In the third and final article in this series on the Bible's 'What is . . . ?' questions, we look at what is perhaps the most important question of all. In the first article we looked at the nature of man, at what it means to be human. Our conclusions will considerably influence our medical behaviour. In the second article we came nearer home and confronted Christ's claim on our own selves with the question 'What is your life?' I hope you have been challenged. What is your response so far?

I hope part of your response so far has been to ask yourself 'Is what I've read true?' Not, 'Do I like it?' or 'Do I agree with it?' but the much more fundamental question - 'Is it true?'

If it is, then you should have done or should be doing some serious thinking. If it isn't, then you might as well 'eat, drink and be merry'. Truth matters. Our thinking and behaviour ought to depend on whether we believe something to be true or not. So, 'What is truth?' becomes a very important question.

The Bible raises the question explicitly in the context of the John's Gospel account of Pilate's trial of Jesus:

This exciting excerpt from the lengthy account of the several trials Jesus underwent (all to a greater or lesser extent a mockery of justice) indicates the central place of truth. Jesus' reason for coming into the world was 'to testify to the truth'. This challenges Pilate. In fact it may even overwhelm him because he then comes out with 'What is truth?' in an almost cynically dismissive way. We know from another Gospel that he literally 'washes his hands of the matter'. (This is the origin of our everyday English expression.) Do read these Gospel accounts by the way - they're the 'Gospel truth'!

Does Pilate's rhetorical question indicate that he was a Roman relativist? Was he someone who for cultural reasons could not accept that there could be such a thing as absolute truth?

I am indebted to Peter May who first really drew my attention to the problem of relativism. He has taught extensively on this while doing training in 'Dialogue Evangelism' and written on it in Nucleus before. Professor Keith Ward has called relativism the 'central heresy of our culture'.

Briefly, relativism says 'Everything is relative'. You may recognise its ugly head when you have shared the Gospel with someone and they respond 'Oh well, that may be true for you, but it isn't true for me'. This laughable absurdity comes all too easily from the lips of the most intelligent and best educated of people, and it presents a devastating difficulty in dialogue.

Think about it a moment. Think about the statement 'everything is relative'. Is it a relative statement? If so, it is only relatively true, and so there must be some things which aren't relative, and so there must be some absolutes . . . Or is it rather an absolute statement? If so, the very existence of one absolute statement means that not everything is relative! Do you see how absurd it is?

Perhaps you find the foregoing too complicated? It's the sort of thing some moral philosophers call humour... Let's try a physical example. A hundred years ago, some people believed the earth was round and some believed it was flat. A few might even have believed it was some other sort of shape, but everyone believed that it was either round or flat or . . . they knew it couldn't be both round and flat at the same time depending on how you looked at it! Yet I have had this said seriously to me by medical students in public debate!

Relativism cannot be true. It is a lie, but one that is both laughably obvious and subtly all-pervasive at the same time. If you keep your eves and ears open, you will soon come to agree with Professor Ward.

So, what IS truth? Most of us know it when we see it but would have trouble defining it. The Concise Oxford Dictionary seems to have trouble too - 'quality or state of being true or accurate or honest or sincere or loyal or accurately shaped or adjusted' - and I wonder if we take so much for granted that there must be absolute truth that it all almost goes without saying.

Jesus defined truth when he said 'I am . . . the truth' (John 14: 6). Doesn't that Dictionary definition sound rather like a description of the character of Jesus?

It may be that we can most usefully progress in attempting to answer our question 'What is truth?' by moving on to think about the opposite of truth, to think about lies, liars and lying. Again John's Gospel records some powerful words of Jesus here: 'You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.' John 8:44

As we have often done in this short series, let us go to the Book of Genesis, the book of beginnings, and look briefly in closing at the devil's first appearance. The story so far is that God has made the world and everything in it, including having made man and woman in his own image, and everything in the garden's lovely, until:

Let us look briefly at some of the strategies the devil (the deceiver, the tempter, the accuser, the liar) uses before we look at the nature of the first lies:

He goes for the woman. As the other side of the coin of having been created by God to be more trusting, women may be more gullible than men.

He gets her on her own. How much more vulnerable we are to being tempted or deceived when we are on our own. Thank God for fellowship.

He sows seeds of doubt. We can imagine that the tone of voice of his 'Did God really say . . . ?' adds to the content of those words.

His first step is to sow a subtle seed of doubt but he then goes in for a really big lie. (God actually said 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.' Genesis 2: 16-17) So, Satan's lie is a deliberate overkill, and the woman recognises it as such. She faithfully reports that she is not to eat fruit from that one tree only - and it she had stopped there, she would have done well. But so successful has the devil been in convincing her that actually God is rather unreasonable, that she makes the fatal mistake of adding something, adding something that might be unreasonable, something that God did not say: 'and you must not touch it'.

The serpent moves swiftly now for the kill with a whopper, a total inversion of the truth, a massive lie: 'You will not surely die . . .' He continues his tactic of saying that God is actually a cosmic spoilsport with 'for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened . . .' and he has his victim. She eats the fruit and the rest, as they say, is history.

So much for the devil's tactics. To complete our picture and understand the importance of the truth and where relativism fits in, we need to concentrate on the content of 'You will be like God'. It is immaterial that there may originally have been a grain of truth in what the devil offered the woman - we must appreciate that he always offers us what is ultimately a lie.

We see 'you will be like God' in so much of the self-centredness of our society. So much of materialism offers 'self-satisfaction'. So much of New Age healthism offers 'self-realisation' or 'self-actualisation', and other more blatantly spiritual New Age practices encourage us to 'realise the God who is in you, the God who is you'. Of course these ideas are not compatible with Christianity - they are lies. When we worship the self, we worship the serpent.

And relativism? If I present the Gospel and proclaim the whole of John 14: 6 - 'Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me' ' - then many people say to me how arrogant I am. I point out that actually it is not me who first said it, but Jesus, who claimed to be the Son of God; but yes, they are very perceptive, that statement is either very arrogant or it's mad or it's true.

I then ask how they would decide who gets into Heaven? After a few gentle steps it becomes clear that, in fact, they themselves set up the standard. They themselves are the arbiters of justice. They themselves have that supreme spiritual authority! Is that not arrogant?

Is that not also a supreme example of the monstrous conceit of the devil? Is it not a perfect illustration of his lying offer to us that 'you will be like God'?

Whether it is a matter of relating to a real world which is not relativistic (a world where I turn up for the 17:18 train expecting that my understanding of 17:18 is as absolute as Greenwich Mean Time allows and is the same understanding of 17:18 as British Rail's) or whether it is in spiritual matters, the truth is vital. I see the balance of evidence as clearly favouring not the devil's lies, but Jesus Christ who said: 'I am . . the truth'.

What do you think?