Sermon: Four Warnings (Part Two): Beware of False Prophets
Evaluate the Fruits
#1738
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 09-Dec-23; 88 minutes
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transcript:
If you would turn in your Bibles with me to Ezekiel the 22nd chapter, we are going to read verses 23 through the end of the chapter.
Ezekiel 22:23-31 And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, "Son of man, say to her [He is speaking of Israel here]: 'You are a land that is not cleansed or rained on in the day of indignation.' The conspiracy of her prophets in her midst is like a roaring lion tearing the prey; they have devoured people; they have taken treasure and precious things; they have made many widows in her midst. Her priests have violated My law and profane My holy things; they have not distinguished between the holy and unholy, nor have they made known the difference between the unclean and the clean; and they have hidden their eyes from My Sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them.
Her princes in her midst are like wolves tearing the prey to shed blood, to destroy people, and to get dishonest gain. Her prophets plastered them with untempered mortar, seeing false visions, and divining lies for them, saying, 'Thus says the Lord God,' when the Lord had not spoken. The people of the land have used oppressions, committed robbery, and mistreated the poor and needy; and they wrongfully oppressed the stranger. So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one. Therefore I have poured out My indignation on them; I have consumed them with the fire of My wrath; and I have recompensed their deeds on their own heads," says the Lord God.
This is a very sad indictment of the people of Israel. God here declares through His prophet the common condition of Israel and His response to it and the fact that it never really changed for very long. We could say that He describes Israel's moral condition or moral situation as a norm; and it is something that could have been said for every nation on earth, or even for all humanity in general. This is the normal, the usual reaction to God, even to those He has not made a covenant. They treat God disrespectfully, they do not listen to Him, they eventually rebel, and of course, the leadership, as He describes it here, are in the thick of things.
So, yeah, Israel is the nation God revealed Himself to and made a covenant with and tried to guide them from Abraham to Malachi. But this passage explains, as I said, the usual state of affairs among Israelites. It has oppressive, grasping leadership; disobedient, profane priests; and cowardly, lying prophets, not to mention stubborn and rebellious citizens. There is hardly any good anywhere. God said He tried to find a person, one man to stand in the gap, one person that would maybe help to turn things around, but He could not find any.
Now, this paragraph, as I said, is a summary of God's relationship with His people Israel. Go ahead, pick just about any period in the history of Israel from the time of Moses, let us say, all the way to the time of their captivities, and the same processes play out.
What happens, as we see in Judges 2 starting in about verse 11 and going through the rest of the chapter (we will not go there), but there is usually a short time of grateful faithfulness to God because He saved them from something, from some other nation or some calamity. And then, after this short period of faithfulness, they slowly or sometimes quickly slide into rebellion and then there is another crisis and God has to deliver them again. And once they have been delivered, they are grateful for a short while and they are faithful for a short while and then, like God often says, the person He used to deliver them dies and they fall off the cliff again and go into rebellion. So the cycle keeps happening over and over and over again.
By Ezekiel's day, which we see here in Ezekiel 22, the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem leading to their captivity in Babylon has occurred. And from his wording here, from the way He puts it, God has had it up to here, He has had enough. So He tells them here, verse 31, "I have poured out My indignation on them; I have consumed them with the fire of My wrath; and I have recompensed their deeds on their own heads." I mean, just read the book of Lamentations and you will see just how devastating it was. He does a little bit later on bring back a remnant of Judah, but they are brought back for one major purpose and that is to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus Christ. He would be born in the land to Jews of David's line and do His ministry so He needed a remnant of the people, of these Jews there in Palestine. And so He brought them back.
But Israel from that point, from the time that they were taken to Babylon, Israel has never again been close to God. They did go through you could say a little period when they came back from Babylon with some of the prophets, but generally Israel has feigned to be a Christian nation or feigned to be God's people, but it is all on their own. And the reason why is, as Hosea wrote, God divorced Israel. If you want to look at that it is in Hosea 1:9 and also in chapter 2, verse 2 of Hosea. You can also see something similar in Isaiah 50:1. Remember Hosea is the one that had the child and his name was "not My people." I mean, how obvious can it get? How clear can it get? It was Lo-Ammi that was "not My people." But God divorced His wife by covenant, Israel, and they have not gotten back together yet.
