Apologetics 101: The existence of truth

So tonight the subject is existence of truth and the reason we're doing this subject first is to lay a foundation for the rest of the week. We have to know what truth is, we have to all agree on that before we can make any progress whatsoever and ultimately it all comes down to this issue, what is the truth, who has the truth, how do we know the truth, how do you know you have the truth, how do I know I have the truth? John chapter 17 verse 17, sanctify them through thy truth, thy word, the bible, thy word is truth. Now to chapter 18 towards the end, the Lord Jesus is standing in front of Pontius Pilate and in verse 37 we read these words, Pilate therefore said unto him, art thou a king then? Jesus answered, thou sayest that I am a king, to this end was I born and for this cause came I into the world that I should bear witness unto the truth.

Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, what is truth? Notice it doesn't say Pilate asked him what is truth, it says Pilate said what is truth. I don't believe this was a sincere question, I believe this was the scoffing retort of a sceptic.

Pilate simply said in response to the words of Jesus Christ what is truth. He's one of the most tragic figures in all of history. You know when I went to school we used to say the creed, some kind of creed, I can't remember which one it was but we used to say suffered under Pontius Pilate or hundreds of us every morning suffered under Pontius Pilate.

How many times has his name been used over the centuries? A man who that particular day was all under kinds of political pressure, even marital pressure, religious pressure coming to bear on him and he's confronted with truth, he's confronted with Christ and Christ says to him I came into this world to bear witness to the truth, the truth about God, the truth about myself, the truth about God's word, the truth about the gospel, that's why I'm here and anybody that's on the side of truth listens to me. What a claim that was. Anybody who is of the truth listens to my voice.

Do you want to know the truth Pilate? You listen to what I say and with a wave of the hand seemingly Pilate simply said what is truth. You see Pilate may have grown up with all kinds of desires to change the world and become a great Roman citizen, he may have believed in the truth as a youngster but by the time you become procurator of Judea and you chop people's heads off and you do what the Caesar says, what's truth after 20 years of that? What's truth? Truth is whatever the emperor says. Who cares? What's truth? You're some peasant from Nazareth, who cares what truth is and we have reached that stage in Great Britain in the 21st century.

Truth! Oh you've got the truth mate, have you? You've got the truth. It's almost preposterous to even mention the word in public discourse nowadays. What has happened is truth in our society has been split.

This is how the average person thinks who's below the age of 50 and lives in non-Christian homes. Truth has been split. Knowledge in the average person's mind is in two stories.

In the bottom story we have scientific facts, biology, chemistry, physics, equations, all of that stuff, laws and these are considered to be public, to be objective, universal, we can depend on them, they're pretty much true. And then there's a line drawn, big thick line and you have this top story, a lovely top story and in the top story are values. Just be careful every time you hear the word values because values are just things like faith, ethics, morals, these are considered to be private views, subjective, it all depends on what's going on in your life or what country you live in.

These are relative and so someone might say well that's true for you but it's not true for me, it's just a value, it's not in the bottom story. Morals, things like abortion, homosexuality, etc, etc, etc. All of that is just a matter of preference, it's in the top story, it's personal taste, it's a lifestyle choice, it's up to you, it's like flavours of ice cream and I don't jest.

That's how they consider it which is why if you say to an unbeliever, if you don't believe the Bible you're going to go to hell, they look at you as if what planet are you on? How could I go to hell for a preference? Whether I believe the Bible or not, that's in the top story, that's just a preference, that's not a fact. You have your religion, I have no religion, some people have a different religion but that's just a flavour of ice cream, that's just what you like. Now this split, this fracturing of truth, it happened at a point in history that we now know as the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was really something that took place in the 18th century. The dates of the Enlightenment are 1685 to 1815. It was a tempestuous time in history.

