Purity Of Truth at War With Blackness of Lies [Update]

This morning, I picked up John MacArthur's book "The Truth War." I have read the book several times and have previously written two blog posts about it. Here are the links:

Truth Means Nothing Apart From God

Fighting For Certainty in an Age of Deception

This time, I want to list the highlighted points within each chapter of the book and expand upon them; particularly as it relates to what we, as Conservative Biblically-based Christian Americans have seen, faced, and dealt with over the course of this last year under the Obama administration.

Rather than working on one extremely long post, my plan is to write several blog posts over the course of the next few days.

Before I begin with the first chapter, I want to share that the quote by C.H. Spurgeon in the preface of the book has special meaning to me, personally. It kind of sums up my original goal when I created this blog over five years ago.

In 2004, I attended my first blog conference at Biola University. One of the speakers asked members of his class what each of our goals will be in writing Christian-based blog material. I stated that I wanted to write discernment articles that include the gospel of Christ while exposing how politics, culture, education, the media, and apostate churches battle against the Word of God and the message of the gospel. I recall that the professor told me, "that would be an impossible endeavor."

Yet, here I am, five years later including all of the above with the discussions here at Talk Wisdom. I don't quite know why the professor thought that way. Perhaps he thought that I should limit myself to apologetics and not include any criticism of the world around us. Or, maybe he worried that any "politically incorrect" approach might turn individuals away from the Gospel message. (Been there, heard that - MANY TIMES - even by some fellow Christian believers.) Perhaps I should have asked him why he thought such an endeavor was "impossible." I didn't get the chance to ask him. The session ended abruptly because we were out of time and he was surrounded by bloggers asking many questions.

The following is the Spurgeon quote:

The Church of Christ is continually represented under the figure of an army; yet its Captain is the Prince of Peace; its object is the establishment of peace, and its soldiers are men of a peaceful disposition. The spirit of war is at the extremely opposite point to the spirit of the gospel.

Yet nevertheless, the church on earth has, and until the second advent must be, the church militant, the church armed, the church warring, the church conquering. And how is this?

It is the very order of things that so it must be. Truth could not be truth in this world if it were not a warring thing, and we should at once suspect that it were not true if error were friends with it. The spotless purity of truth must always be at war with the blackness of heresy and lies.
- C.H. Spurgeon 1

1. Spurgeon, Charles, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 5 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1879), 41.

As the picture at the top of this post implies - sometimes the truth hurts! However, secular society's love affair for diversity (even at the expense of causing harm) and tolerance (today's code word for never offending anyone!) doesn't WANT to know any kind of truth that may initially hurt anyone (emotionally speaking).

However, common sense tells us to grab the arm of a child and pull it hard to prevent that child from running in the street in front of a speeding bus! The truth of the need for rescue may hurt the child physically at that moment in time, but the lie of freedom to do what would harm him/her if he/she ran in front of the bus can end up killing the child!

Such an illustration is even important when considering spiritual truth. These days, telling someone that their religion is not truth may hurt a person's feelings (at first), but the end result of them finding Jesus Christ and becoming a child of God through the biblical Gospel message brings eternal life that they would not have had without Him!

Spurgeon's ending line is quite the keeper! It sums it all up in one brilliant sentence!


The spotless purity of truth must always be at war with the blackness of heresy and lies.


Readers, please feel free to share any thoughts, questions, comments, opinions, criticisms, or compliments in the comment section!

1/3/10 Update:

I just discovered that American Prophet has included this post in that website's "News" items!

American Prophet.org/News

Comment there:

Note This is an award winning site and one of our best choices as well.

Of course, the excellent quotes from John MacArthur's book made the post possible! I am truly humbled and honored to have that post recognized by American Prophet - one of the best Christian sites on the web!

Thank you Rev. Michael Bresciani!