Now notice back in Ezekiel 22 that God frames His declaration against them as exposing a "conspiracy of her prophets." That is in verse 25. The priests and the princes are also part of the conspiracy if only by failing to do their jobs. If we were to go through this, we would find that the priests were to uphold the law. Right? They were the ones that God put in the Temple, the Tabernacle, and they were to uphold the law. They were often judges and such that were placed throughout the land of Israel where people could come to the Levitical cities and get some sort of justice or at least a declaration of what the law said. They were also supposed to demonstrate the Levitical system precisely. They were to go through all the rituals exactly as God had told them to do. Remember His anger at the sons of Levi when they came and put common fire on it. It was supposed to be fire that God gave, it was supposed to be holy.
Notice how when David tried to bring the ark back to Jerusalem where he was going to set up God's house, Uzzah touched it, touched the ark, and God immediately struck Uzzah down. Why? Because they did not demonstrate the holiness of the ark. It was a common man's hand that touched the ark, but that is not holy enough. Humans are far from holy. And so God took that as an affront and He made it a lesson to David and to all those who were transporting the ark—and to us today—that we have to be very careful with the holy things. We have to do what God has commanded to the letter.
But the priests, along with the Levites, did not do this. Things crept into the practice fairly frequently and oftentimes everything just stopped. Then somebody, some person who is a fairly righteous man like Josiah or Hezekiah, would have to come back and get things going again because they were not doing things well or even at some points at all. And of course, we have also got the princes mentioned here in Ezekiel 22. Also along with the Levitical system that they were supposed to do precisely, that it was the Levites and the priests' job, especially the priest's job, to communicate the difference between what is profane and what is holy. They were supposed to be the ones in Israel to tell the people what is right and wrong. But they did not do that. They were a total failure.
The princes represent the leadership, not priests, not prophets, but the secular leaders among the people and they were to lead by their example. They were to live faithfully and properly before God so that the people could look to them and say this is the way, this is how you are supposed to live. And they were supposed to also encourage the people to follow them and oftentimes they encouraged the people to follow them right off a cliff because they were not actually doing what God wanted them to do. They were like the rest of the people in the land, sinful, iniquitous, not following God, breaking the covenant.
So all of these groups—the prophets, the priests, the princes—all failed miserably. But what about the prophets? I really did not go into the prophets very much because they are actually the ones that need the most attention. God blames the prophets the most, which is interesting. How do I know that? Well, He does not say that He blames them the most, but He blasts them twice here and so I think that that is a pretty good indication that they deserve the most blame.
In verse 26 He blames or accuses the prophets of devouring the people, enriching themselves, and making widows. Those are pretty bad things! In verse 28 He tacks on plastering over problems rather than solving them. He accuses them of making up visions so that they could tell the people and appear like God and them are just fast friends. And they also divined lies, it says. Telling the people things that God had not spoken to them.
Now by beginning and ending with the prophets among these three groups, the prophets, the priests, and the princes, He identifies them as the most culpable. They were the main problem. Why? Because they were the men, or supposed to be the men, that God sent to be watchmen and correct the course of the nation, and they had failed Him. They were supposed to be the ones that He called to make things better. Turn things around; cry aloud, spare not, let your voice sound like a trumpet, tell the people their sins, turn them around, get them going in the right direction again. But time and time again they failed, they failed to do that. Instead they did these things that He accuses them of. He just lays it bare what they did: devoured the people, enriching themselves, making widows.
The making widows thing seems like it is kind of bizarre but what it is, is actually they were calling for war, sending men off into battle, doing things that God had not told them to do, putting men at risk, and what happens? They die. They make widows.
He tacks on, like I said, plastering over problems. They never corrected anything in the country. Some of the true ones did, but they were few and far between. Most of the prophets were failures was what God is telling them here. And then making up visions and divining lies. They were just frauds. So they were the main problem and God just tells them flat out here that they had failed Him.
Let us go into the New Testament now to II Corinthians 11 and we will read a few verses here.
II Corinthians 11:13-15 For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works.
This is a very important bit of Scripture. I am not going to go into it right now. I just want you to see a few of the highlights because they keep recurring as we go through other scriptures and actually the rest of the sermon.
So they are deceitful workers, they transform themselves. They are just like Satan, he does the same thing. If he can transform himself into an angel of light, they are going to transform themselves into ministers of righteousness. And also this last part, their "end will be according to their works." I am not going to say anything more there but just show that these things will keep coming up.
Let us move on to II Peter 2.
II Peter 2:1-3 [Peter writes] But there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed. By covetousness they will exploit you with deceptive words; for a long time their judgment has not been idle, and their destruction does not slumber.
Some similar ideas there between Peter and Paul.
Let us go on to I John 4, we will read verses 1 through 6 here.