You think Brexit is bad? The Enlightenment was a revolution. Scientific, religious, political, everything was being shaken, literally shaken and at that time when all those areas of life were shaken, certain men, philosophers started to question traditional ideas about truth, about knowledge and their conclusions led to a major turning point in world history. World history is divided into three periods along the lines of philosophy and truth.

From ancient times up until 1600 we have a period known as the pre-modern era. Then from 1600 to about 1950 that was the modern world and from about 1950 onwards we've been living in the post-modern world. Now you say what's the difference? Well back in the pre-modern world everybody believed in God.

They all believed in the supernatural. Everybody felt they were dependent upon this God for life, for meaning, for truth. There was no split back in those days between facts and values.

No one would have ever dreamt to talk like that. Truth to the pre-modern people was one big united whole. In fact when they went to school, if they went to school, they studied all the subjects together.

Theology back in those days, theology is the study of God. Theology, do you know what it was called back in those days? It was called the queen of the sciences. Imagine that.

The bible, the study of the word of God, was called the queen of the sciences and so the bible was seen as the ultimate source of truth and it reigned over all other areas of study. Truth was total. It wasn't split into bits and bobs.

It was as it should be. Truth was total and then along came the enlightenment and the enlightenment ushered in the next period, the modern period. You say well how was that different to the pre-modern period? Well I'll give you another name for the enlightenment.

There's another name by which it's called. It's called the age of reason and what specifically marks this period off from the one that went before it is, it was the period in which human reason, human thinking, human wisdom started to take precedence over divine revelation. You can remember those, that's two R's.

Reason started to take precedence over revelation. Revelation is an absolute, if you say the word revelation to Dawkins, he will have steam coming out of his ears. They do not accept revelation.

There are no holy books. God has never spoken because he doesn't exist. We use our brains.

This is the enlightenment. Immanuel Kant was one of these enlightenment philosophers. Let me tell you what he said.

One quote from him will convince you of what I'm saying. The human mind can never and must never subject itself to any authority beyond itself. That's the enlightenment.

I'm taught man is the measure of all things and the impact of the enlightenment, this from the 1500s to the 1600s was absolutely revolutionary in every area of life. Politics, business, art, music, architecture, literature. So you need to understand how this split happened because if you can understand how the split happened, you can defend your faith.

You can argue with your atheist friend. You can understand where they're coming from. You can better get the gospel over to them or better understand the gospel if you've never understood it.

I want to trace it. It's going to take about 15 minutes. I want to trace how the split of truth happened and how we can put it back together again, how the word of God puts it back together again.

And I'm going to do it by following the lives of four men. The first one is a Frenchman. He is called the father of modern philosophy.

If you if you've done any kind of philosophy in at all at school or college, you will know of this man. Now, in the midst of everything that was happening in Europe, all the changes that were taking place, this man, Descartes, he wanted to know what is true, what is absolutely rock solid certain. I mean, he looked at the Catholic church and he looked at the reformers.

He said, well, they can't agree. And then he thought about himself, can can I trust my senses? And he began to doubt everything. And he doubted and he doubted and he doubted.

And eventually, do you know what he said? You'll smile if you've never heard this before. He said, there's one thing I cannot doubt. I cannot doubt that I doubt.

You say, well, crazy man. Well, he's considered the father of modern philosophy. He said, basically, doubting requires a doubter.

Thinking requires a thinker. And he came up with a Latin expression. Cogito ergo sum.

You may have heard it, I think. Therefore, you say, well, I could have told him that. Well, you maybe could have told him that.

But he thought that was profound. And he's now got something to rest his feet on. He was the father of a system of thought we now call rational ism.

Ratio is the Latin word for reason. Now, just by the way, there's nothing wrong being rational. Everybody here needs to be rational.

You need to watch before you cross the road and you need to count your change when you go to Tesco's. You need to be rational. But when you put ism on the end of something, it turns it into a system of thought.

And so rational ism is the idea that we can know everything we need to know from our own brain, from our own reason. So an atheist is always a rationalist. I don't need God.

