Truth Is Pretty Powerful

I was listening to a lecture by Dr. Jordan Peterson on YouTube. He said something that stuck with me, or rather stood out above over what he was saying, although it wasn’t the point he was trying to make.

Peterson said, “If you are truthful, then what you bring out of potential, is good.”

This is significant because everyone has potential in “X” supply. Certainly, we are all fitted with a great, unknown amount of it.

Potential is unemployed capacity. It is inherent in and to us all. Everyone has unused and undiscovered potential, undefined and undetermined ways and means. We don’t know or understand the width, breadth, or depth of potential in its dormant state. Often potential is not so much discovered as it is revealed. It is realized when most needed. Potential becomes capacity and act when it is necessary to exceed the walls of limit.

What Peterson is saying is that if we are truthful, which is something we can control, then we can extract good from our potential, which is often undefined and unknown. This gives us power and control. Potential is a natural resource built inside of each of us. If we will just be truthful in deed, word, and spirit then we shall have good.

But what is good? Good in life is both process and destination, both cause and effect. We aim for a good life, one that will benefit us and make us happy. But we are also aiming at a target, a destination that has been determined to be good.

The good we are after has been determined to “be” good. Good is in a state of being or condition. Earlier we mentioned that to have the good we must be truthful. From this it is easy to deduce that truth is good and being truthful produces a good state of being as well as a good being.

The “good life” or rephrased as a good existence. A good existence (life) is a line segment. It has definitive beginning and definitive end. Most folks will look at a person, place, or thing as the target that will make them happy. Focusing on the target excludes existence and being, the journey to the destination that is believed will make you happy.

“We are all but sojourners (foreigners) and travelers here on earth….For our conversation (citizenship) is in heaven.” (1 Chronicles 29:15a & Philippians 3:20a)

Good is two separate things; it is the journey and it is the destination. These two goods are independent of each other but can act in conjunction with one another. But once the destination is reached, the journey ends as well as the destination, for you don’t keep travelling after you arrive to where you were headed.

Jesus Christ self-identified as “the way” and “the truth”. By definition, the New Testament word sin means to fall out of the way (journey) and to miss the mark (destination).

Unfortunately for some people, good is none of what we have just talked about. To these folks good is the consumption of an indulgence, experiencing some pleasure. For these people good is gratifying a lust or desire. Attainment of the good is the end of that good. It is the culmination of effort, thought, and desire in an act of consumption. The only thing left for the indulgent person and their idea of good once attained and consumed is repetition. So, the smoker smokes, the drinker drinks, the drug addict shoots up, the player has sex, the gambler gambles, the liar lies, and so on and so on……….

The good of the indulgent and pleasure seeker is constantly sought after, attained, consumed, and then repeated. The good of indulgence and pleasure is a continuous loop, a continuously shrinking loop.

So, in short what Dr. Peterson is saying, at least in my estimation, is that being truthful (like Jesus), which is a personal choice, causes our potential, which is built and hardwired within us all, to produce good in our life all the way to the end of our life as we know it here on earth.

Truth is pretty powerful.

Bill Hitchcock