I John 4:1-6 [He says] 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. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world. You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are of the world. Therefore they speak as of the world, and the world hears them. We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
Here, John, probably toward the end of the first century, is warning the church once again that they need to be careful because there are false teachers out there. The spirit of anti-Christ is already at work and they need to be careful. They need to have their antenna out for these kind of false teachers and be able to know the difference between truth teachers and false teachers. He makes a pretty big stink over this, making sure that he speaks in very easy-to-understand short sentences that this is how you do it. This is how you know the spirit of error from the Spirit of God, the Spirit of what is true. So he tells them, "Look, you've got to be aware. Your ears must be pricked, perked up for all of these things because they are happening."
Let us go on.
II John 7-8 For many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess Jesus Christ is coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. Look to yourselves, that we do not lose those things we worked for, but that we may receive a full reward.
What he is telling you here, I will cut to the chase, is you could lose your salvation if you are not careful. So look to yourselves, guard your minds, make sure your ears are perked up. And if you hear falsehood, be aware, because if you follow it, it could mean your eternal life. Do not go down that path. Stick to the truth.
Let us go to Jude, another page over.
Jude 3-4 Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men, who turned the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Again, more of the same. Jude says, "Hey, I was going to talk about something that maybe it was a little more theological. But I've got to send this warning to you because there are men out there who are taking aim at you. You better be aware and fight for your salvation, contend earnestly for the faith, for the truth."
So false teachers, false apostles, false prophets have plagued the church almost from the very beginning. It has been a constant conflict for those who want to remain faithful to God, to contend against those who bring in false doctrines and subvert the truth that God has revealed and put into the church. These apostles, all those that have books in the New Testament, all attest to the presence of false prophets in the church. The church here on earth among human beings is not pristine, it is not pure. Within the church are men who do not speak the truth. And so we have to make sure that we are on guard against that.
Many of us have lived through a time of apostasy. We had to be sharp at spotting false doctrine and doing something about it. Most of us, in this occasion, left the group that we were in and went elsewhere where we could hear truth spoken once again; and that was the right thing to do. But we cannot say it is over. We cannot say that all the false prophets are gone. So we have got to still be cautious. We have got to still have our ears perked up to falsehood.
And you know what? They are present and they will always be present in the church until Christ comes, for two big reasons. 1) Satan hates you. Satan wants to destroy the church and he is going to send his spies, his deceitful workers, his false ministers at God's people. He will send his people to confound God's people. And 2) is that God says, "Okay, I'm going to use them like I've used Satan and I'm going to use them, the false prophets, the false teachers, the false ministers, the false apostles, to test My people's faithfulness, see if they're on the ball."
Let us go to II Timothy 3. We will pick up just one verse. Paul writes here, warning Timothy. I am sure he felt that it was necessary to warn Timothy since he was about to die. He was about to be martyred by Rome and so he needed to get this warning out.
II Timothy 3:13 But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.
So here we have a warning from Paul that going forward it is not going to get better, it is going to get worse, especially as we get toward the end.
Let us go back to Matthew 24. This is the Olivet Prophecy, this is Jesus speaking. He has a warning as well.
Matthew 24:11 "Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many."
He is talking about the end. Remember, the disciples had come up to Him and said, "What will be the sign of Your coming in the end of the age?" And this is one of them, "many false prophets will rise up and deceive many."
Let us go down to verse 23.
Matthew 24:23-25 "Then if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or 'There!' do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand."
So Paul and Jesus both tell us that the end times are going to be full of false prophets, even false Christs that we are going to have to be wary of because they are intent on deceiving the very elect if they possibly can. They want to take our salvation from us. They want us to walk willingly away from God. So we have to heed God's warnings to beware of false prophets among us. We have to keep vigilant. We have to keep testing the spirits. We have to examine the fruit to remain in the truth and to attain eternal life. Remember what Jesus says back there in Matthew 24:13 (we were just there, in the vicinity). "He who endures to the end shall be saved." If we allow the false prophets to get in our heads, we will not endure.
So we have to be aware and awake and contending for the faith on a constant basis. I know that is stressful. It is not something we like to do, but it is something that we have to do because we are God's children and all the guns are pointing in our direction.
That is what this sermon is all about. We are going to actually examine Christ's earliest warning to His disciples about false prophets and that appears in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7, verses 15 through 20. You can go ahead and turn there if you like and we will see there as we go through it for the remainder of the sermon that He gives us not just a warning, but the tools to make a godly evaluation of those who claim to teach us the truth. And then He tells us what will happen to those who speak for God when He has not sent them. We have already seen a little bit of that in Ezekiel 22.
Matthew 7:15-20 [Jesus says here] "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them."
