Seeking the Truth of God

Don: What we have been discussing is not just any truth, not scientific truth. We have been and are discussing specifically the truth about God. Why does Wo/Man have such an insatiable desire to pursue this truth, often with extreme and violent reaction? Why do we need to find God? It seems self-evident that there is a general belief that the discovery of this truth will enhance our lives—free us from distress and disease and, above all, lead us to salvation.

The condition in the Garden of Eden was such that Wo/Man did not need to seek the truth. It was all around them, in the presence of God. Indeed, Adam and Eve walked with the Truth in the Garden, where the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil could be thought of as the Tree of Truth-Finding, the Tree of Discrimination. God evidently did not want Wo/Man to go there and (ironically, it would seem) was even prepared to lie to prevent them when he told Adam and Eve that if they did, then on that day they would surely die—when clearly, they did not. It’s arguable that God actually lied; but in any event, Adam and Eve…

… exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, … (Romans 1:25)

This highlights the key distinction between objective Truth and personified Truth. Jesus’ statement that he is the Truth makes truth a living thing—not an idea, not a set of beliefs, not even an exercise in what is right and what is wrong. Truth is a vital and active Being. This distinction changes everything.

First, it means that instead of us seeking Truth, Truth seeks us. Instead of us finding Truth, Truth finds us. Objective Truth must be sought; personified Truth seeks. Jesus made this clear to Pilate:

Therefore Pilate said to Him, “So You are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” (John 18:37)

That “everyone who is of the truth hears [His] voice” harks back to the sheep/shepherd metaphor in John 10, where sheep—even sheep who are not of his fold—recognize the shepherd’s voice. Truth is evidently associated with hearing the voice of God. Putting this together with the concept that Truth finds us, we have a clear picture of a universal shepherd seeking all sheep, of all sheep recognizing his voice, and therefore of all sheep being part of the Truth. The parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15) is a beautiful example of Truth seeking us.

This all then raises the question: Should we be seeking Truth? Is that God’s intent or was it just inevitable after the Fall? In the Garden, the Truth was strictly God’s prerogative. It could perhaps be argued that the Fall resulted from our desire to objectify, quantify, and qualify Truth so that we might understand it. To many, the pursuit of Truth is enslaving. There is no end to the pursuit, no relief from it until, as Jesus said, the day when…

“…you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:32)

We’re enslaved because, having objectified Truth, we then substitute it for knowledge. At the end of the age, men will run to and fro in intoxicated pursuit of it:

“[At] the end of time; many will go back and forth, and knowledge will increase.” (Daniel 12:4)

The frantic search for Truth is in reality a frantic search for God. Yet God is actually very close to us:

“The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’ Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent,…”  (Acts 17:24-30; emphasis added)

Why is God so close? Because he is constantly seeking us. In the pursuit of Truth, God might have been telling us what my old surgical mentor used to tell his students: “Don’t just do something; stand there!” when he said:

“Cease striving and know that I am God;…” (Psalms 46:10)

Paul, too, said that our knowledge is negligible and not worth all the striving for it:

“… if there is knowledge, it will be done away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away….” (1 Corinthians 13:8-10)

David: Seeking knowledge, or what I call small-t truth, is unquestionably part of our nature, but I know people who go happily through life without seeking Capital-T Truth, or God. So my evidence, anecdotal as may be, is that seeking God/Truth is not in our bones, is not the inevitable result of having Fallen. It’s evident that there has always been some sort of belief in God or gods throughout human history, but much of that belief is centered more on explaining the way the world works, not the way God works.

Charles: In the Garden, the desire to seek Truth was introduced from outside. Adam and Eve were not curious until the serpent spoke. They were happy with what God provided.

David: Adam and Eve were literally in the Truth in the Garden. Even today, according to Acts 17 as I read it, we could be back inside that Truth, back inside the Garden, in a heartbeat, if only we would think and “repent.” After the serpent spoke, were Adam and Eve stimulated to look for the Truth (which was all around them) or for other Truths/truths they had not known existed and that seemed somehow more interesting in some way than the Truth they were in?

Charles: Adam and Eve were manifestations of the Truth, prior to the Fall. They were the Creation that was added to the existing fellowship of the Trinity. The End Time is about the re-manifestation of this union. The desire to seek Truth was in a sense a manifestation of the disunity of the serpent, the devil.

Chris: Before the Fall, Adam and Eve knew only one Truth: God. When the serpent deceived them, he in effect introduced them to a new Truth: Evil. In our fallen state, that is the Truth we tend to gravitate towards, and that in turn creates our need to seek its alternative, its opposite: God. God said: “Seek and ye shall find,” so I think we do have a real, justifiable need to seek the Truth.

Don: The search for Truth is not a casual pastime. It is accompanied by a passionate desire to be right, which then provokes extreme responses to competing Truths, including the murder of competing Truth holders.

