A Warning about False Teachers

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Transcript:

It’s good to be back with you tonight. Good to see all of you here. We’re going to be in 2 Peter tonight, 2 Peter chapter 2.

And I am sort of fascinated by the concept of people’s last words. And you can go online, and I’ve done this before, and you can read lists, and they’ll list famous people and what their last words are. Some of the lists I’ve read are so memorable that I can’t think of any offhand of what they were, people’s dying words.

But I do remember reading them and thinking some of these were such profound statements and other ones were just bizarre. It was almost like they’d gone into advanced dementia. But some of them, you know, offered poignant thoughts.

I want to say it was his last words. Voltaire, the famous French writer and philosopher, who said something, I think it was on his deathbed, about stamping out Christianity within 50 years. There wouldn’t be a Bible in France.

In France, that came close to being true, but he was talking about stamping out Christianity all over the world through the Enlightenment, and that certainly hasn’t happened. Some people on their deathbeds, their final words, their final thoughts, they give some kind of poignant thoughts. Some people are just flat out wrong in what they have to say.

But lest you think I’m morbid and it’s some kind of obsession with deathbed, it’s not really because even more, what I find even more fascinating is not necessarily when you’re on your deathbed, but when people realize that either their life is coming to an end or an area of work is coming to an end, and they sit down and think, what are the last words, what are the last thoughts that I want to share with this particular group of people? I love Washington’s farewell address. It wasn’t a deathbed thing.

He was saying farewell, I believe, to the nation as he was putting down his president’s gavel, so to speak, and going back to his farm. I think there were two, actually, farewell addresses, one where he said farewell to his troops and one where he went back to private life after being president. Great, great addresses he gives.

More recently, a couple of years ago, Ron Paul, who was in Congress for decades, it seems like, gave a farewell speech that I went online and read his farewell to Congress. And I thought, more people need to read this. More people need to read Washington’s farewell address.

When you realize that life is finite, when you realize that your work is finite and think about what is the legacy that you want to leave behind, your list of priorities gets very short. And I think those are some impactful, I don’t even know if that’s a word, but those are some impactful words. And I know every time I’ve ever left one church and God’s led me to another, that’s not where this is going, by the way.

Anytime God’s ever led me to leave one church and go to another, I have agonized over what am I going to say? because what are the, not that I’ll never speak to any of them again, but what are the last words that I’m going to give them as pastor to kind of leave behind here? I’m fascinated by the idea of last words.

I have studied so many times the Great Commission, whether we find Jesus’ last words in Matthew and Mark or Luke or in Acts. We were talking about that in Sunday school this morning, that I tend to think that all four of those accounts are part of the same event, that they’re just being written from different perspectives and covering different parts of it. But there’s a lot, obviously it’s Jesus, there’s a lot of wisdom in those final words, those final marching orders that he gives to believers.

I think of Paul in the book of 2 Timothy and the instructions that he gives to Timothy, knowing that he was nearing the end of his life and wrote down, and not that it has any more weight than any of the rest of Scripture, but just knowing that he knew he was about to be executed by the Romans. Those are his final instructions, his final words to Timothy. There’s something very moving about the book of 2 Timothy.

And with the book of 2 Peter as well, which is where we come tonight, set all that to really just set up that we’re going to be in 2 Peter tonight. And I noticed that as he’s sharing some of his final thoughts to the Christians who are scattered throughout the known world about what they were supposed to do, he echoes a lot of what Paul said about the need to stand firm, about persecution is about to come, and that they were going to face opposition from within the church and from outside the church. The opposition from outside the church, we think about the persecution of the Roman government, the Jewish authorities.

They were going to be after them trying to stamp out Christianity as so many have tried in vain to do. But within the church, we don’t think about that so much. But they both write about false teachers arising within the church and a time when true believers were going to have to make some hard decisions.

