The Sabbath Hour

Northern Advocate, 16 December 1939, Page 11

The Sabbath Hour

What Is Truth ?

Scripture Reading’. (John 18:38). —

Sermon by Major Canty, Salvation Army, Whangarei.

There are times in every man’s experience when he is compelled to pause and to ask: “What is the underlying truth of the life that I am living?” This question cannot be left unanswered. ; When the body calls for food, that cry must be heeded If life is to continue. So this deeper cry for that which will satisfy the hunger of the heart must be met with an answer.

There must be some response in the soul of each of us to the question we are all asking: “What Is Truth?”

1 —Now what do we mean when we use the word “Truth”? It is not, as many conceive it, an abstract thing in the mind of the individual. It is more than that. What, you ask, is art? Is it a great painting like the Sistine Madonna? No; that is merely an expression of art. Art is the soul ot Raphael which found its voice in that painting.

In the same way we ask: “What is Truth?” It is merely a term to express the meaning and opposite of falsehood? That is a mere veracity, and veracity is a small corner of Truth. Truth cannot be conceived apart from a personality. Here was Pilate’s mistake, and all the time Truth stood there incarnate. It is not some system of religious thought, but a Man—Christ the Lord. That was Truth, /

This s the error so many are making today concerning Christianity. As Phillip Brooks once said: “I go to a man sometimes and say to him, ‘Are You a Christian?’ He answers, ‘ No.’ ”

“I say to him, * Why are you not? ’ He replies, ‘Because I cannot believe it.’ I say to him, ‘ What is it that you cannot believe? ’ Then he takes some poor little doctrine, some of a Christian teacher, and he says, ‘ I can’t believe it,’ as though that were Christianity ! ”

Luther, on his way to the Diet of Worms, life in hand, said, “They burned Huss, but not the Truth.” The truth had made him free.

2.—lf Christianity were nothing more than that, there might be some excuse for rejecting it. But it' is more than this. It is a personality. It is Jesus Christ. You may pass all the speculations of the theologians, and Jesus, the Eternal Truth of God, still remans. Take these things away and you have only cleared the decks for action. Jesus is the one thing needful. He is the Truth. How is Jeus Christ the Truth? He does not profess to be the truth in matters of sc|enciei or history or philosophy. We have to learn in all of these spheres. But they are not the truths that matter most. They are not the truths that affect life. As an English preacher has said: “A man can live a noble life without knowing anything about the history of the planet cn which his lot is cast, and he can live happily without knowing anything about atoms and electrons. Millions do live quite happily without knowing anything about them, and most of us manage pretty well without knowing much.” But there are other questions concentring which it is of vital importance that we should know. It is not an academic question which any of us—whether there, is a God and what God is; what life is and whether it is to continue beyond this present existence; what death is—whether it is a nothing more than earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or whether it is the gateway to wonderful things which God hath prepared for them who love Him, These are the questions that matter, after all—the only ones that count. If we are at peace concerning them, we need not worry about the rest. These are the questions about which Christ proclaimed Himself as Truth.

Let.us look at a few of these questions.

The. first question is concerning God. The great hunger of the heart is for a knowledge of its God. It knows God exists, but it wants to know more than that.

It was Jesqs Who revealed the Truth. He said: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” Then we behold Him as He healed the sick

cleansed the lepers and made the dead live. We see Him laying His hands on the heads of the little children and blessing them. We hear His words of tenderness and forgiveness to the sinner. Wo see Him dying on the Cross for the sins of the world, and wo begin to understand something of that love that passeth knowledge. This is the Truth concerning God. He is Love —a Love as inexhaustible as eternity itself. The second question for which we are seeking Truth is that concerning life. There is a word that was once much used in religious conversation. It is the word “lost.” Those who were not Christians were called “the lost.” We do not hear the word used so often now. Men do not like to be told they are lost. Bnt we need to come back to it, for in it is bound up the meaning of life as Jesus revealed it. He said He had come to seek and to save the lost. What do we mean when we speak of a thing as “lost”? A lost, article is something which, instead of being where it ought to be and doing the work it ought to be doing, is somewhere else; no one knows just where. You read in the newspapers that a ■little child has been lost. What does it mean? It means—does it not? —that the child, instead of being in his father’s house, in the sheltering care of his mother’s love, is out somewhere where he ought not to be. What is a lost soul? Let us for the moment forget theological terminology and come to the teachings of Jesus. A lost man, a lost woman, is one who ought to be in the Father’s house, doing the Father’s will, who is not there and who has gone his own way to seek his own desires. There are lost souls among us. When God wants us and reaches out for us we are not there. We ought to be standing at His right hand, but we are in the far country of our own wills and purposes.

The third question is that which has to do with death. Does death end all? If it does, then its long shadow falls across every path we tread. But it does not end all. Jesus showed us the Truth. To Him death was not an end, but merely the means to an end. It was not the crack of doom, which men feared, but an incident in life. All that men had known of the ultimate issues of life was the grave, at the foot of a dark and impassable wall. He opened a way through the wall and showed to us: the beautiful gardens of the Father’s love waiting for us beyond it. As the sun is the centre of the solar system, so Truth is the centre of the moral universe. Truth is like the North Star; other bodies move around it. It ever shines, but never moves.