Truth & Love: Inseparable Virtues

If you pay any attention to network news or social media, you have surely heard the expression “hate speech.” Several proposals for legislation that would outlaw unpopular words and ideas are currently pending. Among many of our society’s thought leaders, demands for government restrictions on free speech are steadily becoming more passionate and more popular than ever. After all, who wants to hear or read words that actually promote and glorify hatred?

But clear, workable definitions of hate speech are missing from the discussion. In the minds of many, simply stating facts that contradict popular narratives constitutes hate speech. Quote a verse where Scripture says homosexuality is sin; point out that biological sex and gender are synonymous and designated by God; or criticize any of the radical public policies that overthrow some long-established moral standard and you will be sharply castigated as unfeeling or unloving. You might even get banned from Facebook or Twitter for your opinion.

The underlying assumption is that truth and love are incompatible values. Indeed, as Western culture becomes more and more secularized, those two virtues are being radically redefined and perverted in a way that deliberately sets them against one another.

Love, of course, is the subject of countless popular songs and stories. In a trend that goes back at least to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, every hint of moral purity has been systematically purged from the popular understanding of the concept. So the word love is routinely used to signify every corrupt affection from mawkish sentiment to seriously perverted lust. The result is that the dominant notion of love in fashionable culture today has virtually nothing in common with the biblical idea—because authentic love, according to 1 Corinthians 13:6, “does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.”

Truth? That word has likewise been twisted and tortured—and sometimes used to signify the polar opposite of what it is supposed to mean. Stylish ideas like Darwinism and critical race theory are widely treated as self-evident. Blatant falsehoods are widely embraced as “settled scientific truth.” These range from the transparently bogus claim that life came from nonlife billions of years ago to the equally unscientific notion that human gender is nonbinary and infinitely fluid. That’s not all. The simple question of whether two plus two really equals four is currently being debated in earnest by people whose job is to teach math.

Ask anyone whose worldview has been shaped by these distorted ideas to name some objective truth they are certain about, and you are almost guaranteed to hear an echo of Pilate’s cynical question, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).

Personal feelings and individual preferences automatically trump both sound logic and established facts in just about every debate.

Indeed, the central canon of postmodern belief is that objective truth cannot be known with any degree of unwavering certainty. In practice, how a person feels about a truth-claim is far more important than the question of whether it is factually true. Truth is thus being subjugated to human sentiment. Personal feelings and individual preferences automatically trump both sound logic and established facts in just about every debate.

That’s why people commonly speak of “my truth” and “your truth”—as if truth could be made to order for each person. Facts don’t even matter if you feel strongly enough about your point of view. A recent article in the New York Times noted “the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with [that personal truth].”1 The article implied (and there is no shortage of people today who emphatically believe) that it’s OK to ignore facts that refute popular or passionately held opinions. Call your opinion “my truth,” and all debate must end. The result is that the word truth has little meaning anymore for most people.

That is why those who defend facts and truth when they contradict popular opinion are not only told they are wrong, but are typically derided as unkind, unfeeling, overly harsh, and intolerant. Love and truth have not simply been redefined—the new definitions have been weaponized against real love and authentic truth.

But sometimes the best way to love your neighbor is to challenge a false belief that is holding him in confusion, discouragement, or some worse state of spiritual bondage. The idea that it is unloving to defend truth or confront lies is one of the arrogant opinions of this postmodern age that needs to be torn down (2 Corinthians 10:5).

Symbiosis

Scripture teaches that love and truth are perfectly symbiotic. Try to separate truth from love or vice versa, and you destroy both virtues. Either virtue without its mate is merely a pretense. Love without truth has no character. Truth without love has no power. Love deprived of truth quickly deteriorates into sinful self-love. Truth divorced from love always breeds sanctimonious self-righteousness. Truth absent from love is harsh and heartless. Love from absent truth is hollow and hypocritical.

Try to separate truth from love or vice versa, and you destroy both virtues.

Nowhere in Scripture is the essential connection between these two cardinal virtues more clearly highlighted than in 2 John. Love and truth are the key words in that brief 13-verse epistle.

John was the perfect apostle to write on this theme. Jesus had nicknamed John and his brother James “Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17)—doubtless because of their fiery zeal for the truth. At first, their passion was not always tempered with love, and we see a glimpse of that in Luke 9:54 when they wanted to call down fire from heaven upon a village of Samaritans who had rebuffed Christ.

In later years, however, John distinguished himself as the Apostle of Love, specially highlighting the theme of love in his gospel and in all three of his epistles.

And yet, as we see in all of his epistles, he never lost his zeal for the truth. He did, however, learn to keep it wedded to a proper, Christlike love.

John’s second epistle was addressed to “the elect lady and her children”—most likely an esteemed Christian matriarch who had the means and the desire to make her home and hospitality available to itinerant missionaries, church planters, and teachers in the early church. Extending such hospitality was a tangible way she could fulfill the Lord’s New Commandment.

