Pilate: “What is truth?” (John 18:38a)
Jesus: “I am the truth….” (John 14:6b)
When Jesus stood condemned to death before Pilate, the Roman Governor, they shared a brief exchange. Jesus told Pilate,
John 18:37c “… the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to Me.”
The truth Jesus spoke of was foreign to Pilate. To Pilate, truth was relative. Morality was subjective in his dog-eat-dog world of politics. Jesus’ statement must have caught him off guard. Pilate responded by asking, “What is truth?” in verse 38.
How would you answer that question? Is truth relative? Doesn’t the inherent subjectivity of morality prove that God does not exist? The assumption in this question is that truth and morality are subjective. While different cultures practice varying morals and values, the Bible makes it clear that what is right and wrong is objectively based on the revelation of truth.
That truth is not so much a system of morality as it is a person. Jesus said, “I am the truth…” in John 14:6. This is the greatest revelation of morality we can have. Jesus came to show us what the Creator’s intention was for man to be moral, normal, and functional. The reason man is immoral and dysfunctional is because of the absence of the Creator within the creature. God created man in such a way that His presence within us is indispensable to our existence if we are to be normal and functional as moral human beings.
What instinct is for animals, the Holy Spirit is for man. We were not created as an animal with an inherent instinct that controls our behaviour. We were created to function in a relationship with our Creator. God made man in His image, after His likeness, so that we may reflect the character of our Creator through everything we do and say and are. Because of sin, man is physically alive but spiritually dead. Sin separated us from the life of God within us. It was what God meant when he told Adam that in the day he ate of the forbidden fruit he would surely die. It was a spiritual death that would later bring physical death.
The good news is that through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, God imparts His Divine Nature within us, giving us the capacity to reproduce His character so that by our behaviour, we can reflect the image and likeness of our Creator and live moral lives that please Him. This fact is one of the great evidences for God. It is His presence within man that makes man moral. The Bible puts it like this:
2 Peter 1:3-9 “His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness. Through these He has given us His very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.”
Truth, then, is a person – Jesus Christ is the truth! Through a personal relationship with Jesus, we can live in the truth, and His truth will set us free!