When Pontius Pilate questioned Jesus, they talked about truth:

Therefore Pilate said to Him, “So You are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this purpose I have been born, and for this I have come into the world: to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to My voice.” Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?”[1]

When Pilate said, “What is truth?,” he was suggesting that truth is relative. The musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, makes this very clear where it has Pilate saying:

But what is truth? Is it unchanging law?

We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?

Politicians are famous for what we call “spin”—which is a way of playing fast and loose with the truth. Brittanica.com defines political spin as “the attempt to control or influence communication in order to deliver one’s preferred message.”[2] Wikipedia.com is less tactful, defining political spin as a form of propaganda.[3] Spin is the art of only telling part of the truth—the part you want to emphasize, or the part that you believe helps you—and leaving out the rest. In this country we sometimes seem to have lost the ability to even agree on what is and is not “true.” (Remember “alternative facts”?)

Spin, propaganda, and “alternative facts” suggest that truth can be manipulated, distorted, and subject to different interpretations. But there is no such confusion or ambiguity in the Bible.

Psalm 51:6 says “You desire truth in the innermost being.” Proverbs 12:17 says:

He who speaks truth tells what is right,
But a false witness, deceit.

Isaiah 65:16 refers to God as “the God of truth”—twice.

Balaam, speaking for God, famously says this in Numbers 23:19:

God is not a man, that He should lie,
Nor a son of man, that He should repent;
Has He said, and will He not do it?
Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?

One of the Lord’s grievances against Judah and Jerusalem, as voiced through the prophet Jeremiah, was that “truth has perished and has been cut off from their mouth.” (Jeremiah 7:28) The prophets tell us that God values truth, and that he dislikes lies, whereas Satan “is a liar and the father of lies.”[4]

When Luke wrote his gospel, he prefaced it by saying that his purpose for writing was “so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.”[5] Luke would have laughed at our notions of subjective truth. He was just writing down what happened—what Jesus said, and what Jesus did.

John’s gospel says something similar in John 19:35: “And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true; and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you also may believe.”

In 1 Timothy 2:7, Paul says this: “For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying) as a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.”

John’s gospel says a lot about truth—far more than the other gospels. In John 1:14 he refers to Jesus as “full of grace and truth.”  In John 3:19-21 Jesus contrasts evil-doers with those who practice the truth:

This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.

In John 4:23-24 Jesus says that we must worship God in spirit and in truth (emphasis added):

But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.

And of course, when he appears before Pilate, Jesus says that he came into the world “to testify to the truth.”[6]

But it all culminates in what Jesus says about himself in John 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”  This goes way beyond saying, “I am telling the truth,” or “I believe this is true.” Jesus is saying he embodies the Truth—Truth with a capital “T.”

So when we read God’s word, we can know it’s true.

We have Luke’s word for it.

We have Paul’s word for it.

We have John’s word for it.

And more than that, we have Jesus’ word for it.

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[1]. John 18:37-38. All biblical quotations are from the New American Standard Bible translation.

[2]. “political spin” written by Sandra Braun, fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, and found at: https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-spin

[3]. “Spin (propaganda),” in Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(propaganda)

[4]. John 8:44

[5]. Luke 1:4

[6]. John 18:37