Vampires and other blood suckers

Recently I have been spreading the good news about a natural mosquito repellent that I heard about through a friend who has used this method for “decades”. He lives in an area of the Keys that is routinely visited by swarms of hungry mosquitoes that cannot find enough to munch on in the everglades, and thus is the ultimate guinea pig and he cannot say enough about how effective it is.

I cannot personally use the remedy because it involves eating two garlic pills per day. According to him mosquitoes cannot tolerate garlic. It sounds plausible to me because, I dislike garlic intensely and worse it does not like me any more than I like it.

My buddy buys garlic pills at the grocery store and takes them each morning. He claims they are odorless; however every time I am around him now, I cannot help but notice that he smells similar to an Italian eatery and I try to avoid smelling his breath. He states that he is never bitten by mosquitoes and that the garlic is as good of a repellent as it gets. That was good enough for me and I have been spreading the good news to everyone who will listen ever since.

Recently I went to the dermatologist and as I sat in the crowded waiting room with a hundred other people for hours on end getting more bored by the minute, I leafed through a magazine. The only reading material left was a magazine on health and prevention, so I began reading it. Imagine my surprise when I discovered an article that exposed the myth that garlic wards off mosquitoes. According to these doctors, garlic does nothing to ward off mosquitoes.

Oops. I had already convinced half my friends to eat garlic in order to ward off the pesky critters. Now they are walking around smelling like a plate of genuine Italian spaghetti because of me and there is no telling what that nasty condiment is doing to their innards.

Hmmm We cannot blindly accept and believe everything we are told, (even in this column). That is why when I write Words for the Day I always reference the main point(s) with Scripture. When it comes to God I use the Bible as the baseline for my faith. In other words anything that is told to me concerning God that is non-biblical must come from man. If it comes from man, then it is subject to error.

According to the Bible it is divinely inspired and is of God. Logic verifies this because when you think about an all powerful God preparing His only written communiqu to His most beloved creature, mankind, it would defy logic to believe that He would allow one sentence, comma or semi-colon to be written in error. He wouldn’t be much of a God if He did. This also negates the premise that we can believe only the parts for which we agree. ie Man should be head of household, abortion, homosexuality, etc. (Sigh… sure to stimulate more unsubscribes…)

My good friend still believes with all of his heart that garlic repels mosquitoes. People around the world base their faith on all kinds of things, but many believe what they believe because some, often well meaning person like dear old mom and dad, told them so. I would not want to bet my eternal soul on something that is not backed up by the Bible.

Read the Bible for yourself and when that preacher gets up there and makes all of those statements, you can test the validity of his sermon by simply referencing it in the Bible and comparing. Always evaluate the validity of spiritual claims based upon the authority of the Scriptures and you cannot go wrong.

Hint: If your pastor is not preaching directly out of a Bible then the odds are that he just might be preaching his own garlic remedy. You do know that garlic is commonly used to ward off vampires, don’t you?

1 John 4:1
Beloved do not believe every
spirit, but test the spirits,
whether they are of God, because
many false prophets have gone out
into the world.