The April edition of the Chaplain's Corner by Pastor Dave, SCYL Chaplain
What is truth? We think of telling the truth. We think of being honest. But truth is more than that. Truth is a kind of knowledge. Truth tells us about what is real. So a statement like, “There is a God,” is truth. This is the knowledge aspect of truth.
But there is another side to truth. Truth has a purpose in our lives. What it all comes down to is how to live a good life. And here truth fulfills its most important function. Truth tells us what good is. We have ideas about how to act. We have ideas of what is socially acceptable. But what really matters, is what it is like to be a good person. This is where truth comes into our lives.
We learn about what a good person looks like in may ways. But two very important ways are from the Bible and from teachings from religion. The Bible has two sections—the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament can sometimes look like a bunch of laws. The New Testament is mostly about Jesus’ life. But both the Old Testament and the New Testament talk about what it means to be a good person. The laws of the Old Testament tell us how to act. And the stories about Jesus show how love can be practiced in life. There is a very old passage in the book of Exodus (the Old Testament) that tells one how to act if he or she sees an enemy’s ox running away. It says, “If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to take it back to him” (Ex. 23:4). Jesus says the same thing in a different way: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:43-44).
If you do love your enemy, when you see his or her ox wandering off you will return it to them. This is because you care for them and want what is good for them—that is what love is. But if we talk just about behavior, in case a person does not feel love, we have the law that tells you to return the wandering ox to its owner, your enemy. The case is the same with all the laws we find written in the Bible. In case a person doesn’t feel love for their neighbor, we have a list of laws that tells us how to act toward them. These laws can be called truths. They tell a person how to behave in order to be a good person, and then ultimately in order to be a loving person.
Our purpose on earth is to learn how to love wisely. Truth tells us how to do that—either by laws like we find in the Old Testament, or by stories about Jesus in the New Testament.
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