It is important to recognize that most Christians in our churches today are subject to a wild array of confusing, contradictory, and often indistinguishable voices about what Christians believe and how Christians should live. This is complicated by clergy’s inability to stay current with the discourse on Christian topics given the proliferation of media, theological publications, and online sources. There’s just too much and it all comes too fast.
This was already the case well before the rise of social media, but in the era of popular Christian book publishing, a pastor could at least read the latest author whose work was tearing through a congregation. Now with the emergence of podcasts, YouTube channels, TikTok reels, and the commensurate decline in reading, it is much more difficult to travel with people in our congregations as they journey through the wilderness of Christian, would-be Christian, and pseudo-Christian teaching.
The multiplication of leading voices—ranging between deceitful and truthful—has long been a feature of the religious landscape. Though it may not always be very helpful to assess what someone has to say about the gospel according to its potential divine or demonic origins, at least on some level, the discernment of the truth, or spirits (1 John 4), will eventually return to these foundations, to Scripture itself. Though many will try their hand at explaining or dispersing the confusion of any given moment in history, Scripture is clear that not all voices can be trusted, and for a variety of reasons.
False teachers and prophets are major characters in the Bible and belong among the polarized figures that continue to shape the Church: good and evil, light and darkness, Zion and Babylon, angels and demons, heaven and hell, holiness and sinfulness, and the list goes on. Scripture describes these figures with clarity and distinction from their opposites, even if we have challenges distinguishing one from another and our perceptions are left cloudy.
In the case of false teachers and prophets, at least in certain cases, God allows them to flourish and create confusion among his people: “You shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deut. 13:3).
The presentation of false information about God’s purposes creates a situation in which people have to discern what is good and true. This is a not a skill-testing question devised for the clever, but a moral and spiritual test devised for people who are torn between the comforts and delusions of false teaching and the uncertainty and demands of God’s truth.
Throughout Scripture, false prophets play only a part in misleading God’s people. As Jeremiah says: “The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction; my people love to have it so” (Jer. 5:30-31). There is a confluence of interests between the false prophet and the people, a mutual serving of “their own appetites” (Rom. 16:18), which is beneficial to both sides. False prophets are described in Scripture as those who seek to deceive, pry away, or divide the faithful, but also as those who satisfy those who have “itching ears” and who “will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (1 Tim. 4:3).
The clarity between true and false prophets is often divinely given over a period of time. The proverb Ezekiel refers to this reality: “The days go by and every vision comes to nothing” (Eze. 12:22). This hangs over every purported prophet, until the Lord himself intervenes. One thinks of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, or Jeremiah as he awaited the destruction of Jerusalem.
False prophets operated in the murky periods of waiting and benefitted from the widespread skepticism referred to in the proverb. They were defenders of the moment and they sought to shield God’s people from the threatening and urgent calls for repentance that issued from the Lord’s genuine representatives.
The general state of contested confusion that typifies the life of God’s people in Scripture seems to accelerate in certain New Testament texts that look toward the future. Jesus predicted that “false christs and false prophets will arise and perform signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect” (Mark 13:22). Paul talked about the “mystery of lawlessness” already at work in the world, but building toward a climax so that it might finally be destroyed (2 Thess. 2:8).
The antichrist-like figure is in some ways an accumulation of all the traits godless people treasure most—self-aggrandizement and exalting self in the place of God. This “powerful delusion” (1 Thess. 2:11) is divinely styled to attract the eyes of the proud, the vain, and the ambitious. The antichrist or false christ is a fitting continuation of the false prophet throughout Scripture, but also a frightening expansion and intensifying of the figure, like every false prophet gathered into one apocalyptic beguiler.
It is not obvious what to do with these scriptural realities in today’s world. “Antichrists” and “false teachers” are not concepts that find a ready home in ecumenical discussions or within the precincts of ecclesiology. In a divided church, these categories have been overdrawn and too quickly reached for amid conflict.
Paul, on occasion, seems to have overlooked the bad spirits of those who preached Christ out of “rivalry,” “envy,” or “selfish ambition,” so long as Christ was preached (Phil. 1:15-17). Even so, the threshold between acceptable bad preaching and officially false teaching is not always clear in Paul’s writings, as it seldom is in our churches today.
But the suspension of judgment on account of today’s division of churches, or our general mystification about how we might apply or understand the scriptural figure of the false prophet, does not mean we should deny its presence or power. The truth of God’s purposes is given in the course of time, amid the clamor of competing voices and the drama of good and evil. It is the role, Paul says, of “apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers” for “building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:11-13).
Maturity is characterized by not being “tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine,” but by “speaking the truth in love” and “growing up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:14-15). In this way, the calling of Christian leaders and people remains clear even if the moments in which we live are perplexing and hard to discern. Christians are called to “hold fast” (Heb. 10:23), to “guard the treasure” (2 Tim. 1:14), to “remain” in Christ (John 15:4) and to be careful of the weaknesses within us that would have us creep or lurch in one direction or another.
“The spirit of the antichrist … is in the world already” (1 John 4:3), even as love is being perfected in us by Christ, “because as he is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). To be as him in this world is the surest route. As we search for him through the dwindling twilight of this age, we continuously pray: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Ps. 119:105).
The Rev. Dr. Dane Neufeld is the incumbent of St. James, Calgary.
