Fake News

Imagine if someone, who barely knows you, begins to describe you to others, misrepresenting your character, your history, the attributes of your very being. Or what if they did indeed tells some truths about you, but only a few select truths out of context that support their false narrative about you. Would you be content to just leave your reputation in the hands of strangers?

No one likes “fake news”, a mild way of describing lies and deceit, deliberate or not. But fake news is nothing new. It’s been with us all through human history, and is described even in the first few chapters of Genesis in the Bible.

In Genesis, a false narrative was already being spun about the character of God that helped Adam and Eve make their fateful decision to disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit. In chapter 2, before creating Eve, God had instructed Adam “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

Later, when questioned by Satan in the form of a serpent, Eve put a different spin on this command: “‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

So where did “and you must not touch it” come from? Did Adam distort God’s command when he taught Eve what God had instructed him? Did Eve exaggerate the command deliberately to the serpent, making God seem like an overbearing tyrant with unreasonable rules? It might seem like a small little twist, but this might have been the beginning of “fake news”, and it had a devastating impact.

Maybe there was a progression of falsehoods, from Adam’s distortion to Eve’s exaggeration to Satan’s deception when he claimed “You will not surely die”, thus calling God a liar. That progression escalated quickly, resulting in Cain’s murder of his brother Abel in the very next generation, and the creation of idols and the worship of false gods in generations to come.

As sinful and flawed human beings, we might not mind a little fake news about us now and then, because much of it is to our benefit, making us seem to be better than we really are. But for a perfect being like God, any falsehood can only serve to distract from His perfection, and to corrupt His perfect creation.

This is why, during an outreach conversation with a young man named Nicholas from Columbia, I asked where his beliefs about God came from. Nicholas had described in some detail his ideas about God, but it needed to be pointed out that his ideas were only the product of his own imagination and wishful thinking. We need a source for truth outside ourselves, and the source needs to be based on God’s representation of Himself, rather than the ideas and opinions of others.

This is why God’s revelation of Himself, in the person, work, and teachings of Jesus, and in the words of scripture, needs to be our source of authoritative teaching about who God is. Satan questioned Eve about God, asking “Did God really say...?” He did this for the sake of undermining God’s truth.

We need to ask the same question with an opposite purpose – to determine God’s truth. And we need to check with his Word ourselves - not the fake news, the half-truths, the distortions, exaggerations and outright lies of others – in order to find that truth for ourselves.