Why Watch the News?

Georgie Pauwels

Why Watch the News?

Do you know what news really matters?

Hundreds of headlines per minute are pouring out right now from websites, apps, social media, networks, cable, magazines, radio and newspapers. Fox News alone, for example, posts 1,500 stories online per day. You can’t not watch the news when you’re living in the age of information.

It’s impossible to watch it all. The news glut is so excessive that there are now news aggregators, programs that exist solely to sift the overflow of news: Flipboard, Pulse, Reddit, Instapaper, Reeder, Feedly, Digg, Readability, StumbleUpon, Taptu, Zite, etc. Yet now we find ourselves experiencing a glut of aggregators. That’s the kind of deluge we are living under.

There’s an ocean of news out there and it’s easy to miss or lose accurate information that is actually interesting to the viewer—let alone what is truly important. Millions of those news reports are, in fact, a waste of time.

But some of those events will impact your life. Dramatically. Imminently. In fact, your world has already been shaped by news happening everywhere from down the street to the other side of the planet. That is why you need to watch the news. Because some of those events affect you. They affect your loved ones, your nation and your world.

This has been true throughout human existence. Free republics are particularly susceptible to whether or not their citizens are well informed. History is full of the suffering and deaths of people who have ignored the world around them.

Disregarding the news is like sailing the ocean without ever coming on deck. Living your whole life in your cabin blinds you to the winds and waves and storms and reefs outside.

A world full of human nature is more tempestuous than the roiling high seas—and now, more than ever, it’s more dangerous.

But watching the news is only the beginning. After all, even if you’re vigilant, how do you know what’s important?

You can try your best to absorb as much news as you can. You can use your judgment and the judgment of others to analyze events and reason out how they might affect you. And you can come away feeling informed.

But to be able to ignore distractions and to spy a true course—and to spot the icebergs and the rocks—you need a chart. You need information from a source that knows where the currents and the debris and the squalls are. Otherwise you’re sailing by sight.

Believe it or not, there is one chart that claims to show you how to navigate world news. It was plotted by a cartographer who asserts to know every elevation and depression of human nature. That chart is the Holy Bible. And that chart-maker is Jesus Christ.

Although He is not generally recognized as such, Jesus Christ was a news forecaster. His message during His life on Earth and throughout the Word of God has to do with world events. And most of those events are actually occurring in our day. These world events are actually leading to His return!

Jesus Christ said in Matthew 24:42, “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.”

Jesus has been correct about major world trends that occurred centuries after He predicted them. This may seem outlandish, even to many Christians, but there is a clear choice: Prove whether or not the Bible contains this remarkable and relevant news insight, or rely on your own judgment and the judgment of others.

As you sail a dangerous world full of tumult and evil, this is a crucial decision you cannot avoid.