False Teaching and False Teachers

00:00 - James Spencer (Host) If we were just to sit down and talk about all of the different complexities of life, we wouldn't get very far. We have to have shortcuts, we have to have summaries, we have to have abbreviations, but the goal is, in abbreviating, that we not flatten out the complexity in a way that makes the truth feel easier than it really is. 00:19 - Speaker 2 (None) Welcome to PREPPED, the podcast that equips you to live out God's story, not the world's story. Hosted by James Spencer, PhD, each episode bridges the gap between academic insights and everyday life, preparing you to understand the Word of God and put it into practice. Whether you're diving into biblical studies, looking for ministry guidance or aiming to deepen your faith, PREPPED empowers you to think biblically and theologically in a world that encourages you not to Ready to get PREPPED. Subscribe now and transform the way you bring God's story into the world. 00:54 - James Spencer (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of PREPPED. I'm Dr James Spencer, and today we're going to be talking about false teaching. We're going to be talking about why it's often more subtle, more emotional and even more tempting than we might expect. And in this episode, I really want to help you identify one of the most overlooked dangers in ministry and spiritual formation, and that's the allure of the terribly simple. Now, the terribly simple, terrible simplification, terrible simplifiers. 01:20 These are ideas that I've discussed in Thinking Christian. I have a whole chapter on this in Thinking Christian. It's a concept that I ran across, probably somewhere in the 2018-2019 range, and I've just been thinking about more and more often. Aldous Huxley actually has a great quote about abbreviation, and I'll paraphrase it. He says that abbreviation is a necessary evil and that the role of the abbreviator is to make things simple, but not so simple that they become false. And so this idea that we can boil down a concept, that we can make something too simple, too easy to understand, too clear, so that all the nuance, all the detail, all the contours of a problem, the complexity of it, is sort of pulled out of it and all of a sudden, what is presented is very simple, but it's actually really complex, and so, as we dive into this topic of false teachers and false teachings, I would just say a couple of introductory comments. Number one I would just say a couple of introductory comments. 02:24 Number one I am not here to label people as false teachers. I do think, however, we need to be aware of false teachings. I think false teachers is a really specific category, and that category usually refers to someone who is consistently teaching heresy or teachings that would go against the Orthodox Christian faith. In that sense, I think there are probably false teachers out there, but I'm not really going to be labeling people as false teachers. I think that there's a range of false teaching that can happen and I would say that, as someone who presents the Bible often, who writes, who speaks, who preaches on occasion, it's easy to make mistakes. Now, that is a very low-end form, I would say, of false teaching. 03:22 When we make mistakes in interpreting Scripture, when we make mistakes in presenting scripture, that is, technically, I would say, false teaching, but that doesn't make someone who's made a mistake, who doesn't quite get the biblical text right, a false teacher. False teachers need to exhibit this as a consistent, ongoing willingness to what I would say is wrench the Bible out of its context and force it to serve their own ends. And so it's really about a way of reading scripture and a way of presenting scripture and encouraging other people to follow along with that encouragement encouraging other people to follow along with that. And so I think that one of the things that false teachers often do, and one of the things that false teaching can often do, is that it gives us a false sense of security or certainty. So, as we think about it, what we're looking for oftentimes is just a quick solution to our problems. 04:24 This goes to the terribly simple sort of slant that I'm going to be putting on this. We want a quick solution to our problems. We're living in a complex, fallen world. There are a lot of issues that we're facing, you know. We could look at the economy, for instance, and say, wow, the economy is in a really tough place. I wish there were just one thing that we could do to fix it, but it's probably not going to be just one thing, is it? It's probably going to be a whole conglomeration, a constellation of things that need to be done in order to fix that problem. And so anyone who comes along and says, well, I've got this one thing I'm going to do and that's going to fix the whole deal. They're oversimplifying the complexity of the problem and they're offering a solution that maybe we can resonate with because it seems so simple. We're hoping it'll work. We may not. Even if we really sat down and thought about it, we would sort of recognize in ourselves that we know it's not going to work, it's too simple to work and that the world is too complex for this one thing to change and for the whole economy to get fixed. But that dynamic is the dynamic of oversimplification and it's an aspect of false teaching that I think we'll be diving into today. But I