. Even if it is just a single pillar tower that gets you up where you want to go and which you then get rid of, you’ve got to have that initial connection to the ground to get you started. From there, the sky’s the limit.
Well, while Minecraft’s total disregard of gravity isn’t something we can achieve in the real world, on a philosophical level, we often try to do that very thing. This morning we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series that I have honestly been looking forward to for quite a while. We live in a culture that increasingly has no place for genuine, orthodox expressions of the Christian worldview. It doesn’t like it. It doesn’t understand it. It doesn’t really want very much to do with it. And when we patiently live it out anyway, we are eventually going to be the recipients of some tough questions. None of these questions are particularly new, and most of them have long since received incredibly detailed, well thought out answers. But most of that kind of work has been done by philosophers and apologists who don’t always specialize in bringing important, but abstract, ideas down to a level the rest of us can understand and appreciate. With all of this in mind, for the next six weeks and in parallel with the Sunday school series many of our Sunday school groups are doing right now (which means, by the way, that if you are not already connected with one of our Sunday school groups, this is a great time to address that), we are going to be talking together through some good answers to tough questions.
Each week we are going to stand face to face with a question that often leaves believers stumped and stymied in our attempts to share the Gospel with people around us who haven’t yet embraced it for one reason or another. If you are here and you would put yourself in the category of someone who still has enough big questions about the Christian worldview that you haven’t yet embraced it in your own life, I am so glad that you are here. Tell all your friends to come with you in the weeks ahead. We are going to wrestle some thorny problems with the Christian faith to the ground to see that perhaps they aren’t quite the stumbling blocks we once imagined them to be. These will include things like the existence of real truth, the reality of miracles, the presence of suffering in the world, the exclusivity of Christ, and a couple of big questions at the end about Heaven and Hell. If you have ever struggled with any of those; if you know someone who has ever struggled with them, you are not going to want to miss a single part of this series.
This morning, we are going to start this journey where we need to start it. If we are going to be thinking about how to respond to tough questions about our faith from the culture around us, we need to make certain that we are responding from a place of truth. Indeed, if we aren’t responding from there, then we really don’t have anything to say. The trouble with this, though, as far as the world is concerned, is that the culture around us doesn’t really think truth is a thing at all, much less that committing yourself to one particular “truth” actually matters. The culture we are living in is thoroughly convinced that something can be absolutely true for you, but not even remotely true for me. And, if you decide you don’t like that truth any longer, you can drop it in favor of another truth, at which point the thing that was formerly true for you will immediately cease to retain that distinction. What are we supposed to do with this?
The same thing we do for each and every one of these questions. We turn to the Scriptures. In this case, we turn specifically to something Jesus said. In saying this, though, we run into one of our first major challenges. While as followers of Jesus we are perhaps convinced of the goodness, truthfulness, and overall reliability of the Scriptures, the people who are likely asking these kinds of questions are not. So, for us to say, “Well, we need to look to the Bible for our answers,” is going to carry exactly zero weight with them.
Now, this doesn’t mean we don’t still turn to the Scriptures to give us wisdom and clarity toward finding an answer to our query. We absolutely do and we absolutely will in this series. Rather, the point here is to make sure we understand that our likely audience not only doesn’t trust them, they don’t care that we do. This is about choosing our language wisely so that the people with whom we are having these conversations are willing to at least hear what we have to say. So, when someone poses a question like, “does it really matter which “truth” I believe,” we don’t respond by saying, “Let’s look at the Bible.” We respond by saying, “You know what, Jesus once said something that speaks to that question that is worth our attention.” And if they push back with something like, “Why should I care about what Jesus has to say?” Our response is not, “Because it’s in the Bible.” That’s the wrong answer (even if it’s true as far as we are concerned). Our response is, “Well, because Jesus predicted and then pulled off His own death and resurrection, and because of that I’m pretty inclined to give Him the benefit of the doubt when He speaks to big questions I have about life.” Are you with me?
