A Crisis Of Trust In The Last Days
Why Nobody Believes Anything Anymore — And What To Do About It
Have you asked yourself as of late the following questions: “Is this true or false? Is this just pure propaganda and lies? How can I know what’s real or fake?” The misinformation (and I highly dislike using that word because it’s been dragged through the mud) we’ve had a steady diet of for the past 10–20 years has eroded public trust. While we’ve been asleep at the proverbial wheel in church, enamored by the light show, rockstar pastors, ‘light’ sermons all washed down by a ‘higher calling café’ latte, Satan has been hard at work infiltrating every facet of our country and its institutions with those that would love nothing more than to take our amazing Constitution and put it through the proverbial shredder.
This is sort of how it goes: You hear a story on the news, and a part of you instinctively questions its validity before you even process it: is this true, or is this pure propaganda? You see a video, a headline, a quote from someone that is a supposed “authority,” and instead of feeling relief at the possibility of finally having a real answer, or truth, you feel the opposite — another story or claim to question and run down before you can trust it—or not.
There’s an old saying for this, and many of you might remember it:
Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.
Back in the day, that’s the kind of advice you’d give someone who’d been burned by con men or charlatans in hopes they’d not get burned again.
But now that old adage isn’t just a saying, it’s just... normal. It’s operating advice for anyone with a phone, on a computer, or still reading the morning paper.
Jesus Saw This Coming
When the disciples came to Jesus privately and asked what would signal the end of the age, His very first words weren’t about wars, famines, or earthquakes. They were a very specific warning. Jesus told them:
“Take heed that no one deceives you” —Matthew 24:4
Before Jesus said anything about the last days, He said that this generation would need to guard itself against deception above almost everything else.
Paul echoes the same warning to Timothy, describing a time when people will be:
“always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” —2 Timothy 3:7
Endless information (maybe too much). Always “learning” and zero effort to apply it. And in 2 Thessalonians 2, Paul describes a coming period of deception wherein the “lawless one,” a.k.a. the final Antichrist, will be operating “with all power, and signs and lying wonders.” Or, as the NIV puts it, he’ll use “...all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie.” This is language that should get each and every one of us to sit up and pay attention as we witness what synthetic video, cloned voices, and generative AI can now produce convincingly enough to fool a trained eye, let alone a distracted one. Though I truly believe that the power the Antichrist will wield will extend far beyond anything AI can produce.
This isn’t technically a new problem dressed in new technology. It’s the same old problem Scripture predicted long ago. The only difference is that it is now running at a scale and speed no one in history has had to contend with before.
So, hold on to your seats. You ain’t seen nothing yet!
The Bereans Had the Right Idea
Acts 17:11 gives us the model. When Paul preached to the Bereans, Luke doesn’t just say they listened or took his word for it because of perceived authority. Luke tells us that they “searched the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.” They spiritually “measured twice and cut once!” Essentially, they trusted but verified through the Word. Through the Scriptures. Hence, we’re encouraged to be “Bereans” ourselves.
That’s the discipline most people, even sincere Christians, have wholly abandoned. Somewhere along the way, “a trusted, platformed voice” became a substitute for “let me actually verify this.” That substitution is exactly where deception moves in. It finds the small cracks — not usually through outright, obvious lies, but through confident “authority” nobody thinks to question, though we should.
We’ve become so complacent that we’ve put our trust in platformed perception rather than THE true authority…the Word of God!
When Real Facts Get Stretched Past What They Support
Here’s an example that illustrates the more common — and definitely more dangerous — pattern. A well-known pastor recently spoke about China’s BeiDou-3 satellite positioning system, framing it as proof that the U.S. had been “caught with our pants down” militarily, that our stealth technology and GPS advantage were essentially neutralized, and that the nation was defenseless until at least 2030, that is, when we’d be able to counter it.
Here’s what’s actually documented—because that’s what truly matters: there is real and serious concern among defense analysts that China’s BeiDou system has, in some respects (key word: ‘in some’), surpassed GPS — a U.S. national advisory board has reportedly warned that GPS capabilities are now inferior to BeiDou’s in certain areas1, and GPS jamming has already been used effectively in recent conflicts, including reportedly during the Israel-Iran exchanges, forcing reliance on backup navigation. That’s a fact, and to be honest, I think it’s worth taking seriously.
What isn’t accurate is the leap to “we’re now completely defenseless, our stealth planes don’t work.” That conclusion not only ignores but also outruns the evidence. And that’s exactly the pattern we need to be watching out for. It’s one that’s worth calling out: not a fabricated lie made up out of thin air, but a real, documented concern stretched into a far more total and terrifying conclusion than the facts actually support.
That’s harder to catch than an outright fabrication, because there’s truth underneath it. It’s also, notably, a story that fed something people already wanted to hear or already feared — which brings us to why this works so well in the first place.
Complacency Made This Possible
Part of why a story like that lands so easily is that we’ve stopped checking. We’ve become complacent with what we’re told. We’d been told for years, by people in “power,” that the U.S. possessed uncontested technological superiority — the strongest military in the world, the most advanced systems, full stop. That framing wasn’t entirely false, but once again, it bred complacency: if the people in charge say we’re the strongest, why would anyone go verify it? At the end of the day, they’re the “experts.” They’re the so-called “authority” on this? Right?
Only now are the real, serious vulnerabilities in America’s satellite positioning infrastructure becoming public knowledge2 — not because a pastor said so, but because defense analysts, transportation authorities, and national security researchers have been documenting it for a few years now. We took safety for granted because someone with perceived authority told us we had it.
