Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“They bend their tongues like bows;
they have grown strong in the land for falsehood, and not for truth;
for they proceed from evil to evil,
and they do not know me, says the Lord.”
NL Daily Devotion for Tuesday, November 26, 2024
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Disinformation reigns. We, as a society, can no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood. It’s not an entirely new phenomenon. Clearly, as this passage is a couple thousand years old, we have always had a gift for “bending our tongues like bows” and growing strong in the land “for falsehood, and not for truth.” But in recent years, with the advent of electronic communication of all kinds, the proliferation of falsehood and the relentless undermining of science and reason, and especially the inundation of our outlets with AI-created content, it’s become almost impossible to distinguish reality from falsehood. And, quite frankly, it’s terrifying.
I don’t have a solution. But I do have an exhortation. That we would open our minds and our hearts to genuine self-sacrificial love and service to others. That we would hold every piece of information up to the benchmark of whether it is life-affirming for each and every person, animal, environment, and aspect of what God has created. If it can be used to denigrate, oppress, or diminish the life of what God has created, question it.
How do I discern what is and isn’t disinformation in our modern context?
![1 Kings 17:1-16 [17-24], God’s Care for the Widow](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56b39b61ab48de92d991a40a/bf37035e-33d5-439f-a0d6-a68b02d0f1bc/24-11-03.jpg)
