c. Tests
A Christian’s relationships: to false prophets
(Matthew 7:13–20)
A number of commentators suggest that the main body of Jesus’ Sermon (or teaching) is now over, and that with verse 13 the application or conclusion begins. Certainly he emphasizes here even more strongly than before the necessity of choice. Enter by the narrow gate, he begins. That is, the contrast between the two kinds of righteousness and of devotion, the two treasures, the two masters and the two ambitions has been faithfully portrayed; now the time for decision has come. Is it to be the kingdom of Satan or the kingdom of God, the prevailing culture or the Christian counter-culture? Jesus continues with his presentation of the alternative as he describes the two ways (broad and narrow), the two teachers (false and true), the two pleas (words and deeds) and finally the two foundations (sand and rock).
1. The inescapable choice (13, 14)
What is immediately striking about these verses is the absolute nature of the choice before us. We would all prefer to be given many more choices than only one, or better still to fuse them all into a conglomerate religion, thus eliminating the need for any choice. But Jesus cuts across our easy-going syncretism. He will not allow us the comfortable solutions we propose. Instead he insists that ultimately there is only one choice, because there are only two possibilities to choose from.
First, there are two ways. This concept is found already in the Old Testament. Psalm 1, for example, contrasts ‘the way of the righteous’ who delight in God’s law, bear fruit and prosper, with ‘the way of the wicked’ who are driven like chaff before the wind and perish. Now Jesus elaborates the picture. One way is easy. The word means ‘broad, spacious, roomy’ (AG ), and some manuscripts combine these images and call this way ‘wide and easy’. There is plenty of room on it for diversity of opinions and laxity of morals. It is the road of tolerance and permissiveness. It has no curbs, no boundaries of either thought or conduct. Travellers on this road follow their own inclinations, that is, the desires of the human heart in its fallenness. Superficiality, self-love, hypocrisy, mechanical religion, false ambition, censoriousness—these things do not have to be learnt or cultivated. Effort is needed to resist them. No effort is required to practise them. That is why the broad road is easy.
The hard way, on the other hand, is narrow. Its boundaries are clearly marked. Its narrowness is due to something called ‘divine revelation’, which restricts pilgrims to the confines of what God has revealed in Scripture to be true and good. C. S. Lewis described in his autobiography how as a schoolboy of thirteen he began to ‘broaden his mind’. ‘I was soon (in the famous words) altering “I believe” to “one does feel”. And oh, the relief of it!… From the tyrannous noon of revelation I passed into the cool evening twilight of Higher Thought, where there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting or exciting.’
It is a fact that revealed truth imposes a limitation on what Christians may believe, and revealed goodness on how we may behave. And in a sense this is ‘hard’. Yet in another sense, as Chrysostom pointed out centuries ago, Christ’s hard and narrow way is also to be welcomed as his ‘easy yoke’ and ‘light burden’.
Secondly, there are two gates. The gate leading to the easy way is wide, for it is a simple matter to get on to the easy road. There is evidently no limit to the luggage we can take with us. We need leave nothing behind, not even our sins, self-righteousness or pride. The gate leading to the hard way, on the other hand, is narrow. One has to look for it to find it. It is easy to miss. As Jesus said in another connection, it is as narrow as a needle’s eye. Further, in order to enter it we must leave everything behind—sin, selfish ambition, covetousness, even if necessary family and friends. For no-one can follow Christ who has not first denied himself. The entry is also a turnpike gate: it has to be entered one by one. How can we find it? It is Jesus Christ himself. ‘I am the door,’ he said, ‘if any one enters by me, he will be saved.’
