Beware of False Prophets – Matthew 7:15-20
As we read these words of our
Lord, we are immediately confronted with the stark difference of some of the
basic assumptions of the Christian faith and our culture. In these words, Jesus tells his hearers to beware
of false prophets. He has just finished
exhorting them to enter into the strait gate and to tread the narrow way. And we saw last time that the narrow way is
the way of discipleship, the life that has as its model the Sermon on the
Mount. The reason he gives for the life
of discipleship is that the strait gate and narrow way leads to life whereas
the wide gate and broad way leads to destruction. So here you are contemplating these two
gates. But outside these gates are
people telling you it’s stupid to put yourself to the difficulty of living such
a restrictive life and that you should go by the broad way. Jesus tells us that these people are false
prophets. They claim to be giving you
good advice, but they are not only leading you astray, they are leading you in
a way that will lead to your ultimate destruction.
And there is the rub as far as
modern man is concerned. According to
current attitudes, Jesus has committed at least two evils here: he has put
himself as the standard of truth (since those who oppose his teaching are false prophets), and he has told his
audience that it matters what you believe (since we are to beware of false prophets).
Both these positions are anathema to modern Western thought. We are told that the exclusive truth claims
of Christianity inherent in the text are a straightjacket, and that they
undermine community and personal freedom.
It is especially the perceived
threat to personal freedom inherent in the Christian message that raises red
flags for so many people. For many,
freedom means that you create your own meaning in life, your own truth, and
your own morality, and that anything else is simply too restrictive. In fact, modern man is not surprised that
Jesus described that path of Christian obedience as a narrow path; what
surprises them is that anyone would choose to live such a restrictive life.
The problem with such an
attitude, as Tim Keller points out, is that this definition of freedom is
oversimplified.[1] To think of freedom simply in terms of living
without boundaries is actually to undermine freedom. In fact, you can’t have freedom without
boundaries (that is, without restriction) of some sort. A fish is free as long as it is restricted to
water. Put it out of its native
environment and it is not only not free, it will die. Some “freedoms” are destructive, not
liberating. Nowhere is this clearer than
in relationships. As Keller puts it,
“Love is the most liberating freedom-loss of all.” The question is how we determine what those
boundaries are that enable us to thrive.
When Jesus therefore tells us to
enter into a strait gate, he is not necessarily saying something that is
antithetical to freedom. Actually, he
promises true freedom to those who follow him.
The strait gate leads to life, and that is freedom. “You shall know the truth, and the truth
shall make you free . . . if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed,”
he tells us (Jn. 8:32, 36).
But what about the exclusivity of
the truth claims of Jesus? Many claim
that there is no such thing as absolute truth.
But to make such a claim is to contradict oneself. If there is no absolute truth, then the very
statement that there is no absolute truth must be false. The postmodern position that everything is
relative or culturally conditioned is, as C. S. Lewis eloquently put it, like
seeing through everything so that there is nothing to see. There has to be ultimate truth, so there is
nothing inherently wrong with Jesus claiming to speak truth, or even to say
that he is the way, the truth, and the life (Jn. 14:6).
It really comes down to who Jesus
is. If he is the way, the truth, and the
life – as he claimed and as we believe – then not only should we not be
insulted by the exclusivity of his claims or the narrowness of his way, but we
should gladly embrace it. For only he is
the one who can really show us what the boundaries are that will lead to true
freedom. Only someone with the
omniscience and the love of the Son of God could be worthy of our confidence
that he can show us where truth and freedom are to be found.
And his warnings are to be taken
seriously. Like the one in our
text. The threat of false prophets is no
warning of a falling sky. It is real and
it is serious. But what is Jesus
referring to?
A prophet is someone who claims
to speak for God. A false prophet is
therefore someone who claims to speak for God but who really doesn’t. They are dangerous because they lead people
astray, away from the path of obedience to God.
The danger our Lord is referring to is that false prophets will lead you
away from the strait gate and the narrow way.
Thus, this is serious stuff, because these guys claim to be speaking for
God and yet are leading people down a path that leads away from God. So not only are they hurting people but they
are creating a false sense of assurance as they march to their end, making it
that much harder to recover them from their mistaken allegiance. It is no wonder therefore that Jesus
describes them as wolves who only want to devour the sheep.
The problem, however, is that
these false prophets are not easy to detect.
Jesus says that they are wolves in sheep’s clothing. They are in disguise. They get in among the sheep without being
detected as the wolves that they are.
That is partly what makes them so dangerous. In other words, it’s not the false prophets
that are obvious and who teach obvious heresy that you have to be afraid
of. It’s the false prophets who come in
looking like true prophets speaking words of truth. To heed Jesus’ words, we need a lot of
discernment when it comes to those who come to us claiming to speak for God.
