Fake News, Real News? What's The Difference? It's Not What You Think.

I notice it pretty much every day I drive home.  How can I miss it?  It’s huge.  It’s yellow. It has big bold type.   And the billboard begins with these words that I’ve heard a lot. It asks.  “Have you had enough of the fake news?”   What’s funny is right after that question, it gives you news that isn’t really news at all.  It’s a campaign advertisement.   And that advertisement doesn’t feel all that real.  To be honest, it feels a little fake. 

And that’s the point.  To some extent, all the political news out there or at least the way people view that, is kinda fake.  I’m not talking about its factual accuracy.  No.  I’m talking about how folks often act as if that news is the most real thing in the world.  I mean. It is real, sure, decisions leaders make have real consequences.  In this pandemic, they even have life and death ones. 

But life has far deeper realities than that news.   But we can miss it.  We can act as if this leader gets elected or this leader doesn’t, that calls for abject despair, weeping and gnashing of teeth. Life is over as we know it.  It’s almost a form of false worship.   And honestly, it’s a false worship I get caught up in.  

Yet, here’s the appalling truth.  Over the course of history, empires have risen and fell.  This nation we love so much, it won’t last forever.  It won’t.  No nation has.   Empire after empire once dominated the world, the Akkadians or the Kush or the Indus, and they are gone, long gone. And don’t feel bad if you have never heard of any of those.  I had to look them up on Wikipedia.  In other words, one day, our nation will be like theirs.  It won’t be fake news. It won’t even be old news.  It won’t even really be news at all.

But this news, this news never gets old.  And this news gives you the perspective you need, we all need, on the good and bad news days of these times.  In fact, once you know this news, you know a truth that can never be shaken, that stands no matter what struggles you face.  What is this news?  Here God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12

Do you see what God is telling you in these words?  God is telling you what you desperately need, what everyone desperately needs.   God is giving you news, wondrous news, unexpected news, incredibly good news.   And when you understand that’s what God is bringing you, it frees you from getting stressed out about all the other news.   For you know this news trumps them all. 

Yet, you can miss it.  You can miss that’s what God is giving you.  God is giving you news.  In fact, that’s the essence, the heart of Christianity, that it’s news.   Do you understand what I mean by that?  

Thousands of years ago, the philosopher, Aristotle, created a helpful way of seeing things in the world.  He called it substance and accidents.   And what he meant by those words is that you need to see in life what is essential and what is incidental.  Let me explain with an idea I got from the preacher Tim Keller.  

Let’s say I have a ball of playdoh and a steel pole.  What if I asked you the core difference between these things, between play doh and steel?   And you responded.  Oh that’s simple, one is round and one is straight.   Now, come on would that be right?   No way.   That’s incidental.  That’s not a core difference.  No, the core difference goes to something deeper, something that cannot be changed, that makes these things different no matter what shape you find them in. 

So, what is that essence for Christianity?  After all, you’ll find all sorts of different varieties of Christianity, different worship experiences, different languages, even different beliefs about certain things.   That can’t be the essence.   Now, you might think.  Okay, it’s the good things Christians are called to do, loving others, giving, forgiving, stuff like that.  But you’ve got folks that don’t even believe in God, much less Jesus, and they do all that stuff, sometimes better than Christians.  Now, you might say, well, the difference has to be in the love, right?  We say it every week.   God loves you no matter what.   And that is getting closer but you’re not quite there yet.   So, what is missing?   Well, the arm is missing.   You don’t have the arm. 

You see, that’s what this passage is telling you.  It’s pointing you to the essence.  It’s pointing you to the arm.   You see it just a few verses into what we read.   God is letting Isaiah know of something startling, amazing, shocking that God is going to do.   And God tells you what that will be in two provocative questions.   “Who has believed what we have heard?  And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”  

When the Bible talks about the arm of the Lord, it is talking about something powerful God is doing.   The arm of the Lord delivers Israelites out of their slavery to the Egyptians.  And how did God do that?   God did stuff, powerful, history-making stuff.  

And God is saying, in this day, when this happens, God is going to do something powerful, something history-making, something big.  God is going to make news.  

You see.   Jesus didn’t come to tell you what to do, though certainly he did do that.  But that doesn’t get to the heart, to the essence of God’s mission.  Jesus didn’t come to tell you what to do.  Jesus came to do; to do a powerful, news making thing.  That’s what the word gospel means.  It means Good News.  The gospel isn’t advice.  It’s news. 

In other religions, it doesn’t really matter so much if the stories about the founders aren’t true.    The essence isn’t so much what the founder did.  It’s what the founder taught.   The founder gives you advice on life, gaining peace, meaning, enlightenment.   But in Jesus, God didn’t come to deliver advice.  God came to make news.  If the gospel was just advice, it wouldn’t even make any sense.

