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Transcript 141A — What is Truth?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Hello. The question I have is: Is the truth one? The truth about humankind, what makes the human race tick, what makes it go. What are the principles that operate in us as a total 400 billion person humankind? What makes this thing go? The Christian religion is one of the pieces of that big thing that is going on in the planet. It isn't all there is, but it's a piece of it. At least that's what anthropology says. And that's the truth.
So, my question is, How does one look at truth? Does one look at truth as one thing, where it's all true? Or does he say that only the Bible is true, and every other truth isn't true? How do you answer that?
HC: The question is, What is truth? Is it just the Bible, or can other things be true? Actually, of course, the only place of absolute truth, that is, the only place where there is truth that has no possibility of error, is the Bible, because the Bible is the infallible Word of God.
CALLER: The infallible Word of God. No possibility of error. The infallible Word of God. Therefore it has to be true.
HC: It has to be true. We may not always understand it, and there's a lot we don't.
CALLER: Okay. I'm just trying to get your words, because that's in Anthropology class, too. You learn how words are used. Go ahead.
HC: Incidentally, you know, Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." Now Jesus Himself identified with the Word of God by saying that He was the Word. So intimately we find this relationship, you see, between the Word and Christ. He says He is the Word, and He says He is the Truth. And so, therefore, the Word is the truth. That's the Word of God.
Okay. Now mankind searches for truth. He searches for this ultimate answer, this ultimate foundation upon which he can rest in order to build anything else. And of course he can only start building a successful structure if he is on absolute truth.
CALLER: That's what you rest everything on. You build this big logical house of cards about what the universe is, and you rest this on, whatever the truth is.
HC: Yes. But unfortunately, natural man disregards the Bible. And therefore he never finds absolute truth.
CALLER: Natural man disregards the Bible. Now if an anthropologist does not disregard the Bible, and pays attention to it, as well as everything else in his anthropological study, will he then get the truth?
HC: Yes. Then he is head and shoulders above everyone else. For example, if he starts with the Word of God, he knows that man did not evolve from a lower creature and is getting better and better. He knows that exactly the reverse is true, that man was created in the image of God as a perfect being. And if anything, there is a degeneration in man. Now that is absolute truth that is totally contrary to the foundation upon which the average anthropologist would build his idea of mankind.
CALLER: That is quite a bit different, because they come from a more generalized experience from other cultures, cultures besides the one that the Bible came from. The Bible grew up in a particular mix of cultures, early along in the human race, and as it increased its consciousness, the Bible had its impact on those cultures that it was amenable to. But a lot of other cultures, like the Chinese, Japanese, South Sea Islands, India, Persia, Africa, and a lot of those, didn't grow up with the Christian idea. The Christian idea, in its cultural bent, picked up a lot of the value systems of other cultures along the way and discarded other things, and just generally did what a cultural religious ideology does. But meanwhile, all those others grew up without it.
Okay. Then our Christian ideology goes over to the Chinese and to the Indians, and to the people of other parts of the world, and says, "Hey! Here's the truth." Your Word of God is no better than my Word of God. The Sufis, for example, say that the Christian ideology is fine, but so also are all the others.
HC: Yes. Well now, you see, when you look outside of the Bible, you will find that there are many common denominators out in the world, regardless of whether you start with an Indian culture or whether you start with a Babylonian culture or an African culture, or whatever it is.
And those common denominators are, first of all, that man somehow can find answers for himself, that man can do something about his eternal destiny, about his relationship with God. He can work out a program whereby he can be acceptable to God. More than that, he will concoct some kind of an idea, just searching his own mind for it, as to where man came from. And in one culture it may be one idea, and in another culture another idea. But there will be a certain similarity in all of these, at least general similarities.
But when we come to the Bible, there we have precise truth. We know exactly where we came from. Now the Bible is not just a Western culture. The Bible is cast actually in Babylon, in Africa, in Egypt, in Palestine. And portions of the Bible have been in Persia. And the Christian Gospel has been in Africa. And so these cultures, many of them, have had an impact on the Scriptures.
