“Will you speak falsely for God
and speak deceitfully for him?”
– Job 13:7
As Job rebukes his “friends” for their false and hurtful theology, he highlights a problem we should all remember in this era of social media. There are many people who speak with a false piety about God. Who wrap themselves in religion while sharing words of insight or prophecy God didn’t give. Who speak confidently about God’s perspective on people or situations without a genuine biblical basis. Who radically distort the character of God while claiming (perhaps even believing) that they love Him. Be on the lookout for them, because they now have algorithms aiming their content straight at you!
Job is right about these folks. Later in the book, God will rebuke the men and have Job offer sacrifices on their behalf because they’ve spoken falsely about His nature. What did they do? Said things that were true but incomplete about God’s justice, knowledge, and power. Things that were immature and inadequate in understanding the difference between earthly life in a fallen world and eternal life with the Lord. Inadequate in understanding the existence of Satan and his role in testing the faith of God’s people. Immature in understanding that God’s perfect justice will play out in eternity but that there will be injustice on earth until Jesus returns. Then they used those partial truths as weapons against Job, declaring that obviously his suffering was being inflicted by God as punishment for some hidden sin. This was utterly false as the earlier chapters clearly revealed.
So, be careful with what you watch or read from your “feed”. Be careful about what you like, share, or forward. Test it against the Bible. Test it against the character of God. Test it against the words, actions, and attitudes of Jesus. If it sounds exactly like what you want to hear, test it again! The Bible is clear that we must be careful about things that really make our itching ears happy! Understand that the way God sovereignly rules over this world is infinitely more complicated that humans can understand. So be careful of anything that is “too simple”. Most importantly, spend more time reading and listening to God’s Word than you do reading and listening to people online. Get offline and #FollowJesus out into the world instead. Share His good news with others., Be His hands and feet of love to those in need.