Truth And Not “Truthiness” – Part 3 of 3

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Ask anyone on the street if truth can be absolute and they'll likely laugh. Everybody has what they call my truth these days. In our current series, we've seen that God is the source of all truth and now we'll see that truth is exclusive. Two plus two is always four.

It can never be five. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, this message makes it clear that truthiness will never replace truth and that God's truth is what we must hold onto. You know, Dave, even as you were speaking, there's a quote that came to mind. Booker T. Washington said this. He said that lies never become truth.

Evil never becomes good, even if the majority believe it to be so. And in my new book entitled The Eclipse of God, I have, of course, a chapter on truth. I also have a chapter on law and why it is that it is so critical that we as Christians be involved in legal issues. Even law has to be based on God. Let me ask you a question.

If you have a daughter and she attends a university and she were assigned a roommate and let's suppose that the roommate was born Burt but now he calls himself Betty, would you be okay with that? Law has a tremendous impact upon culture and law must be based on God. For a gift of any amount, we're making my book available entitled The Eclipse of God.

At the end of this message, I'll give you that contact info. And when Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the father but by me, he was excluding other religious options. At the World Council of Religion, Jesus was presented as someone who is the savior or the teacher of the West and Buddha is one of the teachers of the East. And so Jesus was not universally the way, the truth, and the life. But of course he is the way, the truth, and the life. And if he is that, all others are excluded. And you must teach your students and your young people and your grandchildren why Jesus had the authority to be able to make such a statement.

He made that statement because he's the only one who has the credentials to actually save people. All the other religions of the world are gurus, you know, follow this path, here's this path, do this and it'll go well with you, meditate on this. That's all the other religions of the world. But Jesus is one, the only one who actually can be a savior, who can wipe away our sins, take us into the presence of God, and present us to God as if we are perfect, nobody else has those credentials.

And so what we might, thank you for that amen, it was weak, but I certainly take everything up here. Jesus is the one that is exclusively the savior. Now let's go back and talk about that wheel I mentioned at the Parliament of World Religions, that all the other religions, you know, they are religions and they represent the spokes, but at the hub we all agree. By the way, that is utter nonsense, we don't even agree at the hub, but let that stand for a moment.

That's a bad illustration. The spokes of a wheel can be taken and thrown into whatever configuration you would want the spokes to be thrown in, but if you are going to have it represent truth, those spokes would have to be like train tracks throughout all of eternity, because in all of eternity, two plus two is going to be equal to four forever. Christians believe that not even God is capable of contradiction, because if God were capable of contradiction, we could not trust his promises.

The promises could be true one day and they could be false the next day. So we must understand that truth, you know, we always say, well, you know, your truth is exclusive. Yeah, because all truth is exclusive. And if all the religions of the world were equally right, we would be living in a mad house. Here you have Christianity with one God and you have Hinduism with 300,000 gods.

And when the Parliament of World Religions wanted to come up with a document that everyone could agree on, they'd never even use the word God because Buddhists don't believe in God. So we all agree that there is some truth that we can share. No, there is no religious truth that we can share really.

And so what we must do is to gladly affirm, and I'm going to see if I can remember this. Jesus said he is the way, the truth, and the life. Without that way, there is no going. Without that truth, there is no knowing. And without the life, there is no living.

Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. And yes, that is very exclusive. But there's a reason why it is exclusive. So let's keep in mind that truth, biblically, is very exclusive and it is consistent.

If you can believe that two plus two is equal to five, you have a charley horse between the ears. Number three, truth exists independently of us. It exists independently of us. It is not a matter of saying now what is true to you.

There are certain things that are true to you, perhaps, obviously, the life that you live and the issues that you face are unique to you. But if we're talking about universal truth, if we're talking about what Francis Schaeffer used to call true truth, then we are talking about transcendent truth. And that, of course, exists independently of us.

If there's a certain star in the universe, it is there whether you believe it's there or not. It does not depend upon your belief or your feeling. This is so absolutely critical because there are people today, even in some seminaries, that look at the Bible and they say, you know, the Bible was written by people who had authority, it was written by people who were oppressors, and on and on the argument goes. And therefore, when we read the Bible, we have to ask the question, what does it really mean to me?

