First Sunday after Trinity , 2002
Jeremiah 23

Prophetship was an essential office in Israel. Abraham had been a prophet; Moses was the greatest of the prophets. God issued His commands through the prophets, therefore they held a central place in society. Egypt, Greece and other Mid-Eastern cultures as well had prophets who attempted to predict the future. However, these often resorted to freakish behavior. The pagan prophet sought a state of trance or frenzy using incense, narcotics and alcohol. He communicated his divine visions in a sing-song chant, at times a scream.

The greatest single function of the prophet of Israel was to act as intermediary between God and the people on moral matters. There were, then, multitudes of prophets. The true prophets were a great blessing to the Church; the false ones could be corrupting. God's Word has much to say about false prophets. They afflict the Church in every generation, leading the ignorant astray.

Today we want to learn how Jeremiah identified and resisted the false prophets of his day. Those principles can help us spot the false ones of our day.

False prophets are hard to detect because they often exude a prophet-like odor. "Behold, I am against the prophets," says the Lord, "who use their tongues and say, "He says" (Jeremiah 23:31). In other words, the false prophets claim to speak for God, they preface their messages with "Thus saith the Lord" but their words do not originate from God.

Many years ago, some young men fooled me. After a long rebellion, God graciously brought me back to the Church. Within a year of returning to the Lord I invited two Christian guys to live with me. Fred and Vern stayed for five months. It was one of the most confusing and exciting times of my Christian pilgrimage. Fred and Vern were more than typical church-goers, they were on fire for Christ. They lived out their faith with reckless abandon. It is hard to overstate their fervor. They read their Bibles and prayed constantly. Every chance that came their way they witnessed and shared their testimony. My pastor acknowledged their gifts, giving them opportunities to preach and teach. Exuberant, indeed extravagantly heartfelt mannerisms characterized their worship. Much of this was an encouragement to me and the other brothers and sisters in the parish. Nonetheless, there was something a bit unsettling that began to creep in. I was grateful for the ministry of our local church. Fred and Vern didn't agree. They manifested a growing dissatisfaction with the parish: the pastor, the worship, and the people. We were not holy enough, not doing enough, spiritually lukewarm. Their objections became more frequent and severe. I couldn't refute them, so I tried to emulate them and reach their spiritual high. As much as I increased my spiritual exercises it was plain that I would never be able to match them. They kept up the spiritual stuff at a frenzied pace.

Then, something very strange occurred. It happened in stages. First, Fred and Vern stopped attending worship. They hopped from church to church but no parish was adequate. I lived in South America at the time. They returned to the states. I learned from correspondence that they began dating non-Christian ladies, dabbling in atheistic ideologies, their God-talk evaporated, and within a year they had rejected Christianity altogether. The entire episode left everybody spinning. The point is this: false prophets can put on a good front. At the very time that Fred and Vern seemed to be the most holy people in the world, they were on the road to apostasy. Fortunately they had the honesty to abandon the Church. In contrast, there are church leaders who apostatize from the Christian faith and remain, some of them bishops. They maintain all the trappings and vocabulary of Christianity without the truth. Jeremiah was a mature and authentic man of God and he could see through the façade of the false prophets. He rejects their assertion that they speak for God, and that the Lord is the source of their prophecies. In verse 13 Jeremiah says this about them, "They prophesy by Baal." Verse 26, "Indeed they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart." So instead of speaking the true words of God, they receive their visions from demons, and from egotistical self delusion.

Modern false prophets continue to practice these very principles. Wouldn't that characterize the Jim Jones of the 1970s who urged his thousand followers to mass suicide by gulping down cyanide-spiked Cool-Aid? Surely Jim Jones was drunk with power, deceived in his heart, and thus receptive to messages from demons.

The apostle John dealt with false prophets in the New Testament. They were such a problem he had to warn the churches about them. It sounds like the enemies troubling the Early Church were much more subtle and cunning than the flagrant wickedness of a Jim Jones figure. The Apostle writes in 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. 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."

In other words some of the antichrists of John's day were Gnostic. The Gnostic antichrists couldn't stomach the full physical humanity of the Son of God, so they turned Jesus into a disembodied ghostly character. Moreover, the antichrists were denying the Trinity. First John 2:22 says, "He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son." In fact, St. John suggests that through the course of history the Church will always battle antichrists. He declares: "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" (1 John 2:18-19).

Let's review. Jeremiah tells us antichrists exhibit gargantuan pride, sometimes are governed by demons. St. John tells us that antichrists reject the Incarnation of God and the doctrine of the Trinity. They leave the Church and try to start their own sects.

How else can we identify false prophets? Jeremiah draws our attention to the content of their messages. Antichrists tend to downplay God's judgment. Jeremiah 23:17 puts it this way:

"They continually say to those who despise Me, 'The Lord has said, "You shall have peace" '; and to everyone who walks according to the dictates of his own heart, they say, 'No evil shall come upon you.' "

Earlier, Jeremiah had complained about the prophets: "they have healed the hurt of the daughter of My people slightly, Saying "Peace, peace!" When there is no peace" (8:11). According to the Holy Spirit inspired words of Jeremiah, false prophets have a bad habit. At the very moment when wickedness is in the ascendant, the antichrists will paint a rosy picture.

When I was in college an old gypsy lady with a thick accent asked me to mow the weeds that had grown under her trailer. She said that she would read my fortune in return. After I finished the lawn mower job she led me into a dimly lit room. She took my hand and began examining the lines and wrinkles. I don't remember everything she said, but it was very positive. Basically, I would enjoy a long life, good marriage, riches, and live happily ever after. Why are the oracles of false prophets so overwhelmingly sunny? Sin and judgment they do not take seriously. Holiness is irrelevant. They wink at disobedience to God, and the notion of divine wrath against sin elicits a snicker. Their oracles assume that the Lord will bless without repentance and covenantal obedience.