Thirdly, there are two destinations. We have already seen this foreshadowed in Psalm 1, where ‘prospering’ and ‘perishing’ are the alternatives. Moses made it clearer still: ‘See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil …, blessing and curse; therefore choose life.’ Similarly, Jesus taught that the easy way, entered by the wide gate, leads to destruction. He did not define what he meant by this, and presumably the precise nature of hell is as much beyond our finite understanding as the precise nature of heaven. But the terrible word ‘destruction’ (terrible because God is properly the Creator, not the Destroyer, and because man was created to live, not to die) seems at least to give us liberty to say that everything good will be destroyed in hell—love and loveliness, beauty and truth, joy, peace and hope—and that for ever. It is a prospect too awful to contemplate without tears. For the broad road is suicide road.
By contrast, the hard way, entered by the narrow gate, leads to life, even to that ‘eternal life’ which Jesus explained in terms of fellowship with God, beginning here but perfected hereafter, in which we see and share his glory, and find perfect fulfilment as human beings in the selfless service of him and of our fellows.
Fourthly, there are two crowds. Entering by the wide gate and travelling along the easy road to destruction are many. The broad and easy road is a busy thoroughfare, thronged by pedestrians of every kind. The narrow and hard way which leads to life, however, seems to be comparatively deserted. Those who find it are few. Jesus seems to have anticipated that his followers would be (or at least would appear to be and feel themselves to be) a despised minority movement. He saw multitudes on the broad road, laughing and carefree with apparently no thought for the dreadful end to which they are heading, while on the narrow road there is just a ‘happy band of pilgrims’, hand in hand, backs turned upon sin and faces set towards the Celestial City, ‘singing songs of expectation, marching to the promised land’.
I do not think we can build on this contrast between the few and the many any speculation that the final number of God’s redeemed will be small. If we compare Scripture with Scripture (as we always must), we shall want to put alongside this teaching of Jesus the vision of John that the redeemed before God’s throne will be ‘a great multitude which no man could number’. How to reconcile these two concepts I do not know. Nor am I clear how this passage relates to the perplexing problem of those who have never heard the gospel. For one word which is common to both crowds, the ‘few’ and the ‘many’, is the verb ‘enter’. It is because the many ‘enter’ by the wide gate that Jesus urges his hearers to ‘enter by the narrow gate’. This implies that neither crowd is ignorant of the issues; each has been presented with a choice and has deliberately ‘entered’ one or other way. The whole picture seems to relate only to those who have had the opportunity of decision for or against Christ; it simply leaves out of view those who have never heard. We shall be wise, therefore, not to preoccupy our minds with such speculative questions, as on another occasion Jesus himself implied. Somebody asked him: ‘Lord, will those who are saved be few?’ But he declined to satisfy their curiosity. Instead he replied: ‘Strive to enter by the narrow door.’
To recapitulate, there are according to Jesus only two ways, hard and easy (there is no middle way), entered by two gates, broad and narrow (there is no other gate), trodden by two crowds, large and small (there is no neutral group), ending in two destinations, destruction and life (there is no third alternative). It is hardly necessary to comment that such talk is extremely unfashionable today. People like to be uncommitted. Every opinion poll allows not only for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, but for a convenient ‘don’t know’. Men are lovers of Aristotle and of his golden mean. The most popular path is the via media. To deviate from the middle way is to risk being dubbed an ‘extremist’ or a ‘fanatic’. Everybody resents being faced with the necessity of a choice. But Jesus will not allow us to escape it.
2. The peril of false teachers (15–20)
a. Assumptions
In telling people to beware of false prophets, Jesus obviously assumed that there were such. There is no sense in putting on your garden gate the notice ‘Beware of the dog’ if all you have at home is a couple of cats and a budgerigar! No. Jesus warned his followers of false prophets because they already existed. We come across them on numerous occasions in the Old Testament, and Jesus seems to have regarded the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the same light. ‘Blind leaders of the blind’, he called them. He also implied that they would increase, and that the period preceding the end would be characterized not only by the worldwide spread of the gospel but also by the rise of false teachers who would lead many astray. We hear of them in nearly every New Testament letter. They are called either ‘pseudo-prophets’ as here (‘prophets’ presumably because they claimed divine inspiration), or ‘pseudo-apostles’ (because they claimed apostolic authority) or ‘pseudo-teachers’ or even ‘pseudo-Christs’ (because they made messianic pretensions or denied that Jesus was the Christ come in the flesh). But each was ‘pseudo’, and pseudos is the Greek word for a lie. The history of the Christian church has been a long and dreary story of controversy with false teachers. Their value, in the overruling providence of God, is that they have presented the church with a challenge to think out and define the truth, but they have caused much damage. I fear there are still many in today’s church.
