Other Scriptures used:
Jeremiah 23:23-29
Psalm 82
Hebrews 12:1-14
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. (Psalm 19:14)
False prophets are not just an Old Testament problem. We have them in full force today, in all denominations, telling us that God is “doing a new thing,” misinterpreting Isaiah 43:19 to justify sin.
They claim to prayerfully consider their actions, but really just decide among themselves and then tell God to bless their decision. Each denomination has its own share of false prophets leading people astray, and none of us are immune from their effects.
In today’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah, we see that God is rather displeased with people spreading lies in his name. He has a special, severe punishment in store for false prophets who lead people away from the salvation of Jesus Christ through their lies.
But their lies often sound pretty convincing, so how can we tell which prophets are true and which ones are false?
The answer is consistency. Truth is consistent, or constant. It doesn’t change. When you read your Bibles, you can see that God doesn’t vacillate
In his decisions. Murder, stealing, injustice, are all wrong, all through the Bible.
The message of one prophet does not contradict the message of another prophet if both are speaking God’s truth.
For example, the prophet Ezekiel, who was with the Israelites exiled in Babylon while Jeremiah was is Jerusalem, had a vision in which God told him not to fear the people who will mock him. The Lord said,
(Ezekiel 2:7-3:3)
"’You must give them my messages whether they listen or not. But they won’t listen, for they are completely rebellious! Son of man, listen to what I say to you. Do not join them in their rebellion. Open your mouth, and eat what I give you.’
"Then I looked and saw a hand reaching out to me. It held a scroll, 10 which he unrolled. And I saw that both sides were covered with funeral songs, words of sorrow, and pronouncements of doom.
"The voice said to me, ’Son of man, eat what I am giving you—eat this scroll! Then go and give its message to the people of Israel.’ So I opened my mouth, and he fed me the scroll.
“’Fill your stomach with this,’ he said. And when I ate it, it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth."
Where have we heard something similar to that reference — eating the Word of God?
In the Second Book of the Law, also known as Deuteronomy, Moses tells the Israelites something that seems to reinforce Ezekiel’s vision.
(Deuteronomy 8:2-5)
"Remember how the LORD your God led you through the wilderness for these forty years, humbling you and testing you to prove your character, and to find out whether or not you would obey his commands.
Yes, he humbled you by letting you go hungry and then feeding you with manna, a food previously unknown to you and your ancestors. He did it to teach you that people do not live by bread alone; rather, we live by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD."
This is an example of the crimson thread that runs continuously through the Bible, from Old Testament through the New Testament.
What’s the crimson thread?
It represents the blood of Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and rose again on the third day.
If you picture the entire Bible as a brilliant tapestry, illustrating each story in each book, you would see a single continuous thread among all the others that represents the foretelling and arrival of Jesus as the Messiah. That’s the crimson thread that runs throughout the entire tapestry of the Bible.
We just heard about Moses, an Old Testament Prophet, telling the Israelites about people living not by bread alone, but by eating the Word of God. We also heard about Ezekiel eating a scroll of God’s Word.
If we follow that crimson thread to Jesus in the Gospels being tempted in the wilderness by Satan — when Satan tells Jesus, who has not eaten in more than a month, to change the stones into bread to ease his hunger — we see that both Matthew and Luke show Jesus saying the same thing in Chapter 4, verse 4 of each:
"But Jesus told him, ’No! The Scriptures say, "People do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God."’"
So Jesus tells us, just as Moses did, that we need to eat both physically and spiritually in order to live.
We need to eat not just his bread, but also his word.
In the prologue of John’s Gospel, we learn something about the Word. He writes,
"In the beginning the Word already existed.
The Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He existed in the beginning with God....
"So the Word became human and made his home among us."
The New Living Translation uses the word “human,” but John used the Greek word: sarx (sarx), which actually means “flesh.” (NRSV, NIV have “flesh”)
In Chapter 6 (47-51) of John’s Gospel, Jesus says,
“I tell you the truth, anyone who believes has eternal life. Yes, I am the bread of life! Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, but they all died. Anyone who eats the bread from heaven, however, will never die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever; and this bread, which I will offer so the world may live, is my flesh.”
John uses the word sarx (sarx) again for Jesus describing himself as flesh.