Now, as such passages go, this one is fairly straightforward. There are, as far as I know, no contested Greek words that we have to search their meanings for some sort of indication of what Jesus means. There are no big questions about what Jesus intends to teach us. It is very simple, but do not let that stop us from looking at it more closely because we need to heed this warning. I hope my introduction made it clear that we need to keep our eyes out and our ears peeled for false teachings and false teachers.
False prophets are a very real threat, a threat to us and to our salvation. Because frankly, God calls us sheep. We are often dumb, stupid sheep who in our naiveté cannot spot an enemy. I hope that does not offend anybody, but that is just the way people are and God does call the weak of the world. And oftentimes, we do not grow a whole lot, especially in those early years. You know, it takes a while for everything to start producing wisdom. And a lot of times we are just clueless about some of these things. And so Jesus makes sure He gives a very simple and easily understood warning that we must be aware of false prophets.
That is what He says to us in verse 15, "beware." This is the Greek prosecho. (It is not a champagne by the way.) It means to take care, it means to pay attention, it means to give heed or to turn the mind to. It means we must be alert to or on the lookout for. So it is a word that tells us to focus our attention on something and think about it, to think deeply about it because that is the implication of the word. It implies devoting thought and effort to some thing you are trying to know, to learn to, in this case, be aware of.
So, our Savior means that His warning against false prophets is not to be taken lightly but kept top of mind. I mean, it is supposed to always be there. The idea is that we must always be watching. We must always be aware that we could be hearing falsehood. And if we accept the falsehood, that is a step down the wrong path. We must be cautious. So we are to apply frequent and deep thought to the question: Am I hearing the truth or am I being deceived? I think a lot of us have grown to practice this because of what we read on the Internet. We go and we look at a news source and we say to ourselves, am I being deceived? Is this fake news or is it the truth?
And so let us make this more spiritual, let us apply this to religious things, ideas, and things we may hear at church. Is this the real truth or is it deception? We could say that another one of these is these questions that we have to ask ourselves, is it God's Word we are being taught or a slick distortion of it that will destroy us in the end?
Let us go on to the next part. He said, "beware of false prophets." This word is pseudoprophetes. It is exactly what it is. Pseudo, false; prophetes, prophets. They are of a kind with false brethren, false apostles, false speakers (usually when it is a false speaker in Greek the translators usually just simply translate it as liars), false witnesses, and false Christs. The common denominator is deception and hypocrisy. Such false people purport to be real Christians. And they may even, some of them, think that they are real Christians, but they are false. They are not true speakers. They are not, also, on the same path toward the Kingdom of God.
So we have got to make sure that we understand that these are not brethren, they are pseudo, they are fake, they are artificial, they are counterfeits, impostors, pretenders, posers, frauds. They are not who they purport to be. They are at best tares among the wheat, we might say, planted by the enemy to cause problems in the church and lead people astray. And when we discover them, we must not tolerate them because they are there for nefarious reasons.
Now, why do I say this? Why do I say they are not to be tolerated? Let us just see what Christ says here. "These false prophets come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves." They are wolves masquerading as sheep They are not sheep, they are predators. They are not brethren. Look at the I John 2, just very quickly.
I John 2:18-19 Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest that none of them were of us.
They are a different breed, a different species. Even in animal terms, they are not the same as us. They are totally false. They are wolves. They do not want to be sheep. They like being wolves. Wolves want to rend and tear and kill and eat sheep. That is the way they are. Wolves are predators, sheep are prey.
Jesus pointedly calls these false prophets ravenous. That means voracious. They cannot get enough. They are rapacious, insatiable. They are like starving wild dogs that all they want to do is kill and eat. They are greedy for sheep flesh, as it were. I mean, I know that is a vivid illustration, but that is what Jesus wants us to get out of this. They are ravenous wolves. What happens when you as a human being, who are supposedly on the top of the food chain, come across a ravenous wolf? Hopefully, none of you have ever done that. But what would be your first reaction? Get out of there! Or if you have a gun, kill the stupid thing, because you know that you are in danger, you are in great danger! Life or limb is going to be taken from you if they have their way.
This is how Jesus wants us to approach this problem. False prophets/ravening wolves. You are a sheep, you are prey. Do what prey do. Get out of there. Best thing you could do in the sheep/flock metaphor, is run to Jesus, run to the Shepherd, take the problem to Him. But you still must be vigilant. So be careful. False prophets are not something we should take lightly.
Jesus also says here, "They come to you in sheep's clothing." This is another little indication that they are predators. They come into the flock to take prey. That is what wolves do. They are seeking weak or injured members of the flock to sate their appetite for deception. They are like Satan. Satan is a roaring lion going about seeking whom he may devour. Right? That is in I Peter 5:8. There the image is of a lion, but it is a predator seeking the weak, those who have strayed, maybe, a little bit from the herd or the flock, and they single them out and they go for the jugular. That is what predators do.
