Guard Against Deception

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our visitors. My sister and brother-in-law are here visiting today. So, if you ever wanted to hear that choice story about what I was like when I was seven years old, this is your opportunity. Be careful what you ask for. Well, if you'll turn with me, we'll start with a scripture today. We'll turn to Matthew 24. One of the legacies I remember from my father is listening very often to different material from the church. Being a child, this verse is one that, you know, for some reason, things stick with you. This is one that stuck with me for one reason or another. I'd like to start there. We'll read Matthew 24 verses 23 through 25. Maybe it's on my mind as we're preparing for the Bible study next week as well. What we read here is the Olivet Prophecy, as I think we know, that Jesus Christ spoke. If anyone says to you, look, here's the Christ, or there, do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. See, I've told you beforehand.

What struck me as a child and still does was this section near the end of verse 24, where it talks about great signs and wonders that would be so great that they could deceive, if possible, even the elect. It makes you wonder, what is that? What is it that could be that powerful? And what is it about deception? How is it that all of that works? Now, first of all, we have to take great comfort in a couple of words that are here in the Scripture, which is the words, if possible.

So it's making the statement that if it were possible to deceive the elect, these signs would be such that they could do that, obviously implying that it's not possible to deceive the elect. So it's not that we have to be fearful of this, as long as we're attending to our conversion and our relationship with God. But still, this idea of deception and the strength that deception can have is one that I'd like to talk about a bit today. You know, deception is actually a big business these days. And as a result, something that deserves our attention, not only from a spiritual standpoint, but just from a physical standpoint in our day-to-day lives. And so hopefully there's some practical things that everyone can take away from this message in that regard as well. I don't know about you. At work, we undergo a lot of training about cyber attacks and different things that can go wrong from a data protection standpoint, because there's just a lot of stuff out there. One of the stats that I saw was that the FTC reported that in 2024 there were $12.5 billion in consumer fraud losses. $12.5 billion in the U.S. from consumer fraud losses. And that was up 25 percent from the year before. And I would expect the way that things are going, that's going to continue on that type of a trend, or at least at that high of a level for some time. I was reading around some articles on this in addition to some things I've been exposed to at work. I ran across this one from a publication or website called USA Cyber from just this past March. It's an article called Understanding Advanced Social Engineering in 2025, Six Evolving Techniques. And this quote struck me, and it's consistent with some of the things that I've seen and heard as well. The article writes, social engineering involves manipulating individuals into divulging confidential information or performing actions that compromise security. And this is the piece that caught my attention, and again is consistent with everything that I've experienced. Unlike traditional hacking, it does not rely on exploiting technical vulnerabilities, but rather on leveraging human behavior and trust.

And so what's happening and what people are realizing more and more is there are techniques that can be used to deceive individuals, so they unwittingly allow people in to get their information, their confidential personal information, in a lot of cases. One example, there's all kinds of different words for these things out there, but spearfishing is one you've probably heard of fishing with a ph. I'm not actually sure, I'll be curious where that phrase came from, but this is called spearfishing, and it involves using personal information that's gathered from social media or other public sources about a person. So you can actually learn a lot about what a person likes, what they don't like, where they live, all kinds of different things, just by going to their social media profile. And with spearfishing, the people who are looking to deceive that individual to gain access to their information will use that information that's gained through legitimate public sources, and then use that to mimic trusted sources. So I know I've gotten... how many people have gotten an email or a phone call, even in the last week, from somebody that's fishing for information, right? Your warranty, your car warranty is up. I think the latest one has to do with tolls now. There's a text scam going around that says you're a toll transponder, you owe money on your tolls, you've got to click on the link. So there's all kinds of these things that are out there, and more and more they're relying on that human element to get people to give that information away to them. Like all things in life, for most things in life, it takes two to tango. So it's not just the fact that there are people out there looking to deceive, but we as individuals have to be on guard as well. And that's what a lot of this social engineering is about, is letting... finding people and having them let their guard down. And one of the things that impacts us as individuals is the trend that's going on in society in terms of how we consume information, and how we do or don't think critically about the information that we do consume. You've probably heard the term infotainment.

If you haven't heard it, I'm sure you've seen it. Infotainment refers to the fact that nowadays more and more people are getting their news and at least allegedly factual information from sources that are sort of pseudo-entertainment, pseudo-news, but don't really go through the same type of process of making sure the information is true and verified as a typical or a standard news source typically would. So this is leading to a culture where entertainment value is actually as important, if not more important, than the truth of the information that underlies it. So think of some of the popular podcasts that are out there. Why do people listen to these podcasts at the end of the day? Because they're edgy, they're entertaining, they're exciting, they bring a different point of view, and oh yeah, some of that stuff might be true as well, right? And it all leaves an impression because as we consume these things, if we're not thinking about, if we're not consulting some of the different sources that might be out there, it's hard to really sift through what is being presented to us as facts and figure out what really is true and what isn't. I've got a visual to put up. I don't want to disappoint people by not showing at least one slide. I love my memes.