I don't need a holy book. I can work it all out myself. That is rational ism.

You say, well, what was wrong with him saying, I think therefore I am? Well, the problem was this. He was taking a major step in the wrong direction by instead of trusting in God's word and God's revelation to know what's what, he was trusting in himself and he was stepping away from the pre-modern understanding of scripture that authority and truth come from God. Now authority and truth come from in here.

Talk to the average young person today and they say, where does truth come from? Oh, it comes from in here. I have my truth and you have your truth. No, no, no.

It comes from the word of God. It comes from the God of truth. But this is where Descartes stepped in the wrong direction.

Then another man came along, a man called John Locke. He was English, which didn't help him. He was also after certainty, but he totally disagreed with Descartes.

Instead of saying, we get our thing, we get our truth from thinking. He said, we get our truth from our senses. In other words, he said, when we're born, he had another Latin expression.

He said that when you're born, you're a blank slate, a tabula rasa. You're just a baby. You don't know anything, but you start touching things and you start feeling things and you start smelling things and you start seeing things and hearing things and you start building up your knowledge.

And he came up with a completely different way of looking at truth. It's called empiricism. And he was the father of this, along with another fellow called Francis Bacon.

So here's got these two theories. Immanuel Kant, you can think your way to truth. John Locke, you have to feel your way to truth.

You have to experience it through your senses. And then along came David Hume, Scottish. Now, if you've never heard of David Hume, I can assure you that your life has been greatly affected by this man.

This is perhaps the most unknown disastrous man in all of history. David Hume was like Locke, he was an empiricist. But what he did was he proposed a radical idea on the back of empiricism.

Now, this is where things split. This is where the split happened. Said David Hume, if all our knowledge comes from our senses, eyes, ears, nose, hands, then what are we going to do with God? Can't see God, can't touch God, can't hear God.

Can't feel God. Well, that must mean that the whole idea of God is meaningless. There is no empirical proof for God or miracles or the resurrection or the soul.

And he split truth in half, just like that. If only what I can see and touch and feel is true, what am I going to do with morals and ethics and theology? Oh, shove it up into the top story. We'll put it all up there.

We can't put it in a test tube. We can't put it under a microscope. So we'll just shove it up into the top story.

It's just a value. It's just an opinion. You can believe it if you want.

If you're stupid enough to believe it, you can believe it. But you can't force me to believe it because it's not true. I'll give you a quote.

This is exactly what David Hume said. He says, if we take in our hand, imagine taking in your hand any volume, any book of divinity, so a Bible or school metaphysics, a book about the meaning of life. Let us ask, so he's going to ask two questions of any book that you read.

Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? That's a fancy way of saying, is there any mathematics in it? So he says, hold up your Bible. Is there any maths in there? No, not really. Not exactly.

No algebra. So then he says, does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact or existence? Is there any scientific experiments in here? Well, then he says, commit it to the flames. Burn it.

Because it can be nothing but sophistry and illusion. Can you see what he's done? This is the split now. He's done the fact value split.

Unless you've got maths or science, it's not provable. It's not true. It's just a preference.

It's just a matter of opinion. And that one man and his theory altered the course of Western civilization. He said, I've never heard of him.

Well, maybe not, but I can assure you that's what happened. He shattered the concept of comprehensive, unified, coherent truth. It was now split.

So the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount and the Gospel, these things which used to be held as absolute truth, which were considered just as true as the law of gravity, just as true of the laws of science, they're now unprovable, meaningless values. And religion is a private matter. You'll never hear Boris Johnson talking about God in the Commons.

He'd be slaughtered. He'd be lampooned. He'd be buried.

It'd be quicker to prorogue Parliament than talk about God. Tony Blair said, we don't do God. It's private.

It's in the top story. And I'm sure you've met it. Maybe you've been talking to someone and you say, well, the Bible says that that's wrong.