Let us go to II Timothy 3, where were just a little bit before, we were in verse 13. This is a little earlier than that. We will start in verse 4. Here, Paul is going through these attitudes and whatnot that will be extant at the end time, these perilous times to come.
II Timothy 3:4-9 [They are] traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away! For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith; but they will progress no further, for their folly will be manifest to all, as theirs also was.
He is saying that these people are out to get people in the church, they are out to get those who believe in the truth and they will take on various forms. But their end is always destruction. They want to destroy the people who believe, the sheep, and they will go about various ways to do it. If it takes a sexual thing, like Paul mentions there about the gullible women, they will do that. But they will also take other measures as well. It is not just that kind of lewd or licentious behavior. They will take whatever they can. So let us not treat this lightly because Jesus shows us in this section that we should not. This is a life and death matter—eternal life versus the second death—so be vigilant.
These false prophets are not benign in the least. They may outwardly appear like they belong. They might outwardly appear sheep-like. But it is all a façade. It is all a mask.
Let us go back to Revelation 13, verse 11. If you know your chapters, this is the beast and false prophet chapter. This is the section on the false prophet.
Revelation 13:11 Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth and he had two horns like a lamb and he spoke like a dragon.
Here we have a similar image of wolves coming as sheep in sheep's clothing. But in this case, it is the ultimate false prophet and he comes like a lamb with horns, but he speaks like a dragon. He too has an outward façade of being benign or at least somewhat benign, but he is a dragon inside. So we could say that false prophets are, in a way, versions of the ultimate false prophet that we see here at the end time and of Satan himself. And we saw back in II Corinthians 11, Satan appears as an angel of light, but God tells us very clearly he is a dragon, he is the ultimate predator. And so we have got to be careful. On the inside, in their heart of hearts, as we might say, all false prophets are evil and entirely deceitful because it is coming from their heart.
Let us go back to Mark the seventh chapter. Mark 7 and we will read verses 21 through 23. Jesus says, what defiles a man? What makes him iniquitous? What makes him profane? What makes him unholy?
Mark 7:21 "For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornication, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man."
So they could look like whatever on the outside, as benign and good looking and whatever on the outside. But it is the heart that is evil and that heart will tell in time.
Let us go back to Matthew the seventh chapter and read verses 16 through 18 again.
Matthew 7:16-18 [He tells us here what to look for.] "You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit."
Like I said, very simple, easy to understand sentences. We are talking about fruit, trees, good, bad. It is very, very simple. So He tells us to look for fruits. In Greek, this is the word karpos. It literally means fruit or it can be used also for, like, animals' offspring, not just fruit on a tree. So Jesus is saying we will recognize false prophets by what they produce. That is, what their way of living exposes over time or what their teaching produces in their own lives or in other people's lives, those people who believe them and follow them.
So Christ's true disciples cannot take their teachers at face value. Remember, we just saw that the the false prophets are wolves in sheep's clothing. They cannot just take what they get on the outside. But the sheep, God's people, must prioritize assessing their teacher's character and their long term behavior while refusing to be charmed by slick words. All the antenna must be out.
Now the verse's second sentence here, verse 16, "Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?" It uses an agricultural metaphor to explain what He means about looking for the fruits. And it is something people in His day would have readily understood. They were agricultural people. They understood this without even thinking about it. And it is not very hard. We would not expect to get grapes from thorn bushes. We expect to get blackberries from thorn bushes, not grapes. But be that as it may, like produces like is what He is talking about. He is just putting it in the negative. Grapevines will produce grapes. Fig trees will produce figs.
Like produces like, kind after kind. It is a principle found in God's Word all the way back in Genesis 1. That the created animals, fish, birds, they were after their kind. So clearly, this is a principle that God wants us to understand from the very beginning. He wanted Adam and Eve to understand this principle that like produces like. A species does not produce another species, a different species. So if someone teaches the truth, their subsequent behavior and character should also be true as much as lies within them.
Obviously, people are going to be inadequate to the truth a lot of times. They will make mistakes. People are weak. But in their heart, if they are trying to do and speak the truth, they are usually going to speak, going to produce good things. But when behavior and character fail to match the teaching on a consistent basis, then we need to take another look. When behavior and character fail to match the teaching, which is declared to be the truth by this false prophet, something is wrong. Something is unnatural. The natural is for like to produce like, but if he is saying that something is true and it does not produce the true results, then we have to think, what is going on here? If the fruit is wrong, we can assume the teaching is probably wrong too in some way.
