Each individual faces a trial, and the trial consists of one question. We face this trial today and every day of our life.

At some point, we all get to play the part of Pontius Pilate when he is forced to face Jesus. In the trial of Jesus, it is not actually Jesus who is on trial, but the world, and Pilate is the stand-in for every one of us.

Now, most of us know there is corruption in the world. We’ve heard all the stories of the wealthy getting away with murder (sometimes literally) and corruption within both political parties. We know of suffering and pain that doesn’t make sense. We observe many religious Pharisees acting like hypocrites and we see wealthy American Herodians being morally corrupt in every way. America, like Pontius Pilate, for all its claims to virtue, real and imagined, must confront Jesus someday and will have to decide on how to answer the test. We all get to stand like Pilate, not giving the trial, but in the chair of the defendant.

When Jesus said, “Lead us not to the test” in the Lord’s prayer, he didn’t mention that the test is only one question, and it only has one answer.

“Do not bring us to the time of trial,” is another translation. “Lead us not into temptation,” is the most common one we hear in English. Trial, test, temptation - in all cases, we ask God to help us steer clear of it. And what is this test?

We are there. We are taking the test, every day. But we only come to understand the test when we come to forks in the road, decision points in our lives. In good times and in bad times, the trial comes out to meet you. We ask God to lead us not to this test, but because of our desires we like to go looking for it, and we all find the test eventually.

How we answer this test question says everything about us. How we answer it guides our day, our choices, our feelings, our reactions, our heart, our family, our career, our evenings, our mornings, our meals. Judgment day will be so easy for God to carry out, because we answer this test every day. The test question is the one that Pilate asked to Jesus, which is ironic, because Pilate is the one actually on trial. This is the only question on the test:

“What is truth?”

That’s the whole test.

It requires a response. Not just verbally or mentally, but in our actions. It’s both an oral and a practical exam.

In our age, that single question draws many responses. “What is truth?” brings long responses, based on logic, and even illogic, with sweeping topics of historical analysis, tales of heroes and villains and victims, windy arguments, appeals to emotion, appeals to reason.

But God can stop all test-takers after the very first word out of their mouths, because the only answer he is looking for is Jesus.

You can tell how fragmented a person is, how compromised, how scattered, how lost, by how that one question is answered. If you ask someone, “What is truth?” and they start rambling, they are the lost. Pray for them, and pray for yourself, and pray for us all, because even if we think we are not lost, that we are found, even if we answer correctly, we very likely fail the practical part of the exam, which is our lives. This is important to recognize. Even if you answered with the name of Jesus, it is your actions in life that answer for you.

By the time you arrive at judgment, God already knows your answer. You gave it already. And anyone who claims or claimed verbally that Jesus was the truth, but rejected him in spirit, and did not actually follow him along the way, will be exposed. We are more than our mind. We are God’s instruments, with a mind, yes, but also with arms and legs. Did we just assert belief in our mind or do something about it? Did that belief animate our body or just sit boxed up in our head? There is no weaselly appeal to be made to a higher court. The Creator God is the final stop.

Like the rich man in hell who begged for Abraham to go back and tell his brothers to repent, the request will not be honored. We have had our chance. We already have been told, warned, and we choose to ignore the Creator. Even if we acknowledged that he exists, we probably only acknowledge it like we acknowledge everything else. We grant God the same significance of other facts like existence of gravity. Gravity exists. So what? Admitting God exists is just like admitting any other fact that you might accept. Seasons change. Cats are funny. We can declare that God exists and even say that Jesus is the truth, and then we can proceed to give it the same level of respect that we give to any other fact. God exists. Water exists. Now back to cat videos. Agreement to the notion of a Creator is not the question. This is a pass/fail test, and “God exists” is an automatic fail if that’s all you got.

If you feel unsure about “What is truth?” then you are adrift. You are either in the camp of the whitewashed tombs trying to save yourself with some long-winded answer, or you are in denial, thinking that some of your sins are acceptable. If you are unsure whether you are a sinner or not, you are waffling on the fence, and that fence is electric - at some point the power is going to get turned on and you will feel it.

You cannot answer “Jesus” to the test question if you do not come to know your sins and that you are a sinner. That means all of your sins, including the ones you’d like to keep and defend as honorable.

This is the slippery slope of how dishonoring God moves into the mainstream of your life. Straddling half-measures and partial surrender is how the bad patterns spread its feelers through your own life and through an entire nation. This is how the values of Mardi Gras move into Lent. This is how the sandbox database becomes the production database. Chaos is near when the sacred cannot be separated from the rest of the world. When the playground of the red-light district becomes an acceptable way of life, then prepare for impact. America has even gone so far as to give a place of honor to behaviors that only belong in the red-light district. Put your head between your knees, and…no…don’t kiss your ass goodbye; put your head between your knees and pray.

