Truth an Attribute of God
Essay by review • October 13, 2010 • Essay • 1,011 Words (5 Pages) • 1,546 Views
Truth an Attribute of God
The definition of truth according to Webster's is conformity to fact or actuality, reality, actuality. Ryrie defines truth as "agreement to that which is represented it includes veracity, faithfulness, and consistency." To say that God is true is to say that he is consistent with himself. He is all that he should be; he has revealed himself as he really is. His revelations are completely reliable.
For man to understand that truth is knowable to him and life does make sense, he should first understand that all truth is known to God regardless of if it is found in the Bible or other sources. Therefore, it should be called God's truth because Colossians 2:3b says, "are hid all treasures of wisdom and knowledge." People think that God has hid his truth from them, making it inaccessible to man so they cannot understand God's truth. Men do not practice good exegesis when the word 'hid' is taken out of context and means, to some people, that God is hiding his truth from them. I think that Paul is trying to say that the truth about Christ is the focal center to which all other truth about everything in creation is connected. That is to say, God is truth. We are totally dependent upon God to know truth because God is the creator of all things. He is our source for knowledge. God revealed both grace and truth to us by incarnating himself. Truth is unchanging and universal; it is not relative but is absolute. (Holmes 8)
The Old Testament term for truth is emeth. This is primarily ethical rather epistemological term. Truth depends on unchanging reality, is personal, cannot change, and remains the same for every time and place in creation. It is absolute. To say these things is to say that God's knowledge is complete and perfectly true. Truth is the implication that God exist. So one cannot believe in truth and believe that God is non-existence. We need a renewed commitment to the truth as found in the Scriptures and as summarized in theological and doctrinal propositions. (Phillips 26)
When Pilate ask the question 'what is truth,' the Lord answered this in the upper room when he said "I am the way the truth and the life". No one should deny to Christ a personal identification with truth. Before we say we hold Christ and the Bible as central to education, we need to do some serious thinking about God's Truth. Every word that Christ spoke and every act he performed depend solely on his identification with affirmation. God came to this earth to teach men and minister to their needs. He then died for them. This influence should outweigh all the philosophers' ideas and writings about Christ. For this act, men should see once and for all his truth. (Gaebelein 19)
Truth also compromises finite things. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra says in The Adventures of Don Quixote, "Where the truth is, in so far as it is truth, there God is". Those of us who proclaim the Bible and God as wholly undeniable truth must always use proper exegesis when preaching sermons or quoting from the Bible. In Revelation 19:11, the Bible has an unmistakable emphasis on truth. John says, And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True. We can look also in Psalms 19 to see more evidence of God's truth. Verses 1 through
6 tell of heaven, firmament, day, night, and the sun, and verses 7 through
14 tell of God's written word.
We can see evidence of God's truth in many aspects of our daily lives and cultures such as religion, education, music, literature, art, architecture, humanitarian and philanthropic movements. How could
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