Occasions of violence around the world have prompted people to question the role of religion in the world. There are those who blame religion for all the world’s ills and call for the abolition of religion. There are those who realise the foolishness of such and insist on a recognition that not all religions are the same insofar as their effects upon society are concerned. There are an increasing number of people who’s approach is to accept any doctrine as long as there is peace in the world between the followers of religion. Simple logic tells them there must be lies in religion because religions conflict and contradict each other, but they will accept lies in the name of peace and tolerance. Is this the “good lie”?
Many people, in fact all people of good will, desire peace. But peace just doesn’t happen. Everything that works properly has at its foundation, truth. Truth is not just a principle that relates to courts of law and religion. Even inanimate things are subject to truth. Every piece of machinery that functions has to co-operate with the true laws of physics. Every medicine that works has to conform to the laws of medicine, often only found after painstaking research. Doctors look for the truth about your condition. Every mathematical problem is only solved by using the laws of mathematics.
Jesus came for peace (Luke 2:8-14), but also knew He would bring a sword (Matt.10:34-37). This is not a contradiction but rather a recognition that not all men would accept Him though He was the Truth (John 14:6). It’s all very well to say that Jesus was not the truth, but one must advance one’s alternative and the reasons therewith. (I was speaking to a lady once and she said the “Bible fell short of the mark”. I asked her what, then, was the mark but she couldn’t tell me). When some build on truth and others build on error there will be conflict (1 John 4:6-8).
Men have sought to find a way to obtain peace in the world without the foundation of truth. In Shiraz, Persia, on May 23, 1844, a young man, Mirza Ali Muhammed, known as the Bab, or Gate, announced that he came as the fulfilment of prophecy and was to prepare the way for the appearance of a great world Teacher and Revealer of the Word of God, who would usher in an age of peace for all mankind. Thirteen years after the martyrdom of the Bab, Baha’U’llah, while in exile in Baghdad in 1863, announced his own revelation, and this is known as the Founder of the Baha’i faith.
The followers of the Bab claim he is likened unto John the Baptist, because they teach he was the forerunner of Baha’U’llah. Baha’U’llah is to the Baha’i the fulfilment of the second coming of the Lord. They say regarding the advent of Baha’U’llah “the coming of the Lord” is not only “at hand”, but is already an accomplished fact.
How does Christ fit into their teaching? They claim that “God, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe is unknowable, and that through divine prophets who, like perfect mirrors, reflect His attributes and His will, it is possible to have knowledge of God and to worship Him”. Christ, to the Baha’i, is one of the nine prophets (also called Manifestations) who have appeared to reveal God’s teaching and ordinances. The nine religions and manifestations are:
1. The Sabaeans – unknown revelator
2. Hindu – Krishna
3. Jewish – Moses
4. Zoroastrian – Zoroaster
5. Buddhist – Buddha
6. Christian – Jesus Christ
7. Islam – Muhammed
8. Babi – The Bab
9. Bahai’i – Baha’U’llah
One doesn’t have to know very much at all about the various religions to know they conflict and contradict one another. For example, the idolatry of Hinduism cannot contrast more starkly with the monotheism of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Why does the Baha’i faith take such a tact? Because they believe world peace will be achieved by such tolerance of not having to say that any religion is false. They say they were all true in their time but we have passed on and God has superceded them all by the Baha’i faith. So God is effectively either a confused liar or a conscious liar all in the name of peace and harmony!
Denominationalism is no better: people know that the myriad of conflicting denominational doctrines can’t all be true, because God is not the author of confusion (1 Cor. 14:33), but are quite prepared to accept it as good and from God, all in the name of unity and peace. As in the days of Jeremiah, they cry “peace” when there is no peace. Some years ago when I was working in Toowoomba, I received material from a group calling itself the Christian Leaders Network, that promoted the idea of the pastoring, not of churches, but of the whole city, by all the church leaders in Toowoomba. They promoted 40 days of unity and the idea that all churches are just one big happy family. I wrote to ask them how papering over deep doctrinal disagreements was possible without compromising truth. I said that unless we had unity in truth, there would be no real unity.