But when we're going to look at truth, if we reject the Bible, then we have to make a set of assumptions. And we have to use that as our foundation. And then we build our structure, and we leave our structure there for a while, until somebody comes along with a better idea, and we discard the whole structure and start all over again. And so man wastes his time, drifting from one structure which he thinks makes sense, to another. He knows that he's not going to find absolute truth. He doesn't even believe there is such a thing as absolute truth.
CALLER: You build up hypotheses as far as you can, but always recognizing that it could be different, if more facts come on the scene.
HC: But when we start with the Bible, then we have absolute truth to begin with, and we can build on that. And we can build a lot more solid structure, and we can build one that's unshakable.
CALLER: What if the anthropologist says to you, though, that so also do the other religions say, you know, if you just believe in our religion, then you've got the truth and you can go from there, and you don't have to worry about the Bible and those other things?
It seems like an anthropologist would generalize, looking over the cultures of four billion people, that these Scriptures all seem to exclude each other. They say, "We've got the Word and you don't. And the only way you can come to the final light, to truth, is to reject your error and join us, and believe as we do." And the anthropologist says, "That's the real hassle going on all over the world. The Moslems fight the Christians, and the Protestants fight the Catholics, and the Catholics fight the . . . ''
HC: Well, as a matter of fact, everyone in the world ultimately has joined some kind of a religion, whether it's a religion of atheism or a religion of agnosticism, or a religion of Mohammedism, or whatever. And any religion worth its salt, or anyone who follows a religion and is worth his salt, is going to believe sincerely that he has the right one. That is to be expected.
But the fact is that the Christian religion is the only one, the only one, that has an answer to man's sin problem. There's no other religion that has an answer. All the other religions are just guessing games.
CALLER: Zen Buddhism has an answer for that. It has a real good answer.
HC: No. It has an answer, but it's not an answer that is acceptable.
CALLER: Buddhists say that all life is a misery, and that's just the way it is, folks. Get used to it. Do the best you can while you're here. And then the Zens, of course, are somewhat like that. They say that if you just note what reality is, where everything comes from, you don't have any hassles. You can't possibly experience sin. Whatever happens to you is whatever happens. There's no sin. There's no good. It's all just one.
HC: But you see, these philosophies that you speak of, or these religions that you speak about, they fail to recognize, first of all, that there is a God who created man in the image of God. They fail to recognize that to rebel against God's Law, or break God's Law, which all men do, has got to be answered to before God. It's got to be paid for.
Now the Bible is the only book that really shows us the total sad situation, that the wages of sin is death, that we're under the wrath of God because of our sins. Other religions, some say there is no sin. Others say, well, we'll live a good moral life, and thereby we'll pay for our sins.
CALLER: Cultists have their interpretation, too. That's a different interpretation.
HC: They all have their interpretations. But the Bible comes to grips with the question and says: Okay, now let's look at it very candidly. Man is a sinner. Man is under the wrath of God, but the Bible also offers a way of escape whereby God's justice absolutely remains intact. In other words, there is no shortcut. There's no violation of God's justice, as He provides salvation for us. And no other religion has that kind of an answer. Only the Bible has that kind of an answer. And that answer of course is through the Lord Jesus Christ, who is God Himself, who took upon Himself our sins, if we place our trust in Him, who satisfied the justice of God on our behalf.
There's no other religion that has an answer like this. Now this answer is cast in the environment of a book that is loaded with truth, as God has prophesied many of the events that are happening today, as God has prophesied hundreds of years before events happened in the past. And so God has given abundant evidence of the genuineness and the trustworthiness of the Word of God, as He presents the true answer to man's dilemma. There is no other religion that can hold a candle to the true Gospel.
And this is what separates the true Gospel from anything at all. And this is why we can know that the Bible is absolutely true.
CALLER: So you believe it because you think it's true. And you think it's true because you believe it, and you believe it because, you know, you just get one of these elliptical strings. The one ties in with the other. How can you answer an anthropologist, when you do that?
HC: Well, first of all, when we study the Bible we find, for example, that the Bible tells us that Babylon was going to be destroyed years and years before it was destroyed. The Bible predicted that a king named Cyrus would rise among the Medes and the Persians, a couple of hundred years before he arose. The Bible predicted the destruction of Jerusalem. And incidentally, it also predicted the fact that Israel would be a nation again.
