I recently finished watching the HBO miniseries on the Chernobyl catastrophe. Most of the five-episode series focused on the aftermath of the nuclear reactor explosion and on the investigation into what actually happened. A big part of the show was about how the Soviet Union was a government obsessed with its reputation and committed to telling whatever lies it had to in order to present itself as a stable world power.
In reality, the Empire was crumbling.
In the end, the few brave citizens who were willing to tell the truth about Soviet incompetence ended up ostracized, killed, or both. There were two lines in the final episode that resonated with me. The first…
“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to truth, sooner or later that debt is paid.”
The other was a reflection on how truth doesn’t care about your politics or your opinions, it doesn’t care if it’s convenient. Truth simply is, and will be for a thousand years.
The Truth presented in God’s word is a stubborn thing. Whether you agree with it or not does not change it. Whether it forces you to make difficult decisions or eases you into salvation, it isn’t going to change. We can either bend toward truth or resist it and eventually break against it.
We can tell ourselves lies, we can deny and resist, but in the end, Truth will win out. Sooner or later, instantly or eventually, the debt of Truth is paid.
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of God endures forever.
(Isaiah 40:8)
Let’s not fight the Truth, rather let’s submit to it and let it mold us into the kind of people God would have us to be.