Some people are quite prepared to be baptised into Christ as long as others don’t have to be. Some are quite prepared to sing a capella as long as others are free to sing with instrumental music with God’s approval. You see, believing the truth is not just an intellectual thing, it has a social and emotional component as well. That is, there is a moral or character element in it. If I cannot stand with the truth without fear of offending others, then I do not really love the truth. If I want to believe the truth and at the same time say that every other conflicting view is true too, then I lack the intestinal fortitude that Christ displayed and which He wants us to have.
All men love something. No man yet hated his own flesh. No man can serve two masters, either he will love the one and hate the other. What does it take to be saved? For one thing, a love of the truth (2 Thess. 2:10). Even so, if we do not love the truth we will love error – it cannot be any other way. Napolean said, There are some men who can believe anything except the Bible. When it says in 2 Thess. 2:11 that God will send a delusion it is not to be understood in the sense that God is the father of the error, but rather it is to be understood in the sense that God ALLOWS this to occur. This is the way God operates. He strives with people (Gen. 6:3), but if men will not heed His admonitions or co-operate with Him in His attempt to recover their souls, He will give them up (cf. Rom. 1:21-32). God has made every effort to call men by truth, but when dishonest people close their ears to His appeal, He will not force truth upon them. He will allow men to believe what they want to believe, but more than that, find satisfying reasons for believing it (cf. Jer. 4:10):- the people would not believe the truth about their sin and resulting predicament of impending destruction by Babylon, and instead believed the false prophets who cried “peace, peace”. Jeremiah writes as if God is responsible for this, but God did not send the false prophets – rather He allowed them to speak and thus there was an alternative message which people could choose to believe. This is the same principle as in 2 Thess. 2.
What stops men loving the truth? Paul traces the origin of the rejection of the love of the truth to having had pleasure in unrighteousness. The pleasure of sin cannot exist side by side with the love of the truth. Evil hates the light (John 3:19). Moral corruption has no sympathy for the lofty thirst for truth of a pure soul. Hence it may be concluded that indifference to truth is a sign or moral evil. The corrupt life is a false life and that is why the rejection of truth is culpable. Intellectual doubt can be of a different character – it can come from a genuine love and pursuit of truth, but it will pursue truth at any cost.
God expects us to receive a love of the truth. Why? First, truth is good in itself. Truth is to the soul what light is to the body. We detest lying in our children. Second, Christian truth is particularly attractive. Scientific truth is attractive and philosophic truth is valuable. But the truth of the gospel has far deeper attractions, because it contains revelations of the love and Fatherhood of God. Can you imagine singing hymns and spiritual songs year after year to E=MC2, or meeting every week to partake in a memorial supper to the mathematical truth, the square root of 9 is 3?!
Also, truth should be welcomed with love because love saves us from giving it a cursory glance. Love opens our understanding to our sympathetic understanding of it. People have to be willing to make sense of whatever evidence is set before them, but many prefer respectable error to painful truth, and easy convenient answers rather than difficult, inconvenient truths.
The penalty of not having a love for the truth is the incapacity to know truth from error. Truth is too precious a pearl to be cast before swine. Those who do not love the truth shall not have the truth. The habit of indifference to truth so grows on a person that the whole idea of truth becomes obscure and meaningless to them, and they ask with Pilate, half-bewildered, half-scornful, “What is truth?” The spiritual eye is blinded and burnt out by the fires of falsehood and unrighteousness: the highest intellectual faculty, that of grasping truth, killed by corruption and falsehood.
Jesus told Pilate He came into the world to bear witness to the truth – and it got Him killed. Truth is not a game, nor is it a field for cowards. But Oh the glorious freedom that comes from standing with the truth. Not only freedom from sin, and freedom from error, but freedom from men and the need for their approval, knowing that in the truth we have the approval of God.