Truth Is Fallen in the Street

At the tip of your index finger, there is a cell.

This cell is too small for you to see with your naked eye, although you could probably spot it under a microscope.

Within this cell are more than a dozen unique organelles, each with an incredibly important, specialized job to do.

These organelles are built from macromolecules, which are, in turn, composed of atoms, which you’ve probably heard called the building blocks of the universe.

You have, for reference, about 7 octillion—a seven followed by 27 zeroes—atoms in your body.

But we can zoom in further. Even atoms are made of smaller building blocks—subatomic particles bound together by the pull of strong nuclear force, dancing around each other in a precise but mysterious dance defined by quantum interactions that the brightest minds of our generation are still attempting to unravel.

In just that one cell at the tip of your finger, there is a staggering number of physical laws determining how a staggering number of building blocks behave every moment of every day.

A universe without truth

What do you think would happen if those physical laws ever stopped being true?

Nothing pleasant, that’s for sure.

If the forces governing those atomic and subatomic puzzle pieces were ever altered, all 7 octillion atoms in your body would come undone in a nanosecond. Every molecule in every organelle in every cell that composes your human frame would be fundamentally and irrevocably destroyed—in tandem with the entire physical universe as we know it.

The stars, the planets and every inconsequential fragment of debris floating through the vast expanse of space—existence itself would blink out in a horrifying display of chaos.

If truth takes a day off, everything we know goes up in smoke.

Physical truths and moral truths

To put it another way: the universe we exist in continues existing specifically because truth exists. If the laws of physics were not consistently and dependably true, nothing physical could exist at all.

It turns out the most effective way to get people to give up on the truth isn’t by convincing them that the truth doesn’t exist, but by muddying the waters until it feels impossible to distinguish the truth from the falsehoods. There aren’t a lot of people arguing that point. Gravity doesn’t treat different people differently; magnetic fields don’t fluctuate based on opinion or preference. The forces at work in our universe do what they do regardless of how we feel about them, and most of us implicitly accept this.

What we don’t all implicitly accept is the role truth plays outside of keeping planets and electrons spinning. When it comes to our own personal lives—to the thoughts we think and the words we say and the actions we take—what role should truth play there?

For that matter, there are an absurd number of competing religions, worldviews and philosophies. How are you supposed to even recognize truth? What does it look like? How can you be sure? Can more than one view of truth be right? Who decides?

Hovering over all these valid, important questions is another far more ominous—and perhaps far more important—question:

Does truth even matter?

The 2016 Word of the Year

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year was post-truth: “an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’”

A post-truth world isn’t one that denies the existence of truth. A post-truth world simply doesn’t care so much about truth. Truth takes a backseat to the things we feel and the things we believe.

But it’s more than that.

Worse than that.

In this worldview, feelings and beliefs become a sort of truth—and, in turn, truth becomes malleable. It becomes a uniquely personal and highly unstable quality, defined for me by what I believe and feel right now, in this moment.

If those beliefs and feelings change tomorrow, my truth changes along with them. And if you and I have different feelings and beliefs, well, that’s fine—it just means we each have different truths we must live our lives by.

Until, of course, those truths change.

Again.

How a world gives up on truth

If truth—that is, the kind of truth defined by facts and reality, not feelings and beliefs—doesn’t matter, then the other questions don’t really matter either. There’s no need to worry about the right way to define truth if truth is simply a byproduct of how the world looks to you at any given moment.

One modern-day philosopher, Julian Baggini, argues that we fundamentally understand what truth means as a concept: “No witness need ask a judge which theory [of truth] she has in mind when asked to promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

He argues that the issue doesn’t stem from struggling to define what truth is as a concept, but rather that “there is major disagreement and uncertainty concerning what counts as a reliable source of truth. For most of human history, there was some stable combination of trust in religious texts and leaders, learned experts and the enduring folk wisdom called common sense. Now, it seems, virtually nothing is universally taken as an authority. This leaves us having to pick our own experts or simply to trust our guts” (“Truth? It’s Not Just About the Facts,” The Times Literary Supplement).

When so many so-called experts insist that their perspective is the right one and that other so-called experts are wrong—and when platforms exist for all of them to shout louder and louder, trying to drown out any opposing voices—and when those platforms reward increasingly hyperbolic claims—the end result is a cacophony of conflicting statements that few people have the time, knowledge or stomach to wade through.

