Serve Christ; back Him; let His cause be your cause, give not an hairbreadth of truth away, for it is not yours but God’s. –Samuel Rutherford
You’ve got a friend going on a lengthy trip. She has some valuable antiques that she doesn’t feel comfortable leaving in her house. You volunteer to keep some of her valuables in a spare room. A couple months into this thing your budget gets a bit tight and you hear the news that the guys from American Pickers are coming to your area. You’ve got a few neat items that might interest them, so you give the boys a call in the hopes they’ll find the treasures in your trash.
When the guys arrive they don’t find much of interest in all of your junk but they notice that room you’ve got closed off—the one housing all of your friends valuables. They go bananas over the items. They offer you top dollar everyone of them. You’ll be able to meet budget and even have a good chunk left over for a fun shopping trip.
So what do you do?
You sell all of your friends stuff and celebrate, right? Of course not! Any decent person knows that this isn’t yours to sell. You politely tell the celebrities that even though you’d love the cash, you’d love to be on their show, and you’d love to help them out, that this isn’t yours to sell. They’d need to take up business with your friend, you are only the possessor of her resources for the time being.
This same thing is true of the truth of the gospel. Even the uncomfortable truths about holiness and forsaking the darling sins of our culture. We are not the owners of the Bible’s truth. It belongs to Jesus Christ; Truth incarnate. We cannot sell what is not ours. We cannot pretend like the Scriptures are ours to bend and twist to suit our pleasures. This goes for not bending truth for culture and it also means we cannot bend the truth to suit ourselves. We must surrender and submit to the Word even when it rebukes us.
There will be times when we feel backed into a corner. It will seem like the most loving thing we can do is bend the truth…just a little, of course. We will rationalize that we are doing this for the greater good. It’s as if we are going through our friends antique collection and pricing them—just in case, you know. Just in case we need to sell something. So we’ll put truth into tiers. Some of these—if really pressed—we’ll be able to sell. Others of course, we’d never sell. But when you sell that first bit of antique furniture you’ve sealed the fate of the last piece.
This isn’t a slippery slope as much as it is just a truth that when you deny the foundational principle it isn’t long before the whole building collapses. In this case the foundational principle is that the truth isn’t yours to sell and so you’ve got no right to start putting price tags on it in the first place. Deny that and it really doesn’t matter which truths you deem able to be compromised on—eventually they’ll all be sold.
Don’t hear me wrongly. I still find Albert Mohler’s Call for Theological Triage immensely helpful. And I’m not so arrogant as to think I have the truth market cornered. I could be wrong, on some things. But being wrong about something and holding to a humble orthodoxy is not the same thing as pretending that truth has a wax nose and I can bend it however I please. The former is just acknowledging my finitude. The latter is a denial of a God who has clearly revealed himself.
The truth isn’t yours to sell. So, put away the garage sale stickers and instead humbly come to grips with the fact that the God of the Universe probably knows how to love people better than I do. And he does this not by compromising truth but by bringing us into union with Truth; namely, Jesus the Christ.
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