“What is truth?” I’ll never forget the first time I was asked that question. I was at a Christian University’s Welcome Weekend hosting a church booth and had a sign that said, “We’re serious about truth.” After the students and noise died down and I started packing my things, a janitor timidly meandered over to my table and asked me an unforgettable question—“What is truth?”
How would you answer this epistemological question? To a certain degree, everything in life depends on our understanding of truth. What we believe to be true, right, good, proper, and valuable will inform, structure, and shape our lives. For instance, modern Epicureans don’t believe in an afterlife and thus live for personal pleasure. Nihilists believe that life is meaningless and thus live without purpose. What we believe about truth shapes our entire existence.
We currently live in a relativistic society where truth is subject to personal whims. Feelings based upon lived experiences determine our priorities, values, and purpose. Our post-modern, relativistic society rejects the existence of absolute truth in favor of personal self-determination. Cultural evidence is everywhere from the insistence of “my truth” to the ideological claim that gender is a construct separate from biology. Our culture insists reality is self-determined.
The Bible decidedly takes a different approach to truth. Instead of subjective relativism, the Bible advocates moral absolutism. Whatever is true is objectively true because an eternally absolute God determined it. If God is unchanging (Malachi 3:6; James 1:17) then so too is the reality that he determines. Truth is absolute because God doesn’t change.
But what does God say is truth? One of the climactic moments of Scripture is the events surrounding Jesus’s crucifixion. Moments before Jesus is crucified as our righteous substitute, he stood before Pontius Pilate in a mock trial. As Pilate asked Jesus if he was the king of the Jews, Jesus strikingly responded, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice” (John 18:37, emphasis added). With profound simplicity and acute curiosity, Pilate responded, “What is truth?” (John 18:38)
Though Pilate subsequently condemned Jesus to death before a response was given, Jesus previously answered this crucial question. Earlier Jesus declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me” (John 14:6). Truth is what God says it is. Truth explicitly or implicitly points to the One who determines it. Ultimately, all truth points to Jesus, “the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2).
So, what is truth? It’s not subjectively discovered by our preferences, feelings, or experiences. Truth isn’t even beliefs approved by culture. Genuine truth is the objective, absolute reality determined by God that holistically points to his great glory and name. As Jesus powerfully declared, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32).
I’ll never forget when the janitor asked me that unforgettable question; I wish I could forget the unsatisfying answer I gave him as a young, unprepared pastor. What about us? Are we prepared to give an answer and hold to truth as defined and determined by God? Are we willing to speak objective, absolute truths from Scripture to a culture inundated with misinformation, which is starving for truth that’s real? May God make us a people who are “always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15).