For example, in the Law, Moses
warned Israel about false prophets who would come and give a sign or a wonder,
and then the sign or the wonder would come to pass. For many, this would be an obvious sign that
the prophet was speaking the truth – after all, fulfilled prophesy was the gold
standard in false-prophet detection. But
the problem was that this prophet was encouraging the people to go after false
gods. God tells Israel that even if the
sign comes to pass, if he is encouraging idolatry, they should not listen to
him: “for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your
God with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deut. 13:1-3). The danger lay in the fulfilled prophesy,
making it easier for people to think the prophet was really speaking for God
when he wasn’t. Of course, sometimes
fulfilled prophesy was a good way to test a prophet (cf. Deut. 18:22). But this text shows that this was not always
the case. There had to be
discernment.
In the New Testament, the
situation has not changed. There are
still people who claim to speak for God but who are leading people astray, and
it is not always obvious at first that they are false prophets. In fact, Jesus told his disciples that “there
shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and
wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect”
(Mt. 24:24). In other words, so
convincing are the signs and wonders of the false prophets that only the
intervention of God in behalf of his elect saves them from the deception. Elsewhere, the apostle Paul writes that “such
are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles
of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan
himself is transformed into an angel of light.
Therefore it is no great things if his ministers also be transformed as
the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works” (2
Cor. 11:13-15). False prophets don’t
come heralding an antichristian gospel.
Rather, they come in the name of Christ, as the ministers of
righteousness. They claim to be speaking
for Jesus, and they claim to be working for righteousness. And if this were true, this would be
wonderful! But the problem is that it
isn’t true. In fact, these are the
ministers of Satan, who hates Christ and righteousness. And those who follow them will therefore only
be led away from Christ and away from a life of righteousness.
In our Lord’s day, there were the
Pharisees. Today, the word “Pharisee”
only conjures up images of self-righteous narcissists. But in first century Judea, a Pharisee was
precisely the kind of person everyone looked up to. They were devoted to the Law of God, and they
were the defenders of orthodoxy. And
yet, strangely, the Pharisees come in for more criticism from Jesus than did
the more liberal and secular Sadducees.
Jesus called them “blind leaders of the blind” who will both fall into
the ditch (Mt. 15:14). People probably
looked up to them because they seemed to be speaking truth. But our Lord says that the problem was that
for all their devotion to the Law, they had replaced the commandments of God
with the traditions of men (Mt. 15:9).
People were fooled. The Pharisees
came looking like sheep, but they really were wolves in sheep’s clothing.
In our day, the same holds
true. The most dangerous people to the
church are not out of the church but in it.
They are wolves in sheep’s clothing.
They come in the name of Jesus and claim to speak for him. And they fool thousands of people.
What are some of the signs of a
false prophet? How do we detect
them? First of all, from what we’ve
already pointed out, it is not enough to check that they claim to be a follower
of Jesus. There is a tendency in our day
to want to embrace anyone as long as they claim to be Christian. The problem is that this is just a name and
there are a lot of people who want to be called a Christian but who have no
real allegiance to the Jesus of the Bible.
The false apostles that Paul referred to in the Corinthian
correspondence certainly came preaching Jesus; they claimed to be sent by
him. But they were false,
nonetheless. We have to be more careful
than that.
Nor is it enough to check that
they use orthodox language. In other
words, a person may speak in glowing terms of the cross and atonement and new
birth, but it does not therefore follow that they mean what the Bible means
when it uses that language. One of the
ways liberalism crept into the mainstream denominations at the close of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, was through the use of
orthodox language by very unorthodox preachers.
They would speak of the atonement and the central place it should hold,
but their understanding of atonement was very different from the
substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus in the place of sinners that the New
Testament speaks of. For them, the
atonement was primarily an example to us, not a sacrifice for us. People didn’t discern the difference, and
before long these denominations began to crumble under the weight of an
unbiblical theology.
Nor is it enough to check that
they are good people. Most false
prophets are nice, and they are easy to like and get along with. How else could they get a following? False teachers are often dynamic speakers
(this was certainly true of the false apostles that opposed Paul, cf. 2 Cor.
11:4-6) and inspiring leaders. They know
how to generate and maintain a following.
And to do this, they have to first get the confidence of the
people. You don’t do this generally by
being a bad guy. You don’t inspire the
confidence of people by being angry and drunk and immoral. In other words, they come looking like sheep,
not like wolves.
Nor is it enough to look at how
successful he or she is in recruiting disciples. Many people seem to think that a successful
church is necessarily a church with a lot of people, and that if you have a lot
of people, this is a sure sign that God’s blessing is upon it. But God isn’t interesting in numbers, as
such. There have been times when the
false-prophets and their followers vastly outnumbered the faithful. In Elijah’s day, he was one of the few
faithful prophets against hundreds of the prophets of Baal; there were only
7,000 men who had not bowed the knee to the image of Baal among all the tens of
thousands in Israel. As our Lord put it
in the previous verses, the road to life is narrow and those who travel it are
few. A preacher with a large following
is not necessarily a true prophet (although neither is he necessarily a false
prophet!).
What then should we look at? Well, we should look at the man and the
message. There is some disagreement as
to what Jesus is referring to by “ye shall know them by their fruits” (16,
20). What are the fruits that we are to
look at? Some say that Jesus is only
referring to the deeds of the false prophet.
