The following is excerpted from Keeping the Kids in the Social Media Age, www.wayoflife.org -

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We live at the end of the church age in the depths of apostasy at the end of the church age. The little leaven that began in the days of the apostles has leavened “Christendom” for two millennia, until the whole is almost leavened. 

And never has it been so easy for people to come into contact with every type of heresy and goofy principle, from emerging church to flat earth, from Christian rock to New Age dieting, from theistic evolution to yoga.

When I was a new Christian, I didn’t have spiritual guidance in a sound church for the first few weeks and was tossed to and fro in the sea of apostasy. I was confronted with Pentecostalism, Seventh-day Adventism, and Herbert W. Armstrongism. And in that day, to encounter heresies one had to attend a church or Bible study, visit a bookstore or library, watch “Christian” programming on television, or listen to a “Christian” radio program. 

Now all one has to do is surf the web with the ever-present smartphone and scroll through a fathomless selection of error. 

Consider the following testimonies about this danger:

“It is my observation one of the greatest dangers of the internet technology is that it brings (literally) thousands of teachers into your home. Any church member now, in the absence of serious biblical study, can hold forth on any topic by putting the verses in question in Google and then quoting his favorite teacher. The speaker has no knowledge of the subject, no knowledge of the teacher. I had a man in our congregation who got involved with many different online ‘Baptist’ teachers. He adopted all kinds of silly doctrines (amillennialism, no eternal security, etc). He was at best, a baby Christian, with no time in the Word of God, but because he read all these people, he considered himself an expert. He was shocked when I told him to stop reading all those teachers. It is shocking to Americans to tell them that. Right away they say you are trying to hide something from them. Everything is a conspiracy. ‘We have the right to read and learn from anything we want.’ It used to be you had to put effort into finding other teachers, and a pastor who had been saved for decades and approved by a sending church had standing. But now, thanks to the internet, you can find all kinds of experts to tickle all your fancies. With the man in our assembly, it got to a point where he was bringing his smart phone and computer to church and looking up the texts we were using in real time. Then he would raise his hand and contradict me by quoting the internet teacher. Even though I could answer the childish and shallow arguments, he gave more credence to the online teachers. We threw him out. You want booze, we have a teacher for that. You want to be a pastor without meeting the qualifications, we have a teacher for that. You want to have women leaders, we have a teacher for that. You want to stop separating, we have a teacher for that. You think your pastor is a bad guy, we have a teacher for that. Anything you want, we have a teacher for that. This is one of the worst parts of new technology. It puts every heretic right at your fingertips.”

“In my experience and opinion, very few Christians are mature enough in the Lord to be on social media. Social media is (along with many other things) a one-world church tool that promotes unbiblical doctrines and heresies through the use of peer pressure and exposure to philosophy of the world. It is a place where one can trust in the world’s understanding and reason. It is a place where the individual can gather agreement for anything he or she wants to believe or promote from the smorgasbord of views. Do ‘born again believers’ not know the wiles of the devil?”

“I firmly believe that the internet along with social media is the chief aid in the fulfillment of 2 Timothy 3:7, ‘Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.’ The foundational issue is that the average professing Christian is Biblically ignorant. They know just enough to be a danger to themselves and everyone around them. They are too lazy to read their Bibles and study hard after the truth which in turn means they won’t be testing everything by it.”

“While we are all concerned for apathetic, carnal young people who are tempted by the allurements of the world, there also exists a danger for those young Christians who are enthusiastic in their pursuit of God. A ‘novice’ who is spiritually immature and has ‘zeal of God, but not according to knowledge,’ may be easily blown about be ‘every wind of doctrine’ if the local church does not fulfill its responsibility in ‘the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ’ (Eph. 4:12-14). We have seen several cases of young people who wish to learn more about God going to the internet for their spiritual teaching and being deceived by false teachers. There are many Calvinist pastors and hyper-dispensationalist teachers who can sound very convincing to someone who does not have a solid foundation in the Scriptures. We understand that in the end every person must make his choice, and there will be some who ‘will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables’ (2 Ti. 4:3-4). But the local church must do everything it can to provide opportunities for spiritual growth that will help young Christians to become established in the faith. This must include solid preaching from the pulpit, personal discipleship, and other church events which emphasize Biblical principles more than just ‘having fun’ with other young people.

This danger makes it more imperative than ever that churches  educate their people well in doctrinal dangers and provide sound resource material in libraries and bookstores and on the church’s website. 

The most important way of victory is to make all of the Lord’s people serious and effectual Bible students. The equivalent of a Bible institute education is the very beginning of being the Bible student that can protect himself from error. 

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