And it means one thing to me, it means another thing to you, and there is no stable meaning. But we come back to what we've learned about the study of history, that this is very destructive, and what we must do is to recognize that the issue is the text itself. And we may have disagreements, but the disagreement is not because I feel this way and you feel that way. We have disagreements as to what the text has to say.

But the text has to control the conversation. Truth exists independently of us. Booker T. Washington said it best, an awesome statement. He said, evil doesn't become good and wrong doesn't become right just because the majority believe it to be so. Now all of you should have clapped after I said that.

I'll take it. Number four, truth of course, and I'm assuming this in this discussion, in this part of the message, it comes through the word of God. Thy word is truth. And that's why the word of God can be a lamp onto our feet and a light onto our pathway because it is truth. Now, something else that the Bible teaches, and that is that by nature, there are some truths that we will not accept, truths that we fight against with all of our hearts. That's why Jesus said men prefer darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. In other words, what we find in scripture is this motif between light and darkness and darkness has to do with the lies and of course light has to do with truth. And the Bible says in first John is just coming to mind while I'm up here speaking, it says that if any man say that he has no sin, he lies and deceives himself and obviously he's walking in darkness.

Now, where did this all happen? Well, as so many things happened, it happened in the Garden of Eden, of course. The liar came to Adam and Eve and he said, has God said that you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And they said, well, we may eat of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree, which is in the midst of the garden, we shall not eat it lest we die. And he said, you shall not surely die, but God knows that in the day that you eat thereof, then shall your eyes be opened and you shall be like God knowing good and evil. Now, Adam and Eve, you know the rest of the story. They ate the forbidden fruit immediately.

What did they do? They began to hide. They hate the light, they hate exposure because of shame.

And you and I are now all born that way. We do not delight in the truth about ourselves and the truth about God because in order for us to expose ourselves to the light, so to speak, it's painful because we hate to see who we really are. And that's what the Bible calls us to do in honesty and truthfulness as God looks into our hearts. So the first thing that happens is there is hiding. And that's why Jesus said, people prefer the darkness rather than the light. And they find, you know, Isaiah the prophet said, there are those who make lies their refuge and there are people today who make lies their refuge. You know, we need a refuge. We run to the lie. So the first thing was hiding.

And then of course the other is blaming. All of us know how the Garden of Eden story goes. God comes to Adam and says, hast thou eaten of the tree? Where have I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? He said, the woman whom thou gavest me, listen to me, but also look at my hands right now. The woman whom thou gavest me, this weak willed woman that you created, she gave me of the tree.

And then what's a guy supposed to do? Of course I ate. The man blamed the woman, the woman blamed the serpent and the serpent didn't have a leg to stand on. And I want you to know that Adam blamed his wife even though there wasn't a chance in the world that he had married the wrong one. And that's the whole history of the human race right there, hiding and blaming. And that's why the Bible says that people do not love the truth. They don't love the truth about God because that means that they are obligated to him. That means that if he is a holy God and he is that they have a responsibility to him that they don't want to face. And they don't love the truth about themselves.

And you and I are more wicked than we realize we are. When Eva Braun was making her movies and later on they were found and they were played and all of us have seen her movies with Adolf Hitler there. And it is there that Hitler is seen as a human being and people said these movies should be banned because Hitler looks like an ordinary man.

We want people to think of him as a man with horns, a very evil man the likes of which there are none others or very few others on this earth. I have to tell you he was an ordinary man. I could tell you about his mother Clara. She died of cancer when he was 17. He took care of her. He loved her. His father was abusive. Hitler threw himself across his mother's grave and thought that he would never stop crying. Her doctor later on said that she would have been scandalized if she had known how her son turned out.

It is amazing. But we don't like to admit the possibility of evil in all of us. There is another statement I want to make and that is that truth brings freedom. Truth brings freedom. You remember in the eighth chapter the book of John Jesus has this discussion with the disciples. Jesus said to the Jews who had believed on him, if you abide in my word you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. They answered him, we are the offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved by anyone. How is it that you say we shall become free? Jesus answered them, truly, truly I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. We are living in a day and age in which slavery to sin is seen as genuine freedom and liberation. But Jesus said, whoever commits sin is a slave to sin.

