As Nicholas’s third birthday approached, and with nothing provoking us to sense anything outside the ordinary, my wife, Jana, happened to notice a small number of brown splotches on his skin. Their emergence had been subtle; vaguely circular or oval in shape, and not especially large, they had surfaced at seemingly random spots on his body. She showed them to our pediatrician who, to our surprise, told us to get him checked out by an ophthalmologist. Her counsel was driven by a concern that the splotches could be indicative of a disease called neurofibromatosis, its most common form referred to as “type 1” (NF1, for short). 

It was January 2008 when, to the sheer delight of his new big brother, we brought Nicholas home from the adoption agency. He was all of eleven days old. Despite the lack of any prenatal care whatsoever, all signs pointed to a perfectly healthy baby.
But as Nicholas’s third birthday approached, and with nothing provoking us to sense anything outside the ordinary, my wife, Jana, happened to notice a small number of brown splotches on his skin. Their emergence had been subtle; vaguely circular or oval in shape, and not especially large, they had surfaced at seemingly random spots on his body. She showed them to our pediatrician who, to our surprise, told us to get him checked out by an ophthalmologist.
Her counsel was driven by a concern that the splotches could be indicative of a disease called neurofibromatosis, its most common form referred to as “type 1” (NF1, for short). When the condition is present, tiny bumps – imperceptible to unaided examination, and typically benign in and of themselves – eventually form on the irises of the patient’s eyes.
The visit to the eye doctor was uneventful; much to our relief, she found nothing, but she told us to come back in a year. At that second visit – Nicholas was four years old – she found them. In medical terminology, they are called Lisch nodules, named after the ophthalmologist who discovered their connection with NF1.
There is no formal test for NF1; rather, there is an established checklist of symptoms, with two or more positives taken as an indicator of its presence. Lisch nodules and the brown splotches are both on the list. One of the doctors gave us a brochure and links to a few websites. Collectively, these resources laid out for us a well-populated continuum – a range that runs from inconsequential to life threatening – of potential outcomes for NF1 patients. There are some who, over the course of a full lifespan, never knowingly experience a single symptom; they go to their graves happily unaware that the disease had ever taken up residence in their bodies. There’s another cohort that’s far less fortunate: the roughly five percent of patients for whom the condition results in cancerous tumors.
The extensive array of possibilities between those extremes was disquieting. By the time Nicholas was categorized as an NF1 patient, the bone deformities and enlarged skull that sometimes occur would have already been apparent, so we were able to cross those off the list. As he headed off to school, we would need to watch for learning disabilities – if they were going to happen, they would likely surface no later than the third grade. Blindness or loss of hearing could emerge before or after that point, and during adolescence he might develop scoliosis. When full grown, NF1 patients are sometimes small in stature.
There are no predictors for any of this. Specific manifestations, or the severity of those manifestations, might bear no similarity whatsoever between identical twins who inherit the condition from a parent. As a general rule, however, NF1 typically results in an indeterminate number of benign tumors which can form virtually anywhere in the body. That “anywhere” can mean inside the body where, although inconspicuous to the eyes, they might exert pressure on a vital organ. More frequently, they surface in plain sight, sometimes to the point of disfigurement.
Once the Lisch nodules surfaced and the doctors classified Nicholas as an NF1 patient, my wife and I coped in different ways. Jana, imbued with all the dispositions, sensibilities, and impulses that naturally accompany motherhood, found that the doctors’ conclusions filled her with a deep, abiding sadness and provoked a measure of angst that sat lurking in the background of her day-to-day existence. But she kept these things to herself. I did my best to push the matter off to the side. At a practical level, things changed very little for us on a day-to-day basis. There was little to do. Except pray.
Jana was not yet Catholic, and while I knew she had an active prayer life, it was largely hidden from me. But as Nicholas’s doctor’s appointments approached, she would quietly settle into a fasting routine, a subtle but sure sign that she was ramping things up. Not knowing exactly how this miracle business works, my own prayers progressed through a fairly comprehensive checklist. If God, in his divine wisdom, would not completely heal Nicholas, perhaps he might restrict things a bit, keep the really bad stuff like cancer and blindness off the table. I prayed my way down this path many times, usually making allusions to those instances in scripture where Jesus had healed a child. I’m not sure if I was reminding myself or God that he had done this before.
