24.04.08
Shorter Catechism on God (14) - God is Truth
Read: 1 Kings 18:17-40
We come, tonight, to our final study into Q & A 4 of the Shorter Catechism, ‘What is God? God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in his being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth’ – God is Truth. I haven’t gone through this study with you to bore you, or to tire you, but to enthuse you about the God you serve so that you may know Him better, praise Him sincerely, and serve Him enthusiastically. I have also chosen to do these studies on a prayer meeting night, not because I want to cut down the length of time we pray, but because I want us to use each of God’s magnificent attributes as the focus for our prayers on behalf of ourselves and other people.
Never is that more applicable than when it comes to this, last, attribute of God – God is … Truth. The fact that God is truth means, as we shall discover, that we can pray effectively to a God who cares more than we do, and is able to do far more than we can even ask or imagine. I want to see two things about God being Truth. First, elements in the Bible’s Teaching on the Truth of God and then secondly, applications of the Bible’s Teaching on the Truth of God.
1. Elements in the Bible’s Teaching on the Truth of God
In this first section, I want to look first at Biblical ideas of the Truth of God, and then secondly at a biblical example of the truth of God – namely, Elijah and the prophets of Baal.
a. Biblical Ideas of the Truth of God – the basic word which describes the truth of God in the Bible is a word which means ‘not bound’ – it literally means ‘to be open’, ‘not to be concealed’. There are three overriding Biblical senses in which God is said to be true:
(i) God is Real – throughout the Bible the reality of the existence of God is contrasted with the fiction of other gods. For example in Psalm 115:4-8 the non-existence of the idols of the nations – their lack of ability to communicate – is held up as conclusive proof that they do not exist. By contrast, Jeremiah 10:10 reads, “But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King.” As opposed to the living reality of God, the idols of the nations are worthless and empty – they are utter vanity. The French philosopher Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am”. We Christians adapt his philosophy and say, “God is, therefore I am.” We believe that God is the ultimate reality; the ultimate truth – so that even if everything around us proves to be a lie; supposing everything we have ever seen or believed in happens to be no more than some cosmic ‘Truman Show’, God is real and true – not just because we feel Him to be real, but because He is real.
(ii) God is Rational – when we talk of God being rational, what we mean is that God does not contradict Himself. For God, 1+1 always equals 2 and never 3. He is utterly logical and rational. This may come as a shock to us as we are being increasingly told that to believe in Christ is irrational and illogical – the true bastions of logic and reason are all on the side of atheism. But by contrast, God is ultimate logic. That is not to say that we, as His people, are always logical in the way we think or the way we act; nor is it to say that we know everything about God, so it may seem to us at times, as it did to the writers of many of the psalms, that sometimes God contradicts Himself. Like for us, perhaps we find it difficult to marry together God’s predestination of us with our free will; and yet, that’s not because there is a contradiction here, but because we don’t know all the facts of the case. No, God is utterly rational. For that, we give thanks, because if God made no sense or was irrational, then there would be no point in going to university and studying since the world God created would be utterly illogical – there would be no laws of physics to understand or to study.
(iii) God is Reliable – by far, the most important use of ‘the truth of God’ in the Bible is in the area of God’s reliability. God is true to what He is and He is true to what He has said – so when God enters into a covenant with His people, He is utterly true to His Word. Supposing we should break our covenant with God, He always keeps His covenant with us. Paul writes, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful – for he cannot deny himself”. For God to be untrue to those He has entered into covenant with, requires Him to deny Himself. And so, when we are talking about the truth of God, we are thinking primarily of that attribute of His which is utterly committed to His people – to loving His people. Jesus came and suffered much before He hung on the cross, and yet His commitment to us was such that He kept going, even through His suffering. And so God’s love and truth work together in that He can and never will stop working for our good and in order to keep His covenant with us.
God is truth – if you need proof look anywhere in all the Universe and see the creative order and reason of God; if you need even more proof look at the dying body of Jesus on the cross and see the depth of His commitment towards sinners like you and me.
b. Biblical Examples of the Truth of God – perhaps the greatest example of the truth of God in the whole Bible is the account of the royal rumble on Mount Carmel between the Lord and Baal, represented by Elijah and the priests of Baal respectively in 1 Kings 18. We all know the story. Israel was apostate and worshipping the god Baal. Elijah felt alone. On top of Mount Carmel, the priests of Baal danced and cut themselves and cried out to their god to light their sacrifice – but Baal did not because he could not because, in fact, Baal does not exist. By contrast, Elijah prayed and God’s fire descended and the sacrifice over which jugs of water had been poured, was utterly consumed. The message is that God is real and true whereas Baal is a fiction and a fantasy. But more than that, the message is that God is relational – in vs. 39 and 40 we see the two impacts of the display of God’s power: first, God’s people turn back to Him crying out, “The Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God”, and then secondly, the destruction of sin, where the priests of Baal are put to the sword. This whole episode takes place in order that God may turn His people back to Him again – He loves them, has expressed that love to them by making a covenant with their forefather Abraham and their previous King David, and so He turns them back to Himself. God is true not just that He is real but also He is relational, at every stage, working for the good of His people.
2. Applications in the Bible’s Teaching on the Truth of God
Although there are a million million applications of the truth of God, as there are of all the other attributes of God, I briefly want to draw your attention to just four:
1. Be Confident – the society in which we live is increasingly trying to pull the rug from under our feet as Christians by insisting upon the intellectual superiority of atheism. Sometimes, it leaves us feeling like half-wits. They strike me as being very similar to the English Rugby Commentators who so confidently predict that England will win this game or that game, only to end up getting comprehensively beaten. By contrast, God is real – you can be more confident that He exists than that you exist. You might not understand everything, but don’t be made to feel a half-wit for knowing the truth. Do not let them belittle you, rather, be confident in the God you know to be true.
2. Be Studious – God has revealed Himself to us in the pages of the Bible, and every word we find there is absolutely true. The Scriptures more than anything else, tell us the truth about God. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life” – and He said about the Scriptures, ‘these are they which testify of me’. If you want to know the truth about God, then study the Bible. Let it be the first book you open in the morning and the last book you close at night; meditate on its words as you go through the day. Get every morsel of goodness because these words are the truth about the truth.
3. Be Honest – if God is true, then we are to be true also. We are not to think one thing and say another – that would be hypocrisy. We are not to know something and say another – that would be lying. We are not to promise something and do something else – that would be unreliable. God is utterly true, and if we are His people, being re-created in His image, as Paul says in Colossians 3:9-10, we are not to lie to one another.
4. Be Reliant – ultimately, God will never renege on, or fail to keep any of His promises. All His promises are ‘yea and amen in Christ Jesus’. So when He promises never to leave us, He means it. When He promises that all things are working together for our good, He means it. When He promises that if we cry to Him, He will hear us, He means it. He means what He promises and He does what He says. God is utterly reliable. Nothing else and no-one else is – human beings never stop coming up with ingenious ways of displaying their fickleness. By contrast, we can trust God because He is absolutely true. Supposing you are very worried about something about the moment, take your cares to Him and pray, and in return His peace will guard your heart and mind in Christ Jesus.
God is truth! He is Real, Rational and Reliable as demonstrated hundreds of times in the Bible, supremely of course in the death of Jesus, and experienced personally by us all at many times in our lives when in a low time, God has become special to us. God is truth – nothing else is as real as He. Let us praise Him with the fruit of our lips and the worship of our lives. AMEN