I don't want you pushing your values on me. See, they would never say, I don't want you to push your facts on me. Oh, no, they wouldn't say that.

Facts are facts. But they split knowledge into facts and values so that you can't say anything about your values. Very clever, isn't it? Very split.

This fact-value split is the very core belief of the secular world view of today. That is the view of the BBC. That is the view of the government.

That is the view of Ofsted. That is the view of the education system. That is the view of Facebook.

That is the view of Instagram. That is the view. That's the Western view.

So when you go to school, where do you learn about chemistry, biology and physics? All in the science lab. If you want to talk about God, you have to go to the other classroom. You have to go to the RE class and talk about beliefs, but they're not true.

You can talk about anything there, but you can't bring God into the science lab. But philosophy wasn't quite finished. Another man came along, a man called Immanuel Kant, German.

We've got four different nationalities now. Immanuel Kant. Kant started out as a rationalist.

He started out thinking that you could think your way to truth, and then he read Hume. He read the man that's up there. He read Hume, and Hume just shook him to his core.

And he was very troubled. Which is correct, rationalism or empiricism? And he started trying to sort of mix them together. And as he was working all this out, he came up with another totally revolutionary concept.

As if what Hume had done was not enough. Said Mr. Kant, we live, all of us live, in two worlds at the same time. He gave them fancy names.

These people always have fancy names for things. We live in the phenomenal world. That's the world in our heads.

That's the world as it appears to us. The world of phenomena. And then there's another world.

It's called the noumenal world. That's the world as it really is. So for example, I might take a stick, a straight stick, and I put it into water.

And as I put into water, it looks like it bends. But it's not really bending. But I think it is.

That's how it appears to me. So he said, let's take that idea and let's apply it to the whole of reality. And Mr. Kant put a chasm between the world I see in my head and the world as it really is.

So he says, look, you know, I look at that chair and it's red. But if a frog looked at that chair, it might not be red. So what colour is it? A dog might hear a sound, but you can't hear it because you haven't got the same apparatus as the dog.

So you're not actually getting in touch with the real world. You just have this subjective world in your head. So Mr. Kant, this is how you remember him, he said, you can't know the noumenal world.

You've only got this. You say, well, this is really weird. Do these guys have a job? Well, this has now brought in a situation.

Well, let me summarise it before we move on. Mr. Hume did a split between values and facts. Mr. Kant took it further and he did a split between reason and reality.

By the time Hume had finished and Kant had finished, philosophy was on a downward spiral. And over the next two centuries, philosophy went from rationalism to empiricism, to agnosticism, to something called nihilism, to something called existentialism. You say, well, what do they believe? A person who is a nihilist says life has no meaning.

A person who's an existentialist, he says, pick your own meaning. And then came the 20th century, two world wars, millions dead, and a holocaust. And the dream of the modern world with its reason began to fade away.

Humanism's vaunted claims lay in tatters. And of course, by then Darwin had come along and told us that we're just DNA. Well, he didn't know about DNA, but we're just jumped up apes.

There's no purpose, there's no design, there's no soul, there's no heaven, there's no hell. And so men popped up in the middle of the 20th century. Some of you would have been alive at the time.

People like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. And they said, you know what? There is no truth. There's no such thing as absolute truth.

Stop worrying about the truth. Stop worrying about, is it through rationalism? Is it through empiricism? There is no such thing as truth. And having gone from the pre-modern era to the modern era, now we're in the post-modern era.

There was a fellow who lived actually in the 1800s, Friedrich Nietzsche, he already more or less had trailed the way for this. He said, there are no facts, only interpretations. Have you ever spoken to someone and you try to bring the gospel to them and they say, that's just your interpretation? Isn't that so frustrating when somebody does that? No, but it says it.

Oh, but that's just your interpretation. This is where it comes from. What an amazing journey.

400-year downhill journey. Rationalism, empiricism, skepticism, nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism. You say, oh, well, that's got nothing to do with me.

