November 25, 2025

Daily Reflections for a Life of Faith

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Welcome to Whispers of Grace. As an artist and scholar of religion, I hope to bring something unique and worthwhile. These reflections, devotions, or whatever you choose to call them, are personal. These are my thoughts as I struggle to live in the same world and serve the same God as you. I pray that they bring value when you read them, as they do to me when I write them.

-Rondall Reynoso

Alternative Facts vs. Eternal Truth (Hebrews 10:16)

“This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.”

Hebrews 10:16

Reflection

Hebrews 10 is a rich and dense passage in the Bible. There is a ton of essential theology surrounding this one verse.

Before this verse, the author discusses how the Jewish law is just a shadow, how animal sacrifices cannot erase sin, how God has always wanted mercy rather than sacrifice, and how Christ became the single perfect offering.

Wow… that is a frightfully terse summary of fifteen packed verses!

The author then claims that the Holy Spirit said, “I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more,” and followed up with verse sixteen.

God has spoken to humanity through progressive revelation. He spoke to the patriarchs of the faith, then provided the Mosaic Law, then spoke through the prophets, all leading up to the ultimate revelation, Christ Jesus incarnate. The author of Hebrews said as much when he wrote that the law was “only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these realities.” Jesus is the true form.

According to Jesus, love is the fulfillment of the law. What was written on our hearts and minds was not the hundreds of Jewish laws. It was the one law that fulfilled them all.

When we enter eternity, Jesus does not remember our sins or lawless deeds. He simply assesses how we fulfilled the law of love. Faith without works is dead because love that holds no compassion for those around us is not love.

We have a tendency to worry about whether or not we are sinning. We are worried about whether or not we are doing what Jesus promised He would forget. That is a backward focus.

Instead, we should focus on whether we are loving well. Are we living out the law of love that the Holy Spirit wrote on our hearts and minds?

A Quote to Consider

“Truth is the highest thing that man can keep.”

-Geoffrey Chaucer

The transcendentals, the Good, the True, the Beautiful, have become very important to my theology over the last fifteen years. Part of the idea of the transcendentals is that they are “convertible.” What is Good is also True. What is True is also Beautiful. And God is entirely all three of these.

A god who is not Good is not God. A god who is not Beautiful is not God. A god who is not True is not God.

So, in some ways, Truth is no higher than either Goodness or Beauty. And of course, one can argue that to keep any of these three convertible transcendentals fully, someone must keep them all. But we are not God, so we cannot fully keep any of them.

These ideas are also in tension with a lot of popular contemporary thought. For most people, these are all subjective ideas. For example, Beauty, for many people, is in the eye of the beholder. Idioms such as “To each their own,” “there’s no accounting for taste,” and “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” all point to the idea that, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Over the last few decades, the prominence of the phrase “my truth” hints that many people view even Truth as relative.

When the phrase “alternative facts” hit our culture, along with the political realities that brought it into common usage, we were reminded that most people hold to the idea, the deep-seated notion, that some things are true while others are not.

Democratic politician Patrick Moynihan famously wrote in a Washington Post column, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Republican candidate Mitt Romney cleverly riffed off this quote in a 2012 presidential debate when he told President Obama, “Mr. President, you’re entitled to your own airplane, your own house, but not your own facts.”

There is something about our desire for Truth, despite our battles over what is true. Still, on some level, we all seem to agree that Truth is a thing and that it has value.

I would argue that there is an objective reality to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. However, I would also acknowledge that such realities are often hard to apprehend. Though we should try. While I question whether Chaucer was correct in saying that Truth is a higher thing than Goodness or Beauty, I do believe it is right up there.

I’ve been known to say that I believe in God because, ultimately, I believe He is True.

Prayer

Spirit of the living God,

Inscribe Your law of love afresh on my heart and mind today. Let Truth guide me, Goodness shape me, and Beauty shine through me, for the glory of Christ.

Amen.

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Daily Reflections for a Life of Faith

Whispers of Grace is a series of personal reflections written by Rondall Reynoso, a long-time Christian, scholar of religion, and an artist. Each reflection begins with a Bible verse, continues with some honest thoughts about life and faith, and closes with a simple prayer.

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