Truth

When teaching Interior Architecture students how to draw architectural floor plans, I began by taking the class to an unoccupied house where they took all the interior and exterior measurements needed for the floor plan. I would ask two students to measure the width of a room, rounding their measurement to the nearest quarter inch, and then write the measurement on a slip of paper. Invariably, the two students would have different measurements. I used that process to teach them an important concept. Two contradictory statements, or beliefs, cannot both be correct. Either the measurement by student “A” is correct, and the measurement by student “B” is wrong, or “B” is correct, and “A” is wrong, or both are wrong. They cannot both be correct. This is a fundamental truth that precedes all other truth statements.  Of course, there are statements that have nuances that allow two apparent contradictions to both be true. Those are literary constructs used to make a point, where certain true truths can best be explained with what appear, on the surface, to be contradictions. Google’s AI does a nice job of explaining this. “A literary paradox is a statement or idea that appears to be contradictory but contains a deeper truth or insight. Paradoxes can be used to convey a variety of meanings, including humor, satire, or philosophical wisdom.”

When we are not looking at a literary paradox, we are faced with the true truth that two contradictory statements cannot both be true. To illustrate this, I have a plumb bob hanging in my office, as a conceptual work of art that I titled “Truth”.

I had used this plumb bob to locate the corners, in an excavated basement, for a house we had purchased and moved to its new location. In this case, the plumb line represented truth, as it was imperative that the house fit onto the basement. There were ten corners on the house due to its having been added onto over the years. All ten corners needed to fit onto the corners of the concrete walls of the basement.

Of all the vertical lines in my office, and there are a lot since my walls are covered with framed art, there is only one vertical line that I am confident is a true vertical line, the plumb line. The point being truth is narrow. There is no such thing as “my truth”, or “your truth”. There is just truth. There are of course opinions about a wide variety of issues that do not necessarily require any single correct answer.  When there are contradictory statements about what is true between two people, or two groups of people, only one can be right…or both can be wrong.

In Amos 7:1-9, God revealed three visions to Amos. First, locusts, and the second, fire, were visions of what might have come to pass had God not changed His mind. Of the first vision the text reads, “The Lord changed His mind about this. It shall not be.” Of the second vision we read, “The Lord changed His mind about this. This too shall not be.” “Thus, He showed me, and behold, the Lord was standing by a vertical wall, with a plumb line in His hand. And the Lord said to me, ‘What do you see, Amos?’ And I said, ‘A plumb line.’ Then the Lord said, behold I am about to put a plumb line in the midst of My people Israel. I will spare them no longer. The high places of Israel will be desolated and the sanctuaries of Israel laid waste. Then I will rise up against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.”

I created this triptych painting for one of Harding’s Lectureships. The title is Truth and Judgment. The fire and the locusts represent what God might have done had He not “changed His mind”. The center panel is the plumb bob. The vertical line above the plumb bob, the plumb line, represents God's judgment and measurement of people's faithfulness to God's law. That is, the plumb bob is the anchor for the plumb line.

One of my colleagues pointed out, pun intended, that this plumb bob looks like the end of a pencil. With that in mind, the plumb bob becomes a metaphor representing the Word…not just any words, but the Word. The book of John relates these words to us in John 1:1-4, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and Truth (my emphasis).

Jesus told His followers, in John 8: 31& 32, “Jesus therefore was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you abide in My word , then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” 

Jesus, in John 14:6 said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father, but through Me.”

The Word that became flesh, Jesus the Christ, is the anchor for the plumb line of truth and justice.

-John Keller