This is the great existential question that has plagued mankind throughout the ages.  The irony is that Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, who is the embodiment of truth,  this question but Pilate still capitualted to the crowd.

Therefore Pilate said to Him, “So You are a king?” Jesus answered, “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.”  Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?”  And when he had said this, he went out again to the Jews and said to them, “I find no guilt in Him.”  (John 18:37-38)

How often do we lose sight of the truth and go along with the crowd?  One of my favorite descriptions of truth  is by R.C. Sproul, “truth is reality as seen from God’s perspective.”  The key is seeing our world from God’s perspective.  We must realize that people are entitled to their own opinion but people are not entitled to their own truth.  If we do not believe in objective truth then people are free to do what is right in their own eyes.  Perhaps our question should be “who is truth?”  This is how Jesus described Himself in John 14:6,

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”

Jesus, who is God in the flesh, is the personification of truth.  We must either accept His words as true or reject him as a madman – we cannot simply accept Him as a good moral teacher and pick and choose what we want to believe.  C.S. Lewis makes the following observation,

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

What is your source of truth?  Is it following popular opinion, is it from deep within yourself, or is it from looking to God?  Our next blog post will examine the source of God’s truth.