She was probably familiar with John’s first epistle, where he warned “that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3). Such men were “false prophets”—teachers who claimed to be believers but whose teaching undermined true faith. And many of them had already gone out all over the known world (1 John 4:1).

For this woman whose ministry entailed showing kindness to strangers, those were unsettling words. Could she no longer show hospitality indiscriminately? What was the loving response to someone who claimed to be a brother in Christ but taught the doctrine of antichrist?

She had evidently written John personally to ask. The epistle is his reply.

Walk in Truth by Manifesting Christlike Love

Verses 1–5 of 2 John highlight the symbiotic nature of love and truth, and John affirmed the primacy of love. “All who [genuinely] know the truth” do love. (Verse 1 is an echo of 1 John 3:14 and its cross-references.) Love itself is at the heart of all truth, because love is just what the truth demands. Love is the perfect fulfillment of all our Lord’s commandments (cf. Romans 13:10; Galatians 5:14). In no way did John want this woman or any other reader of the epistle to think for a moment that what he was about to say would denigrate the importance of love. Love, after all, is the New Commandment, given by Christ himself (2 John 1:5).

There are, of course, people nowadays who claim to be defending the truth by spewing hate. You see them on the news from time to time. They plaster angry messages on placards and picket funerals or otherwise target distressed people in a purposely hostile way—all while claiming to do God’s work. They are usually religious fanatics so enthralled with the themes of human guilt, divine wrath, the curse of the law, and eternal punishment that they never talk about anything else.

That makes a mockery of truth and brings a reproach in the eyes of the world against anyone who genuinely loves the truth. At best, these angry people, whose messages are merely slogans that fit on bumper stickers or protest signs, are proclaiming half-truths. And Satan himself—the father of lies—is a master at half-truths.

To declare a truth (especially a partial truth) in an unloving way or with unloving motives is, frankly, an assault on truth. Acts 16 gives a fitting illustration of this principle. Paul was in Philippi with his missionary team. They were “met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling” (Acts 16:16). Luke wrote, “She followed Paul and us, crying out, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.’ And this she kept doing for many days. Paul, having become greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, ‘I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her’” (Acts 16:17–18).

Why did Paul silence her? Because in the mouth of a demon, even the truth is a blasphemy and an embarrassment. It is never good when some wantonly evil person pretends to be a proclaimer of gospel truth.

It’s even worse when the message is given in a spirit of hostility, condescension, arrogance, or contempt for one’s neighbors. Such attitudes are fruits of falsehood and human pride. They have nothing whatsoever to do with truth.

Indeed, the singular, distinctive fruit of truth is love—compassionate love; brotherly love; humble, warm-hearted, self-giving love; the kind of love embodied in the sacrifice of Christ: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Love is therefore the supreme test of whether we are really walking in truth, and no one makes this point more clearly or more frequently than the Apostle John.

Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. (1 John 2:10–11)

We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. (1 John 3:14–15)

Anyone who does not love does not know God. (1 John 4:8)

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar. (1 John 4:20)

In other words, even if you can quote true statements, the truth is not in you at all if there is no love in you. Love is the fruit and the evidence that we are truly walking in the light.

Manifest Christlike Love by Safeguarding Truth

Halfway through 2 John, the epistle takes a dramatic turn. John pivots from the theme of love and begins to emphasize the equal importance of upholding truth. He reiterates the necessity of being on guard against deceivers and antichrists, for there are many (v. 7). He explains how to distinguish such people from authentic believers (v. 9).

All of this repeats in shorthand form the things he had already said in 1 John. Verses 10–11 are the only completely new content in this epistle. This is therefore the main point that John wants to address in this letter. It is John’s inspired answer to the question that seems to have prompted him to write the epistle in the first place: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting, for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works” (2 John 1:10–11).

He calls for a strict separation between the people of God and anyone who comes in Christ’s name but denies Christ’s essential teaching.

John isn’t talking about simple matters of disagreement between brothers and sisters in Christ. He is not giving a mandate for speaking rudely to people, being hateful to one’s theological adversaries, or doing anything else that would violate the principle of 2 Timothy 2:24–26: “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone . . . correcting his opponents with gentleness.”

But there’s no mincing of words here. He instructs the woman to withhold both hospitality and honor from itinerant teachers who deny essential matters of the Christian faith. She is not to open her home to them, neither is she to bestow on them any favor or tribute that might encourage them in their evil mission.

May we learn what it means to ground our love in the truth.

Love—love for the truth and love for souls—demands such a response to dangerous falsehoods. To the postmodern mind, that may seem like no love at all, but it embodies the best, deepest love for Christ. May we learn what it means to ground our love in the truth. Whether proclaiming the truth of a literal six-day creation, the guidelines given in God’s Word for marriage between a man and woman, or the biblical view of one human race, may we not succumb to the pressure of our age to spurn or subjugate Christ’s truth under a false and foggy notion of love.