Welcome And Tonight’s Question

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Hello, and welcome to the Westside Church's special podcast.

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If you'd like to follow along in your Bibles, you can go ahead and open up to John chapter 18 and we'll begin there. It's already been a wonderful evening. I hope that we can continue the strength that we have gained from these praises we've sung together, this encouragement into these lessons this evening. What is truth is our subject this evening. It's the question that Pilate asks of Jesus in John chapter 18 and verse 38. And it is a question that philosophers and skeptics and preachers and scientists and college freshmen have spilt rivers of ink asking and answering. And it's the question Mark called me and told me I have 40 minutes to answer. So I don't know what we're going to do with all of our extra time.

Pilate Meets Jesus Under Pressure

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But we're going to start here in John chapter 18, looking at the discussion that happens between Pilate and Jesus. And we're going to back up to the beginning of that section there in John chapter 18. And what's happening is the Jews have, uh the Jewish leaders have brought Jesus to Pilate to accuse him. And there is at the first some back and forth between Pilate and those Jewish leaders, and then the conversation turns to Jesus. So backing up to verse 28, they led Jesus from Caiaphas into the Praetorium. And so they bring him in there, and Pilate, it says in verse 29, went out to them and said, What accusation do you bring against this man? He needs to know what has he done? Now already, now you skip ahead, you already know the question he's going to ask, what is truth? It sounds like he believes that you can find truth. Because he's asking the sort of question that is answered with truth, hopefully. So what has he done? The answer that they give is if this man were not an evildoer, we would not have delivered him to you. Which is the sort of answer you give when you don't have an answer to give. That already should have told Pilate, these are not people who are interested in truth. But that's their answer, nevertheless. Pilate doesn't say, This is nonsense. You people get out of here, which is what he should have said at this point. But he goes on and he says, Listen, this is just really not my problem. Take him yourselves and judge him according to your law. This is your guy, this is your problem, it's your law. Why are you even bothering me with this? And so the people say, Well, you won't let him kill us, let us kill him. Rome has made a law that we can't institute the death penalty, which at this point seems like probably a pretty good idea. And so they say it's not lawful for us, and so uh the response to that is uh that he turns to Jesus. Now, I will say that included in all of this in Luke chapter 23 and in verse 2, that the Jews do add this. We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding to pay taxes to Caesar and saying that he himself is Christ a king. Now, that is something Pilate probably has to deal with, right? And that's probably a little bit more of an answer. So now he kind of has to do something about it. Well, coming back to Luke chapter or John chapter 18, and in verse 33, he turns to Jesus and says, Well, are you? Are you the king of the Jews? Jesus' answer is uh fascinating to me. I think it's the type of answer you ask somebody to figure out if they really want to know the answer to their question. So he says, Are you really the king? And Jesus says to him, Are you saying this from yourself or did others tell you about me? Are you asking, or are you asking for a friend? Is sort of the answer that they get, or that Pilate gets. Pilate backpedals so fast that he almost trips over himself. Am I a Jew? He says. Truly. He believes he's innocent, as we'll see a little bit further down in the text. But here he's got a man who's accused in criminal fashion, who other people want to put to death. Pilate says, Well, did you say it? And Jesus says, Do you really want to know? Ah, no, actually, actually, no. Just tell me what you did. Just tell me what you did. And I think I think what Pilate would like to hear Jesus say is, nah, I never said it. I'm not really king. This is all just a bunch of misunderstanding and nonsense, and you can go back to your comfortable life. But that's not what Jesus says. He says, My kingdom is not of this world. He says, if it were, if my kingdom were of this world, then my people would fight. I believe that what he says to Pilate is, if I didn't want to be here, I wouldn't. So when he asks him, Are you claiming to be king? Jesus indicates, I do have a kingdom. It's not that kind of kingdom. It's the kind of kingdom that makes your kingdom small. And if I did not want to be here, I wouldn't be here. Nevertheless, it isn't that kind of kingdom, and so I am here. It reminds me of where Pilate asks him, Don't you know, don't you know I have authority over you? And Jesus' response is, You would have no authority unless it was given to you by my father. And then he points to the people who actually handed him over. So here's Pilate saying, I'm the one in charge, and Jesus points out there and says, Well, they're the ones that delivered me over. I'm not even here because of you, Pilate. What role are you playing? I don't want to suggest Pilate doesn't, in fact, play much of a role. He bows out of the role he ought to have played, which is to find out the truth. So he says in verse 37, so you are a king, after Jesus says he has a kingdom. So you are a king. Jesus cleverly responds, Well, you said it yourself. That's a trick, a little bit. He's asking, he's making the statement, you are a king, but he's asking the question. Jesus says, Well, you know, you kind of did just say you are a king. And uh, in fact, that's why I'm here. It's uh for this that I've been born, and for this I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice. So essentially he says, That's right. That's why I'm here. That's the truth. Now, here, Pilate, who is going to acknowledge that Jesus is innocent, is having to grapple with the fact that a man is standing in front of him that he knows is innocent. This is not a guilty man. I think he knows he's not a crazy man. So he's not evil and he's not crazy. What are my options? I think my only other option is that he's the king. And Pilate does not want to deal with that.

