KNOWING TRUTH WITH CERTAINTY

Differences of opinion do not mean that uncertainty is the final verdict. Some even take these differences to mean that there is no truth:

·       Everyone has a different opinion. Therefore, there is no truth.

I simply ask, is this statement true? If she says, “Yes,” then I point out that, “Evidently, you do believe in truth.”

There will always be differences. The guilty always proclaim their innocence, but we have more sure guides to truth. This is why we have juries, testimonies, and evidences. Without certainty, we cannot have any justice, love, or anything necessary for society to thrive. With uncertainty, we are left with the disaffected and apathetic, “I don’t know; who can know?”

If there is no certainty or truth, then Jesus is no better than Hitler; propaganda and lies are no better than honesty. If this is so, then just go to bed and await your last breathe.

But can we know truth? Certainly! In fact, any denial of truth requires a truth statement. Therefore, truth cannot be denied. Consequently, when someone tells me, “There is no way to know for sure,” I ask them, “Do you know that for sure?”

But can we truly know the truth? I enjoy the books called “Magic Eye.” They have computer generated markings that contain a hidden image. You can only see it if you let your eyes go out of focus, and sometimes the image appears. If you have any doubts about seeing it, you can go to the back of the book where the answers are revealed.

Do I know that I perceive reality? Yes! How? I see the image and then it is confirmed for me.

The same principle also pertains to spiritual truth. Although it might be difficult to attain, it is attainable, as Jesus had taught:

·       To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31-32)

Knowing the truth doesn’t just happen. It is a product of following Jesus. Why doesn’t it just happen? Don’t we all want it? Not at all! Instead, we have an aversion to the truth, even to the point of denying that it exists. Why? It reveals what we don’t want revealed, as Jesus had taught:

·       This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

Normally, we hate the light. It exposes our wrinkles and blemishes, even worse, it exposes what we truly have become. And we need not even believe in Jesus to know this. Winston S. Churchill, among many others, had observed:

·       Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

The truth about ourselves knocks us down. We cannot tolerate it. No wonder the differing opinions. They grow in the darkness like poisonous mushrooms. However, when you know the truth, you know it. How? It will set you free. It is like putting on a correct set of lens, which bring everything into sharp focus. This is what the truth will do.

However, we must desire truth above all else:

·       If you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God. For the LORD gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. (Proverbs 2:3-6)

THE “FREEDOM” OF POSTMODERNISM

Years ago, Bob Dylan sang the song, “You Gotta Serve Someone.” The more I thought about it, the more I saw that he was onto something. The baby serves his or her instinctual survival needs. They cry when they are hungry and know to drink the mother’s milk. When we mature, we begin to serve other needs – both emotional and psychological. Later, these demanding needs become social, as we seek approval and a place among our peers.

However, somewhere along the line, we also have to learn how to restrain our desires. Our conscience begins to kick in along with social norms. These tell us that we cannot always serve our desires. We cannot fight and scream when we don’t get what we want, or can we?

Our postmodern culture is now telling us that can have it all. In fact, you should have it all. We should have our desires, even if it means that we surgically change our sex. If that is not enough, society will now penalize those who speak out against this insipient I-want-it-now mentality.

How did postmodernity achieve this revolution? It has convinced us that:

·       Repression is bad. It inhibits us. Instead, we have to be who we are and desire whatever we want.

·       We have to be all that we can be.

·       Exercising self-control makes us less authentic.

·       The conscience interferes with our finding self-fulfillment.

·       Those we had regarded as authorities are all wrong.

·       Instead, we are the authors of our own reality, captains of our own ship, and we should empower ourselves to pursue our dreams.

·       We create our own reality. There is no other reality but what we create.

·       There are no higher truths or principles to tell us that we have done wrong. We should be our own judge and jury.