The Bible has predicted all kinds of things with tremendous accuracy. The Bible is the only book that gives us a solid and straight answer as to how it all began. The Bible, for example, lays out for us the message of salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. There are all kinds of people who live today who have had their lives transformed because they have placed their trust in Him, because they have taken God at His Word. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people in the world who had this experience.
And so all of this evidence is there to indicate to us that there is an answer. Now the one thing the Bible demands is absolute faith, or absolute trust, where we abandon ourselves to the Bible. And anyone who goes to the Bible simply looking upon it as a book, along with other books, is not going to find his answer. Or putting it in another way, without accepting the Bible as the Word of God, man remains without a way of salvation, a way of getting to God, because Jesus insists, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." Jesus said, "No man cometh unto the Father but by Me." The Bible says, "There is no other name given among men whereby men may be saved." The Bible is very insistent.
CALLER: It is consistent. It holds to that pretty well, all through the New Testament. I agree. So we've got to say that Jesus did say it. It's not as if, some people could say that Jesus hedged on it and said, "I'm one of the ways," or "I point the way," or all of these other things, like the gurus seem to say, and the other religions, and you might say the wise folks of the anthropological world. They point the way. But Jesus says, "None of that. I am the Way, and I am the Truth," which makes Him different than the other people.
HC: Yes. And more than that, He declared that He was God.
CALLER: "Before Abraham was, I AM."
HC: Yes. And those who have placed their trust in Him have found that this answers all the questions. Now I personally have done lots of work in the Bible, and I have found that it's exquisitely accurate when it comes to history, when it comes to the origins of the world. Do you take the National Geographic?
CALLER: I did at one time.
HC: Well, in December there was a series of articles concerning the Mayan culture, in Central America. Now I have worked through the calendars of Genesis 5 and Genesis 11. And in Genesis 10 it says that in the days of Peleg, the earth was divided. Now that's a surprising statement. But scientists have discovered that at one time, indeed there was one huge continent, and that it was divided. Of course scientists say that this was divided over a period of 150 million years, because they don't trust the Bible at all.
But in the Bible it says that it was in the days of Peleg. Now Peleg, according to the biblical chronology, was born in the year 3153 BC, and he died in the year 2914 BC. Now I can say that very categorically because the language of the Bible is so very careful. All of these ages and relationships are so very carefully identified in the Bible.
Now in the Mayan culture, the archaeologists find that they flourished around 1500 years ago. And when they built their temples and built their important places, they would put a calendar on the outside, to indicate the date that this dedication took place. And archaeologists have been able to decipher these calendars. They find that the Mayan people were as accurate in calendar keeping as we are today. They were just absolutely geniuses in this whole matter of the calendar and the passage of time.
Now the interesting thing is that the Mayan calendar, in every calendar that they look at, has one foundation date as the beginning of their calendar, and that is the year 3114 BC. And so the archaeologists puzzle over this. Why 3114 BC.? But I see in this a tremendous corroboration of the biblical statement. Peleg was 39 years old in the year 3114 BC. In his days the earth was divided.
Now to imagine that the one large continent that then existed was suddenly split and moved across the floor of the ocean so that we have the continents as they exist today, insofar as the nomads what were on that section of the continent, which later on became North and South America, and Central America, it was the beginning of time for them. It was a brand new day. And I can see very reasonably why the Maya calendar begins with a foundation date of 3114 BC. I believe that was probably the year the earth was divided.
CALLER: Praise God!
HC: That's a very interesting possibility, isn't it? Well, thank you so much for calling.
CALLER: I've enjoyed talking to you. And I hope that the rest of the people who are listening could think about that anthropology and religion thing, because it's probably going to be the very big problem in the future, in the next ten years. If the world is going to go any place, it's going to have to figure out what makes us tick, from a scientific viewpoint, and also from a transcendental or religious viewpoint.
Well, anyway, thank you. Good-bye.
HC: Thank you for calling. Good night.