“What Is Truth” As An Escape

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And so instead of dealing with the conclusion, he falls back to our question. What is truth? He does not ask that because he wants the answer. He asks it to avoid the answer. Right? This whole conversation has been getting up to this point, and Jesus just gave him the answer in so many words, and instead of receiving that and wrestling with that and figuring out what all the implications of that are, he goes, I mean, who can know? Really? Who can know truth? I believe Pilate's problem is not that he's intellectually grappling with, he's like studying and he just can't figure it out. His problem is that he's lazy, he is a coward, and he is comfortable with his current lifestyle, and what he wants more than anything is that Jesus would just go away and he could go on back to the life he had just a few moments before Jesus was dumped on his doorstep. He asks what truth is in order to dismiss it, not in order to know it. I want to say before we continue on, because Pilate, the pilots of this world, is who I want to talk about tonight, but I do want to say, I do want to acknowledge that you may be here honestly asking the question, what is truth? It is possible to honestly ask that question. And you are in no better place than you could be to be asking that kind of question. You are surrounded by people who want to help you know the truth. Paul says in Acts chapter 16 that those who would grope and grasp after God, that He is not far from each one of us. If you want the truth, I have confidence that you can and you will find it. That is not the problem. The problem is when people say what is truth but don't want it. And that is what we so often deal with in the world that we live in today. I want to say this: no one can consistently deny truth, deny that truth exists. As I said, as I've already mentioned here, as you go down to the next verse or the end of the same verse in 38, after he'd said this, what is truth? He went out again to the Jews and said to them, I find no guilt in him. That sounds like truth. So on the one end, he says, Who can know? And then he says, Well, I can know this. He's not guilty. But he's not willing to stand by that truth, even, because he will go on to participate in the crucifixion or to condone the crucifixion of Jesus. I don't believe that he wants to crucify Jesus, but he don't, he doesn't want to stand by the truth that would keep Jesus from being crucified. People who say they can't figure out truth often just mean they don't want to deal with the consequences of standing by truth. When somebody says truth is a social construct, or you have your truth and I have my truth, or all truth is relative. They cannot and they will not hold on to that for a moment when truth becomes vital to them. And it will. It always does. And in fact, the most comical thing about that is that when people say things like that, truth becomes important to them in the most mundane of circumstances. In C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, he points to this reality. He points to ordinary quarrels, he says. And in those ordinary quarrels, when people are fighting, not even over big things, just little things, they don't say things like, I dislike what you did. Or, I guess you're just living by your truth. He doesn't say that. That wasn't around back then, but there were forms of it around back then. People don't say that. Instead, they say things like, that was unfair, what you just did. Or they say, You promised me, and you ought to stick by your promises. You ought to tell truth. They say things like, How would you like it if someone did that to you? Or most definitive of all, they say, This is not right. Those kinds of phrases only make sense if truth exists. They only make sense in a world that not only where truth exists, but where the expectation is that we all live by the same truth. It's uh C.S. Lewis compares it to a football game, by which he means soccer, of course. And so he compares it to a soccer game in which a foul is called. And he says that you can argue whether or not it was a foul, but there's no sense in arguing that there's no such thing as fouls. If there's no such thing as fouls, there's no such thing as soccer. Right? Because that's the rules. And what the expectation is, is we all are playing by the same rules. And so the foul is something that we all agree, at the very least, exists, even if we don't agree when it ought to be called. I believe that that's true in so many cases. People agree that we live by the same standard when they need the standard. The reason that Pilate rejected the truth is because it was not his neck on the line. If he was the one facing the cross, I guarantee you he wouldn't be saying, Who can know? He'd be saying, let's get to the bottom of this, which is what he ought to have been doing, even when his neck was not on the line. I would turn your attention to another Roman official who stood at the feet of the cross. And when he saw Jesus breathe his last, his most memorable words are there in Mark chapter 15 and verse 39. Truly, this man was the Son of God. In a moment, he worked through everything. Here is a man who very obviously was not guilty, who very obviously was not a madman, and so very obviously was who he said he was. This was the Son of God. And so it is possible to see the truth and to pretty quickly arrive at the right conclusions from that truth. That leads me to this question.