Let us go to where Paul talks about this principle in the book of Galatians in chapter 6, verses 7 and 8. Notice how he frames this.
Galatians 6:7-8 Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life.
So Paul is telling the Galatians here again—this is an important principle—do not be deceived by false teachers who say you can reap something that has not been sown or that if you sow something you will not reap what is naturally the consequence. This is very important. When Jesus says, "you will know them by their fruits," it is just another way of saying "you reap what you sow." Or in modern computerese we say, garbage in, garbage out. And there are many other proverbs and sayings that basically say the same principle. How about "the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree." There are lots of these things that we use as common sayings and we have used them since the Garden of Eden because like produces like, kind after kind.
This is something we should know and it works on a spiritual level too. It is a universal law and it is constantly in motion to produce an outcome from the programming and the materials on hand. This is something God put into both the physical and the spiritual laws of this universe, that like produces like. That however a thing is programmed when it reproduces itself, it is going to produce something like itself. So a woman, a human woman, will always give birth to a human baby, not a kitten or anything furry and cuddly and cute other than a baby, a human baby. It is impossible for a human woman to produce anything else because she has a genetic makeup, that is, her divinely designed organic programming, to produce human beings, not kittens, not puppies, not otters, not anything—humans. Like produces like.
If we just put aside for a moment the human woman image, we could say cockroaches produce cockroaches, whales produce whales, finches produce finches, salmon produce salmon, mushrooms produce mushrooms, barley produces barley, your red peppers out here produce red peppers. Komodo dragons produce Komodo dragons, peach trees produce peaches, and on and on and on. They do not produce other things. Kind after kind. In the real world there is no input this and presto-change-o you get something else. It does not work that way. What the programming is, what the DNA is when it comes time for reproducing or having a result, making fruit, you always get what you started with.
And as I said, the physical is a type of the spiritual. So this principle works just as clearly in character areas or spiritual areas as well as it does in physical ones. So if we feed our minds with sinful things and imitate and practice the sins that we have learned from those things we have fed our minds with, we will lead a life of iniquity of sin. Our path will be littered with degeneration and destroyed lives and pain and we will die in the end. That is the course of sin. You can look in Romans 6:23. You could look in James 1 where he talks about this is how it all works. It is an unbreakable law, both on the physical plane and on the spiritual plane.
As much as people want to believe that their results are going to be different, they are fooling themselves. They think they can avoid this law's natural processes. It has been happening for 6,000 years! You think by now we would have figured it out, that like produces like and kind produces kind, but we have not. We think we are different. We think we can avoid the pain. We think we can somehow avoid any of these consequences. We think we could repent on our deathbed and void all of those consequences. Not on a human level. In this world, in this life, there are no magical changing of outcomes.
Even when we accept the blood of Jesus Christ, our old sins, even though they have been forgiven and we have been justified, they sometimes come back to bite us. You did drugs before you became a member of the church, well, God is not going to take away, magically, all the bad things that happen from taking drugs. He may ameliorate some of them. But when you get old, you may start feeling the consequences of that. You may not even live to be old because of the way you hurt your body, hurt your health through the drugs. I mean, it would be nice if once we accepted Christ as our personal Savior, that all of those bad things were taken away and we would live to 600 years old, but it does not work that way. The sin that we have done will produce what it does.
It is a whole lot better though when we accept Christ and repent and do what we can to change those things in our own life. But even so, we will die. Paul tells us that (or whoever wrote the book of Hebrews) "it is given for all men once to die" (Hebrews 9:27). So we will die. Our sins and the things that we did in our lives will catch up with us in time. But that is just part of the natural process. God never tells us that we are not going to ever die physically. We will.
We are still in Galatians 6:7. Remember, I intimated it earlier that Paul was talking about untruths, falsehoods that they were hearing. And he begins, then, with "do not be deceived." We are most often deceived when we hear something false that we take as the truth because we are not slick enough, we are not being vigilant enough, or maybe we are just ignorant and we cannot tell that it is not right. But this is what the false prophet tries to do. He tries to trick us into thinking that we can reap eternal life while still allowing ourselves to sow to the flesh, to please and satisfy our physical desires, our material desires.
And how does this come out? In our age, this comes out as "The law is obsolete. So don't worry about those venal bodily sins. You're covered by the blood of Christ. Hell has no claim on you. Your salvation is guaranteed if you just say the words that you accept Christ as your personal Savior. Heaven, here we come." I hope I did not sound too much like a Protestant preacher there. But that is generally the way it comes across in today's churches. The law is done away. Your grace will cover everything and you are covered forever.