So while we're talking about this one, there's a University of New Hampshire study that was done in 2021, and it found that nearly 10% of participants in that survey agreed that the earth is flat.

Okay, well hopefully we'll see the visual in a second. According to other articles, some of the reasons behind this include some notorious sports stars. I don't know if you can see that completely yet. I love this. This is awkward. It shows us all the planets, nice and round in their orbits, and our good old flat earth right in the middle of that solar system.

Somehow it works, I guess. So per other articles I've read, a lot of this is because we've got some famous sports stars, other influencer types that are really into the flat earth theory, and they back that, and that tends to be part of the rise in it, is people that others listen to, whether it's true or not, think this way so people adopt that. And even from a national security perspective now, the United States, among many other countries, is getting increasingly concerned because of the effectiveness that social media has in spreading disinformation.

Again, because people are not necessarily discerning, they will take things that go out there and become viral, and they'll accept what's laid out there. And the visual imagery of a lot of these things is so powerful that people don't even think to go the next step and actually question whether these things are real. So why do I bring these things up? We live within this culture. We're impacted by the things that go on in our culture, whether we want to be or not. And so it's important that we be vigilant to these things, that we think about what's out there, that we approach these things consciously, and consider what it is that it's doing inside of our own minds and the way that we deal with our lives. So today I'd like to use this lens of cybersecurity protecting our information, our data, and use that lens to consider the topic of deception and how it impacts us in our spiritual lives and how we go about that. There are five non-technical ways. I used AI for this, and full disclosure. Co-pilot did a nice job of collating this, and I did check my sources. But there are five ways that Co-pilot put together to summarize ways that you can evaluate messages or calls or the things that come your way to find out if they're true or not. One is trust your instincts. If something feels off, it probably is.

Secondly, verify the source. Thirdly, watch for red flags. We'll go through these more slowly later. Fourthly, check for inconsistencies. And fifth, avoid engaging. Again, we'll talk about those in a few minutes, and I'll walk through those and lay out a few parallels that we should think about as well in our spiritual lives. But first I want to talk a little bit more about awareness, because any issue, any problem, starts with actually being aware of it, being convinced that it's actually a thing. And what is it about deception? Do we really need to be concerned about it? Is it something new? Or is it something that's been around for a long time? And certainly, we don't want to go through life as Christians being suspicious of everything and everyone giving everyone the side eye as they come up and, you know, convince me before I'm going to even talk to you. At the same time, the Bible tells us that we have to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. And actually, I really like the summary that chat, not chatgbt, but Copilot put together on that phrase. It came up with this. The phrase, be wise as serpents and gentlest as doves, originates from Matthew 10 16 in the Bible. It encourages, I don't know what other Matthew 10 16 here is, but at least we're being clear, it encourages individuals to combine discernment and integrity when navigating a complex world. And I like that phrase, the way it produced that phrase, combining discernment and integrity when navigating a complex world. Being wise as serpents suggests the need for shrewdness and caution, while gentle as doves emphasizes innocence and purity in one's actions. I don't know how many of you travel often. I find myself fairly often in different cities around the country, sometimes different parts of the world. And, you know, one of the questions I often ask as I'm in different places, it might be done with dinner and want to walk back to my hotel, is, is it safe? What kind of neighborhoods am I going through? What I need to watch out for? Am I better off getting a car? Some parts of the world, you don't just get a car, you have to be actually very careful because people even fake taxis and kidnap people and take them off and, you know, rob them and do other horrible things. That's what it means to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. And while we're not necessarily going through a physical neighborhood, we don't know every day, the world that we navigate in is the same way. We have to recognize what it is that's out there and why. So let's take a look through a little bit of this and, I don't know, but have you thought about the fact that much of the Bible is a story of deception?

Maybe a little bit of a dark view to take of the Bible, but let me walk you through it. And it is a theme that's actually woven throughout the entire Bible. I'm not going to turn to Genesis. We all know the story of Adam and Eve. It's probably among the small handful of Bible stories that most people, at least in the Western world, could repeat. But that's all about deception, right? At the very genesis, no pun intended, of the human race, Satan was there deceiving people.

