Clickbait

 

Does everyone’s browser throw “articles of interest” in front of your faces all day? When there’s no real news, there are always those magnetic headlines.

 “She’s 83 and she looks so different now.” Really? Because the rest of us don’t look different at 83 than we did at 17? Or maybe she looks different from everyone else. (As we all do.) The missing ingredient would be the object of the missing preposition “from.” So far, I’ve never been interested enough to take the bait and find out.

 Then there’s, “Dog has adorable reaction to learning he’s being adopted.” Sheesh. Even smart dogs don’t know the meaning of “adopted,” at least, not before the fact. And, to dog lovers, dogs have an “adorable reaction” to everything. Except ammonia. Don’t ask me how I know. (For the record, it wasn’t me.)

Particularly irritating to me is, “You’re cooking eggs/treating hair/shopping for batteries all wrong.” Just exactly who has the authority to criticize my cooking/treating/shopping methods? I’ve lived a few decades on this planet; why do “they” think I don’t know how to cook eggs? No, I don’t check on these, just to find out. Why would I let those young punks beat me up?

 The Bible has a lot of catchy leading lines, but none of them is clickbait. God knows how to get people’s attention.

 When Jesus said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers,” he had the attention of his challengers. They all knew this was a dangerous trek. But when He tossed in the word, “Samaritan,” their whole attitude lit up with emotion. We associate “Samaritan” with “good,” but they all had strong opposite responses. They thought, “sinner,” “scum,” “disgusting” and worse. Jesus had their complete focus, and he taught them a principle they accepted only grudgingly, because they couldn’t logically avoid it, at least in public.

 In Acts 17 we read, from the apostle Paul, “Men of Athens, while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘     TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.” He had them. Immediately prior, we had been told, “All the Athenians and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new. So Paul…” He didn’t have to entice his listeners with nonsense. The relevance of his words to their lives gave him a wide open opportunity to present one of the most electrifying and comprehensive altar calls in history. Some believed; some wanted to hear more.

A dear friend, when she was not a believer and was asking questions about God, was advised, “Read the Bible.” She began at the beginning, of course, and part way through Genesis, the message reached her -- she understood that God was real and cared about her. Her life was changed and she has been active in changing others’ hearts ever since. “Read the Bible” was not just cheap marketing; it was eternally effective advice.

 Everything in the Bible is something God wanted us to know. While a great deal of it is intriguing, shocking, puzzling, annoying or otherwise attention-getting, not a word is worthless drivel, hollow sensationalism or clickbait. There’s real substance there. In John 6, Jesus told his disciples, “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you – they are full of the Spirit and life.”

 --Lynda Shenefield