So we have Jesus referred to by John as the Word of God taking human form, Ezekiel eating the Word of God in the form of a scroll, and Moses instructing us that bread alone does not sustain, that we need to eat the Word of God as well, and Jesus telling us he is the bread of eternal life.
It weaves together nicely, just like a tapestry, and God’s glory remains the focus of the image.
We digest God’s Word through reading the Bible, but also through our participation in communion. The bread at the Last Supper and the manna in the desert both symbolize the physical food the God provides for us.
They also symbolize the spiritual food he provides for us in Jesus Christ, the Word of God, through the Holy Spirit.
There’s a unity, a consistency, throughout the entire Bible concerning the importance and the significance of God’s Word in our lives, and the importance of that Word being internalized within us.
When his disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, Jesus combined our need for physical and spiritual nourishment in the single request for the Father to “give us this day our ’daily bread.’"
There’s a daily devotional that reaches about seven million people each day, called “Our Daily Bread;” and they have a daily radio ministry featuring Dr. Haddon Robinson called “Discover the Word.”
It’s a consistent message throughout the centuries that the books of the Bible were written. A message about God’s kingdom and his covenant with us.
That’s really what prophecy is all about. God’s kingdom and his covenant with us. The prophets were covenant enforcers. They reminded the Israelites of what God had already commanded them.
They didn’t add any new rules to those that God had already made for them. They merely enforced God’s covenant with Israel that had already been in place since the days of Abraham.
False prophets, on the other hand, tried to twist God’s Word into serving their own purpose instead of God’s. Jeremiah predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple while the nation was enjoying peace and prosperity. The false prophets called Jeremiah a nut case and predicted continued peace and prosperity.
Most of the people listened to the false prophets because they like the message of prosperity better than a message of sacrifice.
The king’s officials even through Jeremiah down a well to shut him up, hoping to starve him to death.
We have a lot of false prophets today also, and a lot of messages we prefer to hear instead of God’s.
The “common sense” of the world tells us to focus on the bottom line, get a good education so you can get a good career with a high salary, earn lots of money, to buy bigger and better stuff, because stuff is what’s important in this world.
The Golden Rule has been perverted in business to read “The one with the most gold makes the rules.”
But that message really doesn’t blend with the rest of the tapestry of the Bible, does it?
The Bible talks about sacrifice and following Jesus by picking up our crosses each day. Peter, Paul, and Luke write about the incredible hardships that the disciples faced as a result of their faith in Jesus.
None of the disciples died wealthy, and all of them except John died violent, horrible deaths as martyrs.
So where do church leaders of today get this “name it and claim it” Gospel of Prosperity? That believing in Jesus is the best way to build up our net worth? Or that tithing will actually increase your cash because “we can’t outgive God?”
If you’re tithing because you believe God will increase your wealth in return, that’s not an offering. That’s called investing. It’s the same thing we do with stock brokers or financial planners. We give them some of our money each month and expect them to turn it into more money for us.
But God’s not our investment banker. When we give him our money, it should be because we realize it’s his money anyway, and we’re returning some to him in gratitude for what he’s given us. That’s biblical and fits within the tapestry. Tithing as some form of Holy Retirement Plan does not.
Picture in your mind all the frescoes that Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel. They range from God reaching out and touching Adam during creation to the final Judgment Day, with many other biblical scenes between them.
Now imagine that in the middle of the chapel, on one of the walls, among all the spiritual frescoes, is a painting on black velvet of cigar-smoking dogs playing poker.
It’s a nice, entertaining image, but it just doesn’t fit in with the rest of the paintings. Paul warns us about this — false Gospels, not black velvet dog paintings — in his letter to the Church in Galatia (1:6-9):
"I am shocked that you are turning away so soon from God, who called you to himself through the loving mercy of Christ. You are following a different way that pretends to be the Good News but is not the Good News at all. You are being fooled by those who deliberately twist the truth concerning Christ.
Let God’s curse fall on anyone, including us or even an angel from heaven, who preaches a different kind of Good News than the one we preached to you. I say again what we have said before: If anyone preaches any other Good News than the one you welcomed, let that person be cursed."
Paul also warns against the false teachings that will try to replace the Word of God in his second letter to Timothy (4:2-4):
"Preach the word of God. Be prepared, whether the time is favorable or not. Patiently correct, rebuke, and encourage your people with good teaching.
For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear. They will reject the truth and chase after myths."