And it set the tone. And as humanity made that decision through Adam and Eve to follow that way, all of the things that came along with that became a part of our human cultures. It doesn't matter what culture you're a part of, this is something that we have to watch for. Because humanity, with that influence of Satan mixed in, deception is, unfortunately, something that's within each and every one of us. It's just a matter of how, where, and why it's going to come out.

As we move on in Genesis, Genesis 7, chapters 7 and 8, again, we're not going to turn there, but if you'd want to look there and just glance at it, Genesis 7 and 8, tells a story about Moses. Moses is approaching Pharaoh, and he's saying those famous lines, let my people go. And Pharaoh, over and all over again, says yes, well, maybe not yes, but no. And then the next plague comes around, and all these different things happen. Do you remember what happens in the first few times around? Pharaoh had sorcerers. What were those sorcerers able to do? They were able, through their own powers, whatever those might have been, to mimic the miracles that Moses and Aaron were doing under God's authority. It only lasted for a short time, but if we look at Genesis 7, verses 11 and 12, Moses came, Rod turned into a snake, the sorcerers were able to do the same thing, turned their rods into snakes. God, with his great sense of humor, had Aaron's snake consume the rods or the snakes that the sorcerers had put down, which made a point, back to the early point that I was talking about, the fact that God is more powerful than any of these lying signs that might be out there and any of the deception that's out there. But they were able to show that they could do, in that case, the same thing. In verse 22, after the waters were turned into blood, what is it the sorcerers did? They were able, once again, to turn water into blood.

This happened again in verse 7 of chapter 8, when the frogs were produced, the sorcerers produced frogs. Now that was the end of the line for them, because if we read in verses 18 and 19 of Genesis 8, you'll see that when the lice or the flies, however it is that your translation shows it, chapter 8 of Genesis verses 18 and 19 says the sorcerers were not able to replicate those lice. And from there forward, it was understood, and they even said it, this is coming from God. This isn't some trick, this isn't some connection to an evil spirit or something else, it might be doing it through black magic. And so it shows, and God showed, how He was dominant through that. But at the same time, it was showing the fact that even at this high level, there was deception going on there. And these sorcerers were able, at least for a while, to show similar signs to the ones that were being shown from God. There's another interesting passage if we turn to Joshua 9. This account comes immediately after Israel entered the promised land.

They crossed the Jordan and they started to conquer the promised land. They took Jericho. They first were defeated by the people of Ai, and then they conquered it.

And then in Joshua 9, of course, rumors spread across the whole land that these people are coming, they're powerful, they're wiping out cities. What are we going to do? Well, the Gibeonites were pretty shrewd. And they came in Joshua 9, starting verse 3, they heard what Joshua had done to Jericho and Ai, and they resorted to deception to save themselves. Fairly typical human reaction. They sent ambassadors to Joshua, loading their donkeys, and what did they do? They had weathered saddlebags. They had old, patched wineskins. They put on worn-out, patched sandals and ragged clothes, and the bread they took with them was dry and moldy. You know, sounds kind of like when you're a kid, you know, and you're hungry and you had lunch two hours ago. What do you do? You sort of put a little dirt on your face and you try to hollow out your cheeks. Mom, I'm hungry. I'm starving. I need some food. Causing that deception. And so even though they came from a very short distance away, they got all this old stuff so it looked like they'd been wandering for days, weeks, maybe even months. And so in verse 6, when they arrived at the camp of Israel at Gilgal, they told Joshua and the men of Israel, we've come from a distant land to make a peace treaty with you. And so in verse 14, the Israelites examined their food, but they did not consult the Lord. So they took the things that they saw at face value. For whatever reason, after all the miracles that God had worked, they figured, I got this one. I can see what I can see. Clearly not a threat. And they made a treaty with them. And that's in verse 15. They guaranteed their safety and the leaders ratified their agreement with a binding oath. And they found out later, we won't go into all the succeeding verses, but they found out later they'd been tricked, but they'd made an oath and they had to stick with it.

So by taking a look at what was in front of us, in front of them, not consulting God, they were deceived. Let's turn next to Jacob. We're not even out of Genesis yet. Genesis 27 verses 21 through 24. We won't read all of this, but I think we all have heard at some point the account of Jacob in Esau. And Jacob was well known for his ability to deceive. Apparently he came by it naturally because his mother put him up to this one. He was going to claim the birthright through trickery from his father. And he mimicked Esau, his mother helped by cooking the favorite meal, finding skin of an animal to put on his hands. And Jacob went to Isaac, claimed to be his brother Esau, and asked for the blessing. In verse 22 of Genesis 27, Jacob went close to his father. Isaac touched him, and he said, the voice is Jacob's, but the hands are Esau's. But he did not recognize Jacob because his hands felt hairy just like Esau's. And so Isaac prepared, and he blessed Jacob. And he asked, are you really my son Esau? And Jacob said, yes, I am. And that's how he received the gift. So again, deception coming all the way through. Now you might say when it goes around, comes around.

