February 15

“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”, Jesus said. There is an order about these words.

Unless you know the way, you won’t know the truth, and unless you know the truth you won’t have life.

What is the Way? It is the will of God lived out in the life of man. We saw it in all its glory in the life of Jesus. The early Christians were known as “the people of the way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23) and the “Way” was understood to mean “the way of the Lord” (Acts 18:25), “the way of truth” (2 Peter 2:2), “the way of salvation” (Acts 16:17) and “the way of God” (Acts 18:26).

But there is also a false way, “a way that seems right to man but its end is death” (Proverbs 14:12). This is metahodos; where meta means “after” and implies change, and hodos means “way”; thus “after the Way”, or based on the Way but different. Metahodos is translated as the “wiles of the devil” in Ephesians 6:11 and “trickery” or “craftiness” in Ephesians 4:14. It is the product of a “different gospel” about which Paul warned the Galatian Church (Galatians 1:6) and the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 11:4).

What is truth? Truth is the word become flesh. We saw it in the life of Jesus and it is meant to be seen in the lives of those who call themselves His. There is also a false truth, which is the “lie” that is brought by the “liar” and the “father of lies” (John 8:44)). It is nevertheless based on the word of God, but inspired by a different spirit (2 Corinthians 11:4). Paul writes to the Roman Church of those who “exchanged the truth of God for a lie” (Romans 1:25). We see this happening today in relation to the same perversions of which Paul wrote.

There is a subtlety about Satan’s work; the false truth uses the same Bible as the truth, but it is the word of God brought by men, not by the Spirit.