Have you ever done any cooking or baking? Since mostly adults are reading this, I assume your answer is yes. You’ve likely followed a recipe or two in your day. You know the difference between guessing how much of an ingredient you need and measuring out the amount the recipe recommends. You may know someone who thinks guessing is more fun or knows better than the recipe’s author (you may even be that someone), but before you have tested your hypothesis you can’t know that for sure. It may look good, but is the taste how you imagined? The proof is in the pudding as they say. Even then, it’s still subjective. If you believe your experimentation was a success, you will be more likely to try it again. Perhaps as you gain experience you even fancy yourself a good chef or a baker. Maybe others even agree. Your experience and ability serves you and others well. But, when all is said and done, what has been proved? Some people enjoy and share your preference. It may be just as likely or at least possible that others don’t enjoy or share your preference. This is true of all things subjective, right?
Let’s switch gears for a minute. Do you like swimming? Hopefully you have had the chance to swim in a pool on a hot day. Have you ever wondered how you can know the right mix of chemicals in the pool? Some of you are “experts” in this area, though maybe out of necessity more than your choice to play with chlorine and other chemicals. Some of you may be like, “Chlorine is the least of my worries.” If you went through science class in school you probably learned about pH levels in water. You likely had the chance to do simple experimenting and/or testing. If you have talked to someone who has prepped a pool or done it yourself, then you probably heard that person (or yourself) comment about how it is a lot less fun than when you got to play around in science class. I won’t go into the process other than to say there are objective levels and standards that need to be reached in multiple areas for a pool to be considered safe and ready for swimming. It may look good and you may want to use a guessing style similar to when you are cooking or baking, but since there are ways to test it (WHICH DON’T INCLUDE TASTING IT) then you can know if you’ve met the mark. Success is easily measured and it doesn’t matter what you or anyone feels about it. If the levels are slightly off, you probably could swim without much harm, but that doesn’t mean you should swim. You have to consider for yourself the risk and consequences you are willing to deal with.
Now, let’s go in one final direction. Can something be beyond subjective or objective and be considered truth? I say yes, but allow me to make my case. I’ll borrow some words from this dude named John who spent some quality time with Jesus:
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; 3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming, and now it is already in the world. 4 You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world. 5 They are from the world, therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are from God. The one who knows God listens to us; the one who is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
-1 John 4:1-6
That seems like a pretty straightforward test. Got Jesus = from God. Reject Jesus = Not from God, chilling with the antichrist. Pretty simple. If only cooking, baking, or prepping a pool were so easy! Unlike those activities and the relatively minor consequences should your tests show you have missed the mark; failing the Jesus test has catastrophic, eternal consequences! There’s a time for a little subjectivity and guessing, just as there is a time for measuring, testing, and objectivity. This test is THE objective test and it’s based on God’s subjectivity, not ours! Rather than using your time to experiment, I highly recommend you follow the step-by-step recipe God gave us to salvation. I’ll summarize it below:
Step 1 - Jesus
Step 2 - Follow Step 1