Paul Grenelle
This will have been the 6th election that I have been involved in going back to 2000. After every election you will get the expected “God still sits on His throne” articles and posts that serve to either comfort us in our loss or admonish us in our victory. I agree with this wholeheartedly but I’m not going to spend more virtual ink writing about it. I’m also not going to try and give you one of those feel good flowery posts about coming back together as a country and uniting under whoever won. I’m not going to pretend that this was some youth soccer game where we high five, or touch elbows if you’re in a “pandemic”, at the end and then all go out and eat pizza together. This wasn’t a Mr America contest, it was a choice of ideologies that we as a country decided to pursue. Literal lives are affected every time we vote and allow Planned Parenthood’s murder mills to be publicly funded. We were voting whether to allow 8 year olds to autonomously make a decision to mutilate their bodies through gender transformation. We were voting for the freedom to worship God the way the Bible tells us instead of the government. There is little to unite under when the ideologies are so far apart. So instead, my message in this post is simple and clear. Fight for truth.
No matter the outcome of this election, we have a battle raging over truth. When I say truth I mean objective universal unchangeable truth. There is a growing number of institutions and organizations that are now denying this. The most clear example of this comes from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan College of Public Health. This is the organization that many have looked to for guidance during this pandemic. This is also the school that has recently published a paper from one of its graduate student stating that 2+2 does not have to equal 4. They say math can be seen as a cultural construct. They say that demanding 2+2=4 is indicative of whiteness and colonialism and excludes other cultures ways of knowing math. This is not limited to the elites, as the person in charge of developing the math curriculum for high school students in Washington State and will soon implement it in California also states that 2+2=4 is a construct and can be seen as colonialism and whiteness in math. She has even called for ethnic mathematics as if the amount of melanin in your skin or your geographical location has anything to do with how numbers relate to each other. George Orwell was off by 36 years but we’ll spot him those years since the prediction in his dystopian novel was so correct.
“In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”
Now the sky is not falling and I’m not here to claim we are all going to be marching to gulags. Although, why do so many young people who love socialism forget about those pesky gulags? Not yet at least. But what I am here to tell you is that there is going to be a fight for objective truth. And its not even a fight for “what” is the objective truth but rather “if” there is objective truth. The actual existence of truth is being challenged. The proponents of postmodernism and critical theory will say that not only is there not an objective truth but push it to the realm of ethics by saying to pursue objective truth is to pursue racism. You may not hear it in so many terms but what you will hear is the results. You will be called a racist for objectively saying the burning of cities is wrong. You will be called a racist for wanting to wait for the facts to come out before deciding on a police shooting. You will be called a homophobe for saying God wants marriage between one man and one woman (biological and otherwise) for one lifetime. You will be called an imperialist for wanting to make sure what the “experts” are telling you corresponds with reality. And you will be a imperialist, racist, homophobe for saying that the Bible is the objective truth of God.
Okay, so why do we care so much. This sounds like an academic fight, not one for Joe the Plumber. Well I will elevate this to the hill that I will die on because truth is not an abstract concept but rather it is a representation of God. Time for a sword drill:
John 14:6– Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
- Jesus is God and as such is the embodiment of truth.
John 17:17– Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.
- The very words of God are truth, not because they meet some outside standard of truth but because they are based on the very character of God who is definitional of truth. Jesus recognizes God the Father as the embodiment of Truth.
John 18:37– Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world-to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”
- Jesus equates loving truth with loving Him because Jesus is the truth. Pilate further illustrates this point in the next verse when he responds “What is truth”. Pilate did not know Christ and thus fell into the philosophy of the day that also contested being able to know objective truth
John 14:16-17-16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.
- The Holy Spirit is also seen as the truth and thus embodies truth, just as God the Father and God the Son embodies truth.
So the Triune God of the Bible is the definition of the truth. This truth has spread to all men and yet men reject the truth of God while they enjoy the truth that can be found in nature.
Romans 1:21-23 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
And this is what we have today. We depend on the objective unchanging truth of God to build our houses and bridges and to get on an airplane. We depend on mathematics to run everything from the economy to sports. We depend on the objective reality of truth that is only found in God. But the world has rejected God, and yet the truth is still in their face and they don’t like the standard. For the standard points to a standard maker and they will not conform to God, they will not bend the knee. But they sure will demand we bend the knee to them and their ideologies. “Trust the experts” starts as a mantra for a pandemic and has spread to every facet of life. Experts are great and helpful but they are not the standard of truth. God is. If God is not the standard then the Gospel is not real and we are still in our sins. But the cross really happened and the tomb is really empty. That is why this is a hill to die on. Without truth there is no Gospel. And friend, if you will not stand for the Gospel then you will fall for anything the world has for you. If Jesus is the embodiment of truth and you deny truth, then what makes you think Jesus will not deny you before the Father.
But how do we fight. How do we fight such a formidable foe as the intellectual establishment. Well we do it the same way that the reformers did. We start reading our Bibles and studying God’s word so we know the truth. You see it was called the dark ages because the common people were kept from knowing things for themselves and instead were told to “trust the experts” of the state run church and the upper class intellectuals. So the reformers stressed literacy through education so that the common person could read the Bible and so that the darkness would lift. In fact, the Reformers would say “after darkness, light” to explain what happened through stressing Biblical literacy. So I say to us, time to get educated. It is time to be reading our Bibles and be saturated with the Truth. It is time we demand our pulpits teach the truth and not just make us feel good. It is time we read those authors like RC Sproul, John MacArthur, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon, and others that are dedicated to the truth of Scripture. It is time we pay attention to the level of objective universal truth people are proclaiming and not the level of melanin in their skin. And once we get the truth, we then proclaim the truth.
Matthew 10:26-33 “So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. What I tell you in the dark, say in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.
And so we proclaim the truth. First to our families, then to our circles of influence, and then we find ways to increase our circles of influence. We resist every attempt to subvert the truth or to deny the truth. We don’t cower in fear, we don’t stay and play defense. The great commission is an offensive minded strategy. When Jesus said He would build His church He described an offensive strategy. The power of death and Hell are scary but they are the ones playing defense while standing at their gates. They are the ones trying not to be conquered, not us. We are the ones that stand outside those gates and we attack those gates and those gates will not be able to overcome our attack. For we have the power of God. We have the power of truth.