BEWARE OF FALSE PROPHETS

Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. Matthew 7:15-20.

In Matthew 7: 13 onwards, Jesus is wrapping up his kingdom manifesto that is commonly called the Sermon on the Mount in which he lays out the ethics of the kingdom he came to inaugurate and will be consummated at his second coming. In verses 15 to 20, he warns of fake prophets, infiltrators from Satan’s kingdom. What are they, what do they do, how can you recognize them, and what is their end?
False prophets come to believers “in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves”. They act like Christians but they have other intentions. Paul speaks of them as those that rise up within the church and “speak twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them” (Acts 20:30). They twist the truth of God’s word in such a way that they appeal to our carnal desires so that our attention is diverted from seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Matthew 6:33) to seeking first the stuff of this world. They preach shallow unsound messages geared towards shallow unsound believers who “having itching ears … accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passion and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Timothy 4:4). Hence the myths of miracle money, spiritual wives/spiritual husbands, and all sorts of witchcraft sounding doctrines that seem to come out of a Nollywood juju blockbuster as opposed to the Bible. So these false prophets start off preaching what is from the Bible to lure believers but eventually the Bible is thrown out the window as their focus and authority becomes their prophetic words geared to drawing the disciples to themselves for the false prophets’ own economic profit. Peter aptly put it, “And many will follow their sensuality and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they will exploit you with false words” (2 Peter 2:2-3a). Like ravenous wolves, their aim is to devour the gullible sheep by shifting their worship from Jesus to themselves so that they can demand from these sheep the money, sex, and power they have always craved for.

So how can you recognize them? “You shall recognize them by their fruit”, says Jesus. Fruit is character. For the believer in Jesus, this is character that the Holy Spirit forges in him/her as he/she abides in Christ. It is forged in suffering for the kingdom so that Paul can say that Christians rejoice in suffering because suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces a godly hope that does not disappoint due to the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives (Romans 5:3-5). This whole process happens when we abide in Christ by walking in loving obedience to him who is our vine and of whom we are branches (John 15:5) so that we can produce fruit/character that is consistent with the vine, Jesus. This “fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). False prophets can’t produce these in their lives but rather “the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things like these” (Galatians 5:21). A bad tree cannot produce good fruit.

The end of false prophets and those that do not bear the fruit of the Spirit is that they will be thrown into the fire of eternal destruction since they did not produce good fruit. A word of caution for the rest of us is in order here lest we think this fate is only for the false prophets. All those that do not abide in Christ and do not bear the fruit of the Spirit are also going to be cut down from the vine and thrown into the fire of destruction (John 15:6). False prophets may live large now and attract all the publicity and popularity of this world that they have invested themselves in but “their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep” (2 Peter 2:3b). One day God will repay false prophets and their non-fruit bearing relatives in kind.