We Can Handle the Truth

If I didn't have to, I'd probably stop keeping up with the news. Every day, it seems, something happens to make me want to pull out my hair. Last Tuesday, for example, it was announced Penn State would no longer have a homecoming king and homecoming queen -- because "king" and "queen" denote very specifically a man and a woman, and they can't have that. Meanwhile, a journalist claims the pope denied the existence of hell, and the ACLU is trying to stop a Kentucky law limiting abortion because, after all, they're not really babies in the womb, are they.

I will turn thirty-two on Saturday -- still fairly young, if I say so myself -- and I already long for a day we could call things what they are. Men are men. Women are women. Hell is real, and you don't want to go there. Abortion is murder, and women carry fully human babies. These things shouldn't be up for debate, redefinition, or subject to the latest political fad. I feel we live in the midst of a war on the truth. People reject it first because it convicts them and second because it frees them. As Jesus said, "the truth will set you free" (John 8:32). How? By showing us this isn't all there is. We don't have to live in a world dominated by lies, for lies can never defeat the truth. But, as in the examples above, the lies are more comfortable, easier -- and they allow us to build lies on top of other lies to get us what we want, to keep us ensnared in comfortable delusions that will never stand before an Almighty God. Yet Satan convinces us the lies are real, and we don't want to abandon that dread master.

Personally, I want the truth. I want the true freedom it brings, freedom from sin and tyranny. That's "free indeed" (John 8:36), the freedom which can only come from Jesus. You can handle the truth. You can have that freedom. But only if you turn from the lies of Satan and accept the salvation offered by Jesus Christ.