The slave does not remain in the house forever. In other words, you don't always have to be subject to the slave, but the son abides forever. So if the son sets you free, you shall be free indeed. In other words, darkness to the world looks like liberation, but to those who know their own hearts and to those who know God, exposure to God actually brings freedom because along with it, it brings forgiveness, it brings cleansing and all the blessings of the gospel. But in order for us to see ourselves as we are, it really takes a divine intervention of God. And that's why we pray for our children.

That's why we pray for the unsaved is because unless God shows them their great need and shows them the beauty of Jesus, all of our talking does very little good. In the moments that we have left, I want to remind you of the sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah, Isaiah chapter six, and we don't have much time so you need not turn to it because you're acquainted with it. But it says in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.

Uzziah was a king who reigned for more than 50 years and apart from the way he ended, he was a good king. And now Isaiah would be concerned about the leadership because there was a vacuum on the throne of Israel. And God says there may be a vacuum on the throne of Israel, but there's not a vacuum on the throne of the universe. God is high and lifted up and his train filled the temple, speaking of majesty. And then you know the rest of the story, how the cherry of them shout, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory. And I mentioned this passage because of Isaiah, who was a very righteous man. He sees himself in the presence of God and he says, woe is me for I am undone.

I am a man of unclean lips. I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. But he experiences God's grace.

One of the cherry of them take tongs and take a coal from the altar and put it on his tongue and he is cleansed. And then God gives him an assignment that says go preach the truth. And then God says, you know, preach but seeing they will not see hearing they will not hear. In other words, you're not going to be successful, but you and I don't have to be successful in order to be faithful.

We have to be faithful even when we are not successful. And God did not promise Isaiah success. If you wonder about that, read that passage on your own sometime. But God said, Isaiah, even if people don't want to hear, you should share the truth with them. And then there would be those who God would graciously intervene and show them the glories of the truth. And that's why there are those who believe and there are those who don't believe, but there are those whose hearts God opens. But only the truth can set us free.

And that truth is found in the scriptures and found in Jesus. There is a story that Lloyd C. Douglas who wrote The Robe, when he was a college student, he said that he lived above a man who was a music major. He was a retired musician.

And every morning they had a little ritual. Douglas would come down the stairs, he'd open the door and he would say to this retired man, who also was an invalid, what's the good word for today? And the musician would take his tuning fork and hit it against his wheelchair and say, that is middle C. The tenor above me is out of tune.

He's flat. The piano across the hall is wildly out of tune, but that is middle C. It was middle C yesterday. It'll be middle C tomorrow. And it will be middle C in a thousand years. The good news is that is middle C. We're living at an age when our politics is out of tune. Many of our judges are out of tune.

Many of our universities are out of tune. You know the whole story as well as I do, but there is good news. There is a middle C. C-H-R-I-S-T. That is middle C. Father, we thank you that you came to reveal the truth to us and that the truth does set us free. And for those who have listened to this message and even now still are resisting the truth, overcome that resistance. Show them that they can't handle their guilt and their sin on their own, but they need a savior who's actually qualified to save them from their sins.

You know, my friend, this is Pastor Lutzer. Recently I was in Nuremberg, Germany, and perhaps you've heard me tell the story of how when the Nazis were tried, they argued that they did not break any laws because Hitler had changed the law. Killing Jews was legal. So the question was, whose law will be used to judge them? Well, Robert Jackson, the American attorney, stood up and gave a lecture on the law above the law. Now, why do I mention that? Because in my book entitled The Eclipse of God, I have a chapter on law and show how that law has to be based on God. Law, transcendent law must always go back to the divine.

It must go back to truth. For a gift of any amount we're making this brand new book available for you. Here's what you do. Go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337.

Go to RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. These days, justice is all about strategy. Truth is irrelevant. Just find a friendly courtroom and if you're well connected, you're all set. Our legal system is broken with so called justice for the haves and injustice for the have nots. How did we get here? Next time, Erwin Lutzer will tell us how. Plan to join us. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.