Here is the revelation that is shaping my life today – we don’t want truth we just want our truth. What does it cost? I’ll pay! There is something deeply wrong with us in the way we handle our versions of truth. It’s not setting us free, it’s imprisoning us in turmoil.
Matthew 28:2-4,11-13 TPT
[2-4] Suddenly, the earth shook violently beneath their feet as the angel of the Lord Jehovah descended from heaven. Lightning flashed around him and his robe was dazzling white! The guards were stunned and terrified-lying motionless like dead men. Then the angel walked up to the tomb, rolled away the stone, and sat on top of it! [11] After the women left the tomb, a few of the guards went into Jerusalem and told the chief priests everything they had seen and heard. [12] So the chief priests called a meeting with all the religious leaders and came up with a plan. They bribed the guards with a large sum of money [13] and told them, “Tell everyone, ‘While we were asleep, his disciples came at night and stole his body!’
Observation
The evidence that Jesus is who he said he was, the son of God, is overwhelming in the crucifixion and resurrection stories. But rather than kneel religion doubles down on covering up the presence and way to God. If God is present to all, then religion and all its servants become old accessories that have no place in the new day. Their position, their power, their truth, is all shattered on a rolled away stone, but hey there is always cover up! And cover up is costly, but worth the price of the money, but is it worth the price of the truth being known. When we sell ourselves to religion it owns us in a way that is frightening.
Cover up always requires “a meeting with all the religious leaders and came up with a plan,” a conspired story that we all agree to and paying the price to make it sound like truth. Truth is so often sacrificed for the defence of our version of it. We will do what it takes, often whatever it takes, to ensure our truth is maintained, especially by those who we want to stay under our control. How often do we defend our theological reflection of mystery of God with the same passion, and often means, that the religious leaders defended theirs. It’s amazing how our ‘truth’ about God, and our defending of it, can make us look more like the religion that God came to dismantle. How often today do the religious leaders gather and come up with a plan to defend their truth? Even when it flies in the face of what is so clearly obvious. We may not want to cover up the resurrection, or the truth of Jesus, but we cover up His love, which is to cover up him. It has the same effect, people never meet Him. We judge the “religious leaders” of Jesus day – ‘how could they do such a thing,’ then we become them! We must learn a new way, His way, to handle truth.
Application
Be careful when the defence of my truth becomes obsessive, where I will do whatever it takes to maintain its influence, to assert its correctness. Be aware of the tendency of humanity to cover up, scheme, pay whatever price, to maintain their place of power and influence by maintaining their truth. Walk in the way of love when you carry your truth. For to lay down love is to destroy ultimate truth. “Truth sets you free,” but truth is not concepts and beliefs, they can incarcerate you in endless cycles of arguments and torments, truth is the person of Jesus, it’s is only as we hold our truth in His presence, can we carry any of our truths in love.
Response
Thank you that you call us to you, not truths. You are confident in yourself as that to life, not our ideas about you. Thank you that you warn us clearly the destructive power of the ‘defence at all cost’ of our truths. Thank you that life is personal not doctrinal. It’s in intimacy not intellectual knowings. This is a free good life.
Meditation
Meditate – the chief priests called a meeting with all the religious leaders and came up with a plan.
Consider:
How do you handle your version of truth?
What price do you pay for your truth to be defined as truth by others?
JOURNEY DEEPER