I think that if my silent prayers had somehow been audible to disinterested bystanders, they would have sensed a genuine belief on my part that God could heal Nicholas, as well as a conviction that sending up such a request wasn’t an entirely unreasonable thing to do. But if one of those imaginary bystanders had asked me what I expected would eventually happen, I don’t have any idea how I might have answered that question.
On March 8, 2016, I took Nicholas – now eight years old – in for his annual appointment with the ophthalmologist. These visits were never quick: there was a protocol that always entailed a few rounds of preliminaries with technicians and interns. But one look at the waiting area told me that we were in for a long afternoon.
When our name was finally called, we were escorted to an examination room where Nicholas climbed into the patient’s chair. I sat off to the side. Eventually, a woman walked in – maybe a technician, maybe an intern.
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My family occasionally attended a local Nazarene church, and it was at their Vacation Bible School in 1980 that I first responded to the Gospel and committed my young heart to Jesus. But our participation in the life of the church was uneven, and I did not grow up in the conventionally Christian home that my own children would come to know decades later.

You’re getting to know some new Christian friends at a small group you just started attending. People are trading testimonies of how they came to faith. The next guy’s up, and he starts with, “I was raised in a Christian home.” Well, now you know it’s gonna get good. The false starts, the flimsy profession in adolescence, the hypocritical teen years filled with make-out sessions and secular music, the slide into the organized crime underworld by age 22, repentance and true faith at 27 to the tearful strains of Love Comes True—it’s all going to be there.
Well, that’s not me. Growing up, my mother was a believer—I think she was converted when I was a preschooler—and my dad took some years of his early adulthood to come to terms with the reality that the faithful Lutheranism of his upbringing was not his own. My family occasionally attended a local Nazarene church, and it was at their Vacation Bible School in 1980 that I first responded to the Gospel and committed my young heart to Jesus. But our participation in the life of the church was uneven, and I did not grow up in the conventionally Christian home that my own children would come to know decades later.
That little boy responded to his new faith by wanting to read his Bible, which was regrettably a verse-per-paragraph King James edition. Mom encouraged me in my faith, discipling me into the moderately fundamentalist Dispensationalism that, in the early 80s, had not yet begun its eventual decline. I recall enthusiastically reading Hal Lindsey and Salem Kirban and unironically consuming Chick Tracts. But tell me when God has ever been pleased not to allow his church to be, in some parts, a gloriously redeemed tire fire.
My family didn’t hold together. Substance abuse, mental illness, and a crumbling marriage culminated in my parents getting divorced in 1990—and me getting married that same year. My new wife and I promptly left our homes in Colorado and moved to Central Florida for college and a new life together away from our difficult families of origin. Church had not been a meaningful part of our lives in our teen years, and was also absent from the first year of our marriage. On a random August day in 1991, my wife pointed out a Nazarene church right next to the university, and said, “Wasn’t that the kind of church your family used to go to? We should visit there.”
We did. She was converted several weeks later, and my faith, which had been asleep, slowly woke back up over the coming months. We were loved and discipled by the healthy, caring brothers and sisters there—some of whom remain friends 30 years later. I discovered I had a mind for theology, and tried to understand what everyone meant by “Wesleyan Arminianism” and why this “Calvinism” thing I heard about was so bad. “Calvinism” was a system affirmed by “Baptists,” whose primary tenet was the pernicious “Once Saved, Always Saved” doctrine that could never possibly lead to holy living.
We attended the “College and Career” Sunday School class taught by a member of the church board who was around my father’s age. He and his wife took an interest in us and invested in us, as committed middle-aged folks tend to do with young couples in the church.
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In an age where fake news is rampant and governing authorities use scientific rhetoric to enforce their political agenda, we must remember that one of the greatest lies in our age is salvation via science. Christians have an obligation before the Lord to recognize false prophets and false promises. Lest our hopes be divided between Christ and creation, we must see what is behind the vaccine mandate mania of so many.

Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy,and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread.— Isaiah 8:12 —
In our church, one of our elders often reminds us that Isaiah 8:12 is a verse that neither confirms nor denies the presence of a conspiracy. In our world there are many reports that are fake news, and because of that there are many who also discount true news. By the same token, there are reports that some label conspiracies that turn out to be true. And conversely, there are “true” reports that turn out to be false. In short, since the world fell by believing Satan’s Primordial Lie—“you can be like God”—we have lived in a world of lies, half-truths, conspiracies, and fake news. And in that world, the people of the truth must learn not just how to tell the truth (Exod. 20:16), but how to spot a lie.
In the original context of Isaiah 8:12, the Lord has told Isaiah to “fear God, not human armies” (G. V. Smith, Isaiah 1–39, 220). In the historical context, God has promised to preserve Judah, even if the king has foolishly rejected God’s help. In that context, the Lord says,
Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. 13 But the Lord of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. 14 And he will become a sanctuary and a stone of offense and a rock of stumbling to both houses of Israel, a trap and a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 15 And many shall stumble on it. They shall fall and be broken; they shall be snared and taken.” (Isaiah 8:12–15)
In Isaiah 8, the particular sin is fearing man (i.e., human armies) instead of fearing God. But the enduring principle is fearing God according to what God has said. Again, in this case, God has promised a way of salvation, and Isaiah is calling the people to trust him and not human armies. In another context, however, fearing God might mean something else. In the case of Habakkuk, fearing God meant submitting to the coming destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon. In the case of Jeremiah, fearing God meant surrendering to Babylon and not fighting God’s instrument of judgment, as strange as it was to do so. Accordingly, the command to fear God does not always have the same application for God’s people.
Put this all together, and it is a foolish principle to fear God and never recognize or resist the threat of bad actors. Moreover, it is a foolish principle to read Isaiah 8:12 and conclude that everything that people call conspiracy is errant. History teaches us that rulers plot evil schemes (i.e., conspiracies) and that nations conspire together to accomplish wicked ends. Even more, sacred history—the history found in Scripture—teaches the same thing.
Echoing the first sin, the number of times that God’s people have been lied to—by their leaders, by their neighbors, by their prophets, and by themselves—cannot be counted with both hands. While the law of God can be numbered on our fingertips, and digit number 9 stands for “Do not bear false witness,” the number of times God’s people have believed false witnesses is too numerous to count. And thus, we should learn from Scripture how God’s people have believed lies and become liars, so that we who walk in the truth would not believe lies.
The Sin of Believing Lies
Douglas Wilson wrote about this a few months ago, and ever since, his observations from Scripture have stuck in my mind. He observes that “Christians certainly know that it is a sin to go around telling lies, but not so many know that it is also a sin to believe lies.” In context, his argument is a response to the ever changing testimony of Anthony Fauci and the school of prophets who follow him. More germane to this post, however, is the biblical reporting that follows. He writes,
Our race fell into sin because they believed a lie (Gen. 3:4-6). The Roman Christians were told to be on guard against those who with flattering words deceive the naive. It is a sin to be naive like that (Rom. 16:17-18). The Colossians were warned against empty deceit (Col. 2:8). As condemnation, God sent a strong delusion on certain individuals so that they would believe a lie. This was because they refused to love the truth (2 Thess. 2:9-13). The Galatians were rebuked for believing falsehoods (Gal. 3:1). [And] Joshua and his men fell for the deception posed by the men of Gibeon because they did not consult the Lord (Josh 9:14).
Clearly, not believing lies is as biblical as not spreading them. And thus, discerning truth from error in the things we hear and believe and pass on is a Christian virtue. Not believing lies is not something that promises to be fool-proof, but it is something we are called to pursue. Speaking honestly about this, Wilson continues:
If we are going to be reasonable people, I think we have to allow for some instances of deception that can occur where the one lied to really is innocent—where an accomplished hypocrite manages to appear righteous before men (Matt. 23:28). But the passages cited above show that the deceived are frequently complicit in their own deception. They go along in ways they shouldn’t. This pandemic was just such a situation. Believing a lie is culpable when the levers and handles that the liar uses are themselves culpable—those levers and handles being things like fears, lusts, gullibility, ignorance, and so on.
