THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TIKTOK

There are people on various social media platforms who are trying to infiltrate your thoughts and confuse, challenge, and change your perspectives on God, faith, the Bible, and spiritual matters.

They are using terms like “awakening” to suggest that what you may have been taught all your life is seriously lacking, even maliciously withheld, and there is some higher level of spiritual awareness you can attain that is far

beyond the traditional experience of church and Scripture.

Some of those who have made this enlightening journey refer to their experience as “deconstruction,” as if the spiritual values and convictions you have developed over the years about God and His Word are poorly and erroneously manufactured, and you must “deconstruct” those ideas to be free from their influences and curses on your life.

The only way for you to do that is to tear down and destroy those values, convictions, and the understanding you have always held about God and Biblical truth so that you can replace them with a deeper, more accurate truth.  They, of course, have successfully done that in their lives and are eager to help you do the same.  They engage in a vigorous crusade to guide you and enlighten you to greater heights of spiritual knowledge & understanding, far beyond the level of your meager church and Christian upbringing.  To help you in ways your pastor and parents never could.

When Satan embodied a serpent and challenged Eve in the Garden of Eden, he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”  The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’”  The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die!” (Genesis 3:1-4).

Satan did two things in this conversation.  First, he raised doubt about the integrity of God’s Word – “Indeed, has God said…”  In other words, “Are you sure that is what God said?  Are you certain that is accurate?  Is it possible you misunderstood what God really meant?”

The second thing Satan did was deny the truth of God’s Word – “You surely will not die!”  In other words, “God is a liar.  Don’t believe Him.  He’s just trying to keep you from knowing things He doesn’t want you to know.”

This Scripture in Genesis credits Satan as being very crafty.  That means he is sensible-sounding yet very shrewd.  That’s the same way these voices on social media are today.  They sound very educated and intelligent.  They offer rational-sounding arguments and raise thought-provoking questions.  They give you the impression that their enlightenment and understanding have been raised to a level higher than yours, and you should listen and carefully consider their more accurate perspectives.  They flaunt their credentials to you so that you are more persuaded to hear them as experts and accept their proposals based merely on their self-avowed authority.   In reality, they are employing the same sinister tactics Satan did in the Garden.

They will tell you the Bible is full of contradictions.  They insist Jesus said things He didn’t mean, that various writers of the Bible were wrong and taught things contradictory to what Christ represented, that Heaven is not the kind of place you have always understood it to be, and hell is not a place at all.  They insist your greatest depth of spiritual awareness is not found in church, with God, or in the pages of the Bible, but in a superior and heightened self-awareness; that all the right answers for maneuvering life are found within you.  You just have to tap into your “higher self.”  If they can get you to question or doubt the authority of God’s Word in your life, then they seize a stronghold on your curiosity and thought processes so they can lead you into their more enlightening perspectives.

The fact is, Jesus said such people would emerge as we enter the last days – Many false prophets will arise, He said, and will mislead many. (Matthew 24:11).  The Apostle John cautions us in his New Testament writings – Do not believe every (spirit - teacher), but test the (teachers) to see whether they are from God because many false prophets have gone out into the world. (I John 4:1).  Paul warned us – Evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived, during these last days (II Timothy 3:13) .  You see them every day on social media, especially on TikTok.

Friend, you have some decisions to make.  First and foremost, you have to decide who and what your standard of righteous truth is.  Is it God and His Word, the Bible, or someone on social media who insists the Bible cannot be trusted for its accuracy and historical authenticity?  Who insist that other ancient manuscripts contain additional truth you must follow, and they weren’t included in the Bible because those who put the Bible together didn’t want you knowing what those other documents actually revealed?  Who want to convince you that alleged errors and inconsistencies in the Bible can only be explained by them, and they are the ones who hold the real truth?

Many naive people today are listening to and believing those voices.  The Bible said this would also be a sign of the last days – The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths. (II Timothy 4:3-4).  Are you one of them?

Oh yes, I have seen these teachers on social media.  They look inviting and convincing.  They speak with intellectual reasoning, authoritative rationale, and eloquent argumentation, but does that make them right?  I insist they are among those the Bible says will emerge during these last days, who are called wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15) and demonic angels of light. (II Corinthians 11:14). In other words, they will look right and sound right, but they are absolutely wrong!

Yes, they claim they have been called those very things…and they laugh it off.  They pour on a sympathetic ointment that desensitizes your guard by claiming anyone who questions their teaching or points out its opposition to Biblical truth is nothing more than a judgmental hatemonger and not demonstrating the love of Christ.  On the contrary, true love cares enough to confront and correct.  True love defends and holds one another accountable to God’s holy & righteous standard.  If you can sit by and watch someone violate God’s standard of truth without ever challenging them at the point of their error and disobedience, then you really don’t love them at all.

You are being deceived.  The only way you will know and understand that is by becoming a serious and diligent student of God’s Word.  The Bible is not just another book on the bookshelf.  All of the Bible is divinely inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness. (II Timothy 3:16).  That means that God literally breathed into the writers of Scripture and used them as divine instruments to author the written revelation of Himself to mankind.  His divine presence permeated the entire process of its authorship, its translation, the compilation of the exact 66 books it contains, and God has preserved and protected its integrity across the generations of time.  If you can’t believe and accept that by faith, then your mind will always be open to any voice that comes along and offers you a sweet-sounding alternative that incites your inner yearnings.  That is a dangerous disposition!

The Bible is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12).  That means God’s Word is able to cut through all the superficiality of one’s life and get right down to the content of their character and the spiritual condition of their heart & soul.  No other book, nor any other truth, can accomplish that; only the Bible.

When you immerse your knowledge and understanding in the truth of God’s Word, you are then able to measure what people say against that truth and determine whether or not their teaching is divine truth or demonic deception.  If you are Biblically illiterate, you have no knowledge base to understand the difference, and that makes you vulnerable to any whimsical ideology that comes along.

I have written and published a series of books based on the revelation of the Apostle Paul, when he stated – But the Spirit explicitly says, that in the later times, some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons. (I Timothy 4:1).  I’m convinced that many who profess to this new “awakening” and have undergone some radical form of  “deconstruction” have actually separated themselves from the true faith and sold themselves out to deceitful ideas, and are now believing and practicing the false doctrines of demonic spirits.

We know this based on John’s assessment of it:  They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out in order that it might be shown that they all are not of us. (I John 2:19).  When a person shares a genuine relationship with Jesus Christ, he doesn’t just “deconstruct” and walk away.  True followers of Christ hold steadfastly to God’s Word, will, and ways and endure until the end.

You must decide whether these challenging voices are right or whether Biblical truth is right.  I urge you to give that some very deep and serious thought, because your eternity is what weighs in the balance, and eternal life separated from God in the everlasting torment of hell is an awful long time to be wrong about this.  Those people have no control over your life, nor can they offer any guarantees whatsoever about your eternity.  They cannot assure you with 100% accuracy that their perspectives and belief systems are the absolute truth.  But I can assure you that God’s authoritative Word is the absolute truth.

You have to decide who is best to trust & follow, and whose ideology represents genuine divine truth – God’s or theirs?  Jesus promised, “Everyone who seeks shall find” (Matthew 7:8), and God promised through the prophet, “You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13).  Grab your Bible, ask God to guide you in discovering His genuine truth, and you will find the correct answers upon which to base your life and faith; and you will assuredly discover who is right.

God Bless You in that Quest,

Rick M. Smith