Why do I need to know that? I just go to work. And how did you know that that journey in philosophy has been copied in the culture? And the artists have bought into it. And the architects have bought into it.

And the musicians have bought into it. And most people don't realize that, for example, in art, if you were to study art, you would find that art has been on a journey too. And you've gone from Renaissance art to Baroque, to romanticism, to realism, to impressionism, to expressionism, to cubism, to surrealism, to post-modern art.

You say, well, what's that all about? Well, let's have a look at it. 400 years ago, on the left, that's what art used to look like. Leonardo da Vinci, right at the beginning of the modern era.

He's painting the Mona Lisa. 400 years later, there's a guy comes along. Well, he's a post-modern artist.

Pollock is his name. This is one of his greatest paintings. Isn't it good? Well, he was an alcoholic, died in a car crash due to being inebriated.

And you look at that painting, not knowing the history of philosophy, and you think, what is that? I could have done that. Well, all you need is a bicycle and a bit of paint. You just roll it over the speeder, and that's what you've got.

Ah, but you see, what you don't understand is, this is philosophy on paper. You see, post-modernism says there are no rules. There are no absolutes.

There's no order. There's nobody that says, a painting should look like this. It should have this perspective, and it should have, it should be real life.

It can just be what it wants to be. And so he literally put a big sheet of paper out on the floor and dripped paint over it and walked over it. And everybody thought he was wonderful.

He's fated. He's marvellous. And the same thing happened in architecture.

Look at how architecture changed. Go back 400 years. Oh, beautiful architecture.

That's Bickling Hall. That's where Anne Boleyn used to live. 400 years ago, that's the kind of buildings they used to build.

And buildings started changing shape. Now you know why Prince Charles is so upset. Now you know why you've got these weird and wonderful buildings everywhere.

Because the architects thought, oh, well, if there's no truth, if there's no standard, if there's no God, well, let's just put that into a building. Look at that lovely hotel in Spain. That's a post-modern roof.

And you look at it, you think, that is weird. Yeah, of course it's weird, but that's post-modernism in architecture. And the same thing happened in music.

We went from Baroque. We went from Bach to Brian Eno. He's a post-modern musician.

In literature, we went from Pilgrim's Progress to Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction is a post-modern novel. If you've ever watched a film called The Matrix, I haven't watched it, but The Matrix is totally post-modern.

The Simpsons cartoon series is post-modern. Post-modernism is everywhere. And post-modernism is basically saying there are no rules, there are no principles.

A book means whatever you want it to mean. A joke means whatever you want it to mean. Everything is relative.

Life has no meaning. This is the enlightenment. Come home to roost.

It should actually be called the endarkenment, I think. Oh, but you say, what about the advances in science? And what about the advances in medicine? If there is no truth, my dear friend, medicine and science will be used as totalitarian tools to control people and to kill people. Because men without the truth, science will only make them more evil and more dangerous.

This is the dead end of men thinking without God. Our culture has been corroded and destroyed. And then along came Judith Butler.

You say, who's Judith Butler? She's a professor. She was born in 1956. She's an American philosopher, a lesbian, a gender theorist.

She's the author of many books. She's written a book called Gender Trouble, another book called Undoing Gender. She's hugely popular.

You may never have heard of her. You check her up on Wikipedia later, you'll find she's big news. She's very popular in politics, academic circles.

She's received many awards, honorary doctorates. She's called, and I quote, the chief ideologue of the transgender movement. So when you click on the BBC and you find out a man has given birth to a baby and you think, what on earth is that? This is the lady behind the whole thing.

She has led the effort to undermine the concept of binary gender identity. She believes there's no such thing as masculine and feminine being. You may be physically and genetically and biologically a man, but if you want to wake up in the morning and identify as a woman, that's fine.

Gender isn't something that one is, says this lady. It is something that one does. Gender is not something that one is.

