At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“A righteous man hateth lying: But a wicked man is loathsome, and cometh to shame” (Proverbs 13:5).
This is a proverb where the first half of the proverb informs us about what the second half is talking about. The first part is very straightforward. A righteous man hates lying. He is a man of the truth. He hates lies, and this means that he loves the truth.
The truth is what can be said rightfully about the way things actually are. Philosophers call this the correspondence view of truth. This means that a declarative statement is true to the extent that it corresponds to the facts out there in the world. If a man says that “the book is on the desk,” that statement is true if there is a desk there, and the book is on it, and if they are the book and desk that the speaker was referring to. This is the correspondence view of truth.
The alternative goes by the label coherence view. The statement is considered to be true to the extent that it is consistent with and coheres with a larger system of values. It does not need to anchored in the realities of the outside world. And this matters because if the coherence view of truth is the way it is, then we are all of us lost and still in our sins.
Paul put it plainly. If Christ were not raised (actually raised), then we are all still in our sins. The proposition Christ was raised is insufficient. The proposition Christ was raised has to correspond to what actually happened on that first Resurrection Sunday. And thus, if I cannot truthfully say the book is on the table . . . we are all still in our sins.
Now the second half of our proverb is that a wicked man is a loathsome man. We also learn that he comes crashing down—he “cometh to shame.” If we pair this up with the first half of the proverb, we learn the nature of this man’s wickedness. He does not hate lying. And a man who refuses to hate lying, shading, prevaricating, or spinning . . . such is a loathsome man, and the shame is that he will be revealed as such.
So the upshot is this: love the truth.
