Post Truth Society & the Place of Faith & Reason - Dr. Ravi Zacharias

This sermon was preached by Dr. Ravi Zacharias during the commemoration of Reformation 500 at the Reformed Millenium Center Indonesia (RMCI), in Jakarta.

Have you heard the folk story of the bandit Jose’ Rivera, who became notorious in several little towns in Texas for robbing their banks and businesses? Finally the townsfolk, weary of the constant plundering, hired a ranger to track down Jose’ Rivera in his hideout in Mexico and retrieve the money. The ranger at last arrived at a desolate, ramshackle cantina. At the counter he saw a young man enjoying his brew. At one of the tables, hands over his ample stomach, hat over his eyes, snored another patron. With much gusto, the ranger approached the young man at the bar and announced that he was on a mission to bring back Jose’ Rivera, dead or alive. “Can you help me find him?” he asked. The young man smiled, pointed to the other patron, and said, “That is Jose’ Rivera.”

The ranger shifted his southern girth and ambled over to the sleeping bandit, tapping him on the shoulder, “Are you Jose’ Rivera? he asked. The man mumbled, “No speak English.” The ranger beckoned to the young man to help him communicate his mission.

The ensuing conversation was tedious. First the ranger spoke in English and the young man translated it into Spanish. Jose’ Rivera responded in Spanish, and young man repeated the answer in English for the ranger.

Finally, the ranger warned Jose’ Rivera that he had two choices; the first was to let him know where all the loot he had stolen was hidden, in which case he could walk away a free man. The second choice was that if he would not reveal where the money was stashed, he would be shot dead instantly. The young man translated the ultimatum.

Jose’ Rivera pulled himself together and said to the young man, “Tell him to go out of the bar, turn to the right, go about a mile, and he will see a well. Near the well he will see a very tall tree. Beside the trunk of that tree is a large concrete slab. He will need help in removing it. Under the slab is a pit in the ground. If he carefully uncovers it he will find all the jewelry and most of the money I have taken.”

The young man turned to the ranger, opened his mouth...swallowed...paused—and then said, “Jose’ Rivera says...Jose’ Rivera says...’Go ahead and shoot!’”

The question is, do you want to interpret something according to your convinience?
Do you really want to know the truth?

In John 18:33, Pilate asked Jesus, "Are You the king of Jews?", Jesus replied, "Is that a question from your heart, or did someone tell you that?" Why did Jesus answer the question with another question? The only reason why someone would do this is either to determine the direction of the conversation or to expose / humiliate the questioner.

George MacDonald said, "to give truth to him who loves it not is to only give him more multiplied reasons for misinterpretation".
And Winston Churchill once said that "the most valuable thing in the world was the truth. So valuable, that it needs to be constantly protected by a bodyguard of lies".

Yet, we are currently living in a post-truth era, when satan continues to proclaim that there is no absolute truth. Now, which science tells the scientist to tell the truth? To tell the truth is not a scientific imperative, but an ethical, philosophical, and spiritual imperative.

When you are a victim of a lie, you will value the coherence of statements. An example would be saying no to the others when you say yes to one thing. The Hollywood culture does not follow this rule: the show and entertainment are for the camera, but if all that begin to dictate our minds, it becomes a philosophy and a harassment.



In a court setting, there are two ways to test the truth:

1. Law of Correspondence. Here, the suspect is being asked by the judge if he tells the truth
2. Law of Coherence. All the statements made by the suspect have to make sense and fit each other.

Hugh Hefner, the founder of the Playboy Magazine just died not a while ago. He was an American icon,  but people say we should not live his life. This only shows that the society is becoming less coherent and lacks knowledge of what love is, what border is.

You are only free when you live in the eternal truth. What do you see on the news everyday? Who has killed how many people and where? Then we begin to ask the question, "What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of meaning?"


Meaning only comes when four things come together:

1. Truth
2. Wonder
3. Love
4. Security

And all these could be found when a baby hears his mother's comforting voice.
You will lose your sense of shame, reason, and meaning when you are immersed in:

1. Secularism - which leads to no sense of shame
2. Pluralism - which leads to no sense of reason due to the absence of dominant truth and the negligence of the fact that some values must be absolute.
3. Privatization - which leads to no sense of meaning due to the absence of connection and relationship.We must let others receive the privilege of listening and let the Holy Spirit speak to them personally.

I was asked to speak at the United Nations for their prayer breakfast for the second time, and they gave me a tougher subject than the first one. I was to speak on “Navigating with Absolutes in a Relativistic World”—at 6:30 in the morning! I was asked to do this in twenty-five minutes and given one other requirement: don’t talk much about religion because people of all faiths will be there. I said, “I’ll do it, but on one condition. Eighteen minutes, your talk; seven minutes, why my belief in God answers these questions.” I spoke on the search for absolutes in four areas: evil, justice, love, and forgiveness.

“We all want to define what evil is,” I said. “We have people here calling other nations evil. We all want to know what evil is. You’re a society that’s supposedly looking for justice. You’ve left your families, and you miss them because you love them. And some of you are going to blow it big time with ethics; you hope the rest of your peers are willing to forgive you, and you want to know on what basis. Evil, justice, love and forgiveness.”

They’re all nodding. I said, “I want you to think for a moment. Is there any event in history where these four converged in one place? It happened on a hill called Calvary, where evil, justice, love, and forgiveness converged.”

There was pin-drop silence. With five minutes left, I spoke on the cross of Christ and how the cross shows the heart of man, how the cross came because of the justice of God, how the cross demonstrates to us the very love of God, and how we find at the end of the day that without his forgiveness we would never make it. At the end, one ambassador confessed, “My country’s atheistic. I don’t even know why I came here. Today I have my answer. I came here to find God.” That is the power of the cross.

The hill of Calvary is at the very center point of the Gospel. All the suffering of the world converged there in that single act of sacrifice when the One who was without sin took the penalty of sin and accepted the ultimate in suffering—separation from his Father—so that we might be brought to Him. It was the lowest point of the incarnate Christ; he was separated from the Father while still in the center of the Father’s will. There the threads converged in a pattern that seemed so disparate from the world’s point of view, yet they were the crimson threads of our restoration to God. This was Jesus’ ultimate purpose: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

The world is getting darker, it's so dark out there. Let your light shine in the darkness.
For His Word is correspondent and His message is coherent.
The word of God can pierce the unpiercable heart of men, can't be pierced by swords.
It is the most powerful thing in the world.

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