So then, what is this thing Jesus said? If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way to John 8, and we’ll take a look at this together. John was Jesus’ best friend, and wrote his reflection on Jesus’ life and ministry about a generation after Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s similar documents were already in circulation among the various churches in the ancient world. As a result, rather than simply repeating what they all said, John included a bunch of stories they didn’t mention. One of these was a conversation—a debate, really—Jesus had with the Jewish religious leaders on the final day of the Feast of Booths (which, incidentally, was the context for Psalm 65 which we looked at in Sunday school last week, and which Jesus probably sung at the festival, perhaps even shortly before this conversation began). This conversation begins in John 7, and concludes in John 8 after a quick story from another time during Jesus’ ministry that John probably didn’t write, but which probably really did happen.
During this conversation, Jesus started to talk about His forthcoming death. Starting in John 8:21, we find this: “Then [Jesus] said to them again, ‘I’m going away; you will look for me, and you will die in your sin. Where I’m going, you cannot come.’” Now, the Jewish crowds who were gathered around listening to what Jesus had to say didn’t understand this at all. They assumed He was talking about killing Himself and being separated from God by that. They all “knew” they were going to be in God’s kingdom in the end because of their commitment to the Law. Because of this, if Jesus was going somewhere they couldn’t come, He couldn’t have been talking about being with God. With some building exasperation over their enduring inability to make sense out of the things He was saying, they finally asked in v. 25, “Who are you?” Jesus answered, “Exactly what I’ve been telling you from the very beginning.” “‘I have many things to say and to judge about you, but the one who sent me is true, and what I have heard from him—these things I tell the world.’ They did not know he was speaking to them about the Father. So Jesus said to them, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own. But just as the Father taught me, I say these things. The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what pleases him.’”
Now, for whatever reason, at this point, things started to click a bit for His audience. John tells us that “as he was saying these things, many believed in him.” They may not have understood all of it, but they at least understood enough to recognize that this Jesus character was more than just a good teacher. He was more than a mere rabbi. He was something else entirely. He really was talking about God’s kingdom and may in fact represent that kingdom. This was a good thing.
The thing is, though, Jesus was never one to take a good moment like this and just bask in its glow for a bit. He was always looking to push people to the next place they needed to be. In this case, He wanted to set an idea before them in light of what He had just been saying that was critical for them to understand if they were going to really go anywhere good with their newfound belief in Him. He wanted them—and us—to understand that believing in Him isn’t simply a matter of personal preference and convenience. It’s a matter of truth and freedom for our souls.
Look at this next thing with me in v. 31:” Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you really are my disciples. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’” What Jesus says here has been analyzed endlessly. Let’s focus our attention pretty narrowly, though, on just what Jesus says about truth itself. He tells us three really important things about truth here. The first is that truth is found in Jesus’ word. You may have noticed that Jesus doesn’t say my words (plural) here, but rather my word (singular). Don’t get hung up on that. That’s just a way to refer collectively to everything Jesus said. His point is that if they will pay attention to put into practice the things He taught, they will find truth.
Speaking of that, the second important thing Jesus tells us about truth is that it is going to be found by His disciples. You see, simply knowing what Jesus said isn’t enough to get us to truth. We have to actually pay attention to it. We have to be students of it. We have to adapt our lives to it. These are all things that a disciple does. Unless we are willing to take the things Jesus said, study and learn them carefully, and let our lives be shaped by them, truth will elude us.
When we do this, though, we will experience the third thing Jesus said about truth. Discovering and embracing truth like this will bring freedom to our lives. What does that mean? When we know what is true, we gain the ability to live in light of it. We can more quickly and more easily recognize what isn’t true, which keeps us from getting caught in a web of lies. Just like a fly caught in a spider’s web loses its freedom to fly around and drive you crazy, a person who gets caught in a web of lies loses freedom in various ways. And the harder we struggle in that web, the more entangled we can become.
Let me use a silly example to make the serious point of what I mean. If you don’t know the truth that the gravitational pull of the earth on smaller bodies within its field of influence is about 32 ft/s2—or, more simply, that gravity on earth is a thing—or if you reject that “truth” in favor of your own “truth” and try to fly on that basis, depending on how much you put into your attempt to live by your own “truth,” you are going to lose the freedom to do things like walk.