Instead, it’s easier to just gravitate toward whatever feels right. If all of the so-called experts say they have the truth and there’s no clear way to separate the wheat from the chaff, what else can you do?

It turns out the most effective way to get people to give up on the truth isn’t by convincing them that the truth doesn’t exist, but by muddying the waters until it feels impossible to distinguish the truth from the falsehoods.

New words, old melodies

The word post-truth is a relatively new one, but the concept behind it is not. As “the Preacher” of Ecclesiastes lamented, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before us” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, English Standard Version).

Human history is a song that’s been playing for centuries. Each new stanza might introduce new words, but the melody behind them remains unchanged.

• The desire to explore has pushed us beyond mountain ranges and beyond the gravitational pull of the earth.
• The lust for power has started wars fought with swords and wars fought with ballistic missiles.
• The desire to create has produced engineering marvels like ancient aqueducts and modern hydroelectric dams.
• The disgust for those different from us has resulted in diasporas, pogroms and even outright genocide.

Stanza after stanza, the song goes on. New words, but the same notes. And within those recurring notes, the refrain of post-truth is deeply entrenched.

The melody of post-truth

Those notes were playing 2,000 years ago, when Jesus Christ stood on trial before Pontius Pilate and asserted, “For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice” (John 18:37).

Pilate’s response in verse 38 seems to me like a verbal shoulder shrug. He asked, “What is truth?”—but he didn’t wait for answer. He didn’t seem interested in finding an answer. He sounded, instead, like a man throwing up his hands, exasperated at the seemingly impossible task of separating fact from fiction.

He sounded like a man resigned to living in a post-truth world.

Seven centuries before that, the post-truth melody was also playing—this time in the ancient kingdom of Israel. The prophet Isaiah was inspired by God to paint an unflattering picture of his countrymen. “For your hands are defiled with blood,” he told them, “and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies” (Isaiah 59:3).

But it was more than that.

Worse than that.

“No one calls for justice,” he continued, “nor does any plead for truth. They trust in empty words and speak lies” (verse 4).

The people of Israel had given up on pleading for truth.

They had embraced a post-truth outlook. They trusted in their own empty words—words of falsehood and deceit. As a society, they were “conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood” (verse 13, emphasis added throughout).

The final stages of a post-truth world

This total aversion to truth-seeking had transformed Israel into a living nightmare. The people pursued their own desires: “Their works are works of iniquity, and the act of violence is in their hands. Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths” (verses 6-7).

Spiritually, the nation was in shambles. “We look for light, but there is darkness! For brightness, but we walk in blackness! We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes; we stumble at noonday as at twilight; we are as dead men in desolate places” (verses 9-10).

The end result experienced by ancient Israel will also be what our modern world will experience if current trends continue. There’s nothing new under the sun—it’s the same song, and we’re beginning to live through the same notes. “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off; for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. So truth fails, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey” (verses 14-15).

Truth is fallen in the streets.

The New English Translation says, “Honesty stumbles in the city square and morality is not even able to enter.”

It’s a bleak picture with a domino effect.

Without truth and honesty, there can be no righteousness. There can be no justice. Remove them from the equation—cultivate a society that no longer seeks them out, no longer pleads for them—and you cultivate a society built around the seeds of its own destruction.

That’s how the song plays out. That’s how the song will always play out.

No civilization can survive the descent into post-truth.

Life and hope require truth

When the time came to give a name to the public-facing branch of our church (the one that would focus on preaching Christ’s gospel message to the world), we gave it a tremendous amount of thought and prayer before settling on Life, Hope & Truth. And now, 10 years into publishing Discern, we’ve spent the last three issues of this magazine focusing on these core elements of our identity:

Discernment, life and hope.

They’re all important. They all play a key role in understanding God’s plan for the human race.

But you can’t have any of them without truth.

Without truth, there is nothing to discern. Without truth, there is no life. Without truth, there is no hope.

That might sound as bleak as Isaiah’s lament, but in fact, it ought to be a source of comfort.

Why?

The pursuit of truth inevitably brings us to the feet of the One who is the source of all truth. Because a society can reject truth, but it cannot destroy it. It can turn its back on truth, ignore it, shout over it, give up on it, misunderstand it, misrepresent it, even attempt to muzzle it—but no matter what mankind does, truth is truth.