Relativism Collapses In Real Life

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Where do we learn the truth from? Well, I believe we learn the truth from what we can see. And the truth includes things that we can't see. Right? So you take in what you can see and then you draw conclusions about what can't be seen. That is a process of learning the truth. This is St. Paul's Cathedral. It stands near the center of London. This particular iteration of the St. Paul's Cathedral that's there today was built in the 1600s. And the architect of this cathedral was named Christopher Wren. Um it's beautiful architecture, if you're interested, uh, of the classical Baroque style, but maybe you don't care about that. Um if you walk in to the cathedral, you will see tucked away a plaque on a wall that is dedicated to Christopher Wren. And they spell his name a little funny, but that's Christopher Wren. And there at the last couple of lines, uh, it says lector si momentum requis uh circum speaker. That's the Alabama Latin, if you uh are not familiar with that pronunciation. And what that means, translated, is something like reader, if you were to inquire after his work, look around you. That is, if you want to know Christopher Wren, go to St. Paul's Cathedral and look around. And especially if you know something about architecture, you will know something about Christopher Wren. You'll know a lot about Christopher Wren. So we stand in a cathedral, and we stand in a designed place, a built place, and it declares its maker. Psalm 19 and verse 1 beginning says, The heavens are telling of the glory of God, and the expanse is declaring the work of his hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. We stand in a place that tells us about the one who made it. Now, what's happening is throughout history people have stood in the cathedral, if you will. They've stood in St. Paul's Cathedral, and they've argued about whether the architect was Christopher Wren or some other guy. Right? So other people maybe claim that other gods created the earth. They've stood here on the planet and they said, maybe it's this God, maybe it's this God, we're not sure about who the architect is, but we know that there's an architect. Somewhere along the way, men began to get up, and instead of just arguing about who exactly the architect was, they said, I'm not sure architects exist. Now, if you were standing in St. Paul's Cathedral and having a conversation with a conspiracy theorist who said, I believe somebody else actually was the architect, not Christopher Wren, you'd say, Well, that's a little weird, but okay. But what if you were standing there and somebody goes, I actually don't believe in architects? You might say, we're not having a rational conversation anymore. Right? But but we've gone way past that. Now we're standing in St. Paul's Cathedral with people who say there's no such thing as cathedrals. They don't believe in anything, they don't believe reality is real. I had a Bible study not too long ago with a fellow, we sat down, he doesn't believe in God, and I said, okay. And so we started talking. I said, well, let's just talk about what do you believe in. And we drilled down and drilled down and drilled down. The fellow does not believe in his own existence. I don't know what to do with that. Right? We're standing here, you're saying like the things all around us don't exist. Okay, that's madness. But that's that's where we are. I think that what we have to do is we have to recognize that in order to fix the situation we're in, it's not going to be enough to get people back to the point where they say, okay, I do believe in cathedrals, but I still don't believe in architects. Because I want to tell you, when you deny the designer, when you deny the builder, you will eventually think deny the things that he designed and built. They stand and they fall together. And so we've got to not only get back to the reality of things that we can see and touch and smell, we've got to get back to the reality of the one that those things point to. That brings me to my next point, which is that I want to encourage