We've believed that for thousands of years. You are a man. You are a woman.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. You poor, deluded, pre-modern people. You need to catch up.

We're now postmodern. Gender isn't something that you are. It's something which you do.

It's an act. And so postmodernism has, through this transgender movement, led to a total subversion of the reality of our very being. Guess what? She's a postmodernist.

She's listed as a follower of Michel Foucault and Derrida and all the other postmodern authors I mentioned earlier. This is the logical end of a 400-year philosophical journey into darkness. There is no absolute truth.

There is no objective meaning. There is no overarching purpose. You can identify as anything.

You can believe anything. You can profess anything. No one is wrong and no one is right, said Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, it does not exist.

And this is the world you live in. A world gone mad. You say, why would anybody believe such rubbish? Why would anybody believe such nonsense? Well, I'll tell you why.

And I'll tell you why in two minutes by putting up four other men. These are the leading lights of philosophy for the last 100 years. These are existentialists and postmodernists.

Friedrich Nietzsche. He died at 54 after a pitiful bout with venereal disease and insanity. Albert Camus, listed on Wikipedia as an obsessive womanizer.

Jean-Paul Sartre maintained many mistresses. Michel Foucault died of AIDS at the age of 56 after a promiscuous life. These are the top philosophers of the 20th century.

Existentialism. Postmodernism. What are you saying? I am saying this.

These men believe what they believed to justify the life that they lived. In fact, they admit it. One of their mates, a fellow called Aldous Huxley, he wasn't a postmodernist himself, but he definitely believed in a split between fact and value.

Aldous Huxley. He wrote a book called The Brave New World. Maybe some of you have heard of it.

He was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, great friend of Darwin. Let me quote you. This is one of the most staggering quotes you will ever hear.

This is an atheistic author from the 20th century called Aldous Huxley. Quote, for myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. We objected to the system of morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

Now you know why what happened in the 50s happened. Now you know what happened at Woodstock. Now you know what happened with LSD and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Now you know why it happened. These men came up with the idea that there is no truth. Now go and live as you like and do what you want to do because it doesn't matter.

We're back to Pilate, a godless, Roman, idol worshipping, Christ crucifying, pagan. How did he get away with it? What is truth? What is truth? You see, when you meet someone who's an atheist, and I meet them every week on the streets of Oxford and London, the very fact that they come and object to me proves they're not atheists. But anyway, these atheists, they come.

I try not to get into a long argument with them about evolution and all of this stuff because you know what I believe? Atheism is not a philosophical problem. It is an ethical problem. It's not an intellectual problem.

It's a moral problem. It's not that people can't know. It's that people don't want to know.

And I have proved that again and again and again. About six months ago, two young lads stopped in the middle of Cornmarket Street in Oxford. We got talking to them, gathering gospel tracts.

Oh, we don't believe in God and all this. And I thought, right, I'm just going to go for the jugular. Both lovely, big, strapping American lads, and they were friendly and everything, but they were mocking the gospel.

And I just looked at one of them and I said, you know what your problem is? You know there's a God right well, but you're just temporarily pretending there is no God so that you can live a life of hedonism and sleeping around and snorting cocaine and everything. And as I said it, his friend stood back and pointed at him and roared with laughter and said, that's it! You've nailed it! See, they're just saying, well, we're atheists. That's just a cover up.

That's just a front, because they want to live a life that they want to live. They really do believe in truth. If you steal their wallet, they definitely want you to be convicted.

If one of their opposing teams scores a goal and he's offside, they definitely want that to be proved. If they're a Remainer or a Ramona, well, truth is really, really important. But they will go to the most ridiculous lengths to get around the truth of the word of God.

Now, we're going to rebuild truth this week with the help of God and his word. And the first thing you need to understand in the rebuilding of truth is what's wrong with all this nonsense here. I'm just going to show you in two minutes that everything you've just learned from these philosophers is a gigantic, illogical, self-contradictory con.

