2Sa 13:30 And it came to pass, while they were in the way, that tidings came to David, saying, Absalom hath slain all the king's sons, and there is not one of them left.

David did not raise a godly family. It is his fault; he has lost the right to teach morality to his children after his own adultery and murder. As a result, sin begins to reign in his house. And, it begins with his first-born son, Amnon. Amnon was sexually obsessed with his half-sister, Tamar. He listened to the evil devise of his cousin, Jonadab, and lured Tamar into his chamber where he raped her. After committing this heinous crime, he kicked her out of his room. Tamar had a brother called Absalom. Absalom comforted his sister and told her not to speak of what happened for the present. But Absalom had set his mind to kill Amnon at the first opportunity. Two years later, Absalom decided that it's time to take revenge. He invited all his brothers, Amnon included, to a feasting with the sheepshearers. When he saw Amnon was drunk from the wine, Absalom ordered his servants to kill him. Amnon died. News reached David: “Absalom hath slain all the king's sons, and there is not one of them left” (v.30). It was fake news. Not all the king’s sons were dead; only Amnon. But, David and his servants believed it anyway; they believed without verifying whether it’s true (v.31). Fake news equals falsehood. Fake news is in abundance these days. Like David, many are deceived into believing a lie because they do not bother to verify if the information they receive is correct and true. It’s called laziness. The devil plays on this weakness of man and spread lies in the name of God. Everyone agrees fake news is a problem. Fake news isn’t new; it’s been around since Biblical times. The devil was the first to spread fake news. He told Eve that she shall not surely die if she partook of the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3:4). Eve believed in it in spite that God had told her she would die. I believed when Noah was building the ark and warning the people that a great flood would come to destroy the earth, many were telling the people otherwise: “Don’t believe this crazy old man. How is it possible to flood the entire earth? There will be none of those things.” Many believed! When the apostle were preaching that Christ will come again and judge the whole earth, some were spreading falsehood that Christ is not coming again (2 Peter 3:4; 2 Timothy 2:17, 18). Still up to this day, they are some who believe that the second coming of Christ had already happened. Fake news originates from the devil whom Jesus called the "Father of lies" (John 8:44). How can we recognize fake gospel? 1. By knowing the truth ourselves. We cannot know what fake gospel is until we know the truth. Paul says we can only rightly divide the word of truth by a diligent study (2 Timothy 2:15). The Christians in Berea would not take in wholesale everything they heard until they conduct a diligent search (Acts 17:11). Never mind that the preacher was the great apostle Paul, they compared it with the scriptures. We need to be like the Bereans and verify what we hear with the scriptures. 2. By stopping its influence. An experiment conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reveals that falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to get retweeted than truth. And, “political” fake news spread three times faster than other kinds, reaching as many as 100,000. True news, on the other hand, hardly ever reached more than 1,000 people. As Christians, with so many false doctrines propagating in the social media, we need to flood the NET with truth. We need to “retweet” and “share” whenever we come across a piece of truth. The first century Christians turned the world upside down with the truth (Acts 17:6). They flooded the world with the gospel message. David believed in a piece of fake news; Jonadab came and corrected it. Likewise, we need to correct whenever an error is propagated in our midst. Let us contend earnestly for the faith and stamp out false doctrines (Jude 1:3).