That’s the itching-ears problem in a different costume — not doctrinal comfort this time, but national comfort.
And the same principle applies to the church. This problem—or better yet, epidemic—of believing everything one hears and sees continues to perpetuate via most pulpits in the West, especially throughout many “Christian” social media channels.
It’s Not Just the News. It’s the Church.
If deception only lived in cable news and geopolitics, this would be an easier problem. But it doesn’t. Scripture itself has been a target too.
Consider the so-called “Queen James Bible” — a real, published translation deliberately altered to change what the original text says about homosexuality. It was edited not because new manuscript evidence demanded it, but because the meaning was inconvenient to certain readers. That’s not textual scholarship. That’s rewriting the standard so it stops correcting and convicting you of sin. Those that indulge in this kind of abhorrent and heretical “editing” to suit their own desires fear not the Lord. As Paul said in Romans 1:32:
“Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”
That’s exactly what Paul warned Timothy about: a time would come when…
“They will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers” (2 Timothy 4:3)
People don’t usually reject truth because they’ve been led to believe that it’s false. They reject truth because they don’t want it to be true — and then they go find, or manufacture, a version that agrees with them instead.
This is, in miniature, the same dynamic as we read about from the days of Noah: people didn’t want to change how they were living, so when truth showed up demanding accountability of their sinful behavior to a Holy God, they not only didn’t bother looking into or investigating it — they flat out rejected it. Deception isn’t just something done to people. Often, it’s something people go looking for, something they willfully accept because the alternative is being told they’re wrong and need to change.
The Data Backs the Drift
This isn’t just a feeling. Even within practicing, evangelical Christianity — not bench-warming churchgoers, but people who take their faith seriously — the moral distinctiveness that used to separate the church from the wider culture has narrowed dramatically, or better yet, exponentially. Recent research shows that 42% of practicing Christians now consider it “wise” to live together before marriage, compared to 58% of the general public3 (the world). That gap used to be enormous. Now it’s narrowing drastically, generation by generation, not through any single dramatic event, but through quiet, gradual re-negotiation of what counts as acceptable. And when what counts as true authority (the Bible) is denigrated, rejected, or taken as suggestions rather than Truth, society’s pillars not only erode, they come crashing down.
Nobody voted to abandon a conviction. People just stopped teaching it as firmly, stopped treating it as a hill worth being unpopular over or even “dying” on. They stopped fighting the battle between the flesh and the Spirit. That’s slower and quieter than outright fraud, but arguably more dangerous, because there’s no auditor for conviction other than the Holy Spirit. A slow erosion of doctrine rarely gets “caught” the way financial fraud eventually does.
And make no mistake — our world and our country is deeply steeped in all kinds of fraud. We’re all now aware of how Federal investigators in Minnesota recently uncovered a fraud scheme in Medicaid-funded services that likely exceeds nine billion dollars4, described by prosecutors not as a handful of bad actors but as “staggering, industrial-scale fraud.”5 It ran for years, hiding in plain sight, before anyone caught it.
The same thing has happened in California, but on a much larger and deeper scale6. The fraud is staggering. But the question still remains: if that’s what got caught, it’s worth honestly asking — what hasn’t been?
So What Do You Actually Do?
Diagnosis without a response just leaves people anxious and dangerously at risk. Here’s the response, and it’s the same one the Bereans modeled two thousand years ago: the only real antidote to deception is biblical discernment, and the only way to biblical discernment is Scripture and prayer. Together, they’re the whole defense Paul describes: the Spirit giving discernment through the very Word He inspired.
When something comes at you — from the news, from a platform, from a pulpit, from a YouTube channel, even from an AI chatbot — you don’t have to have an instant verdict. You have somewhere to check it against. If it doesn’t line up with Scripture, you don’t need seventeen fact-checking sources to know something’s off. You already have the standard.
That won’t fix the culture. It won’t stop the next fabricated headline or the next well-meaning pastor stretching a true concern past what it can bear. But it will mean you’re not defenseless in the middle of it — and if enough believers actually do this, rather than just nodding along or giving a thoughtless “amen” with whoever sounds most confident, then we will be able to operate confidently in a world that’s drowning in deception. That’s what it looks like to still be salt that hasn’t lost its flavor in a world that’s quietly forgotten what truth is supposed to taste like. True peace!
So, in a world that is chock-full of deception (and growing), here’s a sound word of advice:
“Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see!”
“Search the Scriptures daily to see whether these things are so.” That’s not an ancient instruction or just another old Bible verse.
It’s the only way that still works!
Grateful you’re here.
— Pablo
National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board (PNTAB). “Celebrating the GPS 50th Anniversary: Recommitting to U.S. Leadership in PNT.” May 4, 2023.
SpaceNews. “America is losing its GPS dominance to China’s BeiDou satnav.” April 8, 2024. spacenews.com
Barna Group. “Marriage and Divorce in 2025: Five Trends Shaping Today’s Families.” barna.com/trends/marriage-divorce-trends-2025/
Minnesota Reformer. “U.S. Attorney: Fraud likely exceeds $9 billion in Minnesota-run Medicaid services.” December 18, 2025. minnesotareformer.com
CBS News. “What to know about Minnesota’s ‘industrial-scale fraud’ scandal, as more charges are filed and Trump weighs in.” December 19, 2025. cbsnews.com
U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “Oversight Committee Launches Investigation into Rampant Taxpayer Fraud in California Hospice Programs,” oversight.house.gov/release/oversight-committee-launches-investigation-into-rampant-taxpayer-fraud-in-california-hospice-programs/.
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