Truth is Relative?

Deuteronomy 18:22, “when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.”

Proverbs 14:25, “A truthful witness saves lives, but a false witness is deceitful.”

As you are talking to someone about faith, they say to you: “that is good for you, but not for me.” Meaning what is true for you in your faith is true for you and what is true for their faith is true for them. What? That has never made sense to me. It is either true or it is not true, there is no in between. Either Christ is Lord of all or He is not, and it is not that it is true for me and not for you.

We have the nature of what truth is confused. One reason is today it is just not talked about at all within the school system, including college. Unless of course it is just to say it is relative. A professor will say, “Truth is relative and I can prove it. It is cold in here to me, but it is warm in here to this student. See truth is relative to the person, just as Jesus may be salvation to one person, but not to another. It is all relative.” This has come about in our post-modern society and is crazy to say the least. But how do we answer the professor’s statement, as it appears that two truths were correct at once, because one was cold and one was warm at the same time?

If we hold the correct view of the nature of truth then it is actually pretty easy to see the difference in what the professor was saying. That view is the correspondence view of truth, and people cannot get around it, as if God designed it that way to make sure we have truth. Truth is based on the referent of the context of the sentence, paragraph or paper that is written. If I am cold and you are warm at the same time; this can be true because of the referent of each sentence. I am cold. Coldness refers to me. You are warm. Warmness refers to you. But to say that this applies to salvation does not apply, because the referent is Jesus the Christ. To say Jesus is Savior refers to Jesus, and the answer must respond to the sentence and not to personal opinion.

As a matter of fact, to say that truth is relative is an absolute truth statement. One is saying that “truth” is a relative thing. It is a contradictory belief. When someone tells you they believe in relative truth, then ask them if they are sure about it, because no matter how they answer they are making an absolute truth claim based on the referent of truth. God designed it so that you cannot get around it.

All non-correspondence views of truth are self-defeating because they all use the correspondence view of truth to make their claims. Lies would become impossible without this view of truth because if statements do not refer to the object, they would make statements almost meaningless. This would lead to nothing being false, because there would then be no real difference between two objects, as there is no referent that a statement references. Factual communication would then break down, because statements have to respond to the object they are talking about, thus we are back to the correspondence view of truth.

In the end, people who try to say they are relativists actually prove truth in the end, because they want us to understand what they are saying about truth. They are making truth claims about their topic of no truth. It is self-defeating.

God designed truth and we have to decide whether Jesus is Lord or not, but we cannot say that it is true for you and not for me. Salvation is through Jesus Christ or it is not. Jesus is the referent and not you and me. It is either true or false, but cannot be both. The only thing one can do is say, “I believe,” or “I don’t believe,” but not it is true for you and not for me. As shown there is no such thing as relative truth and it is self-defeating to even argue against it.

You must choose and not hide through a self-defeating argument. Jesus is either Lord of your life and you are for Him, or He is not and you are against Him.

Luke 11:23, “He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters.”

John 14:6, “Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”