Recently at the annual Mid-America Prophecy Conference in Tulsa, OK, one speaker warned against ‘false prophets’. [1] What is a false prophet? A false prophet is “a self-appointed person who does not for speak for God and who deceives people for nefarious reasons”. [2] The speaker at this conference stated we cannot tell false prophets by their actions. The only way we can tell them is by what they say. However, we need to be like the Bereans and search the scriptures to determine if what we are told is true (Acts 17:11).
1 John 4:1 tells us that we are to test the spirits to see if they are from God. It tells us one way to test them is to determine if they confess Jesus has come in the flesh from God.
Matthew 24:24 tells us that false prophets will perform great sign and wonders so that even the elect might be deceived. So we obviously cannot depend upon someone’s actions to tell us if they speak for God.
So from these two passages, it appears the speaker is correct. We cannot tell false prophets by their actions (performing great signs and wonders) but we can tell them by what they say (whether they say Jesus is come in the flesh from God or not).
However, there is another passage about false prophets in which Jesus tells us we can recognize false prophets by their fruits. Jesus says a healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit and a diseased tree cannot bear good fruit (Matthew 7:15-20). What does it mean to bear fruit? Fruit is the output of a tree or vine. The output of a person is what they say, what they do, their conduct, their actions. We must not focus on just one litmus test to determine if someone is a false prophet or not (such as what they say). As Jesus instructs us we must look at their entire output.
This once again illustrates that we must read what the entire Bible says about a particular topic, not just focus on a couple of verses that we pick out.
_____________________________
[1] “Uncovering ‘false prophets’”, Tulsa Beacon, Vol. 16, No. 1, April 21, 2016, p. 1.
[2] Ibid.
