God of Truth

As a person who is generally very honest, it can be hard for me to believe that someone else is lying to me. Because my natural inclination is to not lie, it always seems to take me by surprise when someone else does. 

That said, I am also a person who is always secretly asking if someone is lying to me. I wonder if they're telling me the truth, just telling me what they think I want to hear, or have given up trying to tell me anything because I can be stubborn sometimes. 

At any given point, any one of these things - or perhaps all three of them - can be true. 

The trouble is that sometimes, I have the same questions about God. 

I wonder if God is sometimes lying to me. I know in my head that God is truth, but truth doesn't always feel good and it doesn't even always feel right, so I wonder if what I'm hearing, what I'm sensing, what is heavy on my heart is actually truth or if it's something less. I guess I should say that I don't wonder if God is lying to me so much as I wonder if that's really His voice. Is it Him? Or is it an enemy pretending to be him so as to lead me astray? 

But I do wonder if God has given up trying to tell me the truth because I'm too stubborn sometimes. I'm the kind of person who has a lot of follow-up questions, and it can be exhausting to try to convince me of, well, anything. There always seems to be one more question, one more assurance, one more what-if that I have in my head that needs to be satisfied. 

And sometimes, I wonder if I'm just hearing what I think I want to hear. If I'm projecting God's voice into my own wishes so that it sounds like He's saying what I want Him to say but really, it's not Him at all. It's me, shouting into my own void and pretending it's something of substance. 

Yes, I waste a lot of my time trying to unravel the Lord in my life, wanting to trust what I'm hearing but knowing there may be very good reasons why I can't, or shouldn't, and wondering if perhaps someone is lying to me - or I am lying to myself - in the Lord's name and wishing there was just truth. Just plain and simple, honest-to-God truth. 

Thank the Lord, there is. 

Paul is known for his salutations, for the greetings that he gives when he writes his letters. If you read the ways that he introduces the Lord, you can learn a lot about who God is. 

In his letter to Titus, Paul introduces God as one who "does not lie" (1:2). That's it. God does not lie. We know God does not lie. We can hang our hats on the truth that God does not lie. 

What that means for someone like me - and I don't believe I'm the only one like me on this - is that I need to put away all my mental gymnastics, all my human woundedness, all my hesitation and simply trust God. 

Because if He does not lie, then what else would I do with His voice?