Let God Be True...

11/20/11 Let God Be True... Grace UMC

The concept of truth has played a dominant role in the history of Western thought and culture. In their various ways, in spite of all their differences, the whole history of theology, philosophy and natural science, have been engaged in the search for truth and to understand how that truth impacts us as human beings. In the classical period and after the Enlightenment, truth was held to be the most beautiful of things. Truth and beauty were so connected, it was as if everything that is true is beautiful and everything that is beautiful is true.

But not everyone has thought that truth was beautiful. With the rise of postmodern skepticism and relativism, truth has taken on a different, almost sinister turn. There have been many thinkers who have concluded that the shocking truth is that there is no truth, at least no truth that can be agreed upon by everyone, which means no truth in the sense that we usually talk about truth. In this case, truth is far from beautiful, but can be ugly and even frightening. This kind of truth is something before which we tremble because we have deep desires that there are absolute things like love, goodness, value, meaning, and things like that. What are we to do if there aren't? It is a stark idea that many people have resisted, even if they have been convinced by it, if by nothing else than by a sheer act of the will.

When Jesus was standing before Pilate, he was asked, "So you are a king?" Jesus responded, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Pilate's retort to this is famous. He asks the question that has been on so many lips since that time and is more common now than perhaps at any other time in history. "What is truth?" Pilate merely did what so many skeptics have done. He attempted to dismiss Jesus' claims to the truth on the grounds that he could not find anything that he felt he could call truth.

Since I have begun my appointment here a few months ago, I have found myself asking a classical question about the nature of truth that goes back to Socrates. In his dialogue with Euthyphro, a man known as a prophet of the pagan Greek gods, Socrates asks this question. "Are things loved by the gods because they are holy, or are the things holy because they are loved by the gods?" Now, it must be said at first that this question has a lot of buckshot in it, because Socrates is, in his own way, attempting to make Euthyphro look foolish. After all, you do not need to read Greek mythology for long before you realize that there isn't hardly anything that the gods all agree on. If we define goodness in terms of what the gods think is good, we can never get started, because they can never agree on what is good and what is not.

This particular jab does not apply if we direct the question to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. After all, we do not affirm a plurality of gods who disagree, quarrel, and even wage war on one another, but only one God, who is absolutely united, even in his triunity. And yet, the question still needs to be asked. Are things good because God loves them or does God love them because they are good? To many people, this sounds like a silly question to ask when they first hear it. After all, what difference does it really make? What should we care which way we look at things, if they both say basically the same thing.

Of course, the real question is, "Where does truth come from?" Is truth something that is defined by and has its source in God, specifically the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, or is truth something that is even more basic, even more fundamental than God himself? To look at it from a slightly different point of view, is good what it is because, first and foremost, God is who he is and not otherwise? That things are objectively good or evil based on what relation they bear to God? In that case, we find we must listen hard to God in order to really know what good and evil are. Or, perhaps, are good and evil what they are independently of God, and we follow God because he is so good and being good?

Often, when I ask this question of people, the moment they realize that there is actually a difference between these two ways of thinking, they say, "God loves things because they are good." I think that the reason we do this is because we are so deeply aware of the realities of good and evil, we can see good and evil in our lives everyday in undeniable ways, because we want everyone to live according to our understanding of good and evil, regardless of whether they agree with our religious convictions. And yet, the Bible consistently portrays God as the source of everything, of everything that we can see and everything that we cannot see. And that means that God is also the source of the distinction between good and evil. Things that are consistent with God, that are in their proper relationship to him are good; those that are not, that defy God, that take authority that belongs to God, are evil. This distinction holds regardless of what we as individuals or as a community think about it.

Paul has something to say on this topic. In his letter to the Romans we find a careful and heartfelt exploration of the relationship of the old covenant to the new, of the nation of Israel to the church as a whole. There is a constant going back and forth between the Jewish situation and the Gentile situation. Paul explores and compares how the Jewish people have reacted toward Christ with how the Gentiles have. In the chapter before our text for this morning, Paul, a Jew, critiques the Jewish people and their failure to respond to God in obedience. He argues that the Jews, no less than the Gentiles, fall under God's judgment. Indeed, they are even more guilty, for they had been set apart by God, they had been given a law to live by, they were truly meant to be God's people, and yet they misunderstood when their God came among them.

