What Is Truth?
Jeremiah 23:23-29
What is truth? That question lies at the heart of the passage from Jeremiah that we just heard. The prophet rebukes the false prophets who prophesy lies and the deceits of their hearts, telling the people what they want to hear rather than the word from God that they need to hear.
What is truth? That is the question asked by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, to Jesus, a prisoner and an accused enemy of Rome whose fate rests in Pilate’s hands. During the interrogation, when Pilate asks Jesus whether he is a king, for the Romans would accept no king who did not bend the knee to Rome, Jesus responds, “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” (John 18:37b).
In response Pilate asks, “What is truth?”
The author of the Gospel of John ends the scene there, allowing the question to linger unanswered. What is truth? The implication is that Pilate is not sincerely asking Jesus a philosophical question but rather cynically denying the possibility of there being an objective truth, just as he will wash his hands and deny any responsibility for his role in executing Jesus.
What is truth? The question lingers not only over the interaction between Jesus and Pilate, it also resounds throughout our society today because the truth is increasingly coming under attack by those for whom the truth is inconvenient. Scientific truth like climate change, the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, and even the roundness of the Earth. The truth of election results, economic numbers, and labor statistics. Even historical truths like the reality of the Holocaust, the true horrors of slavery, and more recent events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The vanguard of this attack on objective truth is an alarming rise of misinformation born of ignorance, disinformation designed to deceive, and conspiracy theories that are a combination of both. All of these spread unchecked on social media like a highly contagious and lethal virus. Like Pilate, the CEOs of social media platforms wash their hands, refusing to accept responsibility for the polluting of public discourse that their technology has enabled. And now with the advent of so-called “deepfake” videos made with artificial intelligence, yet another front is opened in the all-out war on truth.
The effect of the circulation of all this false information is distrust in our institutions, in expertise of all kinds, and in the very concept of objective truth. Today we are awash in a kind of nihilism that leads us to believe that everyone is biased, that everyone is spinning the truth, which means that there is no shared reality, no objective truth. The truth is atomized as if sprayed from an aerosol can, countless droplets spreading through the air, each on its own individual trajectory.
In such an environment, we can choose to believe only that which makes us comfortable, only that which fits our worldview. We can consume news only from sources that tell us what we want to hear. We can curate our online experience so that we never encounter a contrary point of view.
it’s human nature to accept only what we want to hear
while discounting or ignoring an uncomfortable truth.
This rejection of any truth that challenges us represents a danger for our scientific understanding of the world, threatens a shared history that holds us together as a nation, and opens us to the danger of an authoritarian who will gladly tell us to believe only him, as if one person could be the arbiter of all claims of truth.
Understand that the point I am making is not so much political as theological. Any assault on objective truth is ultimately an assault on the gospel because the gospel is ultimate truth. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the ground of all truth. To study science—whether chemistry, physics, astronomy, or biology—is to investigate the world that God has created. The study of history is not removed from the gospel because we as Christians claim that God entered into history as a human being born in a particular time and place. To care about how our society is governed flows from Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God, a kingdom that exists not only in eternity but that breaks through into this world.
“For this I was born and for this I came into the world,” Jesus says, “to testify to the truth.” And that, at long last, brings us to today’s Scripture passage from Jeremiah. Yes, this is a reading from the Old Testament, which was written centuries before Jesus was born, and yet, as a popular children’s Bible says, “every word whispers his name.” This passage from Jeremiah is all about the truth of God’s word, a truth that even in Jeremiah’s day was surrounded by lies and false prophets whom people were all too willing to believe.
Jeremiah lived in an especially turbulent time in the history of Judah. For some quick background, the northern kingdom of Israel had been destroyed more than 100 years earlier. The southern kingdom of Judah was all that was left of the once united kingdom that had been ruled by David and then Solomon. At the time that Jeremiah was proclaiming God’s word, Judah was facing a growing threat from the east in the form of the Babylonian Empire.