And that’s what we’re going to look at tonight in 2 Peter chapter 2, is this warning he gives about when times of difficulty arise, about maintaining the purity of the church, about maintaining the purity of what we teach. And unfortunately, it’s a message that’s gone by the wayside in too many churches. But this is one of the last instructions of the Apostle Peter to all the churches, to all the believers who were scattered around.

And looking at these people who he had to dearly love. I mean, we can read their letters and see how they cared for these fellow believers, even the ones they hadn’t met. And what is the last thing he’s going to say to them?

He’s going to warn them because he wants them to stand firm. I think it would do us well to heed his instructions as well. It says in chapter 2, verse 1, So what he is saying here.

First of all, we looked at 2 Peter 1 a couple of weeks ago when we talked about the authority of Scripture. And right before this, he talks about the difference between the cunningly devised fables. Do you remember talking about that?

He says we’ve not followed cunningly devised fables. We are eyewitnesses of the things that we’ve talked about. He says when we preach Jesus Christ, this is not legend.

This is not myth. It’s not fairy tale. Some of the same charges we hear today are nothing new.

They were saying them in Peter’s time. Only Peter had the benefit of being able to say, no, we were eyewitnesses to the things that we’re talking about. He says, but even more than that, even as important as an eyewitness account is, he said, we have a more sure word of prophecy.

He says, we have the word of God. That is an honest preacher of the gospel right there who can say, yes, I can tell you from experience, I can tell you this is true, but even more than my experience, because my experience could be wrong, it matters that this is what the word of God says. And so he tells them that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation.

And that doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t read and interpret Scripture for ourselves. Now, we need to be careful about what interpretation we arrive at and make sure we’re handling there is a right way and a wrong way to interpret the Bible. That’s why I believe it’s 2 Timothy says, study to show yourselves approved to God, a workman who needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

You can wrongly divide the word of truth if you’re not careful. But that means we shouldn’t just go make up interpretations. You can misuse the Bible to say whatever you want it to say.

But it’s not saying we can’t interpret the Scriptures for ourselves. It’s not saying that we need a pope or need church authorities or need a council to be able to tell us what Scripture means. We can understand it for ourselves.

What it’s saying, though, is that the things that are written down in the Bible, the things that are part of Scripture, are not there because any man thought, hey, this would make a good thing to put in there. It’s there because God inspired it to be there. For the prophecy in verse 21 of chapter 1, for the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And then he goes from there.

And I brought you back to that because otherwise it just sounds very abrupt for him to start talking about false teachers. He goes from there into chapter 2, verse 1, saying, but there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you. He’s going back and talking about the Old Testament prophecies that pointed to Jesus Christ and saying, we have a more sure word of prophecy, that for 4,000 years, God has been promising a Messiah, and here he is.

He said, but even in the time when God was sending prophecy, there were false prophets, just as even now they were speaking ahead, they were looking ahead and teaching about things that were to come with Jesus Christ, and there were people who were teaching falsely of things that were to come. And he says, by the same token, as we’re looking back at what happened with Jesus Christ and teaching and preaching about that, there are going to be false teachers who come in and do the same thing, who teach you things that didn’t happen, teach you things that were not true. And that’s where he begins his warning.

They’ll be among you. They’ll privily bring in damnable heresies, denying the Lord that brought them and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And he tells them that there are a lot of people who are going to follow their teachings.

That’s not hard to see that going on in our society, is it? Oh my goodness. And I could name names and I have named names, but many will follow their pernicious ways, excuse me, and by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.

And he says, through covetousness, they shall with feigned words, because of their own greed, they’ll come in and with made up words, with insincere words, they’ll make merchandise of you. Now, how many movies, how many TV shows have they made about preachers who stand in the pulpit or stand on TV, and do what they do for the money. And I’ve told you before, if a minister, a pastor, a Bible teacher is in it for the money, they’re either really confused or they’re doing it wrong.

If you think, hey, I’ll be a pastor, it’s good pay. And by the way, I’m not complaining. I’m just saying, if you think, oh, that’s where the easy money is, no, not so much.

