The Truth and the Individual

To a dear friend in Tennessee truth was the Alpha and Omega.  Of course I mentally agreed with him but his thesis was to me just a banality.  There were other questions that to me were more urgent.

I later understood my friend much better, nay, his words even challenged me passionately.  How much does truth mean to me?  You know, that absolute, uncompromising, unpopular truth which, if necessary, stands alone with no other backing than the truth itself! 

Søren Kierkegaard was probably right when he in Sokrates of the antique Greece (who had never heard of Him who is the Truth) saw a man whom the truth of God had in a wonderful way gripped to the point of martyrdom. -  The Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen, may likewise have sensed the solemnity of truth when he let the principal character in his play ”An Enemy of the People” say:  ”Strongest is the man who stands alone!”  (implied:  for the truth).

Are you and I a person like that?  There is a popular notion among people to the effect that truth needs the approval of the many to manage or to survive. This is a lie of course.  But that lie is part of the political life.  The politician needs votes to get ”influence” (power), and so you never hear a politician say, ”I want the truth and nothing but the truth no matter the cost!”  That wouldn´t give him the votes required for representation.  

Oh yes, the truth stands alone, unchallenged,  and rises above public opinion, applause, religion and church.  Truth is not something that comes to you as an inherited happy fortune.  It has to be personally and painfully applied in each new generation.  Alone, by the individual, personally and never in sociable, superficial environments.  Truth is never chatty, parroting or superficial or wheedingly playing up to somebody.

Now, notice the words of the Lord:  ”Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”  (Joh. 18:37).  He doesn´t appeal to the masses saying, “All of you who want to give the truth your vote….”  His words are directed to the individual one, to you and me.  The Bible has many “everyones”.

But truth is not something in the abstract.  The Spirit of Truth will bring us in the dust before Him who is the Truth, who didn´t come into the world as a philosopher or a guru, but as your and my sinbearer – yes, to bear all our sin with all its lies and our inborn hatred to the Truth.  The cross of the sinbearer stood there for the individual one, for you and me, and is to be proclaimed to all by the individual to the individual in the Spirit of Truth in each new generation.
-jn-

Nov. 6, 2009