want to start here. 05:42 Let's start with false prophets and false teachers and differentiating them, because they aren't quite the same thing. I do think that they share some dangerous DNA, we could say. But whether we're speaking of false prophets who sort of speak for God or explain God's word, and false teachers who present God's word and who presume to be speaking for God, there's this through line they both serve their own interests while claiming divine authority. So both false prophets and false teachers serve their own interests while claiming divine authority. Peter makes this connection in 2 Peter 2. Just as false prophets and arose in Israel, false teachers will arise in the church. And these teachers, they don't just get details wrong, they prey on the disordered desires of the people within the congregation. They offer clarity, but only because they've stripped away the complexity. They give us confidence, but only because they've stripped away the complexity. They give us confidence, but only because they've narrowed the truth into something bite-sized and really self-serving. 06:53 You know, there's a trend in scripture that talks about the error of Balaam. We see it in Revelation 2, in the letter to the church of Pergamum. It's actually referenced in, I believe, jude and Peter. We see it in the book of Numbers. Particularly Balaam appears in the narrative, numbers 22 to 24. And then there's also references to Balaam in, I believe it's Numbers 31. 07:18 And one of the things that Balaam becomes known for because he really is a prophet for hire is doing prophecy for money, and so he has this sort of selfish motivation that redirects his scruples. So Balaam comes on the scene as a prophet and Balak, who is the leader of Midian, hires him to go curse Israel. And Balaam's like, okay, yeah, that sounds like a great idea, I'll go curse Israel because you've paid me to. And on his way, an angel of the Lord confronts him. His donkey actually talks to him. Balaam realizes that he can't curse Israel because God is blessing Israel. So he has this moment of being almost like a true prophet and comes back to Balak and says listen, I can't do what you've asked me to do because God is telling me that these people are blessed. You know, having received this revelation from God, I don't think that I can in any part of my right mind go out and now curse these people. But, needless to say, balaam develops this sort of reputation for being a prophet for hire. He is a prophet for hire. He's doing prophecy not out of some sort of deep sense of loyalty or calling to the Lord, but because he's being paid to. 08:37 And so that aspect of false prophecy in the Old Testament is actually pretty crucial and does carry through into the New Testament. And there's a qualification or a cautionary tale put on those who would prophesy, or even teach, I think for money or for their own gain, we would say. And so one of the telltale signs of false teachers, I would argue, is that they root us more deeply in sort of a their own agendas. In other words, they're doing this to enhance themselves in some way, shape or form. I am not suggesting that pastors shouldn't get paid. I'm not suggesting that teachers shouldn't get paid. It's not about the money, it's about the ambition, the agenda. The agenda, the enhancement and advancement of a false teacher's agenda that is not aligned with what God's agenda actually is. 09:45 So false teachers end up rooting us more deeply in cultural ideologies, in personal autonomy, in things that would make us less dependent on God as opposed to being dependent on him, and so, rather than pushing us toward an unqualified allegiance to Christ, what they do is they teach us to be less loyal to Jesus. They teach us to do things and to follow things that are actually more convenient for us than obedience, and so they do that. And it's not always that they do that by line. Sometimes they do. There are ample passages in scripture where a prophet lies. They just out and out lie. 10:36 But oftentimes it's really more of a misdirection, almost like a sleight of hand, a half-truth. It's a simplification that's so confident that we forget how nuanced scripture actually is. It's a way of distracting us from paying attention to God and redirecting us to pay attention to our own needs and our own desires and our own wants. And so we have this sort of subtle shift where now, all of a sudden, we're justified in ignoring God because a false teacher has given us the warrant to shift our eyes from paying attention to God and looking over here and paying attention to our own needs, our own interests, our own agendas. If you listen to the podcast on reorienting attention, you'll get a little bit more of a flavor of what I'm talking about here with attention. 11:30 But essentially what I would argue is that true teaching and true teachers, teachers who are aligned with the scriptures, teachers who are actually functioning under the word of God as the final authority for life and faith. They're getting us to look directly at God, they're getting us to pay attention to God. They're getting us to reorient our lives so that we are truing ourselves to the biblical text, we're truing ourselves to reality, particularly the reality of the triune God. And so as we align ourselves and as that true teaching comes into us, we begin to see our problems, we begin to think about our ambitions, we begin to consider our agendas and we allow God's word to shape those things. 