WE REDUCE THE TRUTH TO A CODE—AND DIE SPIRITUALLY

“Then cried Jesus in the temple…I am not come of myself, but he that sent me is true, whom ye know not” (JOHN 7:28)

Too many people believe that truth is something that can be received and held by the intellect and that truth can be reduced to a code—just as we know and accept that two times two is four.

 

Two thousand years ago, the theological leaders marveled at Jesus. They said to one another, “How does this man know letters, having never learned?” and “How does He get His wonderful doctrine? He has never been to the schools of the rabbis.”

 

This tells us that those Jewish leaders held “the truth”—and you can spell it with capital letters if you please—to be intellectual merely, capable of being reduced to a code.

 

To them, there was no mysterious depth in divine Truth, nothing beneath and nothing beyond—two times two made four!

 

It was exactly here that they parted company with our Saviour, for the Lord Jesus constantly taught the “beyond” and the “beneath.” He showed them that He was simply a transparent medium through which God spoke.

 

He said, “My doctrine is not mine—I am not a rabbi just teaching doctrine that you can memorize and repeat. I say nothing for myself—what the Father speaks, that I speak!”

 

In His day or in our day, the rationalist sees no beyond and no mystic depths, no mysterious heights, nothing supernatural or divine. He holds the text and the code and the creed and passes it on to others. The result is we are dying spiritually!

 

  1. W. Tozer