It’s time to get metaphysical.
If you read my blog, you know I like Watchman Nee. An amazing student of the Word. A man who had a deep, intimate relationship with God. A man who also, on May 30, 1972, died in a Communist prison camp for his faith in Christ.
A small scrap of paper was found by his deathbed. It read
“Christ is the Son of God Who died for the redemption of sinners and was resurrected after three days. This is the greatest truth in the universe. I die because of my belief in Christ. Watchman Nee.”
“…the greatest truth in the universe.” Quite a claim. The greatest truth. What did Watchman Nee mean?
Project
This post is part of a review of a conference recently held in the Netherlands. The title of the conference, “The Four Pillars of the Lord’s Recovery: Truth, Life, the Church, and the Gospel.”
I’m collaborating with a few other bloggers on this little project. Here are the posts to date.
- The Four Great Pillars in the Lord’s Recovery: Truth, Life, the Church, and the Gospel (ITERO 2011) (agodman.com)
- The Progressive Issue of “Holding to Truth”—Four Great Pillars (holdingtotruth.com)
- Being Sanctified by the Truth to Move Out of Ourselves for the Oneness (holdingtotruth.com)
- The Tree of Life (holdingtotruth.com)
- the God who has become experiential to us through our being in Him is the true God and eternal life (agodman.com)
The subject of this 3rd message is
The Truth
What did Watchman Nee mean by “the greatest truth in the universe”?
Truth, to most of us, is the opposite of false. We teach our children to tell the truth, not lie. That is the conventional definition. Easy enough.
But I don’t think that’s what Watchman Nee meant. As a student of the Bible, he was no doubt using the word in the same way that the Bible uses it.
As Christians, when we talk about the truth, we typically mean the correct teachings of the Bible. There are false doctrines and there are true doctrines. As far as definitions go, that is a deeper denotation of the truth than just “the opposite of false.”
If we use this definition, then Watchman Nee was saying that the resurrected and redeeming Christ is the greatest correct teaching in the Bible.
Eh, perhaps. I certainly wouldn’t say that’s wrong. But it’s incomplete, isn’t it? It would still be a superficial way to understand the word “truth.”
There is an even deeper definition of “truth” contained in the Bible. I think this definition is what Watchman Nee meant when he penned his last words.
The Greek word for truth is alethia (a-LEE-thi-a). It means truth, but it also means “reality,” things that are real. Note: From here on, I’ll use the words “truth” and “reality” interchangeably.
What is real? What is true? Is Micky Mouse real? No. Easy one.
How about your body? Are you real? It seems like it. But after you die, your body is buried and decomposes. Is it still real at that point? Hard to say.
Truth, real truth, should be independent of time. If it’s true now, it should have been true in the past and should be true in the future. For those of you with a math background, read this: Truth is not a function of time.
So what is truth? What is reality? Three things.
1. God is Truth.
And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” (Exodus 3:14)
One of the names for God is “I am.” It is the form of the verb “to be” in the present tense. God is “I am” and He is independent of time. He is eternal and unchanging.
The first deep definition of truth is “God.” God is uniquely eternal and immutable. When you see light, remember that God is the real light (1 John 1:5). When you love someone, remember that your love is not real. It is not true. God is the real love (1 John 4:8, 16). God is truth.
2. Christ is Truth.
I am the way, the reality, and the life. (John 14:6)
Christ is the embodiment of God. Everything that God is, Christ is. If God is truth, Christ must also be truth.
The Greek word for reality in John 14:6 above is alethia. Christ claimed that He himself is truth, reality. That is much deeper than saying that he teaches truth. He Himself IS truth.
That just blows my mind.
If you want the truth, you need Christ. When you see bread, remember that Christ is the true bread (John 6:32). When you need rest, remember that Christ is the real, genuine rest.
Watchman Nee even wrote a book entitled “Christ is All Spiritual Matters and Things.” Apart from Christ, anything you attain, know, discover, achieve, control, or possess is not real. It is false. It is a lie. It is vanity of vanities. It will go away.