However, the freedom that postmodernism has promised is just another form of servitude. Instead of serving ideals, we now abandoned to serve our feelings and desires. The external ideals – objective moral law and our cultural inheritance – have been destroyed. Left alone to our feelings and desires, we find ourselves without a roadmap to tell us what to do with these desires. We are left to serve them. We now live with open borders, tyrannized by demanding desires.

I know that this sounds a bit extreme. So I want to try to illustrate how the removal of moral authorities has stripped us and has left us vulnerable to a more destructive and tyrannical set of authorities.

Have you ever noticed that when you get in a fight, it is always the other person who is in the wrong? I certainly have! In fact, the resulting feelings are so powerfully authoritative. I believe that I have been wronged, victimized, and humiliated. We want revenge, even if only in our own heart or the use of the silent treatment.

When objective principles of right and wrong have been crushed under foot, there is nothing remaining, nothing higher than our feelings, to correct us and show us that we have been wrong in our assessment and determination to seek some form of revenge. Our desires are left unchecked to tyrannize.

Our choices can kill. I had been convinced that my wife had wronged me, and I resented her for this. However, I had forgotten how many times she had forgiven me, but even recalling these wasn’t enough. My feelings had been so strong that they stomped down every other consideration in their path. Instead, these feelings dictated that she always misconstrued what I had said and she always would. I was livid.

If I was a postmodernist, my feelings would have remained king. They would have presided over any pragmatic concerns for my own welfare.

I needed protection from myself and to be convinced that my unforgiveness was absolutely wrong and that my failure to receive her back into my heart was an absolute betrayal of love and commitment. I needed far more than what postmodernism could offer. I needed to know that there is something higher than my feelings and even a cost/benefit assessment. I needed to be told that I was absolutely wrong.

This is what Scripture tells me. No, it comes crashing down upon me, indicting and correcting me, and ultimately, restoring us. I need God’s Word to break through my coercive and imperialistic feelings and desires and to put them in their rightful and humbled place.

I don’t know how other couples make it and how they can stand up against this postmodern madness. When caught cheating, a husband explained,

·       “Well, having multiple partners is just what I am about. This is my truth. You have no right to dictate to me your truth. Keep your own truth for yourself.”

Of course, they divorced. They no longer shared the common ground, a higher truth. Instead, postmodernism damned them to divorce. They had become captains of their own ships and were their compass was leading them to separate ports.

There is no escaping it. We have to serve someone. It will either be our own desires or it will be something above us, hopefully, Someone who dignifies our service.

HOW TO ANSWER THE CLAIMS OF MORAL RELATIVISM?

Our deeds are children of our beliefs. In "Mao, The Unknown Story," biographer Jung Chang estimates that Mao had exterminated 70 million of his own people to implement his communist ideal.

Why had he been willing to pay such an horrendous price?

According to his biographer, Mao was a self-centered moral relativist:

* Mao’s attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, “I,” above everything else: “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others … People like me want to … satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.”

* “People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.” “I am responsible only for the reality that I know,” he wrote, “and absolutely not responsible for anything else. I don’t know about the past, I don’t know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self.” He explicitly rejected any responsibility towards future generations. “Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself … I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one.”

His beliefs were a hammer bludgeoning to death millions.

This makes me ponder how we might effectively challenge these all-to-common relativistic, postmodern beliefs of our youth. It is just too tempting and costly to believe that we can create our own morality designed to serve our desires.

We must be able to demonstrate that there exists objective moral laws, which are as real as our laws of physics. These are laws to which we must conform, like gravity, which will punish us if we throw ourselves off a 10-story building. Likewise, moral laws will punish us if we defy them and inflame our conscience.

Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of researchers have demonstrated that we are wired for these laws which manifest at specific developmental stages.

However, if this wiring is purely bio-chemical, some will argue, "I need not conform to this wiring. I can override or defy it. I can drop a pill or dull their impact. I will be master of my own ship."

Most will not take moral relativism that far. They will merely pursue their own desires as their suppressed moral voice repeats, "You are doing wrong."

