The news crushes you because it hands a finite person a load meant for an infinite one. Christians have names for the qualities that make that load bearable: God’s omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. He knows everything. He has all power. He is present everywhere. You have none of those in full, and no amount of scrolling will change that. Hope under nonstop headlines begins when you admit that limit and trust the One who has no such limit.
Pastor Chris Brooks makes this case when Lisa Fields asks how people should think when every day brings something new: planes, politics, bird flu, friends in Washington losing their jobs. His answer is doctrine, and it is also practical. The two connect once a few ideas are laid out in order.
Why does more information make me feel worse?
Brooks starts with the device in your hand. He says “the problem with these phones of ours is that they make us feel like deity when we’re not supposed to.” That sentence is more exact than it first sounds.
A phone gives you something that looks like one of God’s attributes. It reaches everywhere at once. Within minutes you can learn about a shooting across the country, a war on another continent, a market drop, a celebrity’s collapse. What the phone does not give you is the ability to do anything about most of it. It also cannot put you in the room with the people involved. You get the knowledge without the power and without the presence.
Brooks names that gap directly: “I’m not built to know about all the evil that’s happening through all the world.” He notes that earlier generations had nothing like this exposure. “You knew what was going on in your community,” he says, and perhaps, over time, a little beyond it. What has changed for most people is their intake, while their capacity has stayed the same. In Brooks’s words, “we are surpassing our capacity as finite beings. We’re trying to live as if we are infinite beings, and we’re not. And it’s crushing us.”
That crushing feeling tells you something accurate about yourself. You are a creature trying to carry what only the Creator carries. It says nothing about how much you care or how strongly you believe.
What do omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence actually mean?
The three words sound technical, but each has a plain meaning.
Omniscience means God knows everything: every event, every motive, every outcome. The psalmist says of God, “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite” (Psalm 147:4-5).
Omnipotence means God is all powerful. As Brooks puts it, “Omnipotence means he’s all powerful.” Notice that Psalm 147 sets God’s power and God’s understanding side by side in the same verse. That pairing matters.
Omnipresence means God is present everywhere, with no place outside his reach. “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” (Psalm 139:7).
Here is the step most people miss. In God these three are never separated. He never knows something he is powerless to address. He never watches evil from a distance, as a spectator. His knowledge of evil always comes joined to the power to judge it and redeem it, and to his presence with the people suffering under it.
That is why Brooks can say: “Only God can handle knowing all the evil in all the world, and still maintain hope because he is omniscient, he is omnipotent, he is omnipresent. I’m not.”
God sees far more darkness than any newsroom will ever report, and his hope holds anyway, because his knowledge never outruns his power. For you it does, many times a day. Every time you see what you cannot touch, you experience that gap. Dread is what it feels like from the inside. Trying harder to keep up cannot close it, and neither can reacting to every crisis with a post or an opinion. Both treat finitude as a problem of effort, when it is simply part of being a creature.
Is being limited a flaw?
It is easy to hear “you are finite” as an insult or as a symptom of sin. Scripture points another way.
Brooks traces limits back to the beginning: “From the garden to now God has placed beautiful limitations on humanity.” He points to the first command God gave: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:16-17).
Read the passage closely. This limit came before the fall, in a garden God had already called good. The first humans were finite in a world without sin. So limits belong to what it means to be human from the start. Brooks gives the reason in a single clause: we need those restrictions “because we’re not God.”
The next chapter adds a detail worth noticing, though this connection is a reader’s observation rather than one Brooks spells out. The serpent’s pitch was this: “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The temptation was to reach for a kind of knowing that belonged to God. A feed that offers you all the evil in the world, all the time, makes a smaller version of the same offer. It promises that if you see everything, you will somehow be in control of it.
A distinction theologians often draw helps here. Some of God’s qualities he shares with people in a creaturely way, such as love, wisdom, justice and faithfulness. You are meant to grow in those. Others belong to God alone and are often called incommunicable attributes. The three Brooks names belong in that second group. Growing in love is discipleship. Trying to grow toward omniscience only wears you out.
Isn’t looking away a failure to care?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. Suffering does not stop when you close the app. Injustice often thrives when comfortable people decide not to know. A Christian who hears “embrace your limits” as permission to ignore the hurting has misheard the doctrine.
Brooks does not argue for ignorance. He says, “I’m very much in tune with laws, policies, things that affect my local community, the people I’m pastoring, the folks I’m trying to reach with the gospel.” He limits his intake, but he chooses carefully what he stays informed about.
