Five Safety Nets for Truth

Lessons From the Halfway to Hell Club

Construction on the Golden Gate Bridge began in 1933 and was completed in 1937. It was the middle of the Great Depression and the unemployment rate was 25%. Conditions on the bridge were cold, foggy, and windy and the work was exceedingly dangerous. But until early 1937, only one man died on the job. This remarkable safety record was the result of installing safety nets under the bridge. Over the course of construction, 19 men fell from the bridge into those nets and lived to tell about it. They called themselves the Halfway To Hell Club.

As the bridge neared completion, tragedy struck on February 17, 1937, when a section of scaffolding fell off the bridge with 12 men and broke through the net. Only two men survived and their family and friends wished there’d been another net.

The Preciousness of Truth

In the coming year, we’ll once again be overwhelmed with an avalanche of information, disinformation, and misinformation in the media. Truth will be mixed with lies, fact with fiction, accuracy with errors, and insightful tips with bad advice. The lies will come from the enemies of our nation and the enemy of our souls but mark it down: they will come.

Willful gullibility is a sin. God’s Word repeatedly commands us, “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers” (Jas. 1:16). We have a moral obligation to acquire and sharpen the skills necessary to discern the truth. God requires this of us because he loves the truth and cannot lie (Nu. 23:19). The truth is precious to him, and so it should be to us. “Buy truth and do not sell it,” writes Solomon (Pr. 23:23). In his kindness, God has given us at least five safety nets that help us catch the truth that’s mixed with lies coming at us at terminal velocity. We let the lies pass by, but the truth we must catch in the nets.

Five Safety Nets For Truth

1. Maintain a constant conversation with God (Scripture and prayer).

To read Scripture is to listen to God. Through the written text, God speaks to us, directs us, corrects us, encourages us, and warns us. Like all communication, we must listen carefully by practicing the proper principles of interpretation. Just as you expect people to take care to understand your words correctly, so does God. Don’t take his words out of context or misquote him. Carefully parse his sentences and analyze his text. Study history to understand the background and learn vocabulary so you properly define his words.

To pray is to talk to God. As we bring him our praise, confessions, thanksgiving, and requests, we do the talking while God listens. One of the things we ask for is understanding of his Word.

A working knowledge of God’s word is the best defense against lies and error. If, for example, the headlines tell us that someone discovered the bones of Jesus in Jerusalem or that a man can be a woman if he chooses, our immediate response is, “Nope. Not true.” We know it’s not true because God tells us in his Word it’s not true.

2. Practice genuine fellowship in an “iron-sharpening” church.

But some people claim today that their Bible tells them things that no one has ever heard in the Bible before. For example, many professing Christians now believe that same-sex marriage is compatible with the Bible. President Barak Obama famously justified same-sex marriage by appealing to his paraphrase of the Golden Rule: “treat others the way you want to be treated.”

Yet there’s no historical precedent in two thousand years of Christianity for that interpretation of Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:12. This demonstrates how we can make the Bible say anything we want it to mean, for personal pleasure or political expediency. That’s why we need the church. God gives the church gifted teachers who are able to explain and communicate Scripture in a way that’s faithful to the text. These shepherds are called to instruct you in “sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it”(Titus 1:9).

Proverbs 27:17 says that “Iron sharpens iron and one man sharpens another.” In an iron-sharpening church, we help sharpen one another in our discernment skills. In genuine fellowship, we can help each other understand Scripture better, identify blind spots, increase knowledge, and find facts we weren’t aware of. Many of our brothers and sisters are not only proficient in the Word, but they are experts in the fields of science, construction, engineering, history, medicine, law, military, business, education and a host of other disciplines. Increase your knowledge by learning from your fellow Christians so you can identify misinformation when you hear it.

3. Use a free press to triangulate the truth.

There will be a multitude of truth claims that come our way that the Bible does not specifically address. We can’t use the Bible to check the claim that there are devastating floods in North Carolina, catastrophic fires in California, a brutal war in Ukraine, or an election result in America. Still, current events are things we should know about and we find out about them through the media.

Our nation’s founders brilliantly bequeathed to us the gift of the First Amendment which guarantees freedom for two institutions well suited to check the power of the state: the church and the press. For our experiment in self-government to work, our citizens must be virtuous and educated. Though not all the Founders were genuine Christians, virtually all of them viewed the ethical system taught by Jesus as superior. But good citizens also have to be informed, and for that we he have the press.

