I don't know about you, but when it comes to the news these days, I am finding it harder and harder to know what to believe. It used to be that if you heard something on the news you could pretty much consider it to be reliable information. But not any more!

Perhaps it's because much of our news these days seems to come through social media sources like FaceBook, Twitter, or Pinterest where it's really more about opinions than it is about objective reporting. Maybe it's because the older I get the more I realize just how biased the 'objective' news media have been all along! Or maybe it's because we live in a world that has become so communication intensive that more of the world's battles are being fought in the battlefield of the media than on the battlefields of France (or wherever).

But perhaps it's always been that way. Newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst said in 1897, "You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war." In other words, he saw his paper, the New York Journal, not as a means of merely reporting world affairs - but as means of biased propaganda to influence and control world affairs. That trend has certainly had it's ups and downs over the decades. But it seems to me the news media of our day have become little more than mercenaries in a global propaganda war. A war in which truth and objectivity were early casualties. There comes a point where you really can't tell who is telling you the truth about anything. And perhaps no one is. Everything seems to have some kind of 'spin' on it.

So what's a body to do? How can we hope to make good decisions and form accurate opinions about moral questions and world affairs when we are afloat, as it were, in a veritable sea of disinformation? Thankfully, there is a way.

For myself, I find that I turn more and more often to the Word of God to get my bearings. In the midst of a hurricane of deceits, fabrications, misinformation, libel, slander, propaganda and counter-propaganda, and outright lies - God's Word never wavers. The storms of public opinion that rage across the airwaves do nothing to change God's opinion. Things in our time will most certainly unfold according to the Bible no matter which way the wind blows. Now more than ever, the church needs to get its news from the Word of God and make its plans accordingly, rather than being blown about by the "waves and the sea roaring."