The conscience is silenced by celebrating your desires, and the conscience is the little voice of God, the great gift of the good guardian angel.

You may have answered this question correctly long ago, but have slipped.

This is how habitual sin works.

The pioneer stage of turning away from God is that first sip of beer, the first toke on a joint, the first kiss, the first bribe that you get away with. Taboo is removed and a further step is taken. Retreat and advance, and once you start to enjoy the sin, the conquest begins. Then you get into regular commerce with the sin, transacting your moods on it, trading your body and soul for it.

After that the slide quickens. The drink or the touch or the bribe becomes an expected luxury, a common occurrence, even an expectation.

Once it starts to bear itself out as a problem, you intellectualize it, rationalize it, justify it, saying some version of “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Science, especially genetics, makes a good brush to paint it as a virtue to be embraced, using deft strokes of psychology, sociology, and nature and nurture arguments. When asked, “Is doing X a sin?” you have a paint palette at the ready, just like you do when faced with the ultimate test: “What is truth?”

In the last phase, you settle into the sin, like Gollum with his Ring, the precious, like a ghoul who cannot see himself moving into decline and collapse. This whole cycle happens to individuals and to groups of people and to nations. If no chainsaw miraculously cuts you free from these growing vines, then the decline and collapse process will keep covering you until it becomes a grave.

You need to break free. But you can’t without help. If lucky, a forest fire will burn the brambles away. Often the only way out of habitual sin that has taken root in your body and soul is to be burned free. Like a prescribed burn is done to refresh a prairie with fire, to remove the weeds and the invasive species, we must feel the fire of the spirit to re-awaken our hearts to be generated anew. To return to the faith of a child, to start again, to be reborn - we must become awake to the fact that the things that we thought we wanted were all wrong. Otherwise habitual sin will remain just that: a habit.

American culture has ceased approving of the prescribed burns that renew people. We’ve silenced the voices that speak the truth. We’ve done a wondrous job intellectualizing most of our sins.

We are no longer afraid of God, because we think he’s not real. Unsurprisingly, we no longer worry about sin, because we think it too, is not real. These things go together. The reason the Hebrews said, “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” is because you won’t understand God until you know how pathetically weak you are. Living in a bubble of affluence, we misunderstand how weak we are. But we will learn. We all get to learn this. Affluence is an illusion that turns you away from God and the truth because you assume that the comfort and strength you feel is all under your control somehow. This is the same reason that strong young men are cocky while hunched over old men are humble. He is fooled by muscles as his undeniable strength. But the decades roll along and atrophy instructs with reality.

Only when the plane is about to crash can some of us awaken. That is when poor choices of who we chose to follow in life get outed as frauds. Those who follow Jesus do not have this problem even when the plane crashes into the mountain. This is because they know the answer to the test question, and if they really know that answer, then they have imitated the man, as best as they could.

Whatever rock you hit, whatever end you arrive at, there is no need to worry if you know that Jesus is the truth. Fear of the Lord will get you started on the path to the truth, and Jesus will remove that fear. First you have to know your weakness in order to understand what is really meant by God, because once you see the dragon, you will know the need for God. Fear of the dragon will lead you to God, who is far, far more powerful that any earthly or even spiritual dragon. But the dragon is real and the dragon will kill you. Then you surrender, and Jesus will slay the dragon for you. He will lay it down like a kitten. But you can’t tame the dragon alone, and Jesus won’t do it with you until you recognize and accept your weakness and sinfulness. Surrender is the only way to enlist the army of angels and saints.

We are in the climate of the last days of Babel where the clouds are darkening. The Tower seems nearly complete once again, as there seems to be nothing we can’t do as humans, and our lives bear out our own paper-thin “truth.” We deny ourselves nothing. We are told that we can do anything, we can be anything, and we proclaim this loudly…and that is exactly how every fall of man in the book of Genesis happens.

Everything is permitted when truth no longer exists except in the mind. Everything is upside-down and inside-out and the only real truth that comes out of it in the end is the same pre-Jesus bulldozer of “Might Makes Right.” You hear this message today of “taking the power,” and while some lament the old power fading, of European “whiteness” as the old ruler, you now hear of the ascendant “wokeness” replacing it. What neither side of this volleyball game realizes is that whichever side in this struggle wins, it’s the same outcome.

The underlying rejection of God will result in one side on top and the other complaining. We will again be living in a world of “rules for thee, but not for me,” just like the Epsteins and Trumps and Clintons and Bezos and Gates families do today. Do not let power fool you. Those who think that their oppressor has been “Christianity” have no clue about Jesus, the living God. Evil done under the guise of Christianity is the same as evil done under any other ideology.

Don’t let anyone distract you from the test. Because it’s rather easy, when you stop and think about it. You already know the answer.

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