you to build an imagination. Imagination usually is associated with things that are made up, but imagination is not just about made-up things. In fact, a definition for imagination is the human faculty of forming mental images, sensations, or concepts of what is not present to the senses. We don't usually associate truth and imagination, but notice it's about forming mental images of things that are not present. That can be of anything. I can see, I can form the image of my grandfather who died six years ago. I can hear his voice. I can feel the touch of his hand. That's my imagination. But it's my imagination about things that I've seen. What about things that I have not seen? Well, what we've got to do is we've got to learn to take what we do see and imagine the things that we cannot see. And this is not a complex process, right? You don't need, you know, massive amounts of education. In the story of the blind man in John chapter 9, when Jesus healed the blind man, he is uneducated. And all the people around him are the ones with their M-divs, their degrees in theology, if you will. And they come to him and they're questioned, they're just pumping him with questions. And they want him to say something, admit something that he doesn't even know really what they're talking about until finally he says in verse 29, whether he's a sinner, I don't know. Here, I'll tell you this. Here's what I know. I used to couldn't see out of these eyes, and now I can. That's what I know. And so you can do whatever you want to with your theology. I'm gonna stand right here and keep saying, that man gave me the ability to see that I haven't had since birth. That's that's a pretty good truth to stand on. And later on, as you go through the book, he starts to put the pieces together, even though he doesn't have a theology degree, and he says, Well, now hang on just a minute. I don't think sinners could do that. I don't think what you're saying about him could be true because somebody who's like what you described is not the kind of fella who can make blind people see. Isn't that what faith is all about? Hebrews chapter 11 is about these great men of faith. It is about men who see what is unseen. Hebrews chapter 1 and verse 11, uh chapter 11 rather and verse 1, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, the conviction, I am certain of this thing that I cannot see. I'm so certain that I would do anything on the basis of the one who I cannot see telling me to do it. And that's what you see throughout Hebrews chapter 11 is all of these men are given some sort of instruction, and without being able to see the end of it,

Seeing The Truth At The Cross

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they just changed their whole lives. Most notably, Moses, down in verse 27, by faith he left Egypt, not fearing the rage of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is unseen. Brother, what we need, what we need is the capacity to see past the scene, and we need to know the limits of the scene. We need to know that the scene will only take you so far. In Job chapter 28, we're not going to turn over there and read all of that, but Job chapter 28, at the beginning, he talks about the mines. There's silver mines and gold mines and diamond mines, and men can dig down into the earth, and they can dig shafts farther than you can conceive and take light where no light has ever been. And look at all this that they can find. And in verse 12, he says, But where do you find wisdom? Not at the bottom of that mine shaft. You can keep digging and digging and digging, and you will not find it in the material things of this world. In the voyage of the Dawn Treader, there's a character named Ramandu. He is a star that has set and is resting before he rises again. And Eustace, the boy named Eustace Scrub, who almost deserved it, he comes up to Ramandu and he says, in his certainty, in our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas. And Ramandu says to him, even in your world, that describes what a star is made of, not what a star is. Listen, I want to tell you all that the world can, through