Think about it.  Take Christmas.   Jesus gets born in a manger.  What’s the moral of that story?   In the right circumstances, homeless childbirth can be kinda good.   Of course not. It has no moral.  It’s not even a story.  It’s news.  The arm of the Lord is being revealed.   God is doing something, something God has never done before. 

Or let’s go to the cross, the news to which this prophecy points.  Does that story make any sense, if it’s not news?   Now, you might say, well it’s inspirational. But is it?   I mean, what’s the point?  When evil comes, just give in and let them kill you?  If that’s the point, it’s pretty twisted.   

Or let’s think of it another way.  Let’s say you and I were visiting New York, and we went to the top of the Empire State Building.   And I said to you.  “I want to show you how much I love you.  Watch.”   Then I climb up on the ledge and I jump, plummeting to my death.   Are you going to say? “Wow, look at how that person loved me!”  No, you’re going to be thinking.  What’s wrong with that person?  What were they thinking?

But what if, I was doing something stupid up on the building, and as a result I was about to fall.  But you pulled me out of the way, you saved me, but as a result of saving me, you fell instead.

Here’s the essence of the Gospel.  Something happened in history, something so powerful, so earth shattering, it changed everything, it changed everything irrevocably and forever.  And if that’s not true, if it’s not news, well, then it not only doesn’t make any sense, it’s kinda messed up.

So, what did God come to do?  God came to save us from ourselves.  In this passage, Isaiah uses every word he can think of to describe human brokenness, infirmities, diseases, transgressions, iniquities.   But all the words point to one problem, the problem Isaiah lays out in verse 6.  “All we like sheep have gone astray; and we have all turned to our own way.”

I think my son must have been around three when this happened, and I gotta tell you, it was devastating.   We had gone to Target to get a birthday gift for a friend of his.  And my son was so excited.  He picked out a really cool toy.  As we went to check out, he was so happy.  But then he realized the awful truth.   He wasn’t getting this toy.  No, his friend was getting it.   And he broke into tears.  And he asked me.  “What about me?  What do I get?”   And when I explained to him, well, he got the joy of giving something nice to his friend, well, that didn’t seem all that great at all.  No, he wanted the toy.  

And why?  It’s because all of us want the toy.  All of us get trapped in ourselves, in what we want, what we need, what we’re scared that we’re not going to get.  It’s always me-first.   We’re all focused on our own way.   Last week, when I put the shutters on the church’s windows, I wanted pictures so we could post on Facebook and everyone could see what I was doing.  Why? It was about me not about the shutters. 

This past week, I was heading to work.  I saw a big turtle trapped on the side of the highway.  So, I doubled back, crossed the road, picked the turtle up and carried him someplace safe.  Then later that day, I realized.  I could have taken pictures and posted them, shown the world my good deed.   But I hadn’t.  I was so sad.  Then I realized.  I could use it here as an illustration.  Ka-ching!   It wasn’t about the turtle. It was about me.  

And like sheep, who when they wander off, always get into trouble, when we go our own way, it wrecks us.  It wrecks our world.   Every act of evil, every messed-up moment or action or word in our lives comes down to two words.  Me first.  Me first.          

And why do we go our own way?  Why is it me first?   It’s because deep down, we have a fear.  No one really cares about me, ultimately, except me.   If I don’t take care of me, no one will.   No one loves me like that.   And guess what, you’re right, at least, when it comes to people.  After all, all of us are trapped in me first.  We all can’t get out of our own way. 

But all that began, the Bible tells us, when we started to doubt the love of God, when we stopped believing that God really loves us.   So, we went our own way, like a sheep that wanders off from the shepherd.   And the more we wander, the most lost we become.  But with sheep, the shepherd comes.  He searches.  He saves.  Why?  The shepherd really does care about the sheep.

And that’s the news.  God came for us.  And God didn’t simply risk his life.   God gave it up to save you, to save me.   In our fearful, self-obsessed ways, we go, your life for mine.   But God goes.   Here’s what I do.  My life for yours.   In the book of Hebrews, it tells us that for the joy that was set before him, Jesus endured the cross, disregarding its shame.   And what was the joy set before Jesus?  You were.  You were.    Because God loves you like that.  God does love you no matter what.   

And God didn’t just come and tell you that.  God came and did something.  And on that cross, in that agony, God broke the bondage, the twistedness that holds you forever.  God took on your brokenness and made you whole.  God took on your wrongness and made you right.  God changed everything in you forever.  And that happened.   It’s news, news God made for you.   And if you know God did that, you can know God will never walk away from you.  God will never stop loving you.  God’s love will not even stop at death for you.  And when you know that news, all the other news pales in comparison.  For all that news will pass, but this news will not.   No, this news lasts, beyond nations, and empires, and Presidents, and setbacks and triumphs, beyond even death itself.   So, believe the good news.  Let it live in you.  Let it change you as no other news can.   In the name of the God who loved you from the beginning, who gave up everything to bring you back into that love, and who can do more, even in the brokenness of these days than you could ever ask or imagine or dream.  Amen.