How many times were you spammed last week? If you don’t use e-mail then you might not know what spam is, but if you do have an e-mail account you’ve seen hundreds and possibly thousands of messages touting every kind of product or service. You receive these pitches at your cost in terms of time, computer use, and aggravation. They never stop coming, even when you use spam filtering. Some infiltrate pornography to your home or advertise products which should not be spoken about openly in polite or Christian society.

There are several aspects to spam which are of concern. Spam messages are sent to you without your consent and at your expense. Products of questionable effectiveness are touted and when ordered are sometimes not delivered. You may be bombarded with requests to join a protest or become part of a chain letter which either promises extravagant rewards or threatens dire consequences for breaking the chain. An alarming aspect of spam e-mail is that it so often attempts to defraud you of your hard-earned money. Worse still, you may receive fraudulent messages of spiritual blessings for following the writer’s advice or dire warnings of spiritual danger for not heeding his message.

Our particular concern is that you be on your guard so as to detect fraudulent spiritual claims made either in e-mail messages, in postings on message boards or blogs, or put forward on numerous web-sites. A statement is not necessarily true because it sounds authoritative and appears in print on your screen. The same is, of course, true of what you may read in print media or in books and periodicals. Question any outcome which is in conflict with the Bible. Question any action or speech which is contrary to the spiritual and moral teachings of Jesus. Carefully examine any Scripture which may be quoted to see whether it is taken out of context in order to promote error. Question the authenticity of the source material if any is quoted. Question the approach of the author to detect any bias which colors his statements.

Fraudulent spiritual messages are of ancient origin and emanate from the Father of Lies, the devil. Remember what he told Eve (Genesis 3:4-5)? Isaiah, writing eight centuries before Christ, warns about spurious sources of spiritual information: “When they say to you, ‘Consult the mediums and the spiritists who whisper and mutter,’ should not a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living? To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn” (Isaiah 8:19-20).

In the New Testament age, Paul warns Christians not to “be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us [my emphasis—Mel], to the effect that the day of the Lord has come” (2Thessalonians 2:2). In addition to those Paul alludes to, many apocryphal letters and spurious gospels have appeared which claim to have been written by one of the apostles or associates of the Lord. These have been examined and have been found to have little value, to be heretical in nature, and to be inferior in most respects to the canonical books. They are all ancient spam and should be treated with the same contempt you have for those unwanted e-mails which flood your in-box!

“Be sober, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).

Mel