And if you are getting paid a lot, there are some honest preachers I know who make $70,000, $80,000 a year. I don’t begrudge them that. If you’re making a million dollars a year off preaching the gospel, you’re probably not doing it right.

And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you. They’re going to treat you like a commodity. That what can they tell you to make you ante up some money here?

Whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not. He says there is going to be judgment and it’s going to be soon and their damnation slumbereth not. Now I bring this to you tonight not because I think there’s anything going on here as far as false But again, kind of like this morning, I wrestled with it on the way here, the message from Exodus 18, and thought, okay, is this what I’m supposed to preach here this morning?

Because it didn’t really feel like a Sunday morning message. Really couldn’t sense God leading me in any other direction, so we went with it. Well, tonight, this message is not pertinent to anything that I know of going on here, so why preach it?

Well, first of all, because it’s the Word of God, and I believe in preaching the whole counsel of God. There are some passages that I may steer clear of and shouldn’t, but they’re harder to understand, and I want to make sure I understand them correctly before I come and talk to you about it. But first of all, we teach the Word of God, whether it’s convenient or not.

But second of all, I’m seeing this more and more that there was a time when people had to come into the church in order to cause trouble in the church with what they were teaching. I’ve heard stories from 20, 30 years ago in more, in churches in more. I’ve heard of churches where I was in Arkansas, where somebody would come in and they’d start attending one of the local Bible-believing churches, and then they’d take a Sunday school class, they’d develop a following, and then they’d start teaching some novel doctrine.

And pretty soon, they’d develop a following, and they’d run afoul of the church because it’s not what the church was teaching, and there’d be controversy, and there’d be splitting, and there’d be division and anger, and then they’d go their way. There’s some cults in Oklahoma City that have begun that way by people sneaking into Bible-believing churches and drawing people away. There was a day and age not so long ago when you had to, if you were going to lead people astray, you had to go that route.

But we’re in a day and age now where you can go on TV, you can go on the radio, you can go on the Internet, and you can propagate any kind of teaching you want to. And people in Bible-believing churches are falling prey to this because they’re listening to some guy on the radio. They’re listening to some guy on TV.

They’re listening to people on the Internet. And now, I’m not telling you. Come in and listen only to me.

Just listen to what I have to say and don’t pay attention to anybody else. You know what? For that matter, don’t listen to everything I say.

Check it against the Word of God. And if it’s not right, call me on it. And there may be some areas where we disagree but may not be huge issues.

But if I’m up here preaching heresy, if I’m up here preaching some of the things that this talks about, denying the Lord that bought us, then you need to kick me out. I can’t really do that with the radio preachers. But be very careful what you’re listening to.

Be very careful about what you watch on TV. Just as I say, check what I say against the scriptures. Check what they say about the scriptures.

Just because they have the word Christian in the title of what they do doesn’t make it so. It doesn’t make it so. It’s kind of like the stuff at the grocery store that says, I can’t believe it’s not butter on the tub.

It has the word butter on the tub, doesn’t it? It’s not butter. And it may be hard to believe it’s not butter, but it’s not.

You know what? I’ve not gone and looked it up. I’m sure it may be partially butter even, but it’s not butter.

It’s just because somebody says the name Christian doesn’t mean that what they’re teaching is true to God’s word. Just because it has the word Baptist in it doesn’t always, in this day and age, mean that it’s true to God’s word. so said all that to say don’t think I’m upset with anything that brother dacus is teaching in sunday school or anything here lately you’ve had me teach in sunday school so don’t think I’m mad at what I’m teaching in sunday school or anything like that I don’t know of any heresy being taught in this church but that’s kind of the best time to best time to deal with it is before there’s before there’s an issue especially in this day and age I can’t remember if I’ve told any of you here I know of a preacher through some other preacher friends that we have in common who has been preaching.

