Buy the Truth

“Buy the truth, and do not sell it; buy wisdom, instruction and understanding” (Proverbs 23:23, ESV). One night in 1972 burglars broke into a room in a rather nondescript hotel in Washington D.C., and stole some of the room’s contents.

Thus began the Watergate scandal that finally brought down the planet’s most powerful man. I am “mature” enough to remember those days. It is a wound that still festers in the American psyche.

It seems that we never really got to the bottom of the Watergate scandal. Nixon’s supporters obstructed the investigation at every step; Nixon’s detractors threw every accusation they could at him, some quite ridiculous. What really happened? We still don’t really know.

But I remember the question the presiding judge asked, because it cut so distinctly through the fog of political warfare like a laser:

“What did the president know,” John J. Sirica asked, “and when did he know it?”

He was asking for the truth. Whatever the truth was. While America bled, while politicians on both sides of the issue played politics, what the nation needed was the truth, no matter how hurtful. A clean cut is always better than a jagged tear!

It’s hard to make a decision without the facts. When children hide a doctor’s bad news from a parent “to protect him,” or a gossip adds imaginative details to his “juicy information,” or a sinner declines to listen to a message from God regarding the need to change, they are failing to buy the one commodity that they truly need.

Buy the truth. And hang on to it.

–by Stan Mitchell