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| Photo by o0o0xmods0o0o at morguefile.com |
Gentle applause greeted our concertmaster as he walked on stage and signaled for three As. The piercing tone of an oboe filled the hall for the brass to tune. Sitting a few chairs away in the second violin section, I waited for the final A when we string players would tune.
This preconcert ritual is such an ordinary part of my life that I often forget its significance. To play together we must agree. But who gets to choose the pitch of an A?
I knew Steven was playing a true A on his oboe. A simple tuning app can confirm that an A is exactly 440 Hz, the standard set by an international convention in 1939. But who gave them the authority to define what an A ought to be? Can I be confident this standard is truth?
Later as my family and I celebrated the successful concert with crème brûlée, I pondered the relationship between our orchestral tuning note and truth in general. I’ve been thinking about truth a lot lately because RZIM’s writing competition this month is to answer the question, “In today’s culture of alternative facts and fake news, how do you define truth?” To be honest (a good thing to be when defining truth), my first thought about the contest was “Boring! How can I be creative with that topic?”
The dictionary defines truth. If I go beyond its definition, I might not be speaking objective truth anymore—I might have wandered into the nebulous realm of personal opinion. But who gave the authors of the dictionary the right to define truth? They didn’t create the definition; they merely described how the word was used in contemporary English. As common usage changes, the dictionary changes, just like grammar and punctuation rules change. The perfect English papers I crafted in high school are now flawed. The standard morphed, leaving me longing for something permanent in life.
The dictionary itself testifies to the changing winds of time. Merriam-Webster defines truth as “the body of real things, events, and facts,” and “a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality,” but the third definition is archaic: “fidelity and constancy.”
In my stubborn refusal to accept the inconstancy of a word that once meant constancy, I’m inclined to weave all three definitions together, for they touch the yearning of our souls. We long to know real facts about transcendence, our purpose in life and the meaning behind it all, and we want these facts to be stable, not shifting with public opinion or the fickle decisions of government officials.
We dream of a world where justice and goodness flourish. To achieve this we need a standard higher than the most powerful government, higher than all international organizations, a standard even they cannot violate. We need a tuning note that enables us to live in harmony.
Only a personal God can offer us this. If He made us for a purpose and communicated to us what is good, we can apply that to all perpetrators of evil. If He is unchanging, I can rest in a moral code that permanently protects me. If He is all-powerful, I know justice will ultimately be done.
This is the God I meet in the Bible, a God who entered the world two thousand years ago in the person of Jesus. He picked up the oboe, and He played an A.
“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” John 14:6 (ESV)
