Truth regarded as reliability.
"The truth of the Lord endureth for ever." The term "truth" is constantly employed without a well-defined and precise meaning. Truth sometimes only means that which seems true to a particular individual at a particular time. Sometimes it only means "veracity," or the correspondence between a proposition and a man's belief. Truth is the correspondence of the proposition with fact. There is a standard truth. It is close kin with eternal righteousness. The love of truth is the love of realities; the determination to rest upon facts and not upon semblances. But when the psalmist spoke of the "truth of God," no such abstract or critical ideas were in his mind. He thought of the truth or righteousness of God as seen in his faithfulness to the promises on which he has ever made his people to hope. To him the truth of God was not his verity, but his reliability. His truthfulness, his dependableness, regarded as a basis of trust. His reliability has never failed his people; we may be absolutely confident that it endureth, and will endure forever. A man's truth is the basis of our trust in him. God's truth is the basis of our reliance on him.
I. TRUTH, AS A FEATURE OF CHARACTER, IS A SIGN OF STABILITY. When we speak of a man as a man of truth, we know that we describe a firm, steadfast man; a man who can make up his mind, and stand to his mind when it is made up. There is no wavering, no "shilly-shallying," about the man. He is a prop fixed firmly into the ground, and can bear a good strain. To some men there seems to be no such thing as truth, only varying opinion, nothing worth suffering for, worth living and dying for. Such men easily bend this way or that, swayed by every passing wind.
II. TRUTH, AS A FEATURE OF CHARACTER, IS A SIGN OF CONSISTENCY. Consistency is keeping strictly to a line of conduct which we have marked as right. But only a man of truth will ever look on a line of conduct as right, for only such a man has an absolute moral standard. And only the man of truth will have any anxiety about deviations from the line.
III. TRUTH, AS A FEATURE OF CHARACTER, IS A SIGN OF PERMANENCE. No disintegrating forces can ever destroy it. By the necessity of things the truthful character endures; nothing can end it. These things may be applied in their sublimest forms to God, in whose image man is made. Because he is truth, and his truth endures, we may trust in the Lord forever.—R.T.