Now, nominal Christianity does not realize it but their philosophical foundations, that is, the guiding principles from which they reason, which they think, are gnostic. It was the same sort of thing that Paul was, and James and Jude and John and Peter were all battling in the church at the end of the first century. And just like the ancient Gnostics, some of whom infiltrated the church and corrupted the church, these modern Gnostics have overvalued knowledge and spirituality. You hear that word a lot. "I'm not religious but I am spiritual." They have elevated or overvalued those things over physical behavior and morality.
So they have glorified spiritual things and have, now, a near indifference to physical things, which they say really does not matter. And this reveals itself in Protestant theology, which adores grace. They just go gaga over grace, you might say, but it spurns the law. Rather than taking them together, they essentially reject law or any kind of moral guidance over grace, to actually accept grace but not law. They do not want the rules that constrain behavior. They do not want, necessarily, morality because morality can be judged. In layman's terms we could say that in today's Protestantism, belief and profession mean everything. Grace covers every transgression, but behavior is marginalized. It is not as important.
Let us go to II Peter 2. We are going to read verses 18 through 22. I was just scrolling through X (that is, Twitter for those of you who are not aware of the name change), and I came across something that Dr. Jordan Peterson wrote just on Thursday. I want to give you what he said, which was really interesting because I was preparing for this sermon.
If you can't understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, and then infer the motivations from their consequences.
"You shall know them by their fruits." He is a very insightful man and he does a great deal of studying in the Bible. That is where a lot of his intelligence comes from, his wisdom. But notice what Peter says here.
II Peter 2:18-22 [he is speaking about false teachers and their deceptions] For when they speak great swelling words of emptiness, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through licentiousness, the ones who have actually escaped from those who live in error. [that is, the church, the sheep] While they promise them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. But it has happened to them according to the true proverb: "A dog returns to his own vomit," and, "a sow, having washed, to her wallowing in the mire."
I am kind of juxtaposing these two men, Peter and Peterson, Dr. Peterson and the apostle Peter. And they both actually say the same thing, just in a little different ways. So why? What are the motivations for teachers becoming false prophets? What are the motivations of these people? If we look at the consequences of their actions or their teachings, we can infer the why. Their reasons and motivations, which frankly, for some of them, they may have never articulated to themselves. They have just followed the dictates of their human nature and so they speak and they act what we could call "naturally," like a human, without constraining themselves either by law or by God's Spirit, if they were ever converted at all.
Now, Peter shows us here what their motivations are in a general sense, and he gives us several pointers about their motivations. So Peter here is telling us a lot about the why. Why are they false teachers and what drove them to this? He says here that they are bold and willful, that they speak great swelling words of emptiness, and they often do this against authorities. That is in verse 10. They are presumptuous, self-willed. They are not afraid to speak evil against dignitaries. This points to excessive self-importance. And sometimes we could even see it as even narcissism. It is all about them.
Some of them are irrational and ignorant and they refuse correction or any kind of enlightenment. Some are only interested in their own pleasure. Some are exclusively after sexual pleasure, as we saw back in II Timothy 3:6, chasing after gullible women. Many are greedy, that is, covetous. They see the ministry as a way to fulfill their needs for material things and they want to have as many material things as possible. (I do not know why they choose the ministry but there is that.)
Their teachings (verse 17) "are wells without water, clouds carried by a tempest, to whom the gloom of darkness is reserved forever." By this he means their teachings seem refreshing, like water from a spring on a hot day, but their spring is actually dry. You are not going to get any water out of that. It is all a ruse. It is a fraud. It sounds good, it promises amazing things, but it produces nothing, nothing good that is. Their words are empty and boastful, full of self-illusions and bombast and salesmanship.
But really, if you look at them and hear them with a mind filled with God's Spirit, they are no more intelligible than braying donkeys as far as the truth goes. What they encourage is foolish or foolishness, especially spiritually. And ultimately, because it is usually focused on fulfilling personal desires rather than the will of God, that is, it is worldliness. It is going back to the lifestyle of a deceived world. That is what he eventually gets to here by the dog returns to his own vomit and the sow going back to wallowing in the mire.
But a huge point to watch out for is the promise of freedom. Usually that is somewhere in the false teacher's repertoire. Maybe he begins to use it more and more. It is not the liberty that Christ brings through the true gospel, which He talks about there in John 8:32, but freedom from law, freedom from morality, freedom from even goodness or any kind of external restraint. Oftentimes it is couched in terms of freedom from guilt. People carry around a lot of guilt and those kind of people are attracted to false teachers because they relieve them of the guilt that they carry around with them.
