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The
Traveling Salesman
Problem and the Truth
by Roald Maravillas
In Mathematics, there is a classic conundrum called "The
Traveling Salesman Problem":
"Given the positions of N cities, what is the shortest closed tour in
which each city can be visited once? "
Many cities mean exponential combinations exist to traverse those cities.
If we treat each verse of the Bible as different cities, imagine the
exponential amount of permutations that would result from man's attempt to
"interpret" these verses and weave them into one wholistic picture to
find the great "theological" solution. This sheds some light on the
phenomenon of how and why religion, denominations, and cults arise. Those that
deviate from discovering the one true "solution" are just seeing
"mutations" of the truth even if they profess that they base their
"dogma" or belief on Bible verses. Although they contain subsets of
the truth, their overall profile does not manifest the genuine truth, and their
integrity to represent or lead men to the truth is questionable. This makes them
even more lethal, akin to a malevolent social virus or meme - snagging minds and
spirits away through deception. As expressed by Henry Ford, "An error is
the more dangerous the more truth it contains." - anything that fails to
start from the one core truth is an error, growing deadlier each time it patches
itself with fragments of sub-truths. What many fail to see is that there is only
one truth that can be seen from all the contents of the Bible. In the same way
that there is only one true optimized solution for the "Traveling Salesman
Problem".
The solution is best illustrated by a work of a Korean artist who
meticulously wrote each letter of the Bible's New Testament using a fine tipped pen onto a
large canvas. He adjusted the size and shade of some letters according to a
pattern. The resulting overall picture was an image of Jesus Christ, showing an
analogy that "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us". (Jn
1:14)
Following up on how artists have caught glimpses of the Lord's pattern, the
remarkable artist named Vincent Van Gogh remarked, "It is a very good thing
that you read the Bible...The Bible is Christ, for the Old Testament leads up to
this culminating point. ...Christ alone...has affirmed as a principal certainty,
eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and
the raison d'tre of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater
artist than all other artists, despising marble and clay as well as color,
working in living flesh. That is to say, this matchless artist...made neither
statues nor pictures nor books; he loudly proclaimed that he made...living men,
immortals."
Jesus is the one path that weaves all of the verses into one unified whole.
Consistent, optimized, solid and undeniably true. The truth is not a method, not
a dogma, nor a system, nor religion. Truth is a person reaching out to be
experienced in a one-on-one relationship. In the flesh, Truth is Jesus Himself.
"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father
except through me." - Jesus (John 14:6)
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