Ever since I can remember as a young boy, the local news of the day came on at 5pm every day. In the days of the newspapers, you could always turn on the five o’clock news and get the news of what was happening in your local area, city, and state, along with the weather report and any news that was happening in the sports world. As I grew older, I became aware of the events of the world news that came on at 6pm. I remember the Huntley/Brinkley Report that aired over the NBC Weeknight Network News from 1956 to1970 and the CBS Evening News hosted at the same time slot by Walter Cronkite from 1962 to 1981. We depended upon all three of these men to keep us abreast of news that was happening in our own country as well as what was happening all over the world. Sometimes they traveled to the very sites where news was happening as it was happening. Later, Walter Cronkite hosted a newscast that he called, “You Were There”, in which he related the news events as though we were right there with him, watching the news from a first person perspective. But like I said, they kept us aware of news events from all over the world.
News takes place all around us, we can’t escape it. And we mustn’t. But the place where we should be looking for the news to guide our lives is found in the Bible. In Deuteronomy 8:3, as God was laying down his laws for the Hebrew people, He reminded them that though He had fed them with mana every morning as they traveled through the wilderness, mana being a kind of bread to satisfy their hunger, “that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Matthew, in the fourth chapter of his gospel, related that as Jesus was faced with a temptation by the devil to turn white stones on the ground into bread, he had been fasting for forty days and forty nights up to that point and was probably hungry, but Jesus turned to Satan and said, “It is written, referring to what God had said in Deuteronomy, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
Many years ago, in the land of Saudi Arabia, a very rich man owned a vast amount of land. He had many horses and camels, and an eloquent mansion to live in, plus he had a lot of servants to take care of his wealth, but he was not satisfi ed with life. His life felt empty. He no longer felt the joy he had originally had with all his possessions, so he sold all that he had and took his money to search the world over for that which he was missing, but he never found it, and died a pauper and penniless man.