I don’t think he is anymore, but used to be a Southern Baptist pastor who has been preaching that the crucifixion was not only that the atonement, the blood atonement on the cross took place not only so that God could forgive us, get this, but so that we could forgive God as well. And my question is forgive God for what? Everything he does is right by definition.

What do we have to forgive him. And one of these days, if I can get to a point where my head won’t explode when I do it, I’d like to sit down and ask him, what are you thinking? But there are those kinds of things going on.

And he tells people that on the internet. And so you never know what we’re going to run across out there. So seven things, very quick, six things.

Ah, you got off easy tonight. Six things instead of seven. Six things this evening, very quickly, we’ve already looked at the passage and seen what it has to say to us.

Six things that the Bible warns us about with false teachers that we need to be careful of, that you need to be careful of anytime we turn on the radio or the TV or the internet, or to be perfectly honest, anytime you come to church, I’m giving you not just permission, I’m giving you the responsibility and saying I expect you to check what I say against God’s word and make sure it’s true. But first of all, heretics really are nothing new in our time, and I hate using the word heretic because it reminds me of the days when they used to burn people. I’m not in favor of that, by the way.

I’m not in favor of killing the infidel or whatever they call it. Calling them out and naming names and saying what’s wrong, I’m in favor of that. But the Bible does call it heresy, and heretic just simply is a word in English that means someone who preaches heresy.

He says in 2 Peter 2. 1, There were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you. 2,000 years ago, when the churches first got started, there were already people who were preaching false doctrine.

And he goes back even further than that and says, there already have been. In Bible class one day this week, I think it was this week, I taught the kids about Balaam and tried to explain to them what a false prophet was. It blew my mind that none of them had any idea what a prophet was in the first place.

Now, you ask most adults, and they’ll say, oh, a prophet is somebody who tells the future. Well, that’s part of it. God’s prophets did tell the future, but that was more of a byproduct.

A prophet is someone who claims to speak on God’s behalf, claims to bring a revelation from God. In the case of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Nahum and some of them, that did involve a component of telling the future. But prophet, we shouldn’t look at the same as being a fortune teller.

And there were people who claimed to speak for God and did so falsely. And Moses told them, first of all, how to identify those people. Jeremiah told them not to listen to those people, how to identify them, what to do with them.

But the idea that somebody would come along and teach something false is not something new in 2014. Hear me on this. Joseph Smith didn’t invent that back in the 1830s.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t perfect that. This idea of false teaching, the preachers that you see on TV, not all of them. I really like Adrian Rogers, by the way.

I wish he was still around. But a lot of the preachers on TV didn’t perfect this idea of false teaching. That has been around as long as human history goes back.

It was true 2,000 years ago. It was true in the days of the Old Testament prophets. They were dealing with false prophets.

Balaam was a false prophet. You know what, this idea of distorting what God has said goes back, and I know I say this all the time, but it goes back to the days of the Garden of Eden when the serpent said to Eve, has God said? He wasn’t asking, did the event happen?

Did God actually say that? He was questioning the authority of what God had said. So this idea of distorting the truth and leading people astray is nothing new in our time.

And we could think very easily, well, what can we do? What are we supposed to do? Because this is a new problem.

It’s not a new problem. We just haven’t seen it quite as prevalent as we do nowadays. But the reason I point out that it’s not a new problem because if it was going on 2,000 years ago, it was going on 4,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, the Bible speaks to it and the Bible has answers for what we’re supposed to do.

But he says there will be false teachers among you. And we can look at some of the things that they wrote about. John in particular had no tolerance for a group of people called the Gnostics who taught that there was secret hidden knowledge that led to salvation that wasn’t revealed to everybody.

Sounds pretty elitist. And they also taught that matter was evil, the physical world was evil, the spiritual world was good. And so as a byproduct of that, they taught that Jesus Christ, for him to be truly good, could not have actually been here in physical form. He had to be a spirit being.

I see a real quick problem with that, as John also did, that a spirit being can’t shed his blood and die. And so we might think, well, that sounds like a little thing. But when you start taking doctrine out to its logical implications, There are all sorts of problems if you start changing even a little thing like that.

