It’s Not That Simple

Oh sinful nation, people weighed down with iniquity, brood of evildoers, depraved children!

They have abandoned the Lord; they have despised the Holy One of Israel; they have turned their backs on Him.

HCSB (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2009), Isaiah 1:4.

 

God brings a charge against his people. His people. Them. Us. Me. Burdened with sin, inheritors of evil pass down depravity to their children and their children's children, but still His people. He sees our abandonment, our scornful contempt of Him. Grieved over our worship of worthless, yet seemingly more usable gods, and having turned our backs on Him, we no longer see Him as protector, provider, and moral guide.

 

It’s too simple. We walked away from the truth and began to build lives on our own truth.

 

It's too simple to transport Isaiah's words across time and use them as a complaint against the 21st Century World. I am afraid to list in a table with headings like Sinful, Depraved, Abandoned, Despised, or Turned Away the many ways we have become these people burdened by sin. Even more so to a clearly blessed nation like America.  How did we get this way?

 

It’s very simple. We abandoned truth. We turned away from absolute truth. God's Truth. We no longer clearly see answers. Then we say, "The answer is just not that simple."

 

So, let's define truth. The American Heritage Dictionary defines truth as: Reality; actuality. In other words, truth is reality, not our perception of truth. But, those who study this matter have labeled truth into four categories:

• Binary Truth: Yes/No, Good/Bad, True/False
• Probabilistic Truth: What percent chance this is right?
• Grey Thinking: Good things have bad elements, consider trade-offs, consider pros  & cons
• Multi-Factor Thinking: takes degrees of differences/factors into account

Spencer Greenberg (www.spencergreenberg.com/2020/6/three-types-of-nuanced-thinking) offers the crux of our problem,

 

"If you want to find out what is true in the world, avoid the Binary Truth...and use Probabilistic Thinking instead."

 

In other words, you can abandon absolute truth and divine truth based on your perception of the percentages. For example, as  you approach a red stoplight, you gauge your response to that light as, "What is the percentage of no vehicle approaching on the cross street?" Or do you say, "That light is not a sufficient shade of red to cause me to stop."? What percentages of right and wrong do you calculate each day? What percentages are you relying on? 

 

There are two percentages you can rely on: 100% of us will die and 100% will face God's Judgment Seat (Romans 14:10b; For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat.¹). So, an abandonment of God's Truth asks you to spend precious time applying probabilistic, gray or multi-factor thinking while seeking out the nuanced answers for complex issues. And, sometimes, time runs out and you have to cross that street. Did you make it a yes/no question or did you apply some other rationale?

 

The Apostle Paul saw this in the Hebrew Scriptures (Proverbs 14:12; 16:25) and passed along this wisdom to his mentee and brother in ministry Timothy: (2 Timothy 4:3-4 NLT, For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear. They will reject the truth and chase after myths)². Itching ears? This implies listeners will not listen to the truth and obey. Rather, they will decide what they can accept as true and then listen to that version. This is a prime example of Multi-Factor Thinking by applying degrees of influence and factors to the decision of what is true.

 

As I was muddling through my undergraduate music degree I learned about Grey Area Thinking. Training to tune pianos, I learned the value of a tuning fork sounding A-440. It is THE standard of tuning. I tuned the A above middle C to that standard and the rest of the strings based on A-440. I couldn't waver from it. I couldn't say that my view of A-440 was right or close enough. That tuning fork was A-440 in the past, is A-440 now, and always will be A-440. No amount of my fudging, wishing it weren't, or deciding I knew a new A-440 could ever change the truth of A-440.

 

Orchestral strings tune to A-440 and the others take their cue from it as the basis for their tuning. One or more instruments cannot say, "I don't like that" and tune to their perception of truth. A concert of a hundred fingernails on a blackboard is not what the composer desired. So, the closer I walk in A-440 (truth), I will find those near me seeking to tune to the truth, and in concert, we will walk as the Creator wishes.

 

It's not that simple. There is a price to holding to God's Truth. We are told we are simplistic, narrow-minded, and intolerant. We are told that no loving God would limit us to accepting Jesus as the only Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). Nothing is that simple, we are told.

 

Yes, it is that simple. Dr. David Jeremiah recently said, "Don’t be fooled by the world’s version of truth." God calls us to obey His truth, the one we will face on Judgment Day. Can God make a case against me as He did to Hosea (Hosea 4:1) for not acknowledging His truth and living by it? Faithfulness is equated with truth. We worship a God of steadfast, unfailing truth.

 

Therefore, as an act of worship and obedience, revere Truth as God planned for His Creation.

 

Notes:

¹ The New International Version. Zondervan, 2011, p. Ro 14:10.

²Tyndale House Publishers. Holy Bible: New Living Translation. Tyndale House Publishers, 2015, p. 2 Ti 4:3–4.