How the Media Deceives Us
Everyone’s life can only be aimed in one of two directions. Either our eyes are set on the Kingdom of God, or they’re set on the kingdom of darkness. Put another way, we can either have an eternal mindset or we can be distracted by the cares of this life. But the enemy won’t blatantly divert us from eternal things. Instead, he subtly distracts us by focusing our attention on things that seem important. In this interview, Steve Gallagher discusses the ways Satan uses the media to push this agenda.
Nate: Today we want to deal with things related to mass media. We live in very confusing, perplexing times. The issues that our world is facing seem to be coming much more quickly and with a lot more intensity. Things like the coronavirus, global warming and tensions about injustice. These issues are very unsettling to people, and so they spend a lot of time trying to keep up to date with what they think they should know to make sense of the world they are living in. But you say in your book that this is exposing people to an even greater danger. Why do you say that?
Pastor Steve: Well, let's face it. The news is just another form of entertainment. When you have your own tv show, you want people to watch it because the higher your ratings, the more advertising you can sell for it. So the way the news keeps people coming back is by constantly releasing big stories. They want to consistently broadcast something that will titillate people’s senses or get them excited. When you think about the realities of what's happening in the world, some of these things are not big stories, they're being made into big stories. This is the way the news has been from the beginning.
Go back to the 1880s for instance, and you've got a reporter from the New York Times who wants to keep people coming back to his newspaper stand to buy them every day. To do this, he must write stories that are going to grab people's attention. Let's say he does a series on how bad tenement buildings are. Pretty soon you've got the whole city, or at least all those people reading that newspaper, in the same mindset of looking at these tenement buildings and saying, “this is a terrible thing.” Now we aren’t looking at whether it's terrible or not, that's not the point I'm getting at. The point I'm getting at is that a corporate consciousness is being established and run by a newspaper or a news outlet.
Let’s take it back into the unseen realm for a minute. You've got the Kingdom of God with the culture involved there, and then you have the kingdom of the world. When Christians who should be all about the Kingdom of God and the corporate consciousness that is established in that kingdom give their attention and their hearts to the corporate consciousness created in this world by the devil, their hearts and minds are not where they're supposed to be. We're being drawn away into this whole drama that news organizations are pushing for their own agenda. It's taking us away from the things of God.
Nate: I think the issue that people would have with the answer that you gave is that tenement buildings, in their eyes, represents a small issue from the 1880s. But when the issue is much larger, then it does seem like it becomes something to be concerned about. What’s wrong with people wanting to know about these things and even becoming involved with some of these things?
Pastor Steve: Well, let me change the metaphor. I think it was back in the 1990s that the public finally revolted against tobacco companies and I mean they were getting blistered everywhere. I agree, cigarette smoking is horrible and what it does to people is a horrible thing. But that is an example of a value within the ranks of humanism that would be considered terrible. From a temporal perspective, it is terrible. The bigger issue is that the Kingdom of God is looking at things from an eternal perspective and that's what the most important thing is.
God's perspective has always taken into account the eternal, but all you can expect from people of the world is that they will look at what’s important in the here and now. So they will pump up things like cigarette smoking, tenement buildings or whatever their focus is on, and make them enormous. But what should be more important to us is being set apart. We should have a completely different mindset than the world. We should be over here saying, “Yeah, that is bad, but it pales in comparison to an eternal soul lost in hell.” That is what should be important to believers.
<pull-quote>God's perspective has always taken into account the eternal, but all you can expect from people of the world is that they will look at what’s important in the here and now.<pull-quote><tweet-link>TweetThis<tweet-link>
Nate: You’re saying, it's not so much an issue of their perspective being wholly wrong. It's just that all the things that are left out makes it a deception. I think that's probably one of the reasons that people love the internet. They don't have to dial into a specific viewpoint from somebody else. They can just pick and choose what they believe is true.
Pastor Steve: Yeah. On the internet you have 50 different answers instead of just being subject to whatever CBS, CNN or Fox has to say. But it doesn’t matter if there's fifty, or two or three, it's still all the world and the enemy. If Satan is keeping your mind distracted, that's the important thing to him. He doesn't care if it's CNN, Fox, or some internet site as long as it's keeping your mind from the important issues related to the Kingdom of God.
