The God of Truth

Truth is vital for our lives. If people in a given culture are not broadly committed to telling the truth and honoring commitments, the entire fabric of society will disintegrate. Should our science and technology not be based on what is true about the world, the consequences would be deadly. Our vehicles would probably not have working brakes because we ignore the laws of physics, we might ingest poisons thinking they are safe because chemical companies do not bother to give us warnings or do not test the safety of their products first, and so forth.

Scripture, of course, places much of its emphasis on the fact that God is a God of truth. As with His other attributes, when the Word of God tells us that He is the “God of truth,” as it does in Isaiah 65:16 and in many other passages, it does not mean simply that the Lord possesses truth. Instead, it means that God is truth itself. Truth is not something that the Lord could have or not have and still remain God. It is essential to His very existence. Jesus, who is God incarnate, helps us understand this when He says, “I am . . . the truth” (John 14:6–7).

In many ways, truth has fallen on hard times in our day. Many people have embraced a fierce subjectivism that speaks of “my truth” and “your truth,” especially with respect to religious and moral issues. The idea is that something can be true for one person in ethical and spiritual matters but not true for another, and that the important thing is for each individual to live according to his own belief system. Christians must never take such a view of truth. Scripture and the great Christian thinkers throughout history affirm the correspondence theory of truth, which says that truth corresponds to reality, that something is true only if it matches the way things really are as God has established them. We can see the correspondence theory of truth reflected in such things as the Apostle Paul’s insistence that if Jesus has not risen from the dead, our faith is in vain and Christians are to be pitied (1 Cor. 15:12–18). His point is that if the bodily resurrection of Jesus did not actually happen in reality, believing that it did will do us no good. Sincerely believing what does not correspond to reality gives us no ultimate benefit.

For this reason and many others, God’s Word must be free from error in all that it teaches and affirms. In other words, Scripture must be inerrant. We defend biblical inerrancy because the truth of God’s Word is essential for our salvation.