These false teachers abhor boundaries on our human nature, boundaries or restraints on our physical drives, whether it is sexual, food, drink, what have you. They do not like those things. They do not like what it means that they have drives that need to be constrained. They do not like the sacrifices that they have to make in order to constrain themselves. And so they rail against it saying that we have freedom to just go with them.
Now, this is an interesting one. This freedom may also be freedom from final judgment, might also be part of their preaching. And it is a major facet of Protestantism. It is called the Doctrine of Eternal Security or once saved, always saved. That once you are saved at the beginning of your conversion, God will never take that salvation away. So they say things like, "You're saved forever. So there is no need to fear or restrain your behavior. Christ isn't going to consign you to the Lake of Fire. You can do whatever you please and you'll still go to heaven." They may say things like, "Well, you should still try to be a good person." But it does not come out as a big part of their preaching.
The irony of this false freedom is that it exposes the person to the slavery or the bondage to corruption and sin in the first place, that they are trying to avoid. They are actually putting themselves right into the crosshairs of the final judgment, which they say does not exist. They do not believe that they are going to be judged according to their works, according to their behaviors, according to their decisions. They believe there is no judgment because Christ has done it all for us. We have been saved. And they quote various verses like "no one will be able to snatch you out of My hand." That may be very true. It is true. But you may leap off the hand. So their end, these false teachers and those who follow them, is so much worse than the beginning because they have just basically thrown themselves into the Lake of Fire.
Let us go back to Matthew 7, verse 19. Back to the passage in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says,
Matthew 7:19 "Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."
Jesus is unambiguous about the fate of these false teachers. Cut down and thrown into the fire is Bible-speak for the second death in the Lake of Fire. We will go back a few chapters here to Matthew 3. We will see John the Baptist uses it in verses 10 through 12 as he is castigating the Pharisees here.
Matthew 3:10-12 "Even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge His threshing threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire."
Not only does John the Baptist use it there, but Jesus uses the metaphor again in Matthew 13:40-42; in Matthew 25:41; in John 15:5-6; and of course, He uses it in the book of Revelation chapter 19:20, chapter 20:10, and also verses 14 and 15, and in chapter 21:8. He also makes several references to Gehenna or hellfire. You can find those in Matthew 5:22, 29, and 30, Matthew 10:28, Matthew 18:9, Matthew 23:15 and 33; Mark 9:43, 45, and 47; in Luke 12:5. And in every case, it is very clear that He is talking about eternal death, plain and simple.
Let us go to James 3. A warning to the wise here.
James 3:1 [He says] My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment.
James 3:6 And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. The tongue is so set among our members that it defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature; and is set on fire by hell.
So James' warning here is make sure you have the right reasons for being a teacher in the church of God because God is going to judge you more strictly and everybody else who is a sheep in the church is going to be evaluating you, if they are on the ball. You better be able to take their assessments and judgment. And of course, you better tow the line of God's way and teach the truth.
Let us go back to Matthew 7, verse 20. We will finish there.
Matthew 7:20 "Therefore by their fruits you will know them."
He says the same thing at the end of the passage that He mentioned in verse 16. By repeating verse 16, Jesus emphasizes the principle we are to take from His warning against false prophets. He wants you to make sure that you understand this principle: kind after kind, like produces like, you reap what you sow. So you will know false teachers buy their fruits. They cannot produce anything else.
False teachers are inevitable in the church because Satan and the world hate us and want to destroy us. So we have to take the long view in this. We have to be patient. We have to let the false minister hoist himself on his own petard, as it were, hang himself on the rope that he is given, if you will, and that is his carnality. It will come out in time—if it is there. If he is not doing it for the right reasons, if he is not doing it to please God, if he is not doing it to help his brethren, if he is not doing it out of a spirit of love and sacrifice, it will come out.
No one can pretend righteousness forever. It is going to slip at some point and people are going to notice. The fruit will tell. And then, once we see that and have it confirmed, we can run the false prophet out on a rail, sure that we are correct and not abusing a brother who merely has a weakness. Not all sins that come to light are indications of a false prophet. It needs to be evaluated for what it is. And that is why I said we need to be patient and do this over a long time. If we see a pattern that keeps recurring, then we can say this is wrong and make sure that that person does not speak again.
The verb "know" here in verse 20 implies full proven knowledge. It is not just suspicion. Jesus here wants us to understand that we have to know that the person is a false prophet. So we have to be very careful when evaluating this and assessing things. But this is what we do when we finally figure that out. We dump them, to put it mildly. And in this way, we guard the truth and we protect the sheep who are seeking the Kingdom of God.
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