The message that God tasked Jeremiah with proclaiming was one of impending judgment against Judah for having abandoned their calling as God’s people. Called by God to be a light to the nations, Judah had descended into a moral darkness. Those in positions of power pursued their own agendas, not God’s. God had made it clear what God wanted through the voice of the prophet:
Act with justice and righteousness and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place (Jer. 22:3).
In other words, remember your calling. Remember what I chose you for, how I called you to live. Not to be like the other nations who are ruled by tyrants, who oppress their own people, who prey upon the weak and the vulnerable. But do no wrong or violence to the alien who comes to you looking for work or to escape violence in his own country. Do not pull the rug from under those who cannot live without assistance, like orphans, widows, the sick, and the aged. In the words of another of the Lord’s prophets, Isaiah, “do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow” (Isa. 1:17). Do these things and live. If not, the Babylonians are coming. Jerusalem will fall. The people will go into exile.
This was Jeremiah’s message, which as you can imagine, did not endear him to the king and his courtiers. Jeremiah was not on the guest list for palace dinners. The king did not care for Jeremiah’s preaching. To him it was fake news. He had his own court prophets who told him only what he wanted to hear. Do not fear. The Lord will protect you. God will fight for you. All will be well.
Spoiler alert. It wasn’t. While being the voice of doom and gloom did not make Jeremiah a popular figure, his warnings of judgment would prove to be correct. Jerusalem, the temple, and the king himself were all on borrowed time. The king simply didn’t want to believe it. It was much easier to accept the lies, the deceptions, and the false assurances that there was nothing to worry about. You’re doing great, king! Keep up the good work. God’s got your back.
Look, it’s human nature to accept only what we want to hear while discounting or ignoring an uncomfortable truth. The doctor says, “Unless you cut down on trans fats and sugary snacks and start exercising, you’re at risk for heart disease,” and we think, “Agh, what does he know? It’s my body. It’s served me just fine so far.”
Or we put our house on the market, the house that we spent most of our vacation renovating and repainting, hypothetically speaking. And then at the open house potential buyers point out all the flaws. The AC is 20 years old. The neighborhood looks a bit dodgy. And we say to ourselves, again speaking purely hypothetically, “What do they know? The AC still works fine. The neighborhood is up and coming.”
On a more serious note, we do the same thing on a spiritual level. We diminish, dismiss, or don’t even see our sin…our sin which is transparent to the God who sees near and far. “Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them?” (Jer. 23:23-24). When we fail to see our own sin we are a like a toddler playing peekaboo who because he covers his eyes thinks that he is invisible.
It’s time to put aside childish things and accept the uncomfortable truth that we are sinners. That is what the word of God reveals about us. In fact, that is one of the primary purposes of God’s word in both the law and the prophets—to reveal not only God’s holiness but also the infinite chasm between what God wills us to do and what we actually do.
God wills us to forgive, but we clutch our resentments to our chest.
God wills us to be grateful, but we are filled with grievances because somebody somewhere received a blessing that they didn’t deserve.
God wills us to welcome the stranger, but we build prison camps and arrest day laborers at Home Depot.
God wills us to be especially mindful of the poor and vulnerable, but we take away aid from the world’s poor and cut the social safety net here at home.
Amid all the comfortable lies we tell ourselves, all the self-deception and self-justification we practice to avoid hearing the truth, the word of God blazes like a fire and comes smashing down like a hammer. “Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?” (Jer. 23:29).
Now, I know that those images—fire and a hammer—sound like metaphors for judgment, and they certainly can be. But I believe Jeremiah is suggesting more than just judgment. Fire lights the way in the darkness. A hammer breaks a rock in pieces to get to something valuable—a gemstone or water. A hammer is also useful for building. A hammer, I might add, is also the tool of a carpenter.
And ultimately, that is where the word of God is leading, that is who the word of God points us to—the carpenter from Nazareth who builds a home for us in God’s kingdom, a home not built with wood and nails, stone and mortar, but with his own blood. Ultimately, a crucified Savior who dies for sinners may not be the Word of God that we want to hear, but he is absolutely the Word of God that we need to hear. Ain’t that the truth!