Understanding truth requires understanding its primary source or secondary sources.  Having assumed in the previous essay that truth exists and recognized that the functioning of life requires a basis of truth, we turn our attention to identifying the primary source from which truth comes.  As Christians we recognize that God designed and created all things (Genesis).  Any true knowledge that reflects this reality must have come from God.  Even scientific truth reflecting scientific reality is simply thinking God’s thoughts after Him.  Any truth has already been in the mind of God before we even existed in reality.  Besides the order of the physical world, neither did the order of what is good nor is right, what we label ethics, come into being on its own.  God, as designer and creator was and is the potter with the clay creating both the physical world and truth behind the physical reality.  Thus, beyond what physically is, God is the source of truth for what should be.  God is the ultimate source of truth for physical and ethical reality.

In attempting to understand its source, the world often treats truth as an abstract reality separate from the reality in which we all live.  These attempts look to man or mankind as the source of truth rather than to God. Philosophers may handle it carelessly as if they own the rights to it or at least to an understanding of it.  Some unbelievers marvel that it even exists in the first place.  Some unbelievers scoff at it as a figment of other’s imagination.  Some unbelievers loathe the idea of truth’s existence as it is viewed as an obstacle to the life they want to pursue. Some even practically worship it as the creator of all we see in some gnostic or pantheistic manner.  Truth viewed in isolation from reality can be deified, demonized, or dismissed.

As God’s creation and possession, we cannot disrespectfully play with truth nor irreverently attempt to tear it apart.  As God’s possession to share with His creatures, we cannot ignore its reality nor worship it as the ultimate force of nature.   The reality of our finite lives and the unavoidable need for a creator, despite modern man’s attempt to argue otherwise, means it must come from someone other than itself or from the physical reality it describes.  With this recognition we can seek it in God with humility and with hope.  We can honor it as his possession without worshipping it.  We can respect and honor truth rather than constantly fight against it.

Approaching truth as the act of thinking God’s thoughts after Him in the way that Christians in science of past days, we cannot create new truth that did not exist prior in God.  We cannot create new truth that did not already exist in God.  Even the heresies and errors of man are primarily copies of prior errors.  We can only hope to uncover truth that God already formed and knew.  Then, seeing all truth as coming from Him, we can seek it from the correct source.

By knowing Him, we can better understand what truth is.  We know Him by His revelation in His word, the Bible.  Knowing He is a God of order and unchangeableness, we can look for consistency and order in creation rather than randomness or changing rules of nature.  Knowing he created us in His image, we can look to our reason and senses as means of not only receiving the facts of sensory input, but also assimilating and synthesizing them to reflect His truth.  In His image we should not be surprises that we can find pleasure not only in the beauty of what we observe and experience upon the earth, but in the goodness behind, within, and underneath what we observe or may experience.

Though we seek after a comprehensive and exhaustive understanding of truth, we also recognize that our ability to perceive and to understand are limited.  There are things we cannot sense.  In the physical world, microscopic processes continuously carry on life which we cannot truly observe directly even with the technological tools we have available.  Also in the physical world, at the other end of the size scale, we gaze upward upon astronomical realities we cannot comprehensively understand due to the sheer vastness of the data required.  In the spiritual world, we are even more limited in our understanding.  All around us spiritual reality touches our lives yet we rarely recognize these influences in their fullness.  It is even said that this spiritual reality will outlast the physical reality in which we currently live (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Depths of wisdom and insight exist which neither a single human nor a collective humanity can process.  On one hand this is simply facing the limit of a created and finite human mind that can hold only so much in active thought at one time or can only remember so many interrelationships of reality simultaneously.  On the other, the Fall of Adam marred man’s reasoning (Romans 1:21) such that even what lies within one’s physical limits may become distorted and lose an accurate reflection of reality.

We come humbly to recognizing the need to look to God as the source of truth.  Having recognized that our means of perception is limited, our means of reasoning is both limited and marred despite being in God’s image (to be explored in future essays), and recognizing that God intends for us to grow in knowledge and wisdom, we humbly seek God to reveal both physical and spiritual truth that we might live both “wholly” and “holy” not only as individuals before God, but collectively as His children before His face.

Next in this series… Truth: What does it have to do with health?