The little debate Jesus had with His audience after saying this further makes the point. Remember that He was saying this to a group of people who believed in Him. They were willing to accept the notion that He might actually be the Messiah. But He wasn’t willing to let them accept this as merely some abstract idea that didn’t require changes in their lives. He was pushing them further to really wrap their minds around what His being the Messiah meant for them. They didn’t take it very well. Verse 33 now: “‘We are descendants of Abraham,’ they answered him, ‘and we have never been enslaved to anyone. How can you say, “You will become free”?’ Jesus responded, ‘Truly I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in the household forever, but a son does remain forever. So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free.’”
The crowds were thinking only in temporal, worldly terms. They were thinking about the kind of physical slavery with which they were intimately familiar because of how utterly ubiquitous it was in that culture. Jesus, though, was talking about a much deeper and more sinister kind of slavery—the slavery all of us have to sin apart from His redeeming help. As Jews, His audience did not really consider sin an issue like Jesus very obviously did. They figured that because they were God’s chosen people, as long as they mostly kept the Law and offered the proper sacrifices, sin wasn’t really an issue for them. In other words, Jesus was trying to take a group of people who could rightly be described as “unlost” because they didn’t realize they were lost in the first place, and help them come to terms with their lostness. They didn’t appreciate this at all, and the conversation began to fall apart from here to the point that they finally tried to stone Him to death in the temple courtyard by the end of the chapter.
Well, in talking like this, Jesus drew a line between what is true and what is not. Jesus, all the other contributors to the New Testament, and in fact all the contributors to the Scriptures in general assumed on the existence of this line. They assumed that there was such a thing as “truth,” and further that not everything fell into this category. Indeed, if you spend much time engaging with the Scriptures at all, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that all of the guys who contributed to it were of like mind on this issue. Truth is a real thing and not everything is true.
This idea constitutes a claim about the nature of reality. What the culture around us offers, and what is represented by this first tough question is a competing claim. The person asking, “Does it matter which ‘truth’ I believe?” is assuming on this competing claim. He is assuming that truth is a relative concept. He is assuming that different things, even contradictory things, can both be true at the same time. He is assuming that we can each define truth however we want without consequences (unless my truth gets in the way of your truth, in which case we just need to be more accepting of one another’s truths—that is, accept that they can in fact both be true and get over that).
Ideas have consequences, though, and sometimes we need to push them just a little bit in order to see what those consequences are. In this case, the idea of the relative nature of truth is itself resting on a deeper assumption about the nature of truth, namely, that it doesn’t actually exist at all. Indeed, if everything is true, then, really, nothing is. And if nothing is true, then we can live however we please without consequence, an idea that itself is predicated on the non-existence of God, at the very least as He is presented to us in the Scriptures. The person asking, “Does it matter which “truth” I believe?” is really asking a more important question: “Does God really exist?”
What we have here, then, and again, are two different claims about the nature of reality. These are not just different claims, though. They are contradictory claims. They cannot both be true. They are mutually exclusive of one another. If one of them is true, then the other, by logical necessity, is not. So then…which one is true? Well, let’s go back to what Jesus said. He has a way of forcing us to see what we don’t want to see. In this case, and if we’re being honest, we don’t want there to be meaningful consequences to our choices. I mean, sure, you have to have some consequences, but we want to be able to do what we want and not pay a price for it. We don’t want to pay a legal price, an economic price, a relational price. We want this second claim about reality to be true. We don’t want it to matter which “truth” we believe. That is, we don’t want truth to be a real thing that exists whether we like it or not. Because if that’s the case, then like the world of Minecraft, we can design our lives however we want. The sky’s the limit.
But what did Jesus say? He said that the truth will set us free. Listen: if truth doesn’t exist, then it can’t set us free. Jesus is wrong. But ideas have consequences. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that truth doesn’t exist, that it doesn’t matter which “truth” we believe because they’re all equally right (which, of course, means they’re all equally wrong, but we’ll ignore that inconvenient fact for the moment). That is an idea, and thus it has consequences. What are some of the consequences of that idea?