3. The Spirit is Truth.
…the Spirit of reality, who proceeds from the Father, He will testify concerning Me; (John 15:26)
The Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of reality three times in the gospel of John. The word reality in these verses is alethia. He is the Spirit of truth. He is the Spirit of reality.
God is reality. When God contacts us, He does so as the Spirit of reality. The Spirit of reality brings God as truth to us. Through the Spirit of reality, we contact God who is reality.
How to Find the Truth
Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. (John 17:17)
God, Christ, and the Spirit are not separate. They are one. So the truth that we’re talking about is one truth, not separate truths.
It is my sincere belief that the Bible, of 66 books, is the word of God. This one truth is contained in the word. We call this singular truth contained in the word, “the faith.”
Why It’s Awesome
And we know that the Son of God has come… that we might know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 5:20a, emphasis added)
To know the truth, you must know God who is true. And according to the verse above, to know God who is true you must be IN the God who is true.
To really know a something, you have to be in it. A lot of my friends like music. But one of them plays guitar particularly well. He is into music.
When he talks about music, you can tell that he really knows music. He knows it personally. Its different than if I took a music theory class could tell you about the circle of fifths and the modes of the major scale. His knowledge is subjective and real-life.
To know something, you have to be in it. The goal here is to subjectively know the truth. All the theoretical truth in the world doesn’t do us much good. A real-life, useful knowledge of the truth—that is what we need.
The Triune God is the unique truth. To know the truth, we have to know God. To know God, we have to be in God.
So How Do You Get into God??
God is Spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truthfulness. (John 4:24)
When the priests in the Old Testament worshipped God, they had to come into the temple to do it. Inside the temple is were they worshipped God.
That’s a picture. Christ is the real temple (John 2:19-20). We enter into Christ by using our human spirit to contact God. Our use of our spirit causes us to worship God.
The result? Truthfulness. By activating our spirit as we read the word, God comes in and brings truthfulness into us. This removes the falsehood, the vanity, the hypocrisy, all that stuff. It leaves God as truth in its place.
A habit of contact with the word like this is something I aspire to. Daily call on Christ. Daily come to Him. Don’t just read the Bible, but contact the living Person in the Bible. A life spent like this is a life well spent.
Don
November 11, 2011
Clark, thanks for writing. The outline for this message has only two roman numerals. First is “The divine truth, the divine reality, is the Triune God and His word—1 John 5:6.” Second is “We may know the divine truth, the divine reality, by being in the true One—1 John 5:20.”
In my review of the message I got absorbed in 1 John 5:20. It says, “And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding that we might know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.” This verse declares that a Person is the truth, the reality. The post above covers this.
The verse also promises us that we may know this true One. This knowing is subjective, experiential. It is much more than “knowing about” something. For example, I know about the city of Moscow and can easily find it on a map, but I have never been near it. In contrast, the knowing of the true God in Jesus Christ is by being IN HIM to accumulate experiences of Him.
How can we be in Him? This verse declares that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, has come. This is a wonderful fact. His coming began with His incarnation—God coming to live in and be one with a man. The coming continued with His human life on earth as recorded in the four gospels. The coming continued with His death and resurrection. Through death and resurrection Jesus Christ, the last Adam, became a life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). Now, as the Spirit, He can continue His coming by coming into us and we can believe into Him and be baptized into Him. Hallelujah for such a coming!
Now that He has made the long journey to come into us as the Spirit, He is the eternal life in us. This life has the ability to know the Reality. The Spirit operates in us to guide us into all the reality (John 16:13). This guiding has already begun with the enlivening of our spirit in regeneration. This guiding into all the reality is continuing by the Spirit of reality, who is one with our spirit, spreading into our mind for the renewing of our mind. In our mind we learn to know the reality, not by a university course, but by the ability of the eternal life that is saturating us. This guiding will consummate with the transfiguration of our body which will fully liberate us from the sin and death that inwardly opposes our full knowing of the Triune God who is reality.
