17 Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. (John 17:17 CSB)
37 “You are a king then?” Pilate asked.
“You say that I’m a king,” Jesus replied. “I was born for this, and I have come into the world for this: to testify to the truth.Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”
38 “What is truth?” said Pilate. (John 18:37-38 CSB)
You can almost hear the exasperation in Pilate’s voice in that last line. I am sure being a part of the Roman court at that time saw the truth get bantered around, bent and broken quite a lot. Truth was more based on Roman rule than actual truth. What Rome said was true, was true, no matter the actual facts to the contrary.
We are seeing a lot of this in our world today, and I worry that we too are headed the way of the Romans. Great societies die when truth gets traded like a commodity.
But Jesus told us what was truth. He was very clear in our first line of scripture. So we do not have to wonder as to what is the truth, we must just live by it. We can be sanctified by the truth and we can read scripture to bath in the truth. Through prayer we can be lead to the truth as well. What we cannot do is to think that we will decide what we see as truth. We cannot ask, like Pilate, “What is truth” with an air of exasperation. We must be firm in God’s truth.
Otherwise we will be tossed about like a boat on the ocean, blown here and there by the wind and the tides.