One of the problems we see in our culture today is the belief that truth is relative. What’s true for you may not be true for me. It all depends on our perspective. Nothing is right or wrong, because declaring something as wrong is considered “judgmental.”
That’s why the media can’t bring themselves to refer to people who strap bombs to themselves and blow up a bus full of women and children as terrorists. They call them insurgents or freedom fighters. In 1945, no one had a problem calling the Nazis evil. If it all happened today, the media would be blaming Poland for having policies that caused Hitler to want to invade them.
Josh MacDowell uses an example to describe truth as being constant, not variable. Imagine I’m holding a apple. I say it’s fresh, and you say it’s rotten. When I put it on the table and cut it open, we’ll see that one of us is wrong. The apple will either be crisp and juicy, or mushy and brown. We can’t both be right.
It’s the same with false prophets. The true prophets of God and the false prophets of this world can’t both be right. This idea of relativism, that there are no absolute standards, that God does not demand a certain type of behavior or belief from us, is leading us away from the true Gospel message of Jesus Christ.
Ronnie Knight points out that according to a recent survey, 70 percent of adult American Christians believe there are no moral or ethical absolutes that apply to everyone. In other words most Christian adults have been poisoned by the drug of moral relativism. Most Christians have joined the non-Christian culture and believe we set our own standards. In essence this survey reveals that only 3 out of every 10 adult American Christians believe that God is capable or worthy of establishing guidelines for living.
Of course, evangelicals like us are different, right?
According to research by George Barna, only 9 percent of Evangelicals have a biblical worldview. That statistic reveals that about 91 percent of professing Christians are far more influenced by the relativistic philosophy of today’s culture than by biblical truth. (PWB 5/5/06)
Relativism does not fit within the tapestry of the Bible. And, like a cheap rug, when you give a truthful tug on one of the loose threads of relativism, the entire structure unravels.
J. P. Moreland, in his book Apologetic Reasoning and the Christian Mind, tells of an experience that illustrates the importance of truth:
“One afternoon I was sharing the gospel in a student’s dorm room at the University of Vermont. The student began to espouse ethical relativism: ‘Whatever is true for you is true for you, and whatever is true for me is true for me. . . . But no one should force his or her views on other people since everything is relative.’”
Moreland says, “I knew that if I allowed him to get away with ethical relativism, there could be for him no such thing as real, objective sin measured against the objective moral command of God, and thus no need of a Savior. I thanked the student for his time and began to leave his room. On the way out, I picked up his small stereo and started out the door with it. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ he shouted. . . . ‘I am leaving your room with your stereo.’
‘You can’t do that,’ he gushed.” But Moreland said, “I happen to think it is permissible to steal stereos if it will help a person’s religious devotions, and I myself could use a stereo to listen to Christian music in my morning devotions. Now I would never try to force you to accept my moral beliefs in this regard because, as you said, everything is relative and we shouldn’t force our ideas on others. But surely you aren’t going to force on me your belief that it is wrong to steal your stereo, are you?”
Moreland looked at him and continued: “You know what I think? I think that you espouse relativism in areas of your life where it’s convenient , say in sexual morality, or in areas about which you do not care, but when it comes to someone stealing your stereo or criticizing your own moral hobbyhorses, I suspect that you become a moral absolutist pretty quickly, don’t you?”
The story has a happy ending, for Moreland says, “Believe it or not, the student honestly saw the inconsistency of his behavior and, a few weeks later, I was able to lead him to Jesus Christ.”
The only defense against relativism, against the false prophets of our time, is a strong foundation in God’s Word — God’s printed Word and the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.
If we don’t know what the Bible actually says, we don’t know when it’s being twisted and used to lead us away from God. Satan felt no bashfulness in twisting scripture when tempting Jesus in the wilderness. Do we really think he wouldn’t try the same thing with us?
In William Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice (Act 1, Scene 3), one of the characters (Antonio) says:
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart:
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!
If we compare what the world tells us to do with the whole view of God’s tapestry, we can see when things don’t fit in. We’ll be able to faithfully follow Christ and avoid the pitfalls of following false prophets.
We will be the ones God refers to in our reading from Jeremiah today when he says, “but let my true messengers faithfully proclaim my every word.”
Then we’ll be true evangelists: one beggar helping another beggar find bread.
God bless you.