Nate: Let's just focus specifically on Google as an example. The word google actually means a number so large that it's not even worth quantifying. The founder’s aim is to provide so much information that it's not even really worth quantifying. Is there a danger embedded in that kind of worldview?
Pastor Steve: Well, one of the issues with Google is that they are setting themselves up as the go to place. If you have a question about anything in life, type it in and you're going to get the answer. But you’re really getting their answers. And you get them in order as they want you to get them, and you are subjected to their agenda.
But there's another issue separate from that. That’s that the Kingdom of God has always been built around people who are struggling through spiritual issues and life issues going to the Lord for a protracted length of time. God wants us to prayerfully figure out what the real answers are that He wants to give us. Those answers aren’t meant to be given in a microwave mindset where you just snap your finger, type in your question and there it is. That’s not the way the Kingdom of God works.
Another issue with the internet is its whole entertainment value. We want to be able to go and deal with issues in a more entertaining manner. Let me just refer back to a message you gave one time titled Satan is Extremely Amusing. You brought up the word amuse as tied in with entertainment. You showed that the word is a conjunction. The prefix, the letter “a” in amuse means non or un. Muse is a word that we don't use very much anymore, but it means to contemplate on a deep level. For example, you muse over life's issues. And what you brought out in that message is that Satan is all about amusement, which is to stop you from deeply contemplating life's more important issues. He presents this superficial, glitzy show that gets you so distracted that you don't muse over the deeper issues of life.
Nate: It's interesting that you brought up the whole entertainment aspect of the information age, because that was my next question. We see it everywhere. If you go to a YouTube video to get information it's presented in this really exciting, fun and interesting way. It's not just information, it's infotainment. They actually call it infotainment. Why are we like this? And what is this doing to us?
Pastor Steve: We have been trained to be entertained constantly. But the Kingdom of God was built around men like Moses, David, and Paul, who spent large amounts of time out in the wilderness where there were no distractions. That's where they would hear the voice of God. But we have lost our ability to sit in silence and hear the voice of the Lord. And that's one of the things that concerns me about the whole entertainment system.
Nate: Alright, let's wrap things up by dealing with one final thing that you dealt with in the first section of your book. That’s pornography. You said that you could have easily just included that in the chapter on media because really, it's just another form of entertainment. What are some of the most dangerous lies that are being told to us through pornography?
Pastor Steve: Well, let me just narrow it down to what I consider to be the most damaging lie involved with pornography. The message going out on every pornographic piece of material, book, or video is that sex is the most important thing in life. What these pornographers are doing is catering to their target market and trying to keep them coming back. They want to build up that lie inside people’s minds so they will keep coming back to them. Pure Life Ministries has been in existence for over 35 years now and our whole reason for existence is to repair the damage that has been done to countless marriages and lives because of that one lie. The idea that sex is everything has ruined more lives and marriages than anything I can think of.
Nate: One of the things that I've heard so many people say they appreciate about your writing and about Pure Life Ministries is that it's focus is not on the surface, but on foundational and root issues. We've talked today about mass media, how it shapes our values, feeds our flesh and is exposing us to a lot of sinful opportunities. How does this whole conversation today relate to Walking in Truth in a World of Lies?
<pull-quote>You cannot be involved in any form of sin without a deception working itself into your whole frame of thinking.<pull-quote><tweet-link>TweetThis<tweet-link>
Pastor Steve: Sin is a deceiver. The Bible talks about the deceitfulness of sin. You cannot be involved in any form of sin without a deception working itself into your whole frame of thinking. I've talked about the importance of being in the Word of God, because it creates a Biblical structure in your thinking and a structure of truth in your thinking. Well, it's the same thing that happens in reverse with sin. It creates a deceptive structure in your thinking. So, it's like you're trying to look at some item or some issue, but it's like in the old room of mirrors that you would see at a carnival. It makes you wonder what the real thing is. You never really can get your mind around it. People in sin live in a state of constant confusion, unable to really lay hold of what exactly truth is. They can take a guess at it, and they may know it on a superficial level, but they can't really know that they're connecting with the truth.