David: But the God of the Old Testament seemed to respond in like manner to anyone who disputed his Truth! His Truth had no competition in the Garden, until the serpent introduced it, which to me raises the question: Did the alternative Truth already exist, or did the serpent invent/create it? God seemed to fear that through the acquisition of knowledge we would be in a position then to invent new Truths and new Kingdoms in competition with God and his Truth and his Kingdom. We would be like God, and (to me) the Bible suggests he wasn’t too happy about that prospect.

Charles: The knowledge in the Garden was specific to the knowledge of Good and Evil. The absence of a single standard for Good and Evil seems almost to mandate that Truth becomes relative. But either there is one Truth, or there are multiple truths and people are free to choose the one they like. That leads to conflict and to the relativism of atheism and humanism.

Robin: It is self-worship to deny God’s word. If we are told that God said something, then it is not something we should deny. But often the word can be inconvenient, or humiliating to our ego, so we choose to ignore it or deny it or re-define it as our word.

Charles: Does each individual define their own Truth?

David: I believe we all have God (the Truth) within us—the inner light, inner voice, inner spirit and so on often mentioned in scripture. It is the light, the spirit of the one God, but it is personal as well. In that personal sense, there are as many Gods/Truths as there are people!

Charles: Before the Fall, Adam and Eve had a (presumably) perfect relationship with God. They had the spirit, they had it all. After the Fall, by my interpretation of the Old Testament, not everyone retained the spirit of God. It was quite selective—only a chosen few had it. Pentecost brought the gift of the spirit. So does everyone now have the spirit of God in them? Or not?

David: As I see it, in the Garden, it was not that Adam and Eve had the Spirit in them; rather, the Spirit had them in It. They were part of God, and that is the state we are trying to recover. It gets us back to Don’s question: Who is seeking whom? God is not seeking to get back inside us, he is seeking for us to get back inside him. Or so it seems to me!

Jay: I have the same impression as Charles—that the Old Testament was quite selective about who had the spirit, though it must be said that often the spirit-holder happened to be the one telling the story! When discussing Truth we may tend to conflate “defining” it and “seeking” it. We are called to seek the Truth with all our hearts, etc., but I don’t think we are called to define, to understand, to know it. In fact, scripture seems clear that we can never know it fully. Our human tendency is to conflate seeking and defining, but in so doing we set ourselves up for failure. In the Garden, pre-Fall, there was no need for seeking. The need only arose after the serpent’s introduction of the lie that there was something to know and that we could know it.

David: I am intrigued by the notion that there was only one Truth (God/Good) in the Garden. So where did the alternative Truth (Evil) come from?

Charles: From the creature!

David: But what God seemed to fear most was that Wo/Man would become “like one of us” (why “us”?).

Charles: “Us” probably means the Trinity.

Chris: I am not so sure God was afraid for himself; rather, that he was afraid for us. We were born in his likeness. We were like God and living in a perfect world. But we were not God. The unwanted Truths—Evil—existed prior to this earth. Satan brought them with him. God knew we could not handle that.

Jay: Evil existed before the Fall, which means (to me) that God is impervious to but also capable of evil. Being Good, God simply does not exercise his capability. However, he knew his creatures, and he knew that they would not be able to resist exercising their capability for evil once they knew it existed.

Robin: I wonder if God was afraid not that we would become like him, but that we would think we could. I agree with Jay that we tend to conflate matters of Truth, such as God’s prescription and God’s prediction: For example, God predicted that after the Fall, Eve would become subservient to Adam, but he did not prescribe it. There was no submissive aspect to their relationship before the Fall.

Charles: I’m not sure God is capable of fear. Where does that notion come from? I don’t get that sense from scripture. Rather, I get the sense that the entirety of eternity is part of God’s plan, so he can have nothing to fear. The implications for creation of the creation being independent of the will of the creator required the history of salvation to take its course.

Jay: But that’s determinism—there is no free will in that case. It’s all God’s plan, God’s will.

Charles: Point taken. I’m trying to say that the consequences of free will for an individual or a society independent of God and the manifestation of pride independent of God were foreseen by God. Things have gone, do go, and will go our way until the end of the age—but then they will go God’s way, and he knows that. I don’t know of anywhere in scripture that says God was afraid of anything.

David: This is a problem with scripture: It is suggestive, and that is the cause of so much trouble! I maintain that it is reasonable to infer from scripture that God was afraid about Wo/Man becoming like him when they acquired the knowledge of Good and Evil. Even so, I accept also that the notion of a frightened God of all creation is ludicrous. The Bible—along with the Dao De Jing—affirm that God/The Way is just not accessible to our understanding, but the Bible often suggests (to me, at any rate) that it is. There is no reason to suppose that human concepts such as fear bear the remotest relationship to God.

Don: For next week please read Genesis 11—the story of Wo/Man’s quest to reach God by building the Tower of Babel, which was thwarted by God in part by forcing them to split up into tribes speaking a multitude of different languages; and Acts 2 — the story of Pentecost, in which people of multiple different languages are united through their communion with the one God.

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