The ballroom addition to the White House is a perfect illustration.
If you like President Trump, then he’s building a beautiful structure which will be enjoyed by future generations. If you don’t like President Trump, then he’s destroying a beautiful structure which has been enjoyed by past generations.
Same East Wing space. Polar opposite perspectives. This seems to typify life in America.
Though it may be amped up right now, the phenomenon is not really all that new, friends. Psalm 12 jumps off the page as illustrative of life in the days of King David. In Verse 2, we read: “Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.”
I suspect that we’re all guilty as charged, sadly. Spin is all too readily our native language. When we’re caught up in it, we barely recognize it. And our easy 24/7 access to whatever kind of “news” we want allows us to spend most of our time in the echo chamber of our own design. You and I can drown in spin. A double heart for selfish gain can bring us down.
Please let me define “spin” (not the physics variety): the strategic presentation of information to influence another’s perception by highlighting certain facts while downplaying others. Sounds innocent enough. Quite tragically, it’s not. If you’ll please allow me just a small liberty: The wages of spin is death.
According to Gallup News, the confidence of Americans in the mass media has edged down to a new low – with just 28% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in radio, television, and newspapers to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. This is down from 31% in 2024 and 40% in 2020. Seven in 10 U.S. adults now say they have “not very much” confidence or “none at all.” For comparison purposes, when Gallup began gauging trust in media in the 1970s, between 68% and 72% of Americans expressed confidence in reporting.
Any way you look at it, it’s a dismal state of affairs.
But David, in the same psalm, offers us tremendous hope in Verses 6-8: “The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times. You, O Lord, will keep them; you will guard us from this generation forever. On every side the wicked prowl, as vileness is exalted among the children of man.”
“The words of the Lord.” There’s our hope. And only there.
When every other voice around us feels shaky, and evokes doubt in us, you and I can trust God’s Word. We can stand on it, and we can stand firm. We can stake our lives on it, in fact. God’s pure-to-the-nth-degree Word rests upon His pure-to-the-nth-degree character.
Scripture has one ultimate Author, and the Bible tells one main story: the story of Jesus Christ. There are no errors of any kind in the original manuscripts of the Bible. Translations may err in the way they convey the original languages, but the manuscripts penned by the original writers contain no errors or deceit. Not a single one.
Don’t be confused by the false charges people try to level against the Bible. Again, nothing new. Now the Bible isn’t always grammatically sophisticated, as God used real human writers to record it – and the Bible speaks in real human language. The Bible speaks the way real people communicate with each other. We can’t accuse the Bible of inaccuracy, for example, when it speaks without scientific precision about a “sunrise.” We all know that the sun isn’t rising, technically, but we all understand the meaning of “sunrise” and “sunset” – it’s how we speak. Sometimes people try to undermine the authority of Scripture by attacking the “science” in passages where the Bible isn’t saying anything at all about science. Fake news.
Truth can be conveyed with average grammar and with the use of round numbers instead of exact figures. Skeptics of the Bible seem eager to point out “discrepancies” as if they’ve just sunk the battleship. When we say we affirm the inerrancy of Scripture, we mean simply that the Bible always communicates the true state of affairs and never affirms anything contrary to fact.
The true state of affairs. The Bible is where we find it. When “vileness is exalted among the children of man,” you and I have a place to find the truth. Jesus prayed to the Father on behalf of His people (John 17:17): “Sanctify them in the truth; Your Word is truth.” Jesus knew that, regardless of the subject, you and I need the wisdom of God. Without God’s wisdom, we’re internally conflicted. Spiritually schizophrenic. A person with two hearts is a bit of a monster.
A U.S. Supreme Court Justice from 1902 – 1932 and an able wordsmith much like his father, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said that a word is “the skin of a living thought.” In other words (see what I did there?), a word is a sound with a critical meaning – the oral or written expression of someone’s idea. Though that’s true, the Bible is so much more! “For the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).
God’s Word has intrinsic power. When God speaks, things happen! “Let there be light!” Chaos is banished, and things without order are put into right order. All it takes is a Word from God! We move from spiritual schizophrenia to spiritual wholeness by the Word of God.
God’s Word is so much more than some random collection of letters on a page. God’s Word became flesh! A sound floats on the air and soon dies away, but God’s Word is Jesus – who is not only eternal but with us forever! So we can meet the Son of God in the pages of Scripture and hear Him speak directly to us through the “still, small voice” of the Holy Spirit!
I’m happy to report that you don’t have to drown in spin. In the Word of God, we’ve been offered an unsinkable life raft. We’ve been given an objective source of what is real and true – wise and lovely. We can rise above the cesspool of sly deceit which marks this generation.
Jesus tells those who believe in Him that we’re really His disciples if we “continue in” His Word (John 8:31). Think about it. The only way that you and I can “continue in” something is if that something truly endures. If that something holds its value. If that something is reliable from here on out. If that something can never float away and die. That’s God’s Word (Isaiah 40:8)! Jesus promises us (John 8:32): “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free!”
I suspect that the spin will keep spinning.
But we don’t have to.
Pastor Charles
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