After pointing all of this out, Paul asks his readers, "Then what advantage has the Jew?" Biblical scholar C. H. Dodd responds here by saying that, according to Paul's line of thought, the answer should be "Nothing at all!" If all of the laws and rituals don't necessarily make the people better, what good is it? But that is not Paul's response. What advantage does the Jew have? "Much in every way!" Why is this? Because the Israelites were entrusted with the oracles of God, the revelation of God from the very beginning. The Israelites had played a vital part of God's interaction with humanity and this cannot be forgotten. After all, later in his letter, Paul will say that Gentile Christians, like you and me, are like branches from wild olive trees that have been grafted onto the roots of Israel, and not the other way around. Whatever may have taken place, we are not free to discard the history of Israel, for in Christ, it has become our history, too.

Paul puts forward the counterargument that someone might make. "What if some were unfaithful?" What if the Jewish people, in spite of all the blessings they had received, in spite of the care and mercy that God had shown them, didn't react in faith, but rather in unfaithfulness? What if the people showed by their actions that they did not value God? Paul's response to this is, "What about it? What difference should that make?" After all, just because a whole nation of people, generally speaking, did not behave faithfully to God, why should that mean that God should be unfaithful? "Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means!"

This bold declaration by Paul is incredibly comforting, especially because it reminds us that we are simply not capable of undoing the love that God has for us. We might live inconsistently with it, we might not receive the benefits that we are meant to get from it, but we can never actually undo it, we cannot actually make God change his mind about the compassion and mercy he has decided to show us. Not even the murder of the Son of God could stop God from loving us and working out his redemption for us and in us. "Let God be true though every man be false" is encouraging because it reminds us that, even if we have dedicated ourselves to falsehood, it does not change the fact that God is still true and that the truth of God stands in spite of our falsehood.

There is a bit of potential discomfort that comes with the declaration that, even if every human being was a liar, God would still be true. Because, you see, it means that, if I am false, if I, in spite of myself, am a liar, it means that God stands against me as far as my falsehood is concerned. It means that, if I am to be put in the right with God, I must simultaneously be put into the wrong as far as myself is concerned. That is, I cannot be made right with God without being deeply changed. The same God who reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ is called, in the Old Testament, a consuming fire, a hammer that breaks the rock into pieces. When we are confronted with the truth of God, all our falsehood is exposed for what it is and, if we are honest, we don't really like that. We would rather avoid it.

Christians in every generation have wondered why it is that some people simply will not turn to God. We sometimes wonder if people are just not convinced that God really is good. I think that the opposite is sometimes the case. I think that sometimes, people do not avoid God because they do not know how good he is but precisely because they know exactly how good he is. It is precisely because, when they meet with God all their evil is exposed by God's goodness and all their falsehood is exposed by God's truth that they want to stay away. It is as Isaiah says. "We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like filthy rags. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away." When we compare ourselves to the absolute truth and goodness of God, we shrink away; not because we have found out something about God that we do not like, but that we have found out something about ourselves that we cannot bear.

And yet, it is not as though this discomfort is the final word. God did not come among us to make us uncomfortable, though that certainly happens when we are challenged by his very being. God came among us to stare our evil and falsehood in the face and to overcome it. To endure it in all its depths and even to provoke it to new heights by offering himself to be betrayed and murdered by us, and to use that very manifestation of our human evil and falsehood as the moment where God's goodness and truth are most concretely manifest in our world of space and time. Jesus said once to his disciples, "I am the truth." He did not say, "My words are the truth," or "The scriptures are the truth," but "I am the truth." And how did humanity react to this truth in their midst? By nailing him to a tree and leaving him to die. And yet, in spite of the radical faithlessness that humanity showed toward the faithfulness of God, God did not turn away, but remained faithful, remained true, remained absolutely fixed on his goal to take us and make us his own.

"Let God be true, though every man be false" is a statement of the absolute reliability of God's promises to us. When all the world comes crashing down around us. when it seems that all our hopes and dreams for certainty, for joy, for meaning, collapse, God still stands. When we look around and see that all our heroes are crumbling into dust, when all those we thought we could trust turn out to be deceivers, when we realize that not everyone we thought was looking out for our best interest was actually doing so, when we realize that we ourselves were not always looking out for our best interests; when we realize that our falsehood goes down to the core of who we are, God remains true.
Being put into the right with God carries with it, simultaneously, the realization that we are in the wrong. The word of justification, the word of salvation, the word of redemption means that we, in and of ourselves, are unredeemed, that we are in need of redemption; that we are not who we ought to be.

The good news is that God is true, regardless of whether we are. That God is good even when we are not. That the Good News of Jesus Christ stands, regardless of whether anyone listens. God will not let us out of the implications of what he has done that easily. God is true, even if you are a liar; God is true even if I am a liar. God is true and has invaded this world of falsehood; and that is good news. Let us pray.

AMEN