Well, how about this. If truth really is relative, then objective morality (an idea which is rooted in the notion that there are not only moral truths, but that some moral truths are universal across all times and cultures and are thus objective rather than merely being something we can choose—or not—for ourselves if we so desire) doesn’t exist. It can’t. Now, there are plenty of folks around today who profess to being just fine with the idea that there is no such thing as objective morality. I don’t suspect many of those same folks would be equally fine with your stealing their car because according to your adopted morality, stealing someone’s car is a totally fine thing to do. Let’s get a bit bigger than that. We are just a couple of weeks past a vicious attack on Israel by the Islamic terrorist group, Hamas. One of the explicit reasons for Hamas’ existence as an organization is to kill all the Jews in Israel. As the group’s bloodthirsty attack demonstrated, they really do mean all the Jews regardless of age. If it doesn’t matter which “truth” we believe, then their believing that committing genocide against an entire people group doesn’t matter. The logic here is horrible, but it is also consistent. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.
Make this even more personal, though. If you change “truths” like you change clothes, then eventually you are going to adopt one that will cause pain for you or for the people around you. Your embrace of whatever “truth” suits your fancy will lead you to making some choices that are simply out of sync with reality. You see, the trouble with thinking truth is a relative or variable thing is that reality is what it is and doesn’t care if we don’t like it or want to try to live disconnected from it. The word the Scriptures consistently use for our forays into fantasy is sin. And the further disconnected from reality we try to live, the less freedom we will have. It’s like if you ride on a rollercoaster, but instead of sticking to the track, you decide that the car should go left when the track goes right. That won’t end well. The same is true with life.
No, the uncomfortable reality here is that it very much matters what “truth” we believe. It matters because there is only one truth. Reality is what it is, and it is defined by the character of the God who created it. When something is true, it is true in all situations and for all time. We don’t live in a Minecraft world. You may be able to build your fantasy palace on a pillar, but if you remove that pillar, the palace is going to fall back to earth with a great crash. And the thing is, when your house is balanced on a pillar, you really can’t do very much anyway. The slightest wrong motion will make the thing topple. You may have thought you were going to be able to relax and enjoy the view once you got up there, but there’s no relaxing when your whole construct could collapse at any moment. If we want to enjoy the freedom that comes along with playing by the rules of reality—the freedom of living in the world as God designed it—we have to commit ourselves to the truth. And the most important truth of all is that Jesus is Lord. Everything else flows from there. Knowing the truth of Christ is the only way we can experience freedom. That idea alone provides the foundation strong enough for us to build the structures of our lives that will allow us to live in them and enjoy the process. Knowing the truth of Christ is the only way we can experience freedom.
Now, is this a popular idea? Of course not. We all want to live as we please. One of our culture’s most popular ideas is that we should follow our hearts. That’s Minecraft logic. It makes for great fantasy worlds, but those simply don’t hold up when faced with real reality. But that’s the nature of sin. And it never ends well. It always leads to our losing freedom. If we want to enjoy real freedom, believing the truth that is truly true is the path that will get us there. Knowing the truth of Christ is the only way we can experience freedom.
So, what do we do with this? We need to make sure we are clear on this point as a church and as individual followers of Jesus. Otherwise, we will be following someone other than Jesus and that simply won’t do. In a world that is committed to living according to whatever fantasy is popular at the moment, we need to be willing to gently, humbly, lovingly, and boldly declare what is true by our words and actions. The world won’t appreciate this. It’ll often hate us for it. But it is what love requires of us. We also need to be ready and willing to respond with the compassionate love of Christ when people around us get trapped in that web, even leveraging our freedom for their sake. The thing about the freedom we have in Christ is that it is not only big enough to leverage for the sake of helping others to experience freedom themselves, that is a fundamental part of its purpose. Knowing the truth of Christ is the only way we can experience freedom. And the freer we are, the freer we can help the people around us be as well. Let us commit to being free by living in light of what is truly true. Knowing the truth of Christ is the only way to experience freedom.