Who Do You Say? Reading With the People of God #19Sample

Truth

In the 1992 film A Few Good Men, there is a powerful line in the closing courtroom scene. Tom Cruise’s character, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, is cross-examining Jack Nicholson’s character, Colonel Jessup. Jessup angrily asks, “You want answers?” Kaffee responds, “I want the truth!” To which Jessup famously retorts, “You can’t handle the truth!”

The “friends” of Job claimed to know why he was being afflicted, insisting that God would not allow the righteous to suffer. Yet Job, the suffering servant, still cried out for a particular truth about God. In verse 2 he declares, “Truly I know that it is so: but how can a man be in the right before God?” His lament continues in Job 9:32, “For he is not a man, as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together. There is no arbiter between us, who might lay his hand on us both.” (ESV)

Fast forward a few thousand years, and the apostle John writes a letter to an elder, to be shared with the church. He speaks of a particular truth—about knowing, testifying, and walking in it. What truth is he referring to? It is the truth of the person and saving work of Jesus Christ, the very embodiment of truth itself.

Job’s despair and plea for a mediator is ultimately answered in Christ, the one mediator between God and man. Job longed for answers, but God deemed that he was not ready for the full truth. Instead of explanations for his suffering, Job was given God Himself—and that was enough.

We, however, have been given more. From Job to John, we now hold the words of God and the whole truth in Christ. And that is enough for us to walk in, rest in, and live by—the truth of Jesus Christ, our Savior.

Primer contributed by Eddie Hoekstra, ministering Elder of Cornerstone Community Church of Chowchilla.