Learning Truth From What We See

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biology, through uh chemistry, through lots of science and medical advances, tell you a lot about what you are made of. The world can tell you through biology whether you're a boy or a girl, even if they don't admit that. What they can't tell you is what boys are for and what girls are for. What you are made for. You are made in the image of God. And no biology test will ever tell you that. So the physical things of this world will not get you all the way to the truth. What we need is good stories and a lot better stories than we usually are paying attention to. We need the stories of God's word. We need the stories that teach us truth from history. And we need the stories that teach us truth from fictional stories. We need all of that. I want to suggest to you that the world will say, you know, a true story is something that's based on what, quote, really happened. And then a not true story is something that didn't really happen. I want to tell you that a true story is a story that tells the truth. And you can tell a lie while telling the facts. Happens every night on the news. But God's word tells us the truth no matter what story it's telling us. One of the stories, for instance, that our world tells us is that the solution to a long string of bad kings is democracy. And democracy fixes the problem of having bad kings. The old stories, the fairy tales, in fact, used to tell us that the solution to a string of bad kings was a good one. Can I suggest to you that one of those is closer to this than the other? Go, if you want, to with me back to Judges chapter 9. Judges chapter 9. In Judges chapter 9 and verse 8, I am not anti-democracy, nor am I trying to put a king on the throne in America, just to be clear. But in Judges chapter 9 and verse 8, it says, The trees surely went forth to anoint a king over them, and they said to the olive tree, Reign over us. But the olive tree said to them, Shall I leave my fatness with which God and men are honored and go wave over the trees? Then the tree said to the fig tree, You come reign over us. And the fig tree said to them, Shall I leave my sweetness and my good produce to go wave over the trees? And the tree said to the vine, You come and reign over us. But the vine said to them, Shall I leave my new vine, which makes God and men glad and go wave over the trees? Then all the trees said to the bramble, You come reign over us. And the bramble said to the trees, If in truth you are anointing me as king over you, come and take refuge in my shade, but if not, may fire come out from the bramble and consume the cedars of Lebanon. This story about looking for some sort of tree and then having to settle all the way down at the bottom of the barrel with the bramble is told in response to a man who has usurped. He is uh Abimelech here, the usurper and the judges. He goes and he kills 69 of his brothers. Jotham, his one brother left, is telling the story. They come to him and say, Jotham, did you hear what happened? He says, Let me tell you a story. I want you to just think about that story. Sometimes you can pick your own leaders and still end up in pretty rough shape. You see, the solution to bad kings is never bad people picking their own leaders. The solution will always be the coming of the good king. And so that's a story that still plays, doesn't it? That's still true. A true story about trees walking around trying to pick out who's going to lead them. And it still teaches us something that I think we still need to know. Fictional stories, they help us see what is true. Yes, the true stories can do that, but fictional stories can do that. Our culture tells really bad stories. They tell us that heroism is found in rebellion, that innocence is just foolishness, that evil is just misunderstood, that all authority is oppressive, your parents are fools, you're the true wisdom of the age, that death is meaningless, and that there is no such thing as truth. I want stories when I read to my children at night, I want stories that teach them truth, that good is good, that evil is evil, that sacrifice is noble, that sin will destroy you, that righteousness, though it suffers, will receive its reward, that the wicked, though they prosper, they will be judged. That there is hope and redemption, that death is not ultimate. G.K. Chesterton said, we do not tell children that dragon, we do, fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed. When you have uh when you get into foster care, you have children who come into your home who, like all children, believe in monsters. And I've had occasion to have children in my home who have called me in like my own children and have said, I'm afraid that monsters are going to come into my room. I do not tell those children monsters do not exist. Because they would know I am lying. They know they exist. They have come in their room before, and they have done monstrous things. So it does no good for me to tell them it doesn't exist. I tell them they are in a house that serves the king that slays all the monsters. That's what I want them to know. The truth that will help them deal with the difficulties in that moment and for the rest of their lives. We used to have stories like that that taught children hard truths, but did so in a way that was hopeful. Hans Christian Andersen wrote children's stories about 200 years ago. And this is the book that I read those stories