A free press creates competition between news sources, and competition is usually in the best interest of the consumer. When the press is free, competing news agencies consistently hold each other in check by reporting not only on our politicians and our neighbors, but on each other. Even the most balanced and objective journalists are somewhat biased, so we are more likely to discover the truth by searching for a consensus of what reputable news sources are reporting. When you depend on only one or two sources that tend to tell you what you want to hear, you may be letting other people do your thinking for you.

Triangulating the truth, requires us not only to read and listen deeply, but to read and listen widely. I often listen to Fox News and CNN describe or analyze the same event and conclude they are living in parallel universes. Both sources are selective in what they publish and often quote a politician’s words out of context to spin the reporting one way or another. “The one who states his case first seems right,” warns the writer of Proverbs, “until the other comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17). Consult multiple sources.

4. Find facts uncovered in court.

A free press isn’t free to publish anything it wants. As with all our freedoms, there are limits when the freedoms of others are impinged. That’s why we need the fourth safety net of the courts.

When a free press fails to keep itself from lying, there is a way for victims of the lies to hold the press accountable through the justice system. One of the purposes for God-ordained government is to maintain public order by settling these kinds of disputes. It’s one thing to make a claim on social media, but it’s quite another to prove the claim in court. Legal proceedings are intentionally slow and methodical, in an attempt to remove as much passion as possible in order to focus on the facts.

Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but both have been sued for libel. In both cases, their lawyers (provided by Fox News and MSNBC News respectively) argued in their defense that no reasonable viewer would believe that either Tucker or Rachel were stating actual, objective facts in their news shows. Unfortunately, many Americans think that’s exactly what they’re stating. Likewise, many Americans believe that Dominion Voting Systems was involved in a conspiracy to steal the presidential election in 2020 because Fox News said so. Dominion took Fox to court and Fox ended up paying a $787 million settlement to Dominion. To date, no evidence has been produced in court to support the claim that the election was stolen.

For Christians in America who are willing to work a little harder, there’s a treasure trove of facts to be found in court cases.

5. Cultivate critical thinking and research skills.

The last safety net of truth is your own reasonableness. There will be plenty of lies in a free press and human courts. Witnesses can commit perjury, judges can be bribed, juries can be swayed by emotion and prejudice. And that’s just one of the reasons that God commands us to think.

Paul told the Corinthian Christians “Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Cor. 14:20). Children are easily deceived, but mature thinking is a discipline cultivated over time.

When the Philippian believers were tempted to be anxious over their circumstances, Paul commanded them, “Let your reasonableness be known to everyone” (Phil. 4:5). As I wrote for The Gospel Coalition,

“Reasonableness” is the fair, equitable, and impartial thinking required of a good and wise judge. It was originally an expression for a “balanced, intelligent, decent outlook . . . a considerate, thoughtful, attitude in legal relationships.” A reasonable person is judicious—not given to extreme opinions, carried away by passions, abusive in leadership, harsh in speech, or reactionary to personal insults. If anxiety is the disease, reasonableness is the cure.

The critical thinking skills required in 21^st century are greater and more complex than those required in the 1^st century, but we have a duty to acquire them and teach them to our children. Christians today would do well to learn to read laterally, read for comprehension, assess credible sources, seek primary sources, identify logical fallacies, recognize bias, understand the algorithms, practice impartiality, avoid emotional reasoning, communicate clearly, and stay curious.

The Role of the Holy Spirit

Even if we fix these five safety nets firmly in place, we’re still unable to capture the truth in our own power. In every step in our search for truth, we must depend on God the Holy Spirit. Paul told the Corinthian church that “we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God” (1 Cor. 2:12). At all times, no matter the subject matter, ask the Holy Spirit to “guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16:13). After all, “the heart is deceitful above all things” (Jer. 17:9), and “There is a way that seems right to a man but its end is the way of death” (Pr. 14:12). Knowing that we are totally dependent on the Holy Spirit to discover and discern the truth keeps us humble. We can’t take pride in our superior knowledge or insight. If we have found the truth, that’s only by God’s grace.