Through the mouth of one of his characters, Stephen Vincent Benet wrote: Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth. . . . it is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps in the old days they ate knowledge too fast. One would need discussion with Benet to discover all that he meant by the statement. It seems clear, but it isn’t clear, as so many similar statements about truth are unclear without definitions, or illustrations. We can be comforted that Jesus taught in parables so that when he spoke of truth we know he was not speaking of anything other than God’s perception of truth, and that truth related to the immortal factor in manlind’s and God’s expectations. Any other truth is temporal, so will not ultimately prevail. Further, without a Benet explanation as to how, can we say that persons ate knowledge too fast? Never before the present have we borne so great a burden of information overload so to wonder what truth really is, even in temporal matters much less in spiritual. If Benet is proven, current theories under study will change a stuttering world.
A constant in Scripture is that God never changes. (Malachi 3:6) The difference of truth and change for mankind is far more meaningful than we perceive. Truth changes as culture changes. I might say that most dairy men had milking stools in 1900, and thereby tell the truth. That possession is not true for today, and most dairymen would be clumsy with the peg leg stool used so efficiently by dairy farmers even into the early twentieth century. So it is that the Christian rests in the Scripture, seeking the truth of God, and that truth can set the person free – unchanging. A perceptive Christian may be free from some burdens of society, from anything that a loving God does not approve. If pain, suffering, burdens, battles are permitted to faithful Christians, they will pass away, and human trials will have ended in some meaningful conclusion.
I learned that truth is both simple and profound. It doesn’t take much truth to have all that is necessary for survival, but there is so much more that, when gained, provides what may be called maturity pointing to perfection. When Einstein remarked that the Bible seemed simplistic to him, someone in the conversation should have remarked: I am pleased to hear you say that. It relieves my mind that simple, unlettered, even ignorant persons can gain the basic concepts of what God wants of us, and the hope we want to possess. The world in general, believes truth is virtue. The more persons practice it, the more virtuous they are presumed to be. It can be cast another way. Virtue is active truth. God is holy and mankind ought to seek righteousness (right) as a reflection of that holiness. The more of it persons discover, the more truth they gain. Truth does not have a mortarboard on its head, but an invisible halo of rightness. Truth is lived, and identified in God’s nature. We may discover it in checking the lives of persons who had little room for ultimate truth. We forget that evil persons, like Hitler, were often well educated, skilled in many ways, but were liars. Hitler sponsored practical cars; organized a nation sunken by a war’s end in 1918; and, was a patron of the arts. Millions of persons, young and old, died because of his truth (the superiority of a segment of the human race). We trust in Jesus Christ, who lived the personal truth of God in effulgence (a shining forth). In God there is no darkness, no untruth, no weakness, and no loss of holiness. When all that vision is grasped in faith the believer becomes another person than merely human. Life is changed in the experience. God seems determined to form his children, with whom he fellowships in a more intimate way than may be possible for angels and archangels, or his pets in Seraphim. The half hasn’t yet been told, nor can it be for us. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020