25Such
ones exchanged the truth of God in the lie and worshipped and served the
creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed into the ages. Amen.
I left my last post pondering the words “the lie.” I’m still
not sure whether the “the” is simply an article of previous reference,
referring back to the idolatry of v.23, or whether it is literally “the Lie,”
Satan’s Edenic deception, “You shall be as gods” – out of which grows all the
falsehood that seems to predominate and wreck our world. I’m also not sure, in
the end, it is of any practical significance which of the two views we embrace.
Either way, the fact is we are choosing between truth and falsehood.
That is what I want to stop and ponder today. Truth vs. falsehood.
Our verse would have us know that we human beings actually deliberately
knowingly “exchanged the truth of God for falsehood.” We weren’t just deceived.
We chose to believe lies and why? Because those lies were delicious. They “saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food
and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom” so they took
some and ate it. We still have with us today, “the lust of the flesh, the lust
of the eyes, and the pride of life” – our love of pleasure, possessions, and
applause – and the frightening realization is that we will each of us actually
embrace what is not true, if only it
means we can get what we want.
Francis Schaeffer, in his book, “How Shall We Then Live?”
did a masterful job of probing this very problem. Truth is truth. Truth is true
whether we believe it or not – which then leads to the problem that, if you in
any way deny the truth, you have set yourself up for some kind of self-destruction.
You can stand in the middle of the railroad tracks and tell yourself the train
won’t hurt you – with the inevitable consequence of your own funeral. You can
believe you can jump across a 50’ wide chasm and you will only end up a
lifeless bloody pulp on the rocks below.
You can tell yourself it’s okay to climb in bed with that
beautiful girl, but because God says it’s wrong, one way or another you will
suffer for it. Proverbs warns us, “For the lips of an adulteress drip honey…but
in the end she is bitter as gall…She reduces you to a loaf of bread…until an
arrow pierces your liver…Her house is a highway to the grave.” We can tell
ourselves that men are women and women are men. We can call homosexual sin a “lifestyle
choice” and say it is okay to murder helpless babies. We can tell ourselves
basically anything that “gets us” what we want, but if it isn’t true, sooner or
later we will get hurt. Truth is true and the only way to safely
navigate our lives is to do our best to order our lives according to truth.
Obviously that brings us to where we are today. We were a
nation founded on the common understanding that the Bible is true. Whether we
followed it very well or not, at least there was a common assent that it is
true, that there is Truth, that we are not free to just decide for ourselves
what is and isn’t going to be true. Having forsaken God and the Bible, we have
done exactly what humans have always done – we exchanged the truth of God for falsehood.
We have embraced falsehood as our way of life. Now it is “politically correct”
to say things we all know aren’t true and death to anyone who dares to actually
say anything that is true. We have the “fake news,” precisely because they need
to tell people what they want to hear, regardless of whether they literally
have to make it up to begin with.
But then back to us. Can we let these thoughts remind us
this is exactly why it is so important for us to be in our Bibles? Jesus said, “I
am the truth” and His truth, the only real truth, is recorded for us in the
Bible. We are just as vulnerable as anyone else to embrace lies because they’re
delicious – and then suffer for it, just like anyone else. If no one else today
is striving to know and live the truth, it ought to be us, but it will only
happen if we are reading and studying the Bible ourselves and participating in
a church group where there is a God-gifted pastor teaching it to us.
Maybe I’m different than others but I feel like this is
exactly the battle I’ve been fighting my whole Christian life. My head is
packed full of ideas, priorities, standards, expectations, etc. that simply are
not true. Some of it probably is just a matter of being born a sinner but then
we all grow up in a world that teaches us a completely twisted, contorted,
downright deceptive view of reality. When I came to know Jesus, one of my great
hopes was that He would help me understand life. He has certainly done exactly
that, and I am so thankful for every little tidbit of truth He teaches me. That
is why I study the Bible. It seems like He rarely goes more than a week before
He drops some atom bomb of truth in my heart and radically changes how I see my
world. I love it.
But, again…back to all of us…He can’t teach us if we aren’t
listening, and listening starts with attention to His Word. We were born with
hearts which had already exchanged the truth of God for the Lie. Let us
sincerely seek to let Him restore His truth to its rightful place on the throne
of our hearts.
As Paul here interjects: May He be blessed/praised into the
ages!
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