But is it wrong? How can a bio-chemical reaction be wrong? It just is, isn't it?

We would not say this about gravity. Instead, we would have to admit that gravity exists apart from our thoughts about it.

Here's the question I wish to pose -

* "Is it possible that our moral wiring is like our eyesight? Our eyes are not just biochemical. They perceive a very real external reality. Can it also be that our moral sentiments, our conscience, serves as a portal to an external reality - a world of karma?"

If so, then you are ready for another question -

* "If karma represents the imposition of justice and justice requires the weighing of many subtle factors, Who must be doing the weighing?"

THE UNEXAMINED LIFE

Socrates was a moralist. He talked objectively about morality and his responsibility to teach morality. This, however, makes us uncomfortable – that there exists an objective standard to judge us – and drives many of us into atheism, postmodernism, moral relativism, and even into the denial of freewill.

I like what Socrates had stated:

·       “If… I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the very best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me.” (Apology)

And we still do not agree about “discussing goodness,” real, objective goodness. It remains an uncomfortable subject. However, we are paying a great price for our temporary “comfort.” How so? Well, if we believe that everything is subjective, then there is really nothing substantive we can say about goodness apart from, “It feels good to me.”

Instead, when we examine ourselves, we do not only examine ourselves, but also the features that make us all human. Likewise, when we observe the hummingbird who comes daily to our feeder, we are not merely learning about one hummingbird, but about all hummingbirds.

NIETZSCHE AND NIHILISM: THE DENIAL OF OBJECTIVE TRUTH

 Nihilism is basically the same thing as moral relativism and postmodernism. They all deny the objective reality of any moral or spiritual truth. Instead, they are just a matter of what we subjectively choose for ourselves. The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said it this way:

• “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”  

However, this statement and all of the statements of postmodernism are logically incoherent; they don’t make any logical sense. How so? Nietzsche had claimed that there was no “correct way.” However, by making this dogmatic statement, he had claimed that there was a correct way – HIS way!

Well, what is his way? His insistence that the correct way “does not exist!” (How does he know this?)

I’m not picking on his wording or phraseology. The incoherence is part of his nihilistic postmodern worldview. He asserts that everything is personal and subjective. However, in order to make this assertion, he must resort to using an objective statement of truth, something he claims that we cannot do.

How do you talk to someone like Nietzsche, and there are many Nietzsches around? I would simply ask him:

• Are you absolutely and objectively certain that a “correct way… does not exist?”

If he answers “yes,” then I would point out that:

• Well, doesn’t your assertion just reflect your OWN thinking?

If, instead, he answers that “no” and that he is merely just expressing the way he feels or sees things, then I would respond:

• If this is just the way you FEEL, well, who cares!

APOLOGETICS: A MODERN ENLIGHTENMENT ABERRATION?

In “The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context,” Myron B. Penner writes that our apologetics is a “modern” aberration, an unfortunate outgrowth of the rationalistic Enlightenment:

• The modern apologetic enterprise so many Christians engage in is a bankrupt venture, a kind of false messiah, and considers what this might mean for Christian witness and discourse.

Penner even argues that our rationalistic apologetic efforts fail to even represent Christianity:

• So it is that many attempts to articulate the reasonableness of Christian faith in our context paradoxically end up doing something different than defending genuine Christianity. 

Well, what does genuine Christianity look like? How do we decide this issue? From Scripture! Jesus was all about rational, evidentially-based apologetics. He even instructed His followers to NOT believe Him if His words weren’t backed by the evidence. He then cited the supporting evidence – Scripture, miracles, and the testimonies of John the Baptist and of the Father (John 5:31-37).

Apologetics takes what is certain and uses it to prove what is less certain – Jesus’ own testimony. This might sound unbiblical. After all, how could we regard Jesus’ testimony as uncertain? Without evidential support, it was to be regarded as uncertain. In this, Jesus was merely echoing the Old Testament assertion that everything had to be established by two or more witnesses (Deut. 19:15).