Others say that the fruit is a reference to the teaching of the false
prophet. The truth, however, is that
both deeds and teaching are under consideration here. It refers to deeds, since when John the
Baptist used this very language it is indisputable that we was referring to
lifestyle: “Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance” (Mt. 3:8). But it also refers to teaching, since in the
parallel passage in Luke, Jesus follows up his illustration of good and bad
fruit with these words: “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart
bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of
his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart
his mouth speaketh” (Luke 6:45). Of
course, as Jesus makes clear, both the man and the message go together because
what you believe will inevitably affect how you live.
What can we say about the message
of a false prophet? Well, as Lloyd-Jones
pointed out, it is almost as necessary to look for what they don’t say as much
as it is to look for what they do say.
Look at the breadth of their teaching.
Does it follow the contours of the Bible? Does it maintain a Biblical balance? Or is it fixated upon one thing?
One of the dead giveaways of a
false prophet is that he does not preach the whole counsel of God. He may preach some of it, but he does not
preach all of it. He preaches that part
of God’s word that is popular and tones down on that which is not. What they do say may be alright as far as it
goes, but their teaching is lacking the main thing. They may preach on how to have a good family
life or a good marriage or how to be a successful person in this world. But if there is nothing of the gospel in
their message, if the gospel is not in fact the main thing, then they have
missed it. They are not helping their
people, they are leading them astray.
They are a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
A true prophet will center his
ministry on Christ. Everything else is
secondary; the whole point is to point people to Jesus as Lord and Savior, to
invite people to embrace him and to hold him forth in the teaching so that he
is magnified. The emphasis is not on how
to have your best life now; it is on how to know Jesus Christ and to make him
known. The teaching centers on the
person and work of Jesus Christ, and he is wary about anything that leads
people away from hearts and minds that are focused on him.
Not only so, but the teaching of
a false prophet is unbalanced with respect to the character of God. In the Bible, God is revealed preeminently as
holy; all other attributes (including love) find their orbit around the blazing
center of the holiness of God. Often in
the history of the church this unbalance has shown up in an overemphasis on
love and a corresponding under emphasis upon God’s righteous judgment. Both need to be preached; to deny either is
to wander into serious heresy.
Then there is unbalance with
respect to the Scriptural view of man.
In the Bible, man is not viewed as sort of sick but as dead; not as able
to pull himself up by the bootstraps and save himself but as unable to save
himself and in need of a Savior. In the
Bible, sin is viewed not so much as a moral mess-up but as an act of treason
against God which makes him worthy of everlasting punishment. In contrast, a false prophet is not likely to
emphasize these things. As in most
religions in the world, man is able to save himself; so with the Christian
false-prophet. The cross is
correspondingly diminished and the role that man plays in his own
self-redemption is magnified.
Of course, we must also look at
the man. A message which does not point
to Christ will not make holy people. So
we must always look for holiness of character.
Now this is not the same thing as being nice or an inspiring
leader. A holy prophet is a prophet who
walks with God, who lives to please him and to glorify him. A false prophet, like Diotrephes (3 Jn. 9),
wants to have the preeminence, but a true prophet, like John the Baptist, is
okay with decreasing in importance as long as Christ increases. Just as his message is centered on Christ, so
his life is centered on Christ. In other
words, he is pointing people to Jesus with his lips and his life, by his words
and works.
That doesn’t mean that the
faithful prophet will be perfect. But
God does not call unholy men to be his prophets. This is why when Paul tells Timothy the
qualifications for an elder or overseer, he mentions character qualities rather
than skills, except for aptness to teach (1 Tim. 3:1, ff). Spiritual leaders in the church are called to
a high standard because an unholy man who is not living a God-centered life cannot
lead those who follow his teaching along the narrow way that Christ calls all
his disciples to tread. The disciple is
not above his teacher. It’s why Paul
told Timothy that when an elder sinned, he was to be rebuked before all; it is
that serious. This is important to point
out because in our day we have become so lax and accepting that sin is not
really treated with the kind of seriousness with which it ought to be
treated. Leaders sin and we don’t hold
them accountable because it makes it easier for us to justify our sin. In many places this is the reality: “A
wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land; the prophets prophesy
falsely . . . and my people love to have it so” (Jer. 5:30-31).
What our Lord’s words do not
allow us to do is to judge hearts and attitudes. You judge the fruit – the words and the deeds
of the person. But this is good
enough. For “a good tree cannot bring
forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt true bring forth good fruit” (18). We don’t have to try to peer into their heart
to judge the truth or falseness of their ministry; the fruit of the man and
message will be clear soon enough.
But of course this also applies
to every one of us, doesn’t it?
“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (20). It is not enough simply to say you follow
Christ – do your works back up your words?
Does your life demonstrate that you truly believe that Jesus is Lord and
Savior? May the Holy Spirit enable us to
examine ourselves first of all, to see whether or not we are in the faith!
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