We won't read Genesis 29, but it has to do with a great big wedding celebration, with the sister ending up with Jacob after seven years of work. He meant to marry Leah, or Rachel. Somehow he ended up with Leah, inquiring, minds want to know.

And he had to spend seven more years toiling before he could marry Rachel. So it's a bit of a live by the sword, die by the sword that happened there with Jacob, but definitely somehow ran in the family in terms of how they treated one another. Let's skip forward. We're not going to spend our time walking through everything, but that we can find, because there's a lot of it. And if you wanted to spend more time, you could find endless numbers of scriptures that address this topic in some way or another. But let's turn to 2 Corinthians 11, because Paul warns of this to the New Testament church as well, talking to the Corinthians in this case. In 2 Corinthians 11, he starts in verse 12, he says, And then in verse 13, he says, And so we see this very strong warning to the New Testament church as well, that they have to be very careful. There are people who purport to carry the word of God, to preach Jesus Christ, who actually are deceitful and are false ministers. And it talks about the care that has to be spent, and even compares to the fact that Satan himself—and I think we know that one of the wiles of Satan is that he doesn't go out there and just show himself as pure evil on its face. He uses subtlety. He uses trickery. You see what the Gibeonites used, and he finds ways to make what he's peddling look extremely attractive, even righteous, as he draws people in and works deceit. So let's use this framework then, now that we've established the fact that deceit is actually a really important thing that we have to understand. It's all through the Bible. We could find a lot more scriptures on it, and we're not going to take the time to do that. But I'd like to use the framework of those five things that I read, and just take a brief time touching through those. You can consider a couple practical applications in your own life and how you use your computer and how you answer your phone, and much more importantly, consider some of the impacts on our spiritual lives of these things. So the first one was trust your instincts.

Trust your instincts. And this summary pointed out the fact that scammers often use urgency or fear to create pressure. That's one of the big things that happens. I had one happen to me. It actually happened, I guess, a couple of different times when we were living in Southern California. Maybe some of you had this happen. You're walking down the street, maybe you're in the car, and somebody just comes running up really fast and says, I need help, I need some money.

And they're trying to create an urgency and a shock value that stops you from thinking. I've been in that situation a few different times. Once with a colleague from work, another time I was at a post office late one evening, mailing a letter, and somebody came up, ran up, and did that. And it takes you back. You don't really know what to do. And most cases, people do end up just giving the person some money, so they'll go away because they're so shocked by it. And so that's one of the big things is look for these situations that try to create urgency or fear. When you think about the texts that you get, you think about the random phone calls you get if you choose to answer them, and what is it that they're doing? It's usually the same thing. The fear factor. Your account has been hacked. Unless you give me your password to reset it, you could lose all your money in the next five minutes. So creating that sense of urgency, that fear that something terrible is going to happen. It's one of the big sales tactics that's used as well, isn't it? Pushing people to act now. And there's actually something physiological that goes on within our brains. It's useful to think about and understand that it's there. There's actually a part of our brain that researchers have found called the amygdala, and it's a very small part of something called the limbic system in your body. And it's there because God designed it to be there for good reason.

But just reading a brief summary about it, the amygdala overrides thought by detecting potential threats and triggering the fight-or-flight response before the frontal lobes of your brain can assess the situation rationally. Okay, so this is the part of your brain that just reacts when it senses danger. This leads to impulsive emotional reactions, such as anger or fear, even in non-threatening scenarios. During this process, stress hormones flood the brain, suppressing logical thinking and making it difficult to maintain reasoned decision-making. Understanding how the amygdala functions can help manage emotional responses and regain cognitive control. Now, some of us probably remember the advice we got from our mom or our dad or our uncle, which is count to ten before you react. This is why. It wasn't always physiologically understood why, but the fact is, for very good reason, God designed our brains with this. Why? Because if you're about to pull out on a street and you glance and you see a car racing your way and running a stop sign, do you want to stop and calculate the distance and the speed? Think about, should I brake? Should I accelerate? It's too late. So God created our brains so that in situations where there's imminent danger, we react.

We don't have time to think. Now, what happens, though, in other situations, people can take advantage of that. And that's what this sense of urgency, this sense of fear, there's a sales tactic that's used for this sort of thing as well, right? To create that need, try to get people to operate based on their emotions and let the emotions hijack the rational part of what's going on. And so when we think about this in the practical, the day-to-day, that phone call, that text that you get, again, what they're trying to do is to get you to react out of fear. And the fact is, if you count to 10, you go take a walk around the block, you think about it, you call a friend, you look on the internet to look at what the latest scams are that are going on, you let your rational brain kick in again, you can think your way through things and figure out what the right response is.