Jeremiah confronted this dishonesty in Hananiah. Jeremiah had received the true word of God and foretold that the exile of the people into Babylon would last for 70 years. He held up the hope that one day the Messiah would come as their King and Savior (Jer. 23:5-6). Hananiah went to the King and opposed Jeremiah's negativity. He saw the same sin and debauchery in Judah that Jeremiah had seen, but he predicted that the nation's evil merely deserved a two-year exile (Jer. 28; 29:10). God was not pleased with Hananiah's lie. The Lord tells Jeremiah to inform Hananiah of his doom: "Therefore thus says the Lord: "Behold, I will cast you from the face of the earth. This year you shall die, because you have taught rebellion against the Lord." So Hananiah the prophet died the same year in the seventh month" (Jer. 28:16-17). In effect, God made Hananiah suffer the consequences of preaching cheap grace to the people .

The modern church suffers from Hananiahs. Pulpits are populated by preachers that punctuate the positive and neglect the negative. They are persuaded that good entertainment draws a crowd on Sunday morning. They operate on a pragmatic set of axioms: don't expect too much of parishioners. Make them feel good about themselves and about the church. Don't get into sacramental and incarnational discussions or talk about creedal abstractions like the Trinity and two natures of Christ. That stuff is too heavy. Deal with practical issues. Let people see Christianity as successful happy living. Forget the mockery, pain, renunciation, and self-denial of Christ and His Cross. That message is too somber and gloomy. [Eugene Peterson, Run with the Horses , p. 86.]

According to Jeremiah such a message is chaff; that of a true prophet is wheat. " 'What is the chaff to the wheat?' says the Lord. 'Is not My word like a fire?' says the Lord, And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?" (vv. 28-29). Chaff is the light weight straw that the farmer sweeps into a pile and burns. How is the word of the true prophet like fire and a hammer? A fire can destroy or refine. God uses fire to burn away the chaff and other impurities. A similar thing can be said for the hammer. In the stonemason's craft, the hammer cuts and shapes the blocks for building use. To get a well-shaped block the excess edges must be chipped off. The fire and hammer metaphors suggest that judgment is a necessary component of a prophet's message. Due to sinful habits, we sometimes need a hard message. Doesn't God use fire to refine us, and a hammer to chip away our wickedness? Yes He does!

Let's consider another mark of the antichrists -- their character. Jeremiah has plenty to say about. Jeremiah 23:11 says: "For both prophet and priest are profane; Yes, in My house I have found their wickedness," says the Lord." The false prophets of Jeremiah's day took up filthy language; the false prophets of the present take up porn.

Furthermore, the prophets Jeremiah condemned were foolish. He states in verse 13: "And I have seen folly in the prophets of Samaria." Folly, foolishness, instability; many false prophets dabble in magic and superstitions offensive to God. Antichrists are seldom wise, responsible and well-balanced people. Joseph Smith is a case in point. The late Walter Martin researched the life of Joseph Smith and found that he spent his teenage years trying to unearth treasure. This is relevant when you recall that Joseph was fifteen years old when God the Father and God the Son supposedly appeared to him in the woods, thus launching the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For the next seven years after this crucial encounter Smith would be a fortune-teller and "peek stone" enthusiast. What is a peek stone? It is a magical rock which when placed in a hat and partially darkened allegedly reveals lost items and buried treasure. Wandering the countryside with hat in hand, Joseph's peek stone would tell him where treasure lay buried in the soil below. Smith, his father and brother would then start digging. They were especially serious about finding Captain Kidd's plunder. Eventually New York and Vermont became dotted with their craters. [ The Kingdom of the Cults , Martin p. 170 ff.]

False prophets gravitate toward profanity and folly. What other ethical traits do they manifest? Jeremiah 23:14 declares, "Also I have seen a horrible thing in the prophets of Jerusalem: They commit adultery and walk in lies; They also strengthen the hands of evildoers, So that no one turns back from his wickedness. All of them are like Sodom to Me, And her inhabitants like Gomorrah."

Serious moral problems plagued the false prophets: lying, applauding the sin of others, adulterous and homosexual relations. These are the marks of a false prophet, and grounds for removing a clergyman from office. There is no excuse for adultery and homosexuality in the household of faith. On this count, we can be thankful for the faithfulness of the Reformed Episcopal Church. Such things are not tolerated.

Crossing doctrinal boundaries is also serious. The apostle Paul teaches the Thessalonians: "Brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taughtBut we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw from every brother who walks disorderly and not according to the tradition which he received from us" (2 Thes. 2:15; 3:6).

What are the traditions that all Christians must follow? Scripture is primary and the Creeds follow. How do clergy and laypeople discern the word of God in our own time? By the canon of Scripture, along with the Creeds and Councils. The Bible is our primary authority; the Creeds and Councils are crucial secondary authorities. The vast majority of the cults that have sprung up on the American landscape never would have survived if the Church had been more committed to the Creeds.

Now that we have God's Word written, the Lord no longer gives direct messages to His prophets as in the days of John and Jeremiah. We have a completed canon, the Bible. God has spoken and continues to speak to us through the pages of His Word. If a man or woman claims to speak a direct predictive word of God, then Deuteronomy 18 should apply. According to the law of Dt. 18:20, whoever predicts the future claiming divine origin, and what he says does not come true, God's law says, "that prophet shall die" (Deuteronomy 18:20; 13:1-5).

These are some of the principles that guide us in a fallen world. Due to sin, the Church will battle antichrists until the Last Day. They are unavoidable. May God grant us the discernment to accurately spot the antichrists of our day, the courage to confront them, the grace and zeal to purify the Church of them.

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