We will pick up the pandemic below as an example of this principle that we must not believe lies, but for now I want to ground this principle deeper in Scripture and to find one example of spitting out fake news followed by another example of swallowing hook, line, and sinker. Ironically, this example is found in the same chapter (1 Kings 13) and in the same prophet (the unnamed man of God who warns Jeroboam of a coming judgment). I point to this example, because one of the best way to learn how to discern truth from falsehood is to watch how it is done and how it is isn’t. And when it occurs in the same person, it shows us how vulnerable all of us are to believing lies, even if we have a track record of truth.
So, without giving a full exposition, I will introduce the man of God who rejected one lie and swallowed another.  And from these two incidents, I believe we can find help for walking wisely in our day of secular sacraments and government sponsored scientism. Again, Isaiah 8 is correct: not everything you hear is a conspiracy, but don’t make the absolutizing error of believing that nothing is a conspiracy either. We must remember that no matter what we are told, fearing God is our first priority. And putting God first means, we must learn how to spot fakery, lest we become liars ourselves.
Rejecting Fake News, Swallowing Fake News, and Knowing How to Tell the Difference
In 1 Kings 13, we find an example of God’s man rejecting fake news, only to follow that brave act of obedience with an immediate denial of God, as he swallows up another false report. Here’s the plotline.
After Jeroboam, king of Israel, builds two altars with two golden calves in 1 Kings 12, the Lord sends a prophet to pronounce God’s judgment on Jeroboam’s wickedness. This prophet is introduced in verse 1 as the “a man of God,” and throughout, this title (“man of God)” is repeated fourteen times (vv. 4, 5, 6 [2x], 7, 8, 11, 12, 14 [2x], 21, 26, 29, 31). Peter Leithart has observed, this nameless man of God serves an archetype for the rest of 1–2 Kings (cf. 1 Kgs. 17:18, 24; 20:28; 2 Kgs. 1:9–13; 4:7; etc.). In these books, God continues to send prophets (men of God) to rebuke the wicked kings of Israel and Judah and call them back to the Lord.
In this first instance, the man comes to Jeroboam and announces that his idolatrous altar will be torn down (vv. 2–3). In response, Jeroboam seizes the prophet, but not before his hand is paralyzed and his altar is broken in two (vv. 4–5). Struck down, the king pleads for the prophet to pray for healing (v. 6). The man of God obliges and the king is healed. With self-interested gratitude, the king invites the man of God to dine with him, to which the man of God replies, “If you give me half your house, I will not go in with you. And I will not eat bread or drink water in this place, for so was it commanded me by the word of the Lord, saying, ‘You shall neither eat bread nor drink water nor return by the way that you came’” (vv. 8–9). So far, so good. The narrative reports that the man of God departs.
From these first ten verses, we see that the prophet discharges his duty, escapes danger, and avoids the temptation to dine with the king. Remembering the Word of the Lord, he retains his loyalty to God and refuses the king’s “gracious” offer. Though the prophet’s refusal might not seem remarkable, it does contradict human nature. Made in the image of a God, man aspires for glory; and made to rule over the earth, human nature aspires for dominion. Accordingly, any invitation to rise to the king’s table is naturally attractive (cf. Prov. 25:7). Therefore, it takes moral courage and genuine faith to reject the “treasures of Egypt” and invite reproach as a true follower of God (Heb. 11:25). Accordingly, such obedience depends upon rejecting false invitations by remembering what God has commanded.
In the last year, this has been more difficult than usual. Extenuating circumstances, i.e., a global pandemic, have invited churches and church leaders to gather online, abandon singing, divide the church into clean and unclean, and hide the image of God with various masking protocols. The rationale is that we are doing all of this out of love for neighbor, but in the process the command to love, which fulfills the law, has run roughshod over the law of God and Christ’s commands to gather (Heb. 10:24–25; 12:22–24), sing (Eph. 5:18–20), show hospitality (Rom. 12:9–21), visit the sick (James 5:14), and greet one another with physical affection (i.e., a holy kiss).
In short, unlike the man of God in his refusal to take the king’s meat, many in our day have followed the science and not followed a number of biblical imperatives.
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