The truth that binds subatomic quarks and gluons into the protons and neutrons at the core of an atom is harder to deny than the truth that dictates how we ought to live our lives, but they were both set in place by the same God. The God who set the universe in motion is also the God with the wisdom and insight to show us the best way—the right way—to live our lives.

People can balk at that, but they can’t change it.

They can scream at it, but they can’t make it go away.

No matter how the world reacts to it, God’s truth is a safe haven that has always been and will always be.

Seeking for hidden treasures

How do you feel about truth?

Because that’s the only part of this equation you have any control over. The world will believe what it will believe, the song will play out the way it plays out, and truth itself will remain unchanged.

You’re the variable.

The Bible urges us to “buy the truth, and do not sell it, also wisdom and instruction and understanding” (Proverbs 23:23). The truth—as a reflection of reality and facts, not feelings and beliefs—is a thing that must be purchased. Pursued. And with it, wisdom and instruction and understanding.

It also tells us, “Incline your ear to wisdom, and apply your heart to understanding”—to “cry out for discernment, and lift up your voice for understanding”—to “seek her as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures” (Proverbs 2:2-4).

Because, ultimately, feelings and beliefs are important. The trouble is that in a post-truth world, feelings and beliefs become a stand-in for truth when it should be the exact opposite. The truth—solid, unchanging truth—ought to be the thing that shapes our feelings and beliefs.

Not everyone wants to hear truth

Of course, when that’s your approach to truth, it’s going to set you at odds with people who don’t want to hear that their hand-picked experts and their gut feelings might be wrong.

It’s going to set you at odds with people who insist that biology plays a secondary role to the way we feel about ourselves.

It’s going to set you at odds with people who cast you as a villain for not subscribing to every core idea of their chosen political party.

It’s going to set you at odds with people who believe that facts can and should be bent, twisted and artfully reinterpreted when they get in the way of a deep-set belief.

But it’s also going to bring you closer to your Creator.

The pursuit of truth inevitably brings us to the feet of the One who is the source of all truth.

“Then you will understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God. For the LORD gives wisdom; from His mouth comes knowledge and understanding; He stores up sound wisdom for the upright” (verses 5-7).

Inspecting is a part of understanding

When Pilate asked his question, he didn’t wait around for an answer—but there is an answer all the same.

In His final prayer before His arrest, Jesus spoke to God the Father about His disciples. He asked God to “sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth” (John 17:17).

For most people, it’s quite a leap from believing that objective truth exists to believing that the Bible is a dependable repository of that truth.

If God’s Word is the truth, then it must hold up to our deepest scrutinies. There will always be questions we can’t fully answer, but before we can truly believe the Bible, we must scrutinize it. We must inspect it and study it, poke it and prod it until we understand what it is and the claims it makes.

That’s what we’ve done here at Life, Hope & Truth. And we’ve found, over and over again, that the words of the Bible prove themselves to be true and dependable.

We have tested them through repeated personal application over the course of multiple decades, only to become increasingly convinced of the same truth that Peter confessed to Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (John 6:68-69).

That’s not a belief you can borrow from someone else. We can’t hand it to you, fully formed. It comes from a truth that you must personally examine—a truth that, ultimately, God Himself must lead you to (John 6:44).

If you haven’t already examined that truth—or if it’s just something you’re wanting to refresh yourself on—we’d love to help. We have a booklet called Is the Bible True? that examines evidence for the Bible’s validity in terms of archaeology, history and even the internal evidence of the Bible itself.

We have a seven-day Journey designed to walk you through “The Problem of Evil”—that is, why a good God would allow evil to exist (and what He’s doing about it).

We have two videos on “Three Rational Proofs God Exists” and “Does Archaeology Support the Bible?”

And you can always contact us directly through our Ask a Question form, and we’ll answer as best we can!

What we’ve found (and what we trust you’ll find too) is that the spiritual truths God established are every bit as important (and arguably far more important) than the physical truths that govern our universe.

There’s a reason the 7 octillion atoms of your body don’t just wander off without warning, and there’s a reason certain things are morally right and morally wrong. In both cases, the answer is something bigger than our own thoughts and opinions. We can’t escape the consequences of God’s truths any more than we can escape the consequences of the intricate physics holding our world together.

What we can do is pay attention to them and learn from them. No matter how deeply the world around us delves into post-truth, a life defined by God’s truth is always worth living.