Wednesday, February 24, 2016

The Truth, We Must Obey… What is It? Or..Who?


1 Peter 1:22

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

It was a stumper question that Pilate asked Jesus when Jesus was before him, on his way to the cross.  “What is truth?”  ‘The Truth’ is a recurring theme throughout the gospel of John.  I just finished a wonderful article exploring the use of the word ‘truth’ throughout John’s gospel.  What does that have to do with Peter?  No much except that ‘truth’ rang in my mind from John’s gospel.  And Scripture is supposed to be used to interpret Scripture.

We know a couple things about this ‘truth’ from Peter.  One is that it is obeyed.  Not ‘needs to be obeyed’, but is obeyed.  It is obeyed because by it, the reader’s souls have been purified.  It’s like the truth is some strong ‘soul soap’, if you will. 

A quick scan back up 1 Peter shows me that this is the first time Peter is using the word ‘truth’.  I think that the word ‘truth’ has a technical meaning to it, used to specify something that Peter wishes to make known, something that his original readers would have already known. 

John 14:6, Jesus says “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life”.  “The Way” becomes a technical term in Acts to describe the early church.  “The Life” is Jesus, given to us through his death and resurrection.  The Truth, maybe not what, but who.  Not what is the truth, but who is the truth?  Jesus is the truth.

Could ‘the truth’ as Peter uses it refer back to the sum total of who Jesus was and what he did?  That has been the connecting theme through the verses that come before, it is all centered on the person and work of Jesus.  It, known together, is “the truth”.

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