Now, let me show you this. You see that statement there? If it doesn't have maths and if it doesn't have science, burn it. Can you see a problem with that? Does that statement have maths? Does that statement have experiments? See the problem? His test fails his own test.

He wants to use illusion. He has to burn his own statement. He says, unless it's science, unless it's maths, burn it.

Is that science? Is that maths? He has to burn his own statement. The entire Hume philosophy had a gaping contradiction right in the middle. How didn't they see that? What about Kant? You remember Kant? He says, you can't know.

You can't really know if that's a door because that's the noumenal world and this is phenomenal. You can't really know. Whoa, hang on a minute.

See what he's saying? I know that you can't know. I know the reality is unknowable. I really, really know that you can't really, really know.

That's called sawing off the branch you're standing on. It was nonsense. It was utter, utter nonsense, but he's considered to be one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived.

What about the postmodernist? There is no such thing as absolute truth. Can you see a gaping contradiction there? What's wrong with that statement? There is no such thing as absolute truth. Well, let me ask you a question.

Is that statement true? Well, the guy that said it presumably wants you to believe that it is. And if he's just said, there's no such thing as absolute truth, but he wants you to believe that that's true. He's just said that there is such a thing as absolute truth.

That's like saying, I can't speak English, but you've just done it. When somebody says there's no such thing as absolute truth, all you have to say to them is that absolutely true, what you just said. And they say, well, apart from that, oh, but you can't do that because you said there's no such thing as absolute truth.

What a terrible deception. What a disaster. Imagine going to hell, believing all that nonsense.

Now, second Corinthians chapter 10, verse five, pulling down strongholds. One translation describes it like this, destroying arguments and all these lofty opinions that lift themselves up. What is truth says pilot.

You know, the Bible has a lot to say about truth. If you look up truth in your concordance, you'll find it's in the Bible over 200 times. Isaiah 65, verse 16 describes God like this, the God of truth.

Literally in Hebrew, it says the God of the amen. That's where truth comes from. Truth isn't something that God decides.

Truth is something that God is. God is the source of truth. All truth comes from God and all truth is God's truth.

You say, well, how can you prove that? Well, if you don't believe that, try and define truth without God. They've been trying it for 400 years. It doesn't work.

We've seen that men cannot define truth without God. Perhaps it's the greatest lesson in philosophical history that is it impossible to make sense of truth unless you start with God. Otherwise you've just got, there are 7.5 billion people in the world.

You've now got 7.5 billion truths. The essence of truth demands a universal absolute, the eternal reality of God and truth. Therefore, truth is defined, well, one could define it as that which corresponds to reality and the reality is defined by God.

If somebody says to me, how do you know there's a door over there? I say, because if you go over there and touch that piece of wood, you'll find that's a door. The statement there is a door corresponds with the reality of the facts that there is a door and when we speak truth, we are speaking something that corresponds to reality and God created this great reality, this universe. He created us and he gave us a mind.

This business of you can't tell what's out there in the world and God has given us senses so that we will know what the real world is. There's another thing you need to just note before we wrap up here. There's something called the law of non-contradiction.

When you're thinking of truth, A cannot be non-A at the same time and in the same sense. I cannot be a bachelor and married at the same time and in the same sense. My wife cannot be pregnant and not pregnant at the same time.

If you go to my wife and say, are you pregnant? She says no and two minutes later somebody else goes and she says yes. Both of those things cannot be true. That is a basic law of truth.

It's called the law of non-contradiction. You can't disagree with that law without actually invoking the law. There's a famous story told about Winnie the Pooh.

He goes over to Rabbit's house and he says to Rabbit, well he wants some food you see, and Rabbit doesn't want to feed him and he goes over to Rabbit's house and he knocks on the door and as a wee voice comes out, nobody home and Winnie the Pooh says this, there must be somebody home or else he could not say nobody home. That's the law of non-contradiction. You can't be home and not home at the same time.

