It’s been a long time coming but I’ve decided to work at doing what I set out to do here at the start. I wanted to begin with a subject that is truly at the center of the challenge that Christians face today the issue of Truth and how we come to know it.

We truly live in a postmodern age. Radical skepticism and relativism have moved from the environment of college philosophy classes to the mainstream of our society. It has now become common to encounter the opinion that objective truth is a myth

Attempts to share our faith in the world often end with statements similar to this “That is good for you but not for me” or “that’s just your opinion”. How should we deal with such responses? How do we make a credible defense of the gospel in the pluralistic environment we live in? More importantly are the postmodernists right? Is truth really relative? How do we know anything for sure?

The answers to these questions are too important to be left to the experts and anyone with a mind is qualified to think deeply about subjects like this no matter their educational background. So I think I will add my small amateur voice to this debate. This is a big subject and vastly more intelligent folks than I have devoted their lives to it. Obviously it will take a few posts for me to explain what I know and don’t know and why. So please bear with me

First off it is crucial to keep in mind that

All knowledge starts with God

This fact should be obvious to the Christian however too often when we begin to explore how we can be sure of the truth of our beliefs we start with ourselves. This is exactly the opposite of where we should begin and I believe it explains much of the confusion and difficulty we find our selves in today.

We look at our limited brain power and we know that our senses have deceived us before so we reason that we are doomed to always have incomplete and biased information and since this is so we assume that we have no objective way to determine if we are being deceived now.

But if we understand that to God all true facts are self evident a way out of this dilemma begins to present itself. If God so chose he could reveal to us truth and we could know it for sure. It’s important to realize that God is under no obligation to do this. He could chose to not reveal reality to us and he would as our Creator still be completely within his rights. Or he could reveal some things to us completely and infallibly and others only in part. It is his prerogative

In light of this it is a great blessing that God sees fit to give all his creatures true reliable knowledge of the world to some extent. This wonderful gift of knowledge is entirely due to His Grace and its end result will be for his glory.

The personification of God’s knowledge is Jesus Christ; he is the Word of God and wisdom of God. Anytime God reveals truth to us his creatures it will in some way be a revelation of Christ. And anytime a falsehood is believed it is in some way contrary to Christ who is truth. This is the case in mundane facts as well are deep doctrinal axioms

It is also important to realize that when God reveals truth to us it is nothing short of a miracle in which the spiritual is somehow joined to the physical. It simply can’t be accounted for by the materialistic explanations of science. In some ways it is a shadow of the miracle that happened when The Word became flesh. The fact that we can know anything for sure is proof of a loving powerful God.

No wonder the world so quick to deny this possibility.

More later