Summary
Pilate's Question and the Christian's Answer
When Pontius Pilate stood face to face with Jesus and asked, "What is truth?" John 18:38, he uttered a question remarkably suited to our own age. In a strange way, Pilate was a man ahead of his time—voicing the skepticism that would echo across centuries of human thought.
Historians often divide recent history into three phases, each with its own answer to Pilate's question. The modern period rejected God but clung to absolute truth, claiming that human reason alone could discern universal moral and intellectual realities. The postmodern period, rising after the mid-twentieth century, dismissed even that confidence: truth became relative—"you have your truth, I have my truth." The current post-truth period goes further still. Facts are deemed irrelevant, evidence is brushed aside, and feeling or ideology becomes the measure of what is real. If I feel it strongly enough, it must be true.
Christians may not be ahead of the times, but the danger is that we become comfortable in them. We can drift into the modern habit of reasoning out our own absolutes apart from God's Word. We can drift into postmodern shrugging, content to let every neighbor define his own truth. We can drift into post-truth thinking, bringing our feelings and ideologies to Scripture for confirmation rather than submitting them under Scripture for correction. The temptation is always the same: to turn inward instead of to the Word.
But before Pilate stood the answer to his own question. Jesus says, "For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth" John 18:37. He is not merely a moral teacher whose insights the world eventually caught up to. He is the second Person of the Trinity, God in the flesh, sent in the fullness of time to redeem those under the law Galatians 4:4-5. He is truth personified—"I am the way, and the truth, and the life" John 14:6—and He prays for His people, "Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth" John 17:17.
This is why Lutherans confess Holy Scripture as inerrant—containing no errors because it is God-breathed—and infallible—incapable of error because its Author is God Himself. The Word does not bend to the spirit of the age; it judges the spirit of the age. It is "a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" Psalm 119:105, and it "shall not return empty" Isaiah 55:11.
So parents, do not lose heart in proclaiming the Word to your children. People of God, do not lose heart in a dark world full of falsehood. Christ has named you the salt of the earth and the light of the world Matthew 5:13-14, and the way to be salt and light is to hold fast to the truth of God's Word, whatever period of history we find ourselves in. The One who is Truth itself holds you—and He holds you for all time.
Video citations
- “Holding to the Truth” 10-16-22 — What you're open your Bibles, please, with me today, to John the 18th chapter, if you're using a Pew edition of Holy Scripture, you're going to find the 18th chapter of John on page 99 in the New…