Seeking evidential confirmation might seem like the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but it is also very Scriptural. Jesus routinely quoted Scripture in support of His own teaching, invoking the certain to prove what was regarded by His audience as uncertain.

When asked about divorce, He didn’t simply give His opinion, He engaged in apologetics by citing the Scriptural evidence:

• He [Jesus] answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female [Gen. 1:26-27], and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’ [Gen. 2:24]!  So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6)

The Bible is imprinted with apologetics. The Bereans were not satisfied with what they had heard from Paul. They checked it against Scripture, and Scripture commends them for exercising apologetic discernment (Acts 17:10).

Meanwhile, Paul would enter into the synagogues and rationally reason with them from Scripture:

• Then Paul, as his custom was, went in to them, and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and demonstrating that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and saying, "This Jesus whom I preach to you is the Christ." And some of them were persuaded; and a great multitude of the devout Greeks, and not a few of the leading women, joined Paul and Silas. (Acts 17:2-4)

• And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and persuaded both Jews and Greeks. (Acts 18:4)

Was Paul’s tactics a reflection of “genuine Christianity?” Apparently so! Many were persuaded through his “enlightenment” tactics.

While some of Penner’s brethren argue that Jesus’ ministry was all about proclamation and not rational proofs, Jesus wouldn’t have agreed with this. Instead, He was always ready to provide rational reasons for their faith:

• "You heard me say, 'I am going away and I am coming back to you.' If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. I have told you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe.” (John 14:28-29) 

Jesus never directed His followers to, “Just believe.” After his imprisonment, John the Baptist was experiencing a crisis of faith. He therefore sent his disciples to Jesus to ascertain if He was truly the Messiah. Jesus could simply have answered them, “Just tell John that being my disciple has nothing to do with rational, evidential proofs but of just having faith.” Instead, He directed them to the evidences:

• Jesus replied, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised…” (Matthew 11:4-5) 

This raises another issue. Penner is convinced that our apologetic efforts are bankrupt in terms of winning others to the Lord. However, this is only a secondary aspect of apologetics. First of all, we need to know why we believe. John needed to know, and he was given reasons for his faith. The Apostles also needed to know. Following the Crucifixion, they had abandoned their faith and were hiding. What then turned them around to the point that they were willing to die for this faith that they had now rejected? Apologetics – the evidences, proofs, the reasons to believe:

• After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. (Acts 1:3)

We too experience trials and doubts and need evidential reassurance about what we have believed.

It can even be argued that the entire biblical message is underpinned by apologetics – the reasons to believe. Moses explained to the Israelites that they had no reason to not follow God. They had seen the evidence of His love and deliverance from Egypt:

• Has any other people heard the voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have, and lived? Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by miraculous signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? You were shown these things so that you might know that the LORD is God; besides him there is no other. From heaven he made you hear his voice to discipline you. On earth he showed you his great fire, and you heard his words from out of the fire. (Deuteronomy 4:33-36)

All of Peter’s sermons were apologetic in nature. They not only stated what to believe but also why to believe. In his first sermon, upon the creation of the Church, Peter had to explain that speaking in tongues was not a product of drunkenness but of what Scripture had precisely promised. Peter first cited the evidence from Joel’s prophecy:

• "'In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.'” (Acts 2:17-21)

The rest of Peter’s sermon consisted of the Scriptural evidence Peter brought forth in  defense of the Gospel.

Enlightenment rationalism? Perhaps, but it is Scripture nevertheless. And it has served me well! As someone who always second-guessed himself, battered by one doubt after another, I needed the confidence and stability that only knowing the truth could give me. This confidence came only through a careful examination of the evidence.

There is a joy in believing. However, it only came slowly as God led me to examine the reasons for my wobbling faith. I can only thank God that He has been my tutor and not Penner and the hordes of postmodern thinkers.