In most situations, we're not dealing very often with split-second life-or-death situations where that emotional response is needed. This is true for us in spiritual matters as well. How often do we have these types of things happen to us? Whether it's a conflict with an individual, whether it's somebody who's got a grievance about something, and what is it that ends up happening in those situations? We get worked up about it, don't we? We get emotional. And when we get emotional, what do we want to do? We want to act. That's how we're wired. We want to act out on that emotion. We don't always have self-control as the first thought. 2 Timothy 1.7 is a scripture that might come to your mind, certainly one that comes to my mind in this context, in terms of how it is that we're supposed to act. 2 Timothy 1.7, Paul writing to young minister, says, for God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

It's almost like he's describing this set of choices that has to happen when a situation confronts you. And you have a choice of choosing fear and the knee-jerk reaction that happens as a result of it, or stepping back, asking God for inspiration, asking him for his spirit, asking him for that power, love, and sound mind to make a decision. You know, you think of the Israelites, Joshua and the Gibeonites came up with all their old stuff, and they were probably thrilled they didn't have to get into another battle. Who knows what was going through their minds? But they reacted on that and talked specifically about the fact they didn't reach out to God. They didn't consult God about it. They didn't pray about it. They didn't take time to think about it. They reacted. So that's the first of the five points, trusting instincts and really what it aims at is not giving in to that false sense of urgency that gets produced in some of these situations. The second one that's put forward is to verify the source. Verify the source. And so when we're dealing with cyber attacks or people trying to steal our data or get our personal information, it's very important to understand who is it really. They can mimic all kinds of different things. I actually took a training at work this past week and there was a presenter on screen and started talking. It was a middle-aged African-American lady and she said at a certain point, and I'm an AI-generated image. And the scene immediately switched. The dialogue continued and suddenly, you know, it was a young guy out on the beach and then it switched again. It was another person in another location, a different race, a different ethnicity, different sex. And what it was showing is the fact that through AI you can generate all kinds of different images nowadays. You can generate video. How many have been on Facebook? There's a bunch of these animal videos. Do you ever see those? They're kind of intriguing at first. Then you look at it and you say, there's no way. There was one I think of that I saw of a crocodile attacking a baby elephant and the mother elephant comes and, you know, picks up the crocodile and it's trunk and starts throwing it around like it's, you know, all-star wrestling and then stomps on it. Clearly fake image. But the point is the ability to generate these things is out there now. And so we need to be able to verify the source and figure out where it's coming from, not just simply react to it like we were talking about on the other point. Some practical tips that people make is when you get an email or phone call, often it's your bank, it's your credit card company, it's your insurance company, it's your car warranty company. But we know how to contact them, don't we? We don't have to talk to the person on the phone, we don't have to click on the link that's in the text. If it's the credit card company, go to your wallet, pull out the credit card, hang up the phone, call the credit card company using the number on the back of your credit card or whatever else it might be, the gas company or toll transponder. That way you make sure that whoever showed up claiming to be somebody in an email, in a text, in a phone call, you're essentially neutralizing them and you're going to the source that they claim to be and you're finding out legitimately if there's a problem there. I think we can all see where this is going spiritually in our lives. Acts 17. We'll read verses 10 and 11 of Acts 17. Talking here, of course, about the early New Testament church and as the word of God spread. And there were people that were not in Ohio, but they were in Berea.

Verse 10. Then the brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea. When they arrived at the Browns training camp, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness and they searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. These people were commended because they didn't just take what these guys showed up and started talking about as incredible and actually true as it was, but they went back into the Scriptures. They took the passages that Paul and Silas were talking about. Things that they'd never realized were prophecies of Jesus Christ and His coming.

Things they'd never heard of. And they went back to the Scriptures and they searched them to understand whether these things were so. And that's the thing that we have to do as well. We heard that in the first message today. So important to keep going back to the source, going back to the word of God, using the Holy Spirit that God gives us to call things inter-remembrance, to understand His word, and to go back to that source.

There are all kinds of interesting, sometimes salacious, sometimes outlandish things that are out there that we would love to believe, but the first thing we need to do is go back to the word and find out whether these things are so. 2 Timothy 2, verse 15. 2 Timothy 2, verse 15. Be diligent, Paul writes Timothy, to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. I think here in the context of a working person, you think the old, probably the old dad recommendation, advice that many of us got, measure twice, cut once.