12:18 And so it's the difference between let's say there are different ways that we could achieve any given goal. Let's say I want to be the. You know, I want to have the biggest podcast on the planet. Right, there are a number of ways that I could go about that. But what we would say in scripture is we would say, well, but the goal here having the largest podcast on the planet it can only be faithfully achieved if it's done in a particular way. And that desire right, that goal of having the biggest podcast on the planet may or may not be appropriate, but what we can be sure is appropriate is that we go about this in a way that honors God at every step, that is faithful to the biblical text, that does not take advantage of others or engage in manipulations as we move toward building the size of this podcast. Like, there are certain things that are going to take the edge off how that goal could be achieved, and this is what false teaching sort of takes out of our way. False teaching says well, no, if you get the biggest podcast on the planet, think of the influence you'll have, think about the people you can impact, and so it doesn't really matter how you get there, it just matters that you get there. And I would just argue that that's a form of false teaching, that this idea that the means right can be justified by the end, because in Christianity what we often find is that the means and the ends are equally important. So, overall, what we're looking at with false teaching and, I think, false prophecy we're often looking at sort of this idea that something seems really, really true but it's become so simplified and so detached from other truths that we need to take into account that it actually becomes false. 14:24 I'll give you this example. I've written about this. I think I used this example in Circus and Doves, but it's just a really interesting example I keep coming back to when I was I don't know this is some years ago I was, my wife is working in a hospital as a director of pharmacy and I happened to be there having lunch with her at the hospital, in the hospital cafeteria, and she mentioned to me that she found out that one of my college buddies who became an MD, a doctor, was working in a hospital about an hour away from us. Well, if you know hospitals, you know they're not going to. Just if I call and say, hey, I would like to talk to my college buddy, they're really not going to connect me to his service. They're not going to let me, you know, just direct. You know, give me a direct line to this doctor, because they're busy and so they tend to protect them. 15:10 So I decided that what I would do is I would say okay, well, let's try this out. So I called the hospital and I said hi, this is Dr Spencer, I had my PhD at the time, so not a lie. Right, I was Dr Spencer. So I called, I said hi, I'm Dr Spencer, I'm calling from, and I named the hospital that I was calling from. Also, not a lie. I was eating in the cafeteria at the time. I was actually physically at that hospital, and then I said I have a question for this particular doctor, which I did. I was hoping that we could connect for lunch or something like that. Everything I just said was true. All those pieces were true. I was a doctor, I had my PhD at the time. I was calling from the particular hospital that I mentioned because I was eating in the cafeteria and I did have a question for this particular doctor, and it just didn't have anything to do about medicine. 16:06 And so this is sort of how false teaching and false prophecy works. You can leverage these truths together. You can put them together in such a way that they are deceptive, that they're aimed at accomplishing a particular goal, and so in that instance this story doesn't reflect well on me. It was a deceptive way for me to get what I wanted, and I can't really lean back and say well, I told the truth, I didn't lie, so there was nothing wrong there. Of course there was something wrong there. I wasn't doing what I was doing honestly, even though I was telling the truth. 16:42 And I think these are the wrinkles that we need to get into as we think about false prophecy and false teaching. So let's dive into terrible simplicity just a little bit more. So terrible simplicity doesn't avoid being concise. It's fine to be concise. As Aldous Huxley's quote noted, abbreviation is a necessary evil. If we were just to sit down and talk about all of the different complexities of life, we wouldn't get very far. We have to have shortcuts, we have to have summaries, we have to have abbreviations, but the goal is, in abbreviating, that we not flatten out the complexity in a way that makes the truth feel easier than it really is. 17:35 Panel that I was serving on on Christian nationalism, and one speaker had sort of boldly proclaimed that Christian nationalism is just a term invented by the liberal media to scare Christians out of political participation. And then he went on to say that he'd be proud to be called a Christian nationalist and the room sort of erupted in applause and I was sitting there thinking that's terribly simple, because Christian nationalism isn't just a term embedded by the liberal media. Now, I would admit that when we think about Christian nationalism, there is something about it that the liberal media was trying to use as sort of a scare tactic or to sort of