The doctrine of God’s attributes shows where that line falls. In God, knowledge matches responsibility, because his power and presence have no limit. In you, responsibility follows reach. You are answerable for the places where you actually have some power and some presence: your household, your neighbors, your congregation, your city, your vote, your giving, your prayers. Knowing what touches those places is part of love. Taking in every disaster on earth at once mostly produces alarm rather than action.
Distant suffering still matters. Christians pray for the world and give to people they will never meet. The question is whether your intake serves love or only feeds dread. Brooks adds a warning about the source itself: “So much of it is designed to stress you out.” An alarm and a summons are different things.
Brooks admits he does not follow every move the president makes, knowing some people will be disappointed. That admission is a form of humility. Refusing to carry everything confesses that you were never the one holding it up.
Where does hope come from when the headlines never stop?
If the problem is that you are finite, the hope cannot come from becoming less finite. It has to come from the character of Someone who is not.
One psalm states it in a way anyone can grasp: “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4). Set that beside a line from a different psalm, a pairing that is my own connection rather than either text’s argument: “I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety” (Psalm 4:8). Read together, they suggest that because God stays awake, you can sleep. Brooks says plainly that he sleeps well, and the reason he gives is theological. He knows he cannot handle knowing all of it, and he knows who can.
That is why Christian hope differs from optimism. Earlier in the same conversation, Brooks describes the hope of Christ this way: “It’s not a hope that’s simply based off of external circumstances.” Optimism reads the headlines and bets they will improve. Hope rests on God’s knowledge, power and presence, none of which shift with the day’s news. A bad news cycle can shake your mood. It cannot change who God is.
Omnipresence also clarifies what this hope does not promise. God being everywhere means he is present inside loss, which is different from keeping loss away. Brooks knows the difference. His oldest son, Chris, died in 2019, and he says that switching worldviews would not have removed the question of what to do with that grief. He describes faith as giving people resources to survive hardship rather than to hide from it. The God who is present in every place is present in that one too.
Doesn’t Bible prophecy just add to the fear?
It can, if you read it like another feed. Brooks reads it the opposite way. Looking to Matthew 24 and 25, he says God “tells us what’s gonna happen before it happens, so that when it happens, we can still have hope.”
The text supports that reading of the purpose. When Jesus tells his disciples about coming turmoil, he adds an instruction: “And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet” (Matthew 24:6). The warning is given so that the hearers will not panic.
Brooks offers an analogy from his own home. If he tells his kids before leaving for work that three things will happen that day, they will not be thrown off when those things happen. They will remember that their dad told them. The analogy shows how foreknowledge steadies people. It also has a limit. A father who predicts the day still cannot control it. God’s foreknowledge sits alongside his power and presence. He rules over events and remains with his people through them, which is the part of the analogy to keep.
Christians read the timing in Matthew 24 in different ways. Some connect much of it to the destruction of the temple in the first century. Others connect it to Christ’s return. Many see both in view. Brooks reads today’s turmoil as a sign that the return is drawing near. You do not have to settle the timeline to obey the command in verse 6. And if you find yourself combing headlines for fulfillments, prophecy has turned back into the very feed it was meant to quiet.
What do healthy limits look like?
Brooks turned off nearly all his notifications a few years ago and keeps a Sabbath, along with limits on screens and social media. He finds that the more he leans into those limits, the healthier he becomes. He also insists the limits leave no empty space behind: “it’s not like we cut ourselves off from all this information in a vacuum.” What fills the gap is time in the Word, which tells you the truth about the world without trying to keep you anxious.
The same doctrine that sets your limits lets them differ from someone else’s. A nurse, a city council member and a college student need different information. The test is the same for all three: does what you take in match what God has actually placed within your reach?
Limits also have their own edge. Cutting back on news is wise, but it is not treatment. Brooks is careful about people who live with clinical depression, saying faith can help them keep getting up through dark nights. If anxiety or low mood stays after your habits change, seeing a trained counselor or doctor is no failure of faith. It is part of caring for the life God gave you, and it fits the same humility about being finite.
The relief this doctrine offers has nothing to do with the world being better than the headlines suggest. Often it is worse. The relief is that the only One who sees all of it has not asked you to see all of it. He knows, he has the power, and he is present, so you can put the phone down and be faithful in the place where he has actually put you.