Dealing With Media OverloadSýnishorn

False Omniscience

What should be the Christian response to everything we see? Every morning, whether it’s on Facebook or Twitter or theWall Street Journal,whatever the medium might be, we’re bombarded with the concerns of everyone across the entire globe. The news cycle is not limited to what is happening here in Houston, Texas, nor with what is happening in the evangelical church. There’s a pandemic all over; there are riots about race over there; there is concern in the Middle East. How should Christians respond to all of these things that hit us, every day, all day long?

It is good for us to remember that the ways we are living right now were not even possible 50 or 40 years ago. Now we have a whole world in our hands via our smartphones. Prior to that, prior to the internet age where people have immediate access to unending information, we didn’t live like this. One got up in the morning and spent the day in one’s own community, with one’s own work to do, family, and church. It’s not that one was careless with respect to the rest of the world; we just didn’t have access to all this information.

We are taught to care about God’s work in the world, to pray for the advance of the gospel in missions. All that’s perfectly appropriate, but the idea that we are meant to carry a world’s full of troubles every moment of our lives is not. This idea is something brand new, and I believe it is absolutely counterproductive. It explains a lot of the anxiety that you see in people in general, and even in God’s people. We are trying to live lives we were never meant to live. Our God is omniscient; we are not. But now we have a false, technological omniscience. We know what is happening in this country, in that country, in this moment, in that moment. It is a flood of information on an individual level, and we were never meant to live like this.

We must discipline ourselves to live the life that God has given us. We have to be intentional about the media we consume. We must choose to avoid media overload. It used to be that one had to choose to go get the information; now one must be intentional to avoid it. It surrounds us almost anywhere we go.