The Cathedral And The Architect

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to my children from. One of the stories that he wrote is called The Little Match Girl. I don't know if you've heard that of that one. Disney did a short about it. They probably ruined it, like they did Little Mermaid. But anyway, the second to last paragraph goes like this. In the cold morning, the little girl was found. Her cheeks were red and she was smiling. She was dead. She had frozen to death in the last evening of the old year. The sun on New Year's Day shone down on the little corpse. Her lap was filled with burned-out matches. Now you might go, that's a kid's story? It is. And I read it to my three-year-old. Now the story is that a little girl was selling matches, nobody was buying them. She was afraid to go home because her father would beat her. She goes into a little alleyway, it's freezing, it's New Year's Eve, and she strikes a match to try to get warm, and she sees visions of warmth on the wall. It goes out, the vision goes away. She strikes another one, she sees another vision of a Christmas tree, it goes out. She strikes a third one, she sees her grandmother, who's the only person that ever showed her any kindness in her life, and she's gone now. And she knows if that match goes out, her grandmother's gonna go away. And so she grabs the whole stack and just starts striking. She strikes every single match. And it says her grandmother reached out. Before those matches go out, her grandmother reaches out and pulls her into her bosom. And then you have this scene where she's dead the next day. I read that, I read that to my three-year-old and my six-year-old. And uh, my three-year-old said, Danny, that that was a sad story. And I said, Well, it was. I said, but where's your favorite place in the world to be? And she said, Grandgrands. I said, Well, that's where that little girl went. Did you hear that? She went to be with her grandgrand. And I said, Well, but not only that, not only did she go to the bosom of one who would comfort her, does that sound familiar? Not only did she go to the bosom of one who would comfort her, but she and all the other innocent boys and girls, and all those men and women who have put their faith in Jesus will come back with him. And she goes, Well, that makes that better. I was like, it does. Fast forward three months. We're headed out to a funeral. It was the funeral of the wife of one of my mentors. And I had mourned his loss already, and this was kind of a, you know, just another blow on top of that. And so I was crying before we even got out of the driveway. And she sees that and she says, Daddy, are you sad? I said, I'm sad. Because Miss Bunny died, yes, because Miss Money died. Like Mr. Jackie died, yes, like Mr. Jackie died. That's my mentor. Like Nanny Russell died, that's my grandmother that died two years ago. Yes, baby, like Nanny Russell died. Like Papa Braggwell died. Ease up, baby. I'm dying here. She said, but Daddy, they'll all come back. They will. You see, what happens is we teach ourselves to stop believing the true stories. We believe them when we're three years old. It's like what Jesus said in Matthew chapter 21 and verse 16. As he's coming in on his triumphal entry, and the children are singing his praises, and people come up in verse 16, and they say, Do you hear what these children are saying? And Jesus said to them, Have you never read out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies, you have prepared praise for yourself? Yes, the children see it. Why can't you? I want to tell you, you all are at an age where you are just at the point where you start forgetting the true stories. Don't. Don't. Don't become another adult who stops believing. I don't mean stopping believing in Santa Claus, but maybe the thing that Santa Claus was supposed to point to. Somebody says, there's no such thing as dragons. There's one. And there is a king who slays him. And that is the truth that will get you through the most difficult moments in your life. I want you to believe it. Like a three-year-old, a three-year-old girl who can look at her daddy with tears in his eyes and boldly proclaim it to him. That's the truth I want to leave you with. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 37:06

Thanks for listening to the Westside Church of Christ podcast. For more information about Westside, you can connect with us through our website, just Christian.com, and our Facebook page. Our music is from Upbeat.io. That's Upbeat with two P-U-P-P-P-E-A-T. Where creators can get free music. Please share our podcast with others, and we look forward to seeing you again.