This week someone said to me: there is no right or wrong, you just do what’s best for your family. While I agree that we must do what is best for our families, there is right and wrong (it’s called Truth); and doing what is right is always the best thing to do. So I thought I’d share a couple application points from a recent sermon I preached called “Absolute Truth Exists, Absolutely.” It’s just a couple of notes about the problem with thinking that truth does not exist.
First, if truth does not exist, then Might makes Right. If there is no such thing as truth, then whoever is the most powerful gets to determine what is right. The top of the food chain gets to decide what is right and moral. If they determine that they need your land, they get to confiscate it. If they determine they need your money, they get to tax it. If they determine they need your service, they get to enslave you. If there’s no absolute truth then there are no inalienable human rights. Right and wrong are relative to whoever is making the decisions. The people with the most power decide what is right because there’s no truth to contradict, to contain, or to expose them. If there is no truth then there is only tyranny.
Second, if truth does not exist, then everyday living is impossible. Think about it: If you can’t know anything for sure then you can’t do anything for sure. Francis Schaeffer “cites the famous example of the composer John Cage, whose commitment to pure chance was so strong that he believed that no one musical note or sequence or combination of notes is better than any other. Thus he chose his notes by pure chance. However, as a mushroom connoisseur, he knew he might die if he picked and ate mushrooms at random, regardless of their shape, size, or color. Hence, when he gathered mushrooms, he went strictly by the book, in contradiction to his asserted relativism.”[1]
Relativism simply doesn’t work. Think about it like this: If you can’t know anything for sure then you dare not get inside your car because you can’t know if it’s going to blow up when you turn the ignition, or just start the engine. Nor can you know if it will stop when you hit the brakes if you can’t know truth. Every single time we get out of bed we do so with a set of assumptions and truths that we live by! If truth does not exist then everyday living is impossible.
Third, if truth does exist, then we need to abide by it. If truth does exist, and if we can know truth, then we need to abide by it. At previous times we’ve established the fact that truth does exist. And we’ve asserted that truth is knowable and that it’s most reliable source is the Scriptures. Therefore we have a responsibility to abide by the teachings of Scripture.
Most people reject the idea of truth, not because they don’t believe in truth per se, but because they don’t want to abide by God’s truths. They’d rather have it their own way. And rather than acknowledging their contempt for God’s ways they simply disallow the idea of truth altogether. Even the Bible says: “Where there is no law there is no transgression.”[2] In other words, if we can’t know the truth then we can’t be held accountable for our sin. But if we can know the truth then we are not only accountable for our sin, but we are responsible for following the truth.
[These ideas are adapted from Jack Cottrell's book Faith's Fundamentals: Seven Essentials of the Christian Faith.]
[1]Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Inter-Varsity Press, 1968), p. 72-74.
[2] Romans 4:15
