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Blowing Smoke
By Scott Harrup | September 14, 2009
I ran across an ad for an electronic cigarette today. This device and others like it allow users to “smoke” by inhaling a nicotine-laced vapor. The cigarettes are battery-powered and even have a little orange light on the end to create the glow smokers expect with each inhalation. Promotional Web sites emphasize their products’ elimination of tar and other cancer-causing chemicals found in tobacco smoke.
But that remaining ingredient, nicotine, is far from benign. You can make insecticide with nicotine. A 2001 article put out by Stanford University researchers showed that nicotine may fuel cancer and coronary artery disease. Talk about “picking your poison”!
The marketing tactics behind electronic cigs remind me of some “marketing” that goes on in the spiritual realm. The Bible offers two particularly telling descriptions of Satan. On the one hand, he presents himself as an “angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). But Peter warned, “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). Satan offers you a “sales pitch” designed to lure you into actions that might seem harmless at first but will destroy you in the end.
Peter’s solution at the beginning of that verse? “Be self-controlled and alert.”
I’m alert to the dangers of nicotine, so I’m exercising self-control and refraining from cigarettes of any variety — electronic or otherwise. On the spiritual front, I need to remain alert and self-controlled in a host of other areas.
It’s comforting to know I don’t have to do that alone. As God has promised through the prophet Isaiah, “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’ ” (30:21, NIV).