obscure this perspective, to demonize this perspective. That's absolutely, I think, there. But the reality is that much of Christian nationalism also has deep theological problems. They misconstrue the distinction between church and state that scripture itself teaches, and so to suggest that it's just a term, that it's simply a term invented by the liberal media, is an oversimplification that allows the people in the audience to sort of reinforce an identity as a Christian nationalist. That's not a good thing, and so it's fine to say that, yes, the liberal media is using it this way, but we also need to talk about what does the Bible teach us about our relationship as people of God, as the church, what's our relationship to the state. That's not going to take that much longer. Obviously it could. It's a very deep and, you know, developed topic, but I guess my point here is is that we have to be careful not to so simplify things that we are essentially promoting a lie. We're essentially promoting falsehood. 19:32 I think Job's friends are actually a great example of this in scripture. Job's friends come to Job and they look at the, the suffering that Job is going through, and they tell Job that you know, hey, the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. So that's kind of it. I think we have this idea. We know exactly what's going on here. Job, you just need to repent. Just repent, because this is the way the world works the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. You're suffering, ergo you're wicked, so repent. It's very simple, it's very tidy and it's very wrong. 20:11 And as one commentator notes, john Hartley, who's written on Job, he says that if Job had followed their advice, he would have turned repentance into a strategy for blessing. And that's not righteousness, that's manipulation. And so the friends, by boiling this down and not appreciating the complexity of all that God does and all the ways that God works, they end up taking something that is generally true and we see this in scripture that the righteous will prosper and the wicked will suffer, but we don't see that as a every time the righteous will prosper and every time the wicked will suffer, not in every single concrete instance. What we see is that these are gesturing toward a time when God will bring full justice about, and so in this very particular moment, with Job, they're oversimplifying the way the world works, and so that's just another biblical example of how this oversimplifying the way the world works, and so that's just another biblical example of how this oversimplification can come in. 21:13 Now there's also a sense in which false teaching relates to what I'll call ear scratching. It's drawn from a passage in Timothy where Paul talks about the itching ears of the people, and so false teachers tend to scratch ears. They do something that we could refer to as attention grabbing. False teaching doesn't always come in the form of slogans or soundbites. Sometimes it's really about grabbing our attention and reorienting our focus away from God, and so I think you know John Verbeke, who's a cognitive psychologist and philosopher. He talks about the appeal to whatever provokes something in us. It's this desire, a fear, a nostalgia, but it's not really the truth itself. So there are some people and I would say false teachers can come in this sort of flavor that they're not really committed to the truth. They're not really opposed to the truth. What they're committed to is the reaction right. They're committed to their own purpose and project, and so they just want us to react favorably to that purpose and project. They need us to do what they want us to do, and if they have to tell the truth to do that, great. If they don't, they won't. And so that's what I see Paul warning Timothy about in 2 Timothy 4. People are going to gather teachers who tell them what they want to hear, and it's not hard to see this play out today. 22:43 Again, if I go back to that conference on Christian nationalism, there was a speaker on the panel who quoted 2 Corinthians 3.17,. You know where the spirit of the Lord is? There's freedom, and it was used to argue for political liberty, and that was something that resonated with the crowd. Now, I'm not opposed to political liberty right, I kind of like political liberty. But the reality is that that verse isn't about civic freedom. It's about the Spirit's work of transformation under the new covenant. It's about boldness in Christ, not ballots in November. 23:15 And so I think, overall, what you see there is that the scripture is being pressed into service of a broader ideology is okay, that it's a good ideology, that it's not something that's evil or particularly pernicious. And yet what I would just point out is that when we press scripture into the service of anything, when the Bible is no longer the final authority for life and fate, but it answers to a structure that we're putting it within, it answers to a notion of America, a way of governance, anything like that, we are doing something wrong. That is a false teaching, and so I don't know that that sort of quippy use of scripture is actually helpful. It misreads what the Bible is saying. And if we think about it from this perspective number one, you know that is putting the Bible underneath another ideology. That's one. But if you think about it the other way, if this scripture isn't saying what someone presents it as saying, we're not only losing out, we're not only following something false. We're not only losing out, we're not only following something false, we're also losing out on something true. In other words, by using the scripture wrongly, we're getting a wrong interpretation of it, but we're also missing the right interpretation of it. And so just another example of how we use the scriptures to reinforce the catchiness, to scratch the ears of our audience rather than really pushing them and transforming them into something different. 