You know what? Jesus had to shed his blood and die. That’s why John says that those who deny that Christ came in physical form, I’m paraphrasing, but said, I believe in 1 John, that those who deny that Christ came bodily, that’s the spirit of Antichrist. Because it was this idea, not whether or not he really was a historical figure, but was he able to shed his blood and die for us or not?

This was not a new problem. This is not a new problem. That’s why I also caution people very strongly against, you know, they want to know, well, when did Christians start teaching this?

Is it correct? And they’ll go look at what are called the church fathers, people who came after the apostles but before the emergence of the Roman Catholic Church. Well, first of all, where do they think the Roman Catholic Church came from?

Was these men who started teaching other things. But second of all, even in that day, the apostles were already saying everybody who calls themselves Christian are not correct teachers. Just because they call themselves Christians doesn’t mean they’re correct on everything.

So this idea that even a lot of Baptists are going back to the church fathers need to be very careful about that. And let’s, you know what, if we want to understand history and historical context, that’s fine. But as far as how we formulate doctrine, I just as soon stick with the Bible.

So first of all, heretics are nothing new in our time. Second of all, heretics are dangerously subtle. He says they will privily bring in damnable heresies.

Now that’s not a word I’m comfortable with or use in regular conversation, but this word damnable means that they invite damnation on themselves. They invite judgment. And he says they come in privily.

Not a word we use very often in English today, but it means they came in stealthily. They were sneaky about it. They’re going to come in as wolves in sheep’s clothing.

I can’t remember who I was talking about earlier this week, but we were talking about the subject of ordination. And this friend of mine, whoever it was, I wish I could remember that now, whoever it was was saying he didn’t understand the concept of questioning a man at his ordination. Now I see some benefit in it, but I also understand where he was going with it.

This idea of asking them doctrinal questions at the ordination, he said, if you don’t know them well enough to know what they believe, why are you ordaining them? He said, because somebody can come in and answer your questions the right way, but you want to look at the last 10, 15 years of their life and see what they’ve been teaching and what they’ve been doing. I said, and I think that and the fact that they knew I was a nervous wreck is why at my ordination there were just yes or no questions.

And I specifically asked for Randy Ray to be the questioner because I knew he would not be so scary. But anybody can come in and pretend to be sound for just a little while. But they were going to come in and sneak in, and then once they’ve gotten their foot in the door of the churches, again, teaching things that sounded all right at first, but we’re going to change it just a little different, make it just a little different from what it was.

But on some of these doctrinal issues, just a little bit of change makes all the difference in the world. We talked about that a few weeks ago with the idea of the gospel. And Paul in Galatians chapter 1, saying that if anybody preaches any other gospel, he said, let him be accursed.

And said it twice, so we know it wasn’t just a rash statement. He really meant it. Let them be accursed.

And we can say, well, we take the true gospel, which is believing that Jesus Christ died to be the only atonement, the only sacrifice acceptable to God for our sins, to saying, well, Christ wiped the slate clean and now we can earn our way through good works. And you know what? There are a lot of people sitting in church pews today who would not have a problem with that statement.

Oh, that’s just a little change. No, that is a completely different gospel. And it sounds like a subtle change.

We’ve got to be aware of subtle changes in what’s being taught. And folks, these false teachers he warns about are dangerously subtle in the things that they teach. I need to move through a little faster.

Heretics deny the basics of the gospel. It says in verse 1 that they even deny the Lord that bought them. They even deny the Lord that bought them.

I know that I have harped on this for years. Not that you all have been hearing me for years. I’ve harped on this for years, and I know I’ve mentioned it several times since I’ve been here.

But it still goes all over me that several years ago on the Larry King program, Joel Osteen could not answer the question, is Jesus Christ the only way to heaven? And you know what? I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe he was nervous. Maybe he misunderstood the question. I don’t know how.

