“For the Word of the Lord is right and true; He is faithful in all He does.” Psalm 33:4
We live in a unique time in terms of information. In the 1970s, the Industrial Age crested and we entered the Information Age. Through the 1980s we were bombarded with information from all types of media. Then, as the 1990s began, the Internet came of age. Now information is everywhere, all the time. We generate more video and written content, every year, than in the previous 100 years combined.
With this increased volume of information has come many new simple and effective ways to produce it and disseminate it to large numbers of people. Enter social media. Online news. Email. Blogs. Everyone can have a voice. Anyone can say anything. So much information, so many people creating it, and so many agendas behind it, that today, it is exceedingly difficult to know one thing about all of the information we have access to: Is it true?
The term “fake news” has come front and center into our culture. It’s a claim anyone and everyone can make about the information they’re receiving. This is not real. It’s fake. False. Untrue. But is it? Who is policing all of this information, and determining what is true, and what is not? The answer is nobody. And everybody. You, yourself, are responsible for determining whether the information you are consuming right now is real or fake.
The reality is that the only way to know what is real is to have some objective measure by which we can judge it. And we have just such a tool available to us. It was written over 1,500 years by 40 different authors, but its consistency and veracity have been tested over and over and over again. Experts, scholars, and theologians agree that for this book to have such consistency, clarity, and authority over such a long period, under such close examination, it is miraculously and wholly true in all respects. That book is, of course, the Bible.
Because we can trust the Bible, we can trust that the truth contained in it is an objective measure of what is true in all circumstances, for all people, eternally. When we want to know whether something is true or not - if we are dealing with fake news - we can hold that information up to the Bible to determine its veracity. Now, this won’t help to know whether the President’s latest Tweet is true or not, but it will help you know what is sinful, what is godly, how to live, and what to live for—the larger questions of life that are often subject to individual interpretation.
In a fake news world, it’s comforting to know that we have a way to determine real truth, for real life.
God, thank You for Your Word, the Bible. Give me insight as I study it daily so that I can know the real Truth, and live by Your truth in all areas of life. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Topics: Truth
