Your Truth, My Truth, or The Truth?

We’re talking about heavy stuff today, heavy but important. Please stick with me, O.K.?

Adele Rogers St. John, a cub reporter with Hearst Newspapers, rode one night with an EMS crew to a home in San Francisco. They found a father and mother and several children dead, lying in vomit and excrement. The family had eaten Death Cap mushrooms they thought were edible, look-alike Paddy Straws. (Death Caps are so toxic a single mushroom can kill a whole family.) They died because they trusted “my” truth.

Oprah Winfrey talks a lot about “your truth” and “my truth,” and I understand why. She wants women to be heard when they express an opinion. But opinion is not necessarily truth, even when sincerely held. Ben Shiparo challenged Oprah’s statement, saying it puts “privileged personal experience over any more objective kind of reality.”

Objective reality is essential. “My truth” about mushrooms killed that pitiful family in San Francisco.

Strange how that kind of relativistic thinking permeates our culture.

A major U.S. drug company recently paid a $26 billion dollar fine, accepting some responsibility for the opioid overdose deaths of 500,000 people. Health agencies supply free needles to heroin addicts to cut down the transmission of infection. But free needles have not lessened the addicts’ heroin use.

Many states have moved to decriminalize marijuana, yet statistics show marijuana users are 8 times more likely to use cocaine and 15 times more likely to use heroin than those who do not use marijuana at all.

If someone kills a woman who is pregnant, U.S. law charges the murderer with two homicides, the woman and her unborn baby. Yet a pregnant woman, under the legal right to her own body, can legally end her pregnancy.

Obviously, such conflicting laws were enacted according to the beliefs, the “truth” lawmakers believed. But truth never, ever, conflicts with truth. Is there not some incontrovertible, factual evidence we can confidently call The Truth?

Yes, thank God, there is! Romans 1:19,20 says, “For the truth about God is known to them instinctively. God has put this knowledge in their hearts. From the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky and all that God made. They can clearly see His invisible qualities–His eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God.”

We can’t touch God to verify His existence. He is Spirit. But we can know about Him by the tangible (touchable) evidences we see every day, all day, all around us, in His world. No one has to wonder if God is real, if He is The Truth.

So why all this relativistic uncertainty in our society? Romans 1:21,22 explains it. “Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn’t worship Him as God or even give Him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. The result was that their minds became dark and confused. Claiming to be wise, they became utter fools instead.”

Objective, eternal truth can be known. God gave us His Holy Word, complete, with no errors, so that we can know it. Here’s how Jesus explained it to the people who believed in Him in John 8:32,36:

“You will know the truth,
and the truth will set you free. . . .
So if the Son sets you free,
you will indeed be free”

Blessed reality! We don’t have to be afraid of being deceived. Jesus promised we can know the truth, and we can rest in His truth, free from doubts and fears.

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford