“God is absolute veracity.”

In my early days working as a draftsman at a Nuclear Power Plant, I was asked to “check against original” the plans that were being upgraded to the computer. This has always stuck with me as good analogy as to what truth is. Truth is the original that we check ourselves against. If we have an error, we could have a disaster, so our life is spent rooting out places in our life that doesn't square with the original, and fixing those areas.

God is truth. He is the original that we check ourselves against, to see if we are living rightly. He is that template external to ourselves, that we can overlay our vellum on to check and verify that we have accurately copied ourselves.

Truth is then, something which we must assent to even if we don't like it. The truth of the Earth revolving around the Sun, or the truth that whatever I throw into the air will come down, and maybe hit me on the head, will remain whether or not I agree to it. Some might argue about if such a truth exists in the realm of human actions, but certainly it is true in the realm of science. Pontius Pilate's “What is truth?” (John 18:38) surely underscores the idea that truth is flexible in our society, as it was seen as flexible by some even in Jesus' day. However, God is not flexible like that, He is Truth as science would see it – an unchanging reality that all else is compared to. This is why the dogma states God is absolute veracity, that He is absolute truth. This is a clear rebuttal to those who might claim god is a relative truth, dependent upon the believer and the times and places.

God is the absolute truth for us because He is the fashioner of all that exists. He alone knows the blueprints to the universe, he alone is that architect and builder of all that is, and it conforms to His plan. Therefore, we know that if we check our actions against His original plans then we can live a life more in conformity to how the world actually works. And what is His plan? It is the Law of Love, explained in Luke 10:25-28:

“There was a scholar of the law who stood up to test him and said, "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?" He said in reply, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." He replied to him, "You have answered correctly; do this and you will live."

Further Reading: Wisdom (the discernment of what is right) guides us to salvation (Wisdom 10).

Note: This reading comes from what Protestants would refer to as an apocryphal text, but what I as a Catholic I would call a deuterocanonical text. If you can find this reading in your Bible, you have either a very old Protestant Bible (or a modern reproduction), or any Catholic Bible. For more information on this topic, and generally why we have the Old Testament we use today, see the Catholic Encyclopedia at New Advent.