As we continue with the first element of The Armor of God in The Belt of Truth sequence, we move on to the last aspect of its four-part makeup, complex truth. Complex truth simply claims that the other three truths—objective, subjective, and normative—are forever true. In other words, The Belt of Truth is a system or an arrangement of God that is always true in activity and flux. Jesus spoke of this truth system when he shared these words with the woman at the well, "Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks."
An excellent way to think of complex truth is to imagine a human body, preferably yours! As you can see, it's very complicated (See 1 Corinthians 12 for a biblical understanding of the body). Let's think about it as the Apostle Paul did in the New Testament. Like it or not (subjective truth), your body is a whole thing (objective truth). However, as you know, it has many parts or systems to it, the nervous system, endocrine system, skeletal system, etc. To make things even more complex, each system has sub-systems. It's incredibly complex, and the crazy thing is that all the body's systems must come to an agreement (normative truth) to be healthy and active in all kinds of environments. It's crazy how nature itself glorifies God.
The problem with complex truth is people are the ones who make it problematic; rather than understanding reality in all of its beautiful arrangements, the whole truth, we complicate things by thinking in part of the entire thing and miss the complete picture. Nothing in detail, including "you," can ever function as a whole in part; to attempt to do so is to live outside of God's plan. As the teacher in Ecclesiastes put it, "This is all that I have learned: God made us plain and simple, but we have made ourselves very complicated (7:29 [GNT]).
To not complicate things, Christians need to learn the strength of simplicity. Simplicity is a discipline that comes with maturity as the Christian puts on the armor of God. It's learning a skill-set that allows a person to gain wisdom through understanding how to listen and judge the whole, discern it in its parts, and then reason it back together to learn and gain truth as Jesus understood it. Hence the Apostle Paul's words, "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5).
To live a simple life doesn't mean to be simple-minded; it means to be focused and a straight thinker to understand elaborate realities, be it practical or spiritual. May God give you—and me—the courage, the wisdom, and the strength to consistently hold to God's complex truth. To do so is to put on The Belt of Truth!
Pastor Drake