I think we've all heard that one. Rightly dividing, you know, you think you divide and you buy a piece of lumber. It takes all the time to, you know, first of all, the money to buy it, the time to lay everything out. You measure it hastily, and you make a cut, and it's in the wrong place. You can't redo that. You can't glue the wood back together, based on looks on a few people's faces. You've experienced that sort of thing, as I have. I was working once, I was working on a college newspaper back in the old days when you had to actually print photos out, and you would crop them.

You'd have to do all the measurements with a ruler, and you'd have to crop the photo to fit the space. And I remember measuring the photo, it was like a five by seven, and it had to fit in a four inch high window. And so I measured four inches from the top of the photo, and I took an exacto knife and I made the cut. What I didn't think about was the fact that, and it's so easy electronically now to move that photo around in the window to position it right, but I didn't want everything on the top of the photo.

I now had four inches of photo that had several inches at the bottom that I actually needed. And I had to kind of, actually what I did is I was able to push it together so you couldn't see the line, and I was cut it again, and it was two pieces, but it was, the cameras were low resolution enough at that point in time that once it was printed on newsprint you couldn't tell. Dividing the word of truth, measuring twice, cutting once, going back to the source, not rushing, but taking our time through things to make sure that we have correct information that we're acting on.

The next recommendation is watching for red flags. Watching for red flags. There's certain things that just don't seem like they quite add up, right? We probably all remember the Nigerian scheme. There's a whole set of these things that started probably 20-25 years ago. It started by email, when email first became widespread, and it was, I'm a Nigerian prince, I've run into a problem transferring funds, I need to use a U.S.

bank account in order to take my five million dollar inheritance and transfer it, and if you would just open an account for me, put whatever the amount was, $10,000 into a $20,000 to establish the account, that will let me move the funds, and I will leave behind $100,000, $200,000 for you as a commission. The number of people who did that is actually staggering, and that scam is still going on in different ways.

Red flags. I mean, how many people contact you out of the blue and offer you a deal to move money that's going to make you six figures? I mean, really. We all want to believe it. We all want to suspend reality for that kind of thing, but we know it's not the way that it happens. You know, my mom fielded one of these calls when she was in the early, very early stages of dimension. It was a group, and it was a bank, and they claimed to be a bank, and they said, I need a gift card in order to resolve this whole thing. You need to get a gift card for $500.

Come back, read me the gift card number, and I can resolve the situation for you. And she was in a mental state, reasoning-wise, where she wasn't able to work through the fact that this was a scam, and she did it. And then afterwards, my sister, who was there living near her, found out about it, and of course, checking into it, it's too late, because these things are gone in an instant, right? You give a gift card number, and the money is just immediately gone.

So we have to think about, you know, what are some of those red flag things? What's too good to be true? Where is it that they just want me to operate based on a wish or based on perceived danger?

The Bible warns of a variety of red flags as well when it comes to deception and false teachers. We're not going to have time to read through all of it. It's a study that I think is useful, and I'd recommend that you do. 2 Peter 2 would be an entire chapter in the Bible that you could look at, and I'd recommend spending some time there. We'll read a few verses of that chapter, 2 Peter 2 verses 1 through 3. Your Bible probably has a heading of some sort on that that talks about false prophets or false teachers. 2 Peter 2, starting in verse 1. Here it says, There were false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction. And in verse 2, many will follow their destructive ways.

Again, why we have to be on the watch for deception, why we have to go back to the source.

One of the things that I think is a fantastic tradition of our church, and sometimes maybe it even gets a little bit boring. We end up mentioning a scripture for everything.

But we do it for a purpose. And that purpose is that you should not be believing things that we say simply because we say them. We're here to preach the Word of God. We're here to point to the Word of God and to his Son Jesus Christ. That's what we're about as a church, because we need to go back to that original source, and it needs to agree to that source. And that's what it's speaking about here, so that many will not follow destructive ways if they're going back to the source to understand what is true. By covetousness, it says in verse 3, they will exploit you with deceptive words. For a long time their judgment has not been idle and their destruction does not slumber. This passage lays out all kinds of different characteristics. Here you see things like covetousness. So, greediness. People who want personal gain because of what they're doing.

And we can probably all think of public examples that have happened out there in the world of sort of religion and popular religion that we've seen over the course of the years. But 2 Peter 2, just to give you some quick thoughts, maybe to feed your own study into it, provides a variety of characteristics. Verse 1 talks about denying the work of Jesus Christ as being a work of deception. Verses 1 through 3 talk about promoting false doctrine.

Verse 3 talks about exhibiting covetousness or greed. Verse 10 talks about rejecting authority.

