The Truth is Truth

[RJ Mac]

Jn.17:17 Thy Word is Truth.
It's my firm belief that God's Word is Truth. God writes Truth. Is Revelation
Truth - yes - is it symbolic - yes - these are the things John saw.

How can God write a non-Truth and expect us to see a Truth in it and yet
not believe what He wrote. I hear a lot about metaphors and analogies, God
wrote it as a metaphor but doesn't expect us to believe it. Don't believe Gen1
just read it as a metaphor. Truth is Truth.

If there is a metaphor in the Truth fine but the Truth is still Truth.
I would like to hear some examples where God has written a non truth to
teach the Truth.

RJ

[apothanein kerdos]

A metaphor doesn't mean something isn't true. Just because something is written as an analogy or a metaphor, or as a poetic narrative in the Ancient Near East Context, doesn't mean the overarching idea behind it is false. Only in our Western, hyper-literal context do we often equate metaphors with falsehood. In the Ancient Near East, metaphors were actually considered the best way to learn the truth.

[crawfish]

I'm going to use a bad example here. Consider the movie "Titanic". In the beginning, one of the scientists gives an account of exactly what happened to the ship when it hit the iceberg and how it sank. Then, the main character tells her story from a personal standpoint. It corroborates the facts mentioned above, but the fictional account gives us a connection to the event that the former does not have; we can better understand the horror and fear that the passengers felt, and understand the tragedy on a much deeper level.

A rote description of facts is as much a lie as "historical fiction", in that it leaves out much information (emotions, drama, etc) that marks the event it is documenting. Fact can tell us about an event; but it cannot connect us to it.

In the same way, metaphor, analogy, parable are all methods used to personalize ideas. It wasn't important how God created the universe; what was important was THAT he made it. The account in Genesis 1 tied that event to the Israelites in a tangible way that could be celebrated and imitated (through the Sabbath).