WHO’S TELLING THE TRUTH?
By John Rhinehart
To see how trusting citizens and believers are, all one has to do, is seeing how one accepts and believes what each candidate states about their opponent. In today’s 2004 election of both state and federal candidates, both sides points the ‘finger’ at each other accusing of doing the same thing. Who’s telling the truth? Only the individual that takes the time out to investigate if what these candidates are saying is truth will only know the truth. But all to often, we tend to accept what these individuals say as the ‘gospel truth.’ And thus, we vote on what we have heard and not what we know is the truth.
This is also true about pastors and ministers. The congregations hear these individuals and on the basis of what they have said, the people believe them as the ‘gospel truth’ without searching what they claim to be true or not. To where the Bereans, “they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” Acts 17:11
Jesus asked his disciples “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” Mat 16:13. The disciples gave him all kinds of ‘gospel truth’ answers such as, John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah or other prophets. Now these people were telling others who Jesus is and those individuals believed on the basis of what they were saying with out any proof of their claims if they were false or not. “Ya, that must be true because he said so,” goes the typical response of how one believes.
Then Jesus, knowing that the disciples had heard from others who the Son of Man might be, he wanted to know if they too believed. So as he asked, “But what about you? Who do you say I am?” (Mt 16:15; Mk 9:29; Lk 9:29) And that’s what we should be asking. Are my ministers/politicians telling me the truth? Or are we just “following the crowd?” What is the truth? Do I want to be as the “blind leading the blind?” And how do we know the truth? We must search. We must search the candidates records and for the ministers, the Scriptures. If we don’t do this, then we too will believe as the ‘people’ and ‘ministers’ do but by hearsay.
Now the rest of this context states, Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. Mt 16:16,17. Shows us that without the Father’s help, we cannot recognize who Jesus is.
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