You say why are you mentioning this? Because what we're going to do this week is we're going to prove that God exists and if God exists, atheism is not true. We're going to show you this week that Christianity is true, which will then mean that everything that contradicts Christianity is false. We're going to show you this week that Jesus Christ really is the son of God.

He really did die on the cross. He really did rise again from the dead, which means that Islam cannot be true. Now if there's anybody there saying to yourself, oh but everybody's entitled to their opinion, you have not been listening for the last hour.

The whole point of the last hour is to show you that you don't have a top story called my opinion. It doesn't exist. There is a thing called truth and if you are against that, you have a different opinion to that, it doesn't matter who you are or how long you say it or who backs you up, you're wrong.

And this is a fundamental fact of life that has been ripped from our hands by post-modernists. Good old Winnie the Pooh, he had more sense than all of those philosophers that went before him. What about you? Are you right or are you wrong? Are you on the side of truth, says Jesus, the Lord Jesus? He who is of the truth, he who is on the side of truth, he who believes the truth, he who wants the truth, he's my voice.

That's powerful stuff, isn't it? I'm going to give you seven bullet points and I'm going to sit down because I've got one minute left. Truth matters. Truth matters in the courts, truth matters in politics, truth matters in hospitals, truth matters on the labels of medicine.

Imagine not thinking truth matters when it comes to where I come from and where I'm going and who I am. I think, to be honest with you, nothing matters, only truth. Truth exists.

You say, how do you know that? Try and deny it. Stand toe-to-toe with me and look me in the eye and say truth does not exist. Is what you just said true? You can't deny truth, you can't say truth doesn't exist.

If your statement is true, it exists and if your statement's not true, it exists. Truth does not exist. Hang on a minute, you're just telling me something you want me to believe is true.

Truth does exist and the source of truth is God and he has revealed himself in his word. Thy word is truth. We're going to spend a whole night on that on Thursday night, on the Bible being the word of God.

Number three, truth is knowable. God has given you reliable senses. God has given you a mind to think and he has revealed himself.

Go out and look at the stars. Only a fool would say it all happened by accident. God has given you all of this.

He has revealed himself and truth is, don't believe Mr. Kant, don't believe these people who say you can't know. You can know. Truth is knowable.

Number four, truth is eternal and unchanging. Truth is existing, existed before you were born and it will exist after you die. There never was a time, nor will there ever be a time, when there was no truth.

Truth is not invented. Truth is discovered. Number five, truth is absolute and objective.

That is to say truth is out there. There's no such thing as my truth or your truth. Truth is true for all people at all times in all places.

Truth is absolute. Six, truth is total. This is where we started.

Truth includes everything. You know, you'll often hear on wherever you get your news or your media from, you'll hear people say things like this, science gives us facts but religion gives us meaning and they think that's all very lovely. That's just the split.

That is Hume's lie. Oh, science gives us facts and religion gives us meaning. No, you cannot split truth in half.

Christ died for our sins is just as true as any physics equation you've ever heard. Christ rose from the dead is just as true as the law of gravity. In fact, if the resurrection isn't true, it has no meaning.

You can't hang a meaning on nothing. If the resurrection isn't true, it has no meaning. No, no, this is a false dichotomy.

The bible gives you facts and meaning. And number seven, truth can be tested. Well, we tested Mr. Hume and we tested Mr. Kant and we tested Mr. Foucault and we tested Mr. Nietzsche and what did we do? We found them wanting.

Their little theories blew up in our faces. You test them and they don't stand the test. But what we're going to do this week is we're going to test the truth.

Prove me now, says the Lord. Come now, let us reason together. I have nothing to fear of you testing this book or testing the gospel of Jesus Christ or testing the manuscript evidence or testing the resurrection.

You could test the truth, says the Lord Jesus in John chapter 8. You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.