In telling us to beware of false prophets Jesus made another assumption, namely that there is such a thing as an objective standard of truth from which the falsehood of the false prophets is to be distinguished. The very notion of ‘false’ prophets is meaningless otherwise. In biblical days a true prophet was one who taught the truth by divine inspiration, and a false prophet one who claimed the same divine inspiration but actually propagated untruth. Jeremiah contrasted them in these terms: false prophets ‘speak visions of their own minds’, while true prophets ‘stand in the council of the Lord’, ‘hear his word’, ‘proclaim it to the people’ and ‘speak from the mouth of the Lord’. Again, ‘let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream; but let him who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat?’ So in referring to certain teachers as ‘false prophets’ it is clear that Jesus was no syncretist, teaching that contradictory opinions were in reality complementary insights into the same truth. No. He held that truth and falsehood excluded one another, and that those who propagate lies in God’s name are false prophets, of whom his followers must beware.
b. Warnings
After noting these assumptions of Jesus (that there are false prophets, and that there is a truth from which they deviate) we must now consider his warning more precisely: Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves (15). We learn from this metaphor that pseudo-prophets are both dangerous and deceptive.
Their danger is that in reality they are wolves. Now in first-century Palestine the wolf was the natural enemy of sheep, which were entirely defenceless against it. Hence a good shepherd, as Jesus was to teach later, was always on the look-out for wolves in order to protect his sheep, whereas the hired labourer (who, not being the sheep-owner, did not care about them) would abandon them at the sight of a wolf and run away, leaving it to attack and scatter the flock. Just so Christ’s flock is at the mercy of either good shepherds or paid labourers or wolves. The good pastor feeds the flock with truth, the false teacher like a wolf divides it by error, while the time-serving professional does nothing to protect it but abandons it to false teachers. ‘I know’, said Paul to the Ephesian elders, ‘that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert …’
What are these ‘perverse things’ which are a disturbance and a danger to the church? One of the major characteristics of false prophets in the Old Testament was their amoral optimism, their denial that God was the God of judgment as well as of steadfast love and mercy. They were guilty, Jeremiah said to the people, of ‘filling you with vain hopes … They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, “It shall be well with you”; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart they say, “No evil shall come upon you.” ’ Similarly, God complains: ‘They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.’ Such talk was, to say the least, a grave disservice to the people of God. It gave them a false sense of security. It lulled them to sleep in their sins. It failed to warn them of the impending judgment of God or tell them how to escape it.
It is surely not an accident, therefore, that Jesus’ warning about false prophets in the Sermon on the Mount immediately follows his teaching about the two gates, ways, crowds and destinations. For false prophets are adept at blurring the issue of salvation. Some so muddle or distort the gospel that they make it hard for seekers to find the narrow gate. Others try to make out that the narrow way is in reality much broader than Jesus implied, and that to walk it requires little if any restriction on one’s belief or behaviour. Yet others, perhaps the most pernicious of all, dare to contradict Jesus and to assert that the broad road does not lead to destruction, but that as a matter of fact all roads lead to God, and that even the broad and the narrow roads, although they lead off in opposite directions, ultimately both end in life. No wonder Jesus likened such false teachers to ravenous wolves, not so much because they are greedy for gain, prestige or power (though they often are), but because they are ‘ferocious’ (NIV), that is, extremely dangerous. They are responsible for leading some people to the very destruction which they say does not exist.
