There was once a time when hearing news required a certain amount of waiting. The story happened. Someone investigated. Questions were asked. Facts were gathered. Then, eventually, the story reached us. Today, the story can reach us before the dust has even settled. A headline flashes across our phone. A thirty-second video begins circulating. Someone posts an accusation. A commentator gives an opinion. Within minutes, thousands of people have decided who is guilty, who is innocent, who is good, who is evil, who deserves our sympathy, and who deserves our scorn. And often, we have made these judgments without ever realizing how little we actually know.
Proverbs anticipated this human tendency long before smartphones, social media, or twenty-four-hour news. “The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him.” (Proverbs 18:17.) Notice that Scripture does not say the first person is necessarily lying. It says he seems right. A story can be entirely convincing and still be incomplete. A person can tell us something true while leaving out something equally true. A photograph may capture one second while concealing everything that happened in the minutes before it. A quotation may be accurate and still lack the context necessary to understand it.
Half-truths are particularly dangerous because they contain enough truth to make us comfortable judging the half we have not heard.
Perhaps that is because emotion moves much faster than wisdom.
Anger does not like to wait. Outrage has little patience for investigation. Fear does not ask many follow-up questions. And righteous indignation, perhaps most dangerously of all, can make us feel virtuous while we are being foolish. There is something intoxicating about joining the crowd when the crowd is certain it is right. We see hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of people condemning someone, and we assume there must be good reason for it. We repeat what we have heard. We share the headline. We form an opinion. Sometimes we even help deliver the sentence. And all the while, somewhere quietly in the background, Proverbs whispers: Have you heard the other side?
This is where another verse from the same chapter becomes particularly uncomfortable: “To answer before listening—that is folly and shame.” (Proverbs 18:13.) Not inconvenience. Not merely poor judgment. Folly and shame. The Christian, then, should perhaps be one of the hardest people in the world to recruit into a mob. Not because Christians should be indifferent to injustice. Quite the opposite. We should care deeply about truth precisely because we care deeply about justice. But justice cannot exist without truth, and truth is rarely frightened by another question.
There is another reason we should be cautious before joining the crowd. One day, we may be the person standing in its path. One day it may be our motives being questioned, our words taken out of context, our mistake being discussed without mention of our repentance, our family being judged, our child being accused, or our reputation being reduced to a headline. Our side of the story may be dismissed because everyone has already decided what happened. Suddenly, we will desperately want from others the very thing we were once unwilling to give: the patience to listen. We will hope someone asks another question. We will hope someone reserves judgment. We will hope someone remembers there are two sides to a story.
Perhaps this is another expression of Christ’s command to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. If I would want to be heard, I must be willing to hear. If I would want someone to question an accusation made against me, I must be willing to question accusations made against another. If I would want mercy while the facts are still being gathered, I must extend that same mercy. This does not mean truth never requires judgment. Scripture certainly does not teach that. Evil is real. Sin is real. Injustice should be confronted. But discernment is not the absence of judgment. It is the refusal to judge carelessly.
That is becoming one of the more difficult Christian disciplines of our age. We live surrounded by voices competing for our emotions. Every headline wants our attention. Every controversy demands an immediate opinion. Every argument seems to insist that silence means complicity and hesitation means weakness. But wisdom is not always quick. Sometimes wisdom waits. Sometimes wisdom listens. Sometimes wisdom asks another question. Sometimes wisdom refuses to join the crowd until the crowd has heard the whole story.
Scripture tells us, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). We often think of guarding our hearts as protecting them from what might hurt us. Perhaps we must also guard them from what might harden us: outrage, gossip, suspicion, the strange satisfaction of believing the worst about someone we have never met, and the pride of being certain when we possess only a fraction of the facts. What we repeatedly allow into our hearts eventually shapes what comes out of them.
The crowd will always be eager to hand us its verdict.
Wisdom asks us to wait, to listen, to question, and to seek truth rather than merely confirmation. Before adding our voice to the roar of the crowd, perhaps we would do well to remember that somewhere on the other side of every accusation stands another human being. And someday, that human being could be us.
The first story may sound right. Wisdom waits to hear the rest.