Verse 10 also talks about displaying pride. Verse 18 talks about being boastful or self-promoting.

And reading through the entire section, another theme that comes up over and over again, is avoiding the teaching of repentance and holy conduct. It's so easy to say, let's get all those benefits of calling ourselves Christians and blow by these pieces of living transformed lives, living converted lives, letting Jesus Christ live within us, all of those difficult things. So things that we have to think about as we consider this point, watching out for the red flags. Again, a lot written in the Bible about this. There are other places where it talks about false prophets and judging them by their fruits, seeing what it is that comes out of those individuals' lives. All right, second to last one, checking for inconsistencies. Some of us might have seen this if you get a lot of scam emails. Scammers often use poor grammar, misspellings, vague messages, clunky graphics. Now, all of that is changing with AI coming in because the technology tools and the sophistication of them are allowing them to really mimic if they're even a little bit careful about it, fully mimic official websites or emails. But, you know, one of the things that we do at work is we send out actual fake phishing-type emails to our employee base, because we've got thousands of employees across the world, hundreds of thousands.

But we send fake emails out to people, and we have a little button in our email that says, report phish. And the idea is that by sending out these emails, if you click on a link, there's a message that comes up saying you have responded to a simulated phishing email, and here are the things that would have happened to you potentially if this was truly somebody trying to scam you. Or if you report it, it says, congratulations, you've detected a simulated phishing email. What does that do? It exercises the senses. It starts to reinforce. If you get the mail, and I've clicked on a few of these, and I was exactly in the situation that I described, it was something that said, you've had confidential information, your site has been hacked, and confidential information is exposed. Click here to close whatever the security gap was. And I clicked on it before I thought about it, and I got that message. It made me think. And so by exercising your senses to start to see things, you start to recognize, okay, if I see an email and it says there's a problem, what do I do? I click up on where it's from. Instead of whatever name they've created for themselves, the detail of the email address that it came from is shown. And if it's an email that says it comes from Amazon, and you look at the email address, and it's some weird combination of letters and numbers, which a lot of these often are when they're scams, you immediately know that's not a genuine email. You can just tell by that inconsistency of where the message came from. Let's turn to Hebrews 5.14. Hebrews 5.14.

Here, the writer of Hebrews, I think we were in the following verse in the first message today.

Hebrews 5.14, solid food belongs to those who are full age, and it defines who those are, those who are mature, like we heard, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil. Having senses exercised. So when we get those simulated fake emails, they're looking for information, it exercises our senses to look for things. That's how it works for us at work. That's why we do it. We can do the same thing with the Word of God. You know, the more we go to the Word of God, the more we can understand and discern, know what's consistent with it, and what isn't.

We don't have time to talk about it in detail, but I found some super interesting stuff when I was researching this message about something called haptic or tactile memory. And it talks about the fact that your memory for touch is actually a strong, if not stronger, than other elements of your memory. And people can recognize that there have been really interesting studies done where you let people handle something that looks the same, like you give a basket of oranges and you give elementary school kids each an orange out of a basket, and you let them sort of just play around with it every day for 10 or 15 minutes and put it back in the basket. By the end of a short period of time, they can go in, they can feel which orange is theirs. Tactile memory. If you think about it, for those of you who flip pages in a Bible still, you just know when you pull the page whether you've got one page or if you have more than one page, don't you? That's tactile memory. Not even thinking about it, you just feel it, you know there's something wrong. And that's exactly what it's like going back to the Word of God over and over and over again because you develop that understanding. You're feeding God's Spirit within you with what it needs in order to continue to work with your mind. Let's turn to John 10. John 10, this uses the analogy of a sheep and a shepherd.

Spoke about this a little bit on Pentecost. It talks about the shepherd, the one who enters by the door is the shepherd. In verse 4, it says, when the shepherd brings out his own sheep, he goes before them and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. That's what the handling of God's Word lets us do, recognize his voice. So that when that scammer figuratively calls us and puts different propositions before us, we know that's not of God. It's not consistent with his Word. Why? Because we know that voice. We know what it says, we know what it stands for, we know how not only what it says but how it feels. We gather that full understanding. In verse 5, lays that out even more, they will by no means follow a stranger, and this is a dumb sheep, they'll flee from him because they do not know the voice of strangers. And so we have to ask ourselves spiritually, do we have the discernment that we need of God's voice? If we don't think that we do, the solution for that is relatively simple. It's not always easy to do, but it's relatively simple, and that's go back to the Word of God. Nowhere else, the source. Read the Scripture.

