“As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.”
Paul was always on the defense against the false prophets, and those who were trying to steer believers away from the teachings of Christ. I suppose you could call these false prophets the “influencers” of their day. They were in it for themselves; they didn’t care about people’s souls, or eternal salvation. Then as now, these types of people were out to make easy money, that’s all. Paul tells his readers that their lives are now rooted and built up in the person of Jesus, and they should be extremely grateful. It’s not a morning I don’t wake up and think to myself how lucky I am that I have a saviour in our Lord Jesus Christ. But then, it’s not luck, is it.
To be taken in by deceivers and false prophets is akin to being trapped, like an animal in a snare. And the snares that Paul refers to are human generated philosophies, theories, and what he calls elemental spirits of the universe. If we look around us today, the snares are obvious: things like belief in pagan spirits, gods and goddesses, the worship of idols, money and power, arcane knowledge, alchemy, crystals, spells; the list goes on and on. All these things are without substance, they are empty and serve no purpose whatsoever. They have been put into place to deceive and manipulate. But to many they can be exotic, mysterious and attractive, and influencers will use these false philosophies for their own benefit, not yours.
Once we have received Christ, these phantasms will appear as they really are, fake and insubstantial, ridiculous even. Often if we have entertained such diversions in the past, we may find that, after Christ enters our hearts, we can be left with a sense of embarrassment that we were foolish enough to have been duped into accepting the fake philosophy as something real.
Hold on tightly to Jesus, and the one true God, now and always.
Tell Out My Soul 
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