What Is Truth?

What Is Truth?

When Jesus was on trial at the end of His life on earth, He stood quietly before Pontius Pilate as Pilate tried to figure out this man who had been brought before him.

Was He a king? Was He a revolutionary? Was He a prophet? Was He crazy?

As Pilate interrogated Jesus, he began to realize that there was something different about this One. He couldn’t find anything wrong with Him. When Jesus explained who He was—and how it was the truth-seekers who knew Him best—Pilate ended the conversation with these words: “What is truth?” (John 18:38).

Now, there is a question that many people have asked. The answer is not so easy to find because it is not what you might expect. Truth, it turns out, is not a thing. Truth is a person. Truth has a name.

Perhaps no one knew Jesus better than John. In the first chapter of his Gospel, John said this about Jesus:

John 1:14

“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Later in the same book, Jesus was talking to His disciples when He explained heaven by saying that He was “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6).

It seems that John understood Jesus in a way that others could not. He knew Jesus intimately. He walked with Him, talked with Him, watched Him heal and teach, lived with Him, learned from Him, ate with Him, and he was there to watch Him die. And then he saw Him alive again.

He knew Jesus. He knew Him better than anyone, and he knew the only way to describe Him. John mentions truth over 40 times in his Gospel.

He didn’t say that Jesus was true… he said that Jesus was Truth. Do you see the difference? Many things are true, but there is only one Truth.

What does that mean to you and me 2,000 years later? Tomorrow we’ll look at the implications of knowing Truth as a person rather than a philosophical idea.