Bill Randles

For I rejoiced greatly, when the brethren came and testified of the truth that is in thee, even as thou walkest in the truth.  I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth. ( 3 John 3-4)

Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,  And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.  And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:  That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.( 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12)

We have been talking about the third sign of eternal life, which is belief in the Truth. Eternal Life, is a gift of God, it can’t be merited only received freely as the gift of Love.

But those who have received the gift of God’s life, manifest it sooner or later and to varying degrees in three major areas. Since God is light, those who have a share in his life have come and remain in the Light of God. They hate sin in their own lives, and resist it consistently.

Since God is love, those who have received a share in the Life of God, now love God and they love the brethren. In fact , eternal life leads them into the development of a life like Jesus, laying down their lives to love, serve and give of themselves as a way of life. “As he is so are we in this world….thus shall we assure our hearts before Him”.

Finally, because God is Truth, eternal life causes us to adhere to the Truth, resonate with it, remain in it, and to propagate it wherever possible.

By the term Truth, we refer not to the general abstract concept, but to a specific Divine revelation of the reality of the Spiritual world; of the person of God, the state of man, and most importantly, of who Christ is and what he has done for us. This is “the truth” that we are born of, and  of which Jesus has come to reveal to us.

Those who have eternal life are said to be “of the Truth”. Jesus Christ calls himself “the truth”, and “the faithful witness” of “the only true God”. In his confession before Pilate, Jesus told him that Truth was the reason he came into this world,

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. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.(John 18:37)

But in the confessing church are those who seem to have no regard for truth in the sense we have been speaking of. These are the ones who ridicule “doctrine” as something which only divides the body of Christ, it is for the “spiritually dead” christians, who “argue over words and teachings, and are in “head knowledge” and not truly “in the spirit”.

There are many teachers who are widely accepted by evangelicals and Pentecostals, who teach that which amounts to a complete denial of the truth as revealed by Jesus and the Apostles.

It matters little, for example , to the followers of the late Kenneth Hagin that he repeatedly denigrated the Incarnation by declaring that “the believer is as much an incarnation as Jesus was”. When this is pointed out to the “WordFaith” followers of Hagin, if they respond at all it is usually with a statement about taking Hagin’s heretical quotes “out of context”.

Nor does it matter much to followers of the heretic Copeland, when his various false teachings are held up, word for word, in the light of the Word of God. Copeland denied Jesus’ deity, and proclaimed  that any “born again believer with the revelation knowledge Jesus had could have died on the cross and defeated Satan”.