Grace in Truth

Though inconvenient for some, truth exists!
Amazing... truth exists

Knowing truth is grace from God.

“Postmodern” has become something of a bad term in Christian circles. The general claim of postmodernity is that absolute truth is impossible to establish. We are too bound up in our subjective points of view, in our experiences and cultural limitations, to really be able to have a claim to objective truth.

If you think about it for a while, there is something to be said for the humility that this viewpoint entails. If I become less sure of my own perspective as the only truth, I’m less likely to impose my way of thinking rigidly on everyone around me. Science seems to have grasped at least a portion of this. It deals in hypotheses, not absolute truth; even the most dearly held theorems and “truths” are actually not, at their core, stated as absolutes.

Although postmodernity is wrong, it highlights that truth itself is an incredible grace from God.

I don’t mean the concept of truth. I mean actual truth. Truth that is correspondence to reality, the reality of the One who matters, our creator God. God has chosen to give humanity His Word, His Truth. This truth isn’t only a set of propositions, but narrative, metaphor, and ultimately relationship. Truth for us is made possible because the Holy Spirit opens eyes and biblical revelation leads to lives that are submitted to God’s reality. Truth is possible because true reality actually isn’t my perception, or your perception, but how things really are in the eyes of the only One who can be truly objective: our saving, redeeming, creating, judging, all-powerful God.

I know that’s a heady paragraph. But the Bible clearly affirms truth, and links it to grace. Colossians 1:6 says that truth is the way in which we understood the gospel of the grace of Christ. John 1:17 proclaims that grace and truth came to us in Jesus Christ. John 1:14 declares that His glory is full of grace and truth.

Our salvation is based on belief in actual truth. 2 Thessalonians 2:13 proclaims that “God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.” This verse clearly assumes that there is an actual truth, and belief in that truth is what, along with the Spirit’s work of sanctification, is what saves.

Grace and truth, connected to salvation and Jesus Christ.

All this isn’t just for the theologian. Our lives, spent in study of the Word, prayer, communion, and devoted following after Christ, are being more and more molded into the true reality – the reality of relationship with our Savior. We get to more and more see the world as He sees it; more and more have our own personal subjectivities submitted to Biblical reality. Our lives in Christ more and more resound with the reality of the living God.

Truth matters. The Bible is God’s truth, not only in proposition, but in its being used by the Holy Spirit to shape our understanding of reality into what reality actually is. Postmodernity is right in that I, a fallen human being, could never understand true reality. It takes a perfect God, who does know and understand all reality, to declare what truth is.

That our God would go to the effort of not allowing us to simply live in our “rational” self-deluded state, but break through our blindness, patiently direct us and mold us and grow us more and more into correspondence to what reality is: this is amazing grace.

The grace of truth.

“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:17).

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