Jesus Defines What Truth Is

By Daniel Lundy

 

What sets Christianity apart from all other faith systems is that it does not talk about man’s search for God. No, Christianity is the amazing story of God’s stepping down to earth, God searching for man. Christianity is the story of how God has appeared in our midst in the Person of Jesus, His Son.

God has appeared. Everything else in Christianity depends on this one essential fact: God has appeared on earth. This in fact is what we celebrate at Christmas: God’s appearing in our midst in that tiny baby in Bethlehem.

 

Only One God

But let us understand what this means. When the apostle John wrote that God had appeared, what did he mean by that? We must understand that John was a Jew. As a Jew, he believed in one God who was not to be confused with the world or any part of the world, but rather this one God had made the world, had made everything that can be seen, had made human life, the animal kingdom, the stars, the earth and all its elements. Everything that exists had come into being by the all-powerful Creator. This God was the God the Jews believed in.

But John writes this: "That which was from the beginning…we have seen with our eyes…the eternal life which was with the Father…has appeared to us." John, as a Jew, was convinced that God had come to earth.

Do you realize what a staggering claim this is? It has been well described by C. S. Lewis:

"God selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was, that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews.... Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man, Jesus, who goes about talking as if He were God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now, let us get this clear: among pantheists, anyone might say that he was a part of God or one with God, but Jesus, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God in their language meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what Jesus said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips."

 

Jesus Defines Truth And God

What are the consequences of believing that God has appeared, that Jesus is God? Because He is God, He is the test of truth. Jesus defines what truth is. Jesus is God. That means we now have an unchanging standard by which to measure everything that confronts us in life. God has appeared and now He defines what truth is. Jesus defines the truth about God.

The truth about God is defined by the One who stepped down from glory and became a baby in Bethlehem and went to the cross for our sins. Jesus is God! Jesus, therefore, defines who God is.

Do you see why John and his readers and we today can be so sure of the truth about God? It is because God has appeared in the Person of His Son. In Jesus Christ, God has made a full disclosure of who He is: His personality, His character, His plan, His purposes. Whatever claims to be from God must agree with what God has said about Himself by coming down, clothing Himself in human flesh, walking among us.

 

The Jesus Of History Is God

The Word was made flesh, and that Word that was made flesh in Bethlehem is the test of anything that claims to be from God. The historical Jesus that John and many others heard and saw and touched is not the Jesus of modern liberal scholarship which strips away the supernatural until what is left is merely the vain imaginations of men who think that 2000 years after the fact they are closer to reality than those people who walked and talked with Him, the people who put their lives on the line.

There was a Man the existence of whom is acknowledged even by the secular Roman and Jewish historians of His day, one Jesus who went about through Palestine, who appeared, in fact, before the Roman governor of His day, and this Man was put on trial for His life and crucified on a Roman cross. It was all witnessed by the very people who are writing these documents for us. This historical Jesus is the test of truth.

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