They are more than dangerous; they are also deceptive. The ‘dogs’ and the ‘pigs’ of verse 6, because of their dirty habits, are easy to recognize. But not the ‘wolves’, for they sneak into the flock in the disguise of sheep. As a result, the unwary actually mistake them for sheep and give them an unsuspecting welcome. Their true character is not discovered until too late and the damage has been done.
In other words, a false teacher does not announce and advertise himself as a purveyor of lies; on the contrary he claims to be a teacher of the truth. ‘Knowing that Christians are credulous people, he conceals his dark purpose beneath the cloak of Christian piety, hoping that his innocuous disguise will avert detection.’ Not only does he feign piety, but he often uses the language of historic orthodoxy, in order to win acceptance from the gullible, while meaning by it something quite different, something destructive of the very truth he pretends to hold. He also hides behind the cover of high-sounding titles and impressive academic degrees.
So, ‘Beware!’ Jesus warns. We must be on our guard, pray for discernment, use our critical faculties and never relax our vigilance. We must not be dazzled by a person’s outward clothing—his charm, learning, doctorates and ecclesiastical honours. We must not be so naive as to suppose that because he is a PhD or a DD or a professor or a bishop he must be a true and orthodox ambassador of Christ. We must look beneath the appearance to the reality. What lives under the fleece: a sheep or a wolf?
c. Tests
Having noted the assumptions Jesus made and the warnings he gave, we are now ready to look at the test or tests he told us to apply. He changed his metaphor from sheep and wolves to trees and their fruit, from the sheep’s clothing which a wolf may wear to the fruit which a tree must bear. In so doing he moved from the risk of non-recognition to the means of recognition. Although you may indeed sometimes mistake a wolf for a sheep, he seems to say, you cannot make the same mistake with a tree. No tree can hide its identity for long. Sooner or later it betrays itself—by its fruit. A wolf may disguise itself; a tree cannot. Noxious weeds like thorns and thistles simply cannot produce edible fruit like grapes and figs. Not only is the character of the fruit determined by the tree (a fig tree bearing figs and a vine grapes), but its condition too (every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit, 17). Indeed, a sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit (18). And the day of judgment will finalize the difference, as when non-fruitbearing trees are cut down and burnt (19). Therefore (for this is the conclusion which Jesus emphasizes twice) you will know them by their fruits (16, 20). What are these fruits?
The first kind of ‘fruit’ by which false prophets reveal their true identity is in the realm of character and conduct. In Jesus’ own allegory of the vine fruitfulness evidently means Christlikeness, in fact what Paul later termed ‘the fruit of the Spirit’. This being so, whenever we see in a teacher the meekness and gentleness of Christ, his love, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control, we have reason to believe him to be true, not false. On the other hand, whenever these qualities are missing, and ‘the works of the flesh’ are more apparent than ‘the fruit of the Spirit’—especially enmity, impurity, jealousy and self-indulgence—we are justified in suspecting that the prophet is an impostor, however pretentious his claims and specious his teaching.
But a prophet’s ‘fruits’ are not only his character and manner of life. Indeed, interpreters ‘who confine them to the life are, in my opinion, mistaken’ wrote Calvin. A second ‘fruit’ is the man’s actual teaching. This is strongly suggested by the other use Jesus made of the same fruit-tree metaphor: ‘The tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers! how can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil man out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. I tell you, on the day of judgment men will render account for every careless word they utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.’ So then, if a person’s heart is revealed in his words, as a tree is known by its fruit, we have a responsibility to test a teacher by his teaching. The apostle John gives us an example of this, for the Asian churches to which he wrote had been invaded by false teachers. Like Jesus he warned them not to be deceived, but rather to ‘test the spirits (i.e. teachers claiming inspiration) to see whether they are of God’. He encouraged them to look for righteousness and love in their teachers and to reject as spurious both the unrighteous and the unloving. But to these moral tests he added a doctrinal one. In general this was whether the teachers’ message was in accord with the original apostolic instruction, and in particular whether it confessed Jesus as the Christ come in the flesh, thus acknowledging his divine-human person.