Maybe something else was going on, but then later to come out and defend the answer instead of saying, I was wrong. I misspoke. Of course, Jesus is the only way.

but to later come out and defend the answer of basically, I don’t know, that’s up to God. Well, absolutely it’s up to God, and he’s already told us, hasn’t he? And there’s this sort of thing that goes on all the time.

Is Jesus Christ the only way to heaven? Well, that’s not for me to say. Well, no, it’s not, but it’s for Jesus to say, and he did, and so we’re really just repeating what he said.

Or, you know, how do we get to heaven? Well, Jesus died for us, and now we have to be good people and live a certain way. Okay, that’s denying that Jesus Christ’s blood was sufficient.

That’s denying that his sacrifice was sufficient. And if his sacrifice couldn’t accomplish what needed to happen for us to get to heaven, I don’t know what gives anybody the idea that our effort can. If his effort, if God in human flesh came and made the effort to get us to heaven and it wasn’t enough, I don’t know what makes us think that our effort’s enough.

But any time we step away from the basics of the gospel, any time we step away from the simple truth that we messed up the relationship with God, that we messed it up beyond any attempt we could to repair it, and that Jesus Christ came and did all that was necessary for our sins to be forgiven. That when he shed his blood and when he died and he said, it’s paid in full. He said, it’s finished.

If we teach anything other than that, we’re messing around with the basics of the gospel and we are denying that he bought us with his blood. And you can get a lot of things wrong. I will cut preachers slack on getting a lot of things wrong.

You know what? I know this will shock you. It’s really not me.

I’ve gotten some things wrong in the past. When I get it wrong, I try to come back and correct it. And fortunately, it’s not been anything major. But I’ll cut preacher slack on getting a lot of things wrong.

If you get this wrong, it doesn’t matter what else you get right. If you get the gospel wrong, it doesn’t matter what you do get right. You can teach everything absolutely correctly about what Jesus said, about how we’re supposed to behave, how we’re to live our lives, do unto others, love your neighbor as yourself, but if you get the gospel wrong, all you’re going to do is lead a lot of good moral people into an eternal hell separated from God.

We cannot listen to teachers who deny the basics of the gospel and deny the Lord that bought them. Fourth of all tonight, heretics incur destruction. It says they bring upon themselves swift destruction, whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.

That’s part of verse 1 and part of verse 3. He lets us know that God is not just letting this go on and ignore it. Choices, I say all the time, I say to my children, and they have no idea what I’m talking about yet, but they will remember it one day.

Choices have consequences. And more than that, ideas have consequences. Y’all know by now I’m kind of a history buff, and I’ve been fascinated for years by the Cold War.

Maybe it’s because I was just starting to, some of my earliest memories are from around the 1989, 1990 era when the Berlin Wall was falling and seeing those things on TV and not really understanding what was going on Some estimates say that a hundred million people died in the 20th century as a result of all the wars surrounding that involved communism Communism, oh I hate communism In all its forms because it is a it is a terrible ideology that dehumanizes man tries to dethrone God all the things that you all heard during the Cold War. But you know what? It didn’t start with the barrel of gun.

It didn’t start with mass murder. It started with a man in Germany who had an idea. Ideas have consequences.

Teachings have consequences. And we can look at some of these things that are taught and say, God, how do you let them get by with it? How does this continue to go on?

God, aren’t you ever going to step in and prove that you’re right? and that they’re wrong, as it says in Romans, let God be true and every man a liar. You know what?

If most Christians would just memorize that verse, that would be a good start toward putting everything back to right in this country. Let God be true and every man a liar. I think that’s in Romans.

But you know what? There will come a day when he is going to judge us for every idle word. One of the scariest verses in the Bible to me because I like to talk.

And there’s a lot of idle words that have gone on. But that’s why he tells us, I are not many to be teachers, for ours is the greater condemnation. When somebody stands up and holds themselves out as a teacher of God’s word, there is a tremendous responsibility on their s