Why World News Fits Within Our Bible Study
TruthSetsFree is a daily letter on the wars, markets and negotiations that are shaping the world right now. It was merged into TalkToTheWord from an older version called Ro-Bob's Blob.The name is taken from what Jesus told the disciples who had begun to believe him: that if they held to his word they would know the truth, and the truth would make them free (John 8:31–32). We have taken that seriously in both directions. Freedom comes from knowing what is actually so. And a believer who wants to love the world has to know something true about the world they are being asked to love.
That is harder than it sounds. Most of us meet the news as a set of sides to pick, and picking a side is the quickest way to stop seeing the people inside it. Christ was asked point blank who counts as a neighbour. He answered with a story about a man from the wrong nation, the wrong religion and the wrong side of an old hatred, who stopped on a road when two respectable men had walked past (Luke 10:25–37). The parable does not ask us to feel warmly about a category. It asks us to notice a particular person who is actually there.
Accurate news is how you find out who is actually there. Fourteen seafarers on a burning tanker. A family in a flat under a flight path. A province whose government cannot say who fired from its own territory. None of them chose the quarrel they are inside, and none of them appears in a headline written to make you angry at a country.
How the letter is written, and why that is a Christian question
TruthSetsFree runs to a fixed method. It names its sources. Where two accounts disagree it prints both and refuses to reconcile them. It marks its own reasoning as reasoning rather than dressing it up as fact, and it says plainly when it does not know. Every day it publishes four predictions with a number attached, and grades them against the record a week later — including the ones it got wrong, in public, with the reasons.
That discipline is not a technical preference. The ninth commandment is about testimony, and a false account of your neighbour is a false account whether you invented it or merely repeated it without checking. Being slow to claim more than you can show is a form of honesty, and it is one the internet is actively training out of us.
What you are asked to do with it
Every edition ends with a box called Act On This, tied to that day's argument rather than to a general appeal. It is usually three things, and they are deliberately small enough to actually do.
Pray for the people, not for the outcome. Christ told us to pray for those who persecute us, which rules out praying that one nation's people come off worse (Matthew 5:43–45). Pray for the man still missing, the household under the drones, the officer carrying blame for something he did not do.
Give where the need actually is. Knowing which crisis is real, and which is merely loud, is exactly what accurate reporting is for. John put it bluntly: love shown in deed and in truth rather than in word and talk (1 John 3:18).
Change how you speak about it. Wars run on the habit of talking about a whole people as though they were a single party that can be reached by a single instrument. Refusing that habit in your own conversation costs nothing and is not nothing. Bear with one another, forgive as you were forgiven, and be kind and tenderhearted about people you will never meet (Colossians 3:12–13; Ephesians 4:32).
Tolerance, in the sense the New Testament actually uses, is not agreeing that everything is fine. It is forbearance: staying at the table with people you think are wrong, because Christ stayed at the table with you. The news gives you daily practice.
Where to go next
What love requires of us
Where to give
Further reading
TruthSetsFree — Christian News
Read the world accurately. Then love the people in it, including the ones on the other side of the map. That is the whole of what TruthSetsFree is for.