Whatever happened to good, old-fashioned truth? You know, right and wrong; black and white with no gray areas in between. Today these concepts seem to have fallen through the cracks in our morally decadent society. Even our president is locked in a battle for truth. Most people don’t believe him when he says he didn’t have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. Worse, they just don’t care. The fact that the president of the United States of America can behave that way only justifies someone else’s sinful behavior. The real truth is lost today in a world which carries the attitude of "there are no absolutes" (which, ironically, is an absolute statement!).

LOST AND FOUND No matter what people think truth will always exist. It may be lost for a time, but it still exists. Consider Josiah in 2 Kings 22 & 23. Truth in King Josiah’s kingdom (7^th century BC) was lost for a time, but when the lost book of the Law was found he instigated a great revival in Israel that has been unequaled to this day. Truth still existed – it was just lost for a time.

Today, just like in King Josiah’s time, homosexuality is wrong. Stealing, lying, and cheating are wrong. They’re wrong because the Bible says they are. Now, you can deny that. But if you don’t believe in the Bible then you must form your own truth. That type of truth, however, has no merit. But that is exactly what is happening today.

MISSING THE MARK Mark Twain once said, "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as much as you please." Truth is a concept that deals with fact and reality. George Washington was our first president. Bill Clinton is our current president. You are reading this article. These are true statements – they are fact. In modern society truth has been replaced with relativism – or the belief that if you think it’s true then it is true for you. If it feels good do it. Many influential leaders today promote this heresy; many of them write nice thick books with beautiful book-covers – complete with all their academic achievements so that the reader is left believing that their philosophy of truth is an accurate one. These writers and professors stray from the truth because their basic premise, or presupposition, is way off the mark.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson said: "The soundest reason leads to the wrongest conclusions when the premises are false." That was Rudolph Bultmann’s problem. In 1926 this premiere theologian wrote, "I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus." He was influenced by a philosopher named Immanuel Kant, who claimed that God’s existence cannot be proved by pure reason. Well, Jesus was a man of history, and He claimed to be God. Fulfilled prophecy and His resurrection from the dead proves it. Sounds like reason to me! So Kant’s conclusions were wrong because his basic premise was wrong. Kant missed the mark.

THE REAL TRUTH So what is the proper premise, and what is the real truth? The Bible says that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life; no man can come to the Father except through Jesus. It makes good sense then, for a person seeking truth to seek to know Jesus. And since the life of Jesus is taught in the Bible, that’s where we find truth, life, and the way to truth and life. Without a knowledge of Jesus Christ a man is just spinning his wheels in his search for truth.

This Biblical Jesus, however, offends many. For instance, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong says, "Jesus can no longer be viewed as a sacrifice for sin but as a source of infinite life-giving love." Spong has one of those books with the beautiful book-covers on the shelves titled Why Christianity Must Change or Die. He is not a believer in Biblical Christianity, so he has formed his own conclusions based on his own presuppositions, and he is dead wrong.

Then there’s the Jesus Seminar. This group hates the Jesus of the Bible, and they’ve cut it up, done some fancy editing, and concluded that what Jesus said in the Bible is only 18% correct.

And we can’t forget the "Christian mystic" Brennan Manning. His beautifully crafted book is titled The Signature of Jesus. Manning does speak of God’s grace and love, but the timeless Biblical concepts of prayer and Bible study are replaced by New Age, eastern mysticism which promotes what he calls Centering Prayer. This form of prayer focuses on nothingness, repetition of a single word or phrase, and promotes some sort of spiritual journey integrating the conscious and the unconscious. As one writer has pointed out, Manning is just following in the footsteps of the Carl Jung – a 19^th century psychotherapist who actually sought the counsel of demons.

Not gonna to find truth there.

Getting back to Jesus – if He is the truth then He demands our attention. The Bible says that He died, was resurrected, and was seen by over 500 people at one time following His resurrection. The change which His disciples underwent is also evidence that what they saw was miraculous. In fact, all but one of those twelve men (John) went out and died martyr’s deaths. People who make up lies don’t die for them, and that includes Jesus. If He wasn’t God then He knew it – but yet He went out and died a horrific, torturous death on a cross. His death made it possible for us to know the truth and be set free from the bondage of sin.

In a simple phrase, Jesus is truth. To seek any other so-called truth is to seek in vain. All one comes up with is New Age, atheistic psycho-babble. So beware of those beautiful books in your local Christian and secular bookstores that have the catchy titles and pretty book-covers appealing to the eye. Satan parades around like an angel of light, and he has been confusing people with non-truths from that fateful day in the Garden until the present.