This ran at the Visalia Times Delta on April 1, 2015. The online version retained the title, “What is Truth.” The print version had the title, “Neglecting history at our peril.”

One of the most distinguished apologists of our era says that the most profound inquiry we can undertake is, “What is truth?” One theologian furnished this clarity, “Truth is who God is,” – referring to the God of the Bible. The Bible describes the human heart as deceitful and wicked. We do not have to look far to confirm this truth. To elucidate here the opinions of man are highly compromised and the only person whose perspectives are completely true and accurate are those of God himself.

In 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. The grand idea was to jettison God and install the state up as supreme. The Bolsheviks burned churches, raided monasteries and killed clergy. Conservative estimates set the number dead due to Soviet Communism at 20 million, an incredible amount of carnage.

One professor described more recent winter life in the Soviet Bloc: a prohibition of religious public manifestations, no milk, no fresh fruit, very limited meat, but adequate amounts of bread and alcohol. Add to that frequent blackouts, no water every third day, and no heat at night – all of which results in a toxic elixir that promotes, “the extinction of all human dreams.”

Solzhenitsyn offered this insight for such disaster in Russia, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

History is a testament for our benefit and we neglect it to our own peril. To reject God is to lose and suffer, as the Bolsheviks dramatically proved.

Science and reason are extremely valuable but they cannot explain, among other things, beauty, romance, emotion, conscience and first-cause origin, along with the meaning or purpose of life.

If you attempt to answer the inquiry, what is truth, with unalloyed fidelity and intellectual honesty then where will that path lead you? What if you set aside for a brief moment your default modes? How valuable might it be to set aside your instinctual constructs and seek out what the truth really is?

It is Easter.

The mystery of the ages is Jesus who said, “Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

Ron Hunnicutt