24:56 Now, do I think that person was malicious? Probably not, but it was still a misapplication of scripture. It's still a false teaching of a sort, and again, I'm not calling him a false teacher. What I'm saying is that's a false teaching of a sort. It's an example of the way that the Bible can be used to mislead, and I think that kind of thing can scratch the itch of our political desires while dulling our theological sensitivities. So, with all that said, how do we really prepare ourselves? How do we recognize and resist this kind of teaching? 25:32 I'll offer a few sort of discipleship level takeaways. Number one I think we have to pay attention to theological complexity. If a teacher is giving you easy answers to hard problems, it should be a red flag that not everything in scripture is simple. Sometimes truth really does require tension, and I think overall when we look at the Bible, especially if we look at something like the book of Revelation I've been teaching through the book of Revelation on Wednesdays and so it's kind of fresh in my mind. But if you look at the way that works, you know God is acknowledging that people are going to suffer for obedience. He's not apologizing for that. He's encouraging them to continue suffering for obedience, because that is the way that we come to victory. False teaching almost flips that on its head. It promises comfort, it gives us security, it gives us an overconfidence in this life, and that's what it often does. And I think that when we see that coming, when we see this sort of simple way to make our lives better, to make our lives more comfortable, make our lives more convenient, we should approach that with a level of skepticism, recognizing that we do serve a savior who was crucified. 26:44 I think the second thing we need to evaluate teaching by its posture. So are those teaching us standing under God's authority? Are they seeking to stand under God's authority or are they asserting their own? Again, I want to make that distinction between making a mistake and consistently deciding that my way is the right way and I'm going to use God's word. I'm going to borrow from God's authority to enhance my own. 27:12 Paul really does warn against those who want to be teachers but lack understanding, and I think we need to take that warning to heart. We need to recognize that there are teachers who lack understanding and we need to be careful about who we end up listening to and when we end up listening to them. Third, I think we need to sit under selfless, scripture-soaked teaching, the kind that reproves, rebukes, exhorts with patience, the kind that doesn't appear to have any upside for the person who's preaching it, the kind that sort of draws from the depth of doctrine rather than skimming the surface, like let's sit under people who are really dedicated to understanding and who labor under the word of God in a deep, deep way. And then I think finally and this is something I usually suggest I think we need to ask better questions. We need to ask theological questions Instead of does this make me feel comfortable or confident Ask, does this make me more Christ-like? 28:23 You know, does this inspire? Does this align with what it means to be loyal to the Lord in this life? Does this redirect my attention to the triune God? Does it help me to give over all I am and have to him, or is it helping me to keep a part of me away from him? That's mine? So my loyalty now to God is qualified as opposed to unqualified. Finally, I'd just say don't assume that someone's influence means that they're primarily they're you know they're spiritually sound. 28:54 Some of the most dangerous teachers are the ones who look successful but teach from a place of performance rather than submission. Now I'll close with this Philip Towner. He's a New Testament scholar. He says doctrinal subtleties, spurious claims to authority, controversy and dogmatism are timeless markers of false teaching. These aren't just theological glitches, they're discipleship threats. So if we want to be PREPPED really PREPPED for ministry, for leadership, for faithful living, we need to develop our doctrinal discernment, the living we need to develop our doctrinal discernment. We need to recognize how our ears itch, what our hearts want to hear and how easily we can be persuaded by the terribly simple or the spiritually shallow. We need to know the truth well enough to spot the imitation. Hey, thanks for listening to Prep Today. If you found this helpful, I'd love it if you'd share the episode and leave a review. If you wanna go deeper, check out the show notes for more resources and, as always, you can check out our website, usefultogod.com. Take care, everybody, we'll see you on the next episode of PREPPED. 30:02 - Speaker 2 (None) Thanks for tuning into PREPPED. 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