Handling the Truth: Jeremiah 36:1-8, 21-23, 27-31 - Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

“What is truth?”

Pontius Pilate spoke these words during his sham trial of Jesus. Not that Pilate was interested in truth, particularly the truth Jesus was sent to reveal. All that mattered to Pilate was whatever was right for him, as evidenced by his order to crucify a man he knew was innocent.

Throughout the bible, we encounter many rulers who are of the same mindset. Like Pontius Pilate, Herod, Pharoah, Ahab, and other biblical tyrants, they had the power to bend people to their will. If they said that the sky was purple instead of blue, they could force people to agree with them.

King Jehoiakim was of the same mindset, one of the last kings to rule the Southern Kingdom of Divided Israel.

God commanded Jeremiah to write a warning of God’s word of judgment onto a scroll and read it to the people.

Torah 6 by J. Nathan Matias on flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0

Trouble was, Jeremiah had been banned from the Temple for the crime of speaking truth to power. So, Jeremiah sent his secretary Baruch to read from the scroll on a fast day.

The King heard about the scroll and sent his men to retrieve it. As the king read it, he cut out the words he found objectionable and threw them into the fire. In the end, he burned the entire scroll.

Ironically, the city of Jerusalem and the temple will be burned when the Babylonians come in conquest, all because he and others paid no regard to God’s Word.

Those in power believed that God would never allow his holy city to be conquered, and his temple destroyed. To say, as Jeremiah did, that the city was doomed was treated as blasphemy.

Still, the words Jeremiah wrote upon the scroll were not all doom and gloom. God was begging his people to repent of their idolatries, and if they did, they would be spared God’s wrath and judgment.

Unfortunately, Jehoiakim’s mind was made up. In his pride and arrogance, he became blind to reality. He was in denial that his kingdom had become infected with violence, the injustice, and idolatry, making it easy prey for the mighty Babylonians.

Jehoiakim and his successors will learn that they couldn’t bend reality to their will. You can’t make the truth go away when you don’t like it.

The more powerful a person gets, and the more they get their way, the greater the chances that they will deny the truth of simple, verifiable facts. Sadly, there are many powerful people in government and industry who firmly believe that they can bend reality to their will. When their efforts fail, they blame other people, because they are so firmly convinced that they can do no wrong.

It can be downright dangerous to tell someone they’re wrong, even if they’ve committed a crime and you have it on tape. So many live as though the universe revolves around them, and that they are accountable to no one except to themselves.

Worse yet, our society has stopped seeking truth from schools and churches and from knowledgeable experts.

Anymore, we say that truth can be found in your heart. “Listen to your heart,” we say, “it will never lead you astray.” “It can’t be wrong if it feels so right.” “If it makes sense, seek no other sense.”

But those are lies. It is written “All deeds are right in the sight of the doer, but the Lord weighs the heart” (Proverbs 21:2).

We are mortals. We are sinful. Therefore, truth can never be found within us. The fact that you or I judge something as “right” or “good” doesn’t necessarily make it so. It is countercultural for us, as Christians, to declare that the basis of truth is not the human heart. God is truth.

The truth will set you free, but not before it shatters your illusions of grandeur and your delusions of invincibility and infallibility.

One of the most audacious acts of faith is inviting God’s judgment into your life: for God to reveal the truths that keep you enslaved to things that will ultimately destroy you, the neighbor, and creation. So much of what you call “good” isn’t good at all. Anything you would call good that is not rooted in God is destined to perish. Apart from God, there is no truth, no life, no love. Only death.

You cannot know all truth; you cannot know all there is to know about God; you cannot judge what’s right and what’s wrong in every circumstance. People like Pilate and Jehoiakim believed they could command truth, but the truth they denied was the truth that took them down. You can only ask God to command you in truth.

What is truth? Truth is God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Truth is that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life. It is God’s Holy Scriptures which are a lamp unto your feet and a light unto your path. Truth is there is no higher Law than to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Truth is that Jesus is coming again.

So, show us, O God, in your truth. Shatter our delusions, smash our idols, break our pride. Knock us down if that’s what it takes to rescue us from pathways of falsehood and lead us in the Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life.