What voices do you trust?

As soon as it was night, the believers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. As a result, many of them believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men. (Acts 17:10–12)

The other day, my wife and I were watching a movie and witnessed a tragic scene in which a boy was run over by a tractor, landing him in the hospital in critical condition. As the family members in the movie prayed for his recovery, Michele turned to me and said “tell me if the boy survives or not.” As a husband who understands my wife’s anxiety, I turned to ChatGPT and asked if the boy would survive the accident. The answer came immediately: “Yes. The child survives… the child is taken for medical care and ultimately recovers, which the film presents as a miraculous answer to prayer.” I let my wife know the good news, and she was relieved.

And then the child died.

After the movie ended, I let ChatGPT know that it had answered my question wrong. It thanked me for my correction, and confessed to mistakenly conflating the movie we were watching with another one (although it didn’t mention the other movie, which felt curiously like a pitiful excuse a human would give).

My experience with the fallibility of artificial intelligence was a poignant reminder of one of the critical questions of our day: from where do you get your truth? In the old days of Google searches, the top results were not always the most accurate answers, but the ones which had mastered Search Engine Optimization so as to show up first. Now, in the days of AI, the answer may be a distillation of everything on the internet, but as we found out the other day, it is still not always the truth.

When Paul traveled around on his missionary journeys, he would preach first in the synagogue and then in the marketplace about Jesus and the need for people to turn from sin to faith in Him. Sometimes people received his message enthusiastically as truth from God. Other times, people rejected him as a heretic or rabble-rouser. But one crowd that has always stood out to me are the Bereans. They neither blindly accept or reject Paul’s message, but “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” The implication is that the Scriptures, the Bible, is the truth by which we measure the messages we hear in this world.

So from where are you getting your truth? Which voices do you trust, and do they align with God’s Word and the example of Jesus, who claimed to be “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6)? Trusting the wrong voices, whether they are human or artificial, can be deadly. I found that out yesterday when I saw a snake hiding in a bush and used Google Lens to take a picture and ask what kind of snake it was. The answer came immediately: “There is no snake in this picture.” Nice try, Satan.

Not every voice speaks the truth. In this confusing world full of voices competing for your attention and allegiance, let God’s Word and the example of Jesus be your standard.