See what it is that Jesus Christ did as he walked with his disciples, how he spoke to the multitudes, the parables that he told. Read the epistles. See what Paul and the other apostles did as they were functioning in the early New Testament church. We begin to understand and have that real strong intuition, that understanding of God's voice so that we'll know his voice and we'll know most importantly what's not his voice. The last one here is avoid engaging. Avoid engaging. When I lived in Denver, I had a friend who was an attorney, and he actually told me a story. I don't remember the details of it, unfortunately, but it was a story of some people who had actually gotten caught up in the Nigerian scam, and they thought they were going to scam the scammer by actually arranging a meeting in person and bringing money physically. I think they ended up meeting somewhere in the Caribbean, and they thought that they would be able to scam the scammer and either get them into custody or take their money from them. And it ended up in a bit of a minor international incident, jail kind of thing. I don't remember the details again, but they thought that they could engage and they'd be smarter and they could outwit these people.

Avoid engaging is exactly what they recommend here. You know, when you receive a phone call, when you receive an email, you don't actually know what it is that they're looking for and what they're trying to gather. Nowadays, voice sampling is a thing, too, and the longer you stay on the phone talking with someone, the more opportunity you're giving for them to sample your voice. So you're better off just not engaging. Phone calls come in if you don't know who they're from. Let them leave a voicemail. If it's important, if it's really for you, they'll leave a message and you can call back. If it's an email, delete. If it's a text, delete if you're not sure.

There's one more story I'll tell you. At work, we do work sometimes what's called white hat hacking. A company will hire us and we'll go in. Not me, I'm not that smart. Our people will go in, and they'll show how they can gather confidential information and then sell services to close those gaps. There was one of our teams. The company didn't really believe that they had any security problems. They made a deal and they said, I'll tell you what, we're going to find out the CEO's salary and we'll have that to you in a week, just to show you how this works.

What they did is they created a fake LinkedIn profile with an attractive woman on it, made up a biography, made some posts and things, and started sending an invitation to a whole bunch of different people, including several people within this company. A number of them accepted the invitation. They had no idea who it was, but it was an attractive female. Us guys aren't usually very smart when it comes to those things. And one thing leads to the next. The fake account sends an email to all the people at this company. The email has an attachment that says it's the person's resume. They're looking for a job. One person clicked on it. That file had malware in it. It allowed our team to go in to access the compensation records of the entire company, including the compensation of the CEO. And they walked in. A few days later, they said, well, you asked for it. Here it is. And obviously, they were more convinced at that point that they had some gaps that they had to close. That's the way these things work. So we avoid engaging. If you don't know who people are, don't connect with them on social media. Nowadays, people create fake profiles. If they get two or three of your friends to connect to that profile, you look at it and say, oh, they're friends with two or three of my friends. Sure, I'll go ahead and accept them.

You don't necessarily know what it is that's out there.

2 Timothy 3. We'll go again to Timothy and then we'll wrap up here.

The Bible actually has a lot to say about avoiding people, strange as that might seem. And it's in this context. 2 Timothy 3. We'll start in verse 1. Here laying out the characteristics of people that will exist in the end times. You could argue that these people exist throughout time in one form or another. Know this, that in the last days, perilous times will come. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanders, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. That's quite a list. It's quite a list. And what does it say at the end of the day? From such people turn away. Some of the more modern translations simply say, stay away from these people. Just like we see if we want to avoid compromising our personal information, we don't engage. Likewise in this situation, we see people who are in this way, people who are clearly in defiance to God in the way that they live their lives and the things that they stand for. This is what it tells us to turn away from people like that when that's what they show that they're about. So in conclusion, we've taken a bit of a tour today around the idea of deception, how some of the attributes of our modern world can leave us uniquely susceptible to it. We think about social engineering, think about all of the other tools that are out there as we get more and more used to, as a society, consuming infotainment, being more interested about how compelling is it than how well sourced is it. We looked at some of the key defenses against social engineering attacks, trusting our instincts. If something feels off, it probably is. Don't give in to situations that look to manipulate you by fear or other emotions. Verify the source. We've been given the scripture and the Holy Spirit to help us to truly internalize what's in the scriptures. There's no substitute for knowing God's will.

Watch for red flags. The Bible gives multiple descriptions of deceivers. 2 Peter 2 is an entire chapter that's devoted to that topic that would be profitable study. 4th, check for inconsistencies. Being skilled in handling God's word allows us to quickly spot a fake.

And 5th, avoid engaging. Can't let spiritual clickbait distract us and take us away.

We live in perilous times, both physically and spiritually, but thankfully God gives us weapons of warfare that are fit to overcome all enemies. There is nothing more powerful than the blood of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Let's be aware of the dangers and let's be practiced in the use of our tools so we can continue to walk solidly and safely in God's way.