CAMPBELLTON, New Brunswick, March 7, 2024 – During Jesus’ trial, Pontius Pilate rather sardonically muttered as an aside: “What is truth?”, likely not expecting anyone to answer him let alone record his question for posterity. And yet here we are, nearly 2000 years later, not only repeating Pilate’s question but happy to finally set the poor man straight. (“Better late than never”, as my grandmother would say.)

First of all, Pilate’s remark needs rephrasing. He shouldn’t have asked “What is truth?” but “Who is Truth?”, and the answer to that question is, of course, “God”.

God is Truth. As believers, we’ve heard this countless times and (if we’re believers) wholeheartedly agree. But for unbelievers like Pilate, it’s simply a shrugging moment. So what if God is Truth?

We believers need to address their shrugs because a lot rides on God being Truth. God’s quality of being Truth works in tandem with all his other qualities, like being Loving, Just, Merciful, Good, Omniscient, Eternal, Unchanging, and so on. If God isn’t Truth, then he can’t be the wonderful qualities we’ve come to know about him. He would just be relative lies, the kind that social justice and the evil “DIE” trinity are based on.

Back when I was an atheist, I would have waved enthusiastic jazz hands at Pilate’s sardonic aside. But the instant I was born-again, I knew Truth, and knowing Truth, I also knew what wasn’t Truth. Jesus tells us that Truth is a Spirit – not a thing, but a living being – and that the Spirit of Truth inhabits believers. At my rebirth, God’s Spirit of Truth entered into me and I could see – really see – for the first time in my life. By “see”, I mean that I finally understood how the world works and why people do what they do. I could see what motivated them and what enticed them. I finally understood why things are the way they are, an understanding that had eluded me from the time I was old enough to wonder why things are the way they are.

My eureka moment of understanding has lasted now for nearly 25 years. In that time, I’ve come not only to know who Truth is, but to get to know him personally, one-on-one. Truth is my heavenly Father, the same Father Jesus spoke of during his ministry years, the same Father Jesus was referring to after his resurrection, when he told Mary Magdalene: “go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father, and to my God, and your God”.

God is Truth. Because he is Truth, he is also all good things by virtue simply of being Who He Is. Jesus said that none are good but God. Since we know that is a factual statement (Jesus never lied to us), then we know of a certainty that God is good and that all good things come from God. We know of a certainty that the way things are is precisely as God’s Spirit of Truth shows them to be. My understanding of God’s Truth and God-as-Truth is not based on my own understanding but on God’s revelations through his written Word and his Holy Spirit. God’s Spirit has been with me now for nearly two and half decades since my rebirth, teaching me and revealing more and more of God to me as my capacity grows to receive him. By “capacity”, I mean faith. By “capacity”, I mean faithfulness.

The world is blind and deaf to God and his Spirit, as Jesus told us it would be. We who see and hear are blessed beyond measure, as this gift cannot be bought or bartered or sold, no, not for any price. The richest and most powerful people in the world, even if they pooled all their wealth and persuasion, still could not purchase the smallest measure of God’s Holy Spirit. The tiniest of slivers would still be unattainable to them, and yet we, the “afflicted and poor”, received a generous measure of God’s Spirit as a welcoming gift when we entered into God’s Kingdom at our rebirth.

Pilate knew Jesus didn’t deserve the death penalty, but his hands were tied and he had to give into the mob’s demands. If Pilate had known God to be the truth he’d so cynically dismissed, perhaps he would have stood his ground. Perhaps he would have taken Jesus and hidden him away, like Paul had been hidden away before being rescued. But had he done that, Pilate wouldn’t have fulfilled scripture. His blindness to Truth was part and parcel of prophecy, as is the world’s blindness, as was our own blindness, before we could see.

God is Truth. Thank God we know this now with every fiber of our being.

Thank God we see.

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“Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see: For I tell you, that many prophets and kings desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them….”

Luke 10:23-24

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