On the Whole

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” – John 8:31-32

A little further on, in John 14:6, we hear Jesus say to Thomas, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

Christ does not merely tell us or teach us the truth; He does not simply embody the truth. He is the whole truth. As Oswald Chambers said, we have to be careful about embracing truth. Any partial truth can be an error. If we stop to think about it, most falsehoods are not wholly false. Most errors are not completely wrong. This is the case in any human endeavor. It generally contains or holds to some partial truth. It is hardly possible for us to know the whole truth about anything apart from Christ. The mistake that people make is substituting some fragment of the truth that they have stumbled upon for Jesus. They insist that what they have is true, and, most often, the part they rely on is true. It is simply not the whole truth and cannot be. No partial truth contradicts Jesus. If all the truth in its entirety were revealed to any person, he or she would immediately see the Person in the center of it all.

An honest man may honestly tell us a lie believing it true. It is possible for a partial truth to be true at one time or in one place and not true later or somewhere else. Philosophers, theologians, and ethicists may create internally consistent systems to deal with circumstantial truths and wonder why their systems fall apart as circumstances and times change. Man-made systems collapse when they are built on foundations that do not rest upon the solid Rock.

The beauty and strength of documents like the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are that they erect very little on partial truth. Most of the weight of constitutional freedom rests upon the revelation of God in Christ, embracing both the sinfulness of man and his ability to be redeemed. I know that secularists and even many Christians would disagree with the preceding statement, pointing out that some of the most influential Founders were agnostic or Deists. Yet, once the whole truth of Christ has been revealed, it cannot be entirely covered or forgotten. Like it or not, the partial truths of philosophy and mythology were swallowed up by the Whole Truth. When the Declaration said, “… endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights …”, they laid their case upon the Chief Cornerstone, testifying that there was a Source of absolute good and truth to which any of man’s efforts must bow if they were to succeed at all.

Whenever I read the Book of Acts, as I am currently, I am struck by how often the Apostle Paul repeats his testimony of meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus. Everything in Paul’s life, every journey, every effort, every word he spoke – so it seems, developed and blossomed from that encounter with the Truth, with the Person who is Truth. We may not – we cannot relate the whole truth in words. We make our best efforts. Some are better at it than others. We cannot relate the whole truth in art or music, but sometimes some of the most gifted ones get close. The whole truth cannot be embodied in architecture, yet those who built the great cathedrals gave us, not only a glimpse of the wholeness, but a space in which we might encounter the Truth if we sought Him. The whole truth cannot be captured by theories, by economic schemes, by methodologies or even religions, though from the Truth there may arise more than one righteous, wise, and beneficial system. No, as Paul knew, we are able to embrace the whole truth only in the Man, Christ Jesus.