Personal Truth

Text: Colossians 1:15-23

As my students will testify, there are a few phrases that draw a reaction from this professor more readily than this one in the title. The idea that we each get to have a truth that is personally drawn undercuts the very concept of truth, which deals with the way things really are, independent of how we might choose to see them. So what's the phrase doing in the title?

Glad you asked. No, the universe hasn't yet tilted to the point where I affirm the notion of relative truth, which remains an oxymoron. But it is also a mistake to think that our perspective on the truth is the truth itself. More importantly, what does any of this have to do with Colossians 1? Everything.

Jesus Christ is spoken of in terms which can only be understood as the sum total of truth--all things created by and for him, before all things, in whom all things hold together. This must mean that he is more fundamental than any criterion of truth we could possibly conceive. And there's more, as we read that all the fullness of deity was alive in and through him, and that he reconciles us to God by his death and resurrection. If there is a better synopsis of God's narrative of the world, I can't imagine where it would be found (other than John 1:1-18). And one point which stands out is that this One is a person; the truth, indeed is personal, albeit in a far different sense from the way such a phrase is commonly used. We are redeemed, made whole, fulfilled, given hope, purpose, and God's own blessing by our relationship to the one who is himself truth. Not our relationship with statements about him, but with him.

How many of the secrets of the physical universe we may uncover and how many of those we will observe and categorize correctly remain to be seen. But we can know truth because the God who made us came to us and continues to do so in this one, Jesus. No other religion or faith makes such a claim about its key figure. There is only one. And because he is truth, he judges all other competing systems of thought, secular or religious. That's quite a claim. He died to make it and to bring us knowledge of truth.