More was spoken in the second half of this message, but this is enough for one comment.
Lord, work in us every day. Lord, grant us to know more reality today!
Tom Smith
November 11, 2011
Clark,
I was also considering the meaning of truth this week as well as how we can know this truth. I was also impressed by read the Bible that truth is just not just the opposite of falsehood, not telling lies. It is something much deeper. The truth in the Bible is really just what God is. God is truth. Christ came as the physical embodiment of this God of truth. He simply said “I am the truth.” But without the Spirit, still this God of truth would be a mystery. I’m so glad that through Christ’s going into death and coming in resurrection, this God of truth as reached us, even come into us, as the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of reality.
What’s even more awesome is that this God who is truth is embodied in His word. So when we contact God’s word by using our spirit (as you mentioned at the end of your post), we get Him as the reality within His word.
I’m so glad that we can really know this truth, as 1 John 5:20 says, by being in this true One. When we are abiding in Christ by enjoying His true words we know Him who is true and we’re in Him who is true. What a wonderful and profound reality.
I also share more about this same point on my blog holdingtotruth.com in my recent post, “Knowing the Divine Truth, the Divine Reality.
Tom
pswatson (@pswatson)
November 11, 2011
Wow, I love your explanations. I was thinking along the same line of truth being eternal as I listened to the message, but you expressed it very well as “truth is not a function of time”. If it’s “no longer true” it’s not truth. Such a phrase always bothered me, just like the current society’s assigning certain behavior as “okay for me, but not for you”. How can morality be relative? There must be an absolute morality, one set by God. In the same way, there is an absolute truth, that is always true and forever will be. One could get more metaphysical on this topic, but it’s good to go the the Bible to find out what it says is truth.
So only God meets that definition. And the Word confirms this as you’ve written above. God is eternal, hence God is truth. (Another verse for God being truth is mentioned in this other blog on the same subject is Psalm 31:5 – O Lord, God of truth.) And in the Bible, God is embodied in Christ, available in our hands in the Bible, and made real to us as the Spirit. So truth is the Triune God, whom we can find in the Word.
But the greatest, deepest truth here is that “we are in Him who is true” (1 John 5:20a). To expand on your example of worshiping in the temple, when Jesus was speaking to the Samaritan woman in John 4, He said, “true worshippers will worship in spirit and truthfulness (alethia).” Given that God is spirit (v.24) and by your post, the Triune God is truth, we no longer go to a place to worship, but by exercising the human spirit we enter into God and there, in God and in our spirit, that is, in the truth, we worship God. Wow.
As John said “This is the true God and eternal life.” Mere knowledge, doctrine, even about God, is not the true God. Only our being in Him and worshipping in Him and allowing Him as the reality to live out of us is true. So if we practically, day by day, know God as this true One and allow Him to live out of us as the true love, the true compassion, the true mercy, the reality of all our human virtues which otherwise always fall short, we are expressing The Truth. May we live as such true Christians.
Stefan
November 13, 2011
Amen, brothers! In this message I was so exposed concerning what TRUTH really is! Nothing we see or can touch in this world is real – the whole world is a lie. 100 years from now nothing will be the same, and even we ourselves are not real unless we have the True One, the Real One, in us. People today don’t stand for anything – but God in His Word reveals what truth is, what is real, and we can stand for that! We can stand for the truth! And the truth is: God, Christ, the Spirit, and the Word of God! Praise the Lord – we can find the truth, be sanctified in the truth, and even become The True in Him who is the Truth! For this we really need to move our of ourselves and into God by exercising our spirit to enjoy the True One! Oh Lord, open our eyes to see You, enjoy You, and become real in You!
Clark Russell
November 14, 2011
Amen to all your comments, brothers. May God as truth become our truthfulness.