The sixteenth-century reformers, who were accused by the Church of Rome of being innovators and false teachers, defended themselves by this doctrinal test. They appealed to Scripture and maintained that their teaching was not the introduction of something new but the recovery of something old, namely the original gospel of Christ and his apostles. It was rather the medieval Catholics who had departed from the faith into error. ‘Cling to the pure Word of God,’ cried Luther, for then you will be able to ‘recognize the judge’ who is right. Calvin made the same emphasis: ‘All doctrines must be brought to the Word of God as the standard,’ for ‘in judging of false prophets the rule of faith (i.e. Scripture) holds the chief place’. He also went a step further than this in drawing attention to the motives of false teachers in addition to the substance of their teaching: ‘Under the fruits the manner of teaching is itself included …, for Christ proves that he was sent by God from this consideration, that “he seeketh not his own glory, but the glory of the Father who sent him” (John 7:18)’.
In examining a teacher’s credentials, then, we have to examine both his character and his message. Bishop Ryle summed it up well: ‘Sound doctrine and holy living are the marks of true prophets.’ Then I think there is a third test which we must apply to teachers, and this concerns their influence. We have to ask ourselves what effect their teaching has on their followers. Sometimes the falsity of false teaching is not immediately apparent when we look at a teacher’s behaviour and system, but becomes apparent only in its disastrous results. This is what Paul meant when he wrote of error’s tendency to ‘eat its way like gangrene’. Its gangrenous progress is seen when it upsets people’s faith, promotes ungodliness and causes bitter divisions. Sound teaching, by contrast, produces faith, love and godliness.
Of course the application of the ‘fruit’ test is not altogether simple or straightforward. For fruit takes time to grow and ripen. We have to wait for it patiently. We also need an opportunity to examine it closely, for it is not always possible to recognize a tree and its fruit from a distance. Indeed, even at close quarters we may at first miss the symptoms of disease in the tree or the presence of a maggot in the fruit. To apply this to a teacher, what is needed is not a superficial estimate of his standing in the church, but a close and critical scrutiny of his character, conduct, message, motives and influence.
This warning of Jesus gives us no encouragement, however, either to become suspicious of everybody or to take up as our hobby the disreputable sport known as ‘heresy-hunting’. Rather it is a solemn reminder that there are false teachers in the church and that we are to be on our guard. Truth matters. For it is God’s truth and it builds up God’s church, whereas error is devilish and destructive. If we care for God’s truth and for God’s church, we must take Christ’s warning seriously. He and his apostles place the responsibility for the church’s doctrinal purity partly upon the shoulders of Christian leaders (whether bishops or other chief pastors), but also and especially upon each congregation. The local church has more power than it often realizes or uses in deciding which teachers it will listen to. Jesus Christ’s ‘Beware of false prophets’ is addressed to us all. If the church had heeded his warning and applied his tests, it would not be in the parlous state of theological and moral confusion in which it finds itself today.
With this paragraph Jesus concludes his delineation of a Christian’s relationships. As we now look back and bring them together, we see how rich and varied they are. As a brother the Christian hates hypocrisy, criticizes himself and seeks to give constructive moral support to others. As an evangelist he prizes the gospel pearl so highly that he refuses to expose it to scornful rejection by hardened sinners. As a lover of all men, he is resolved to behave towards them as he would like them to behave towards him. As a child he looks humbly and trustfully to his heavenly Father to give him all the good gifts he needs. As a traveller on the hard and narrow way, he enjoys fellowship with his fellow pilgrims and keeps his eye on the goal of life. As a champion of God’s revealed truth, he heeds Christ’s warning to be watchful for false teachers who would pervert it and so ravage Christ’s flock.