Tested and True?

In the past there were false prophets among God’s people. It is the same now. You will have some false teachers in your group. They will teach things that are wrong—ideas that will cause people to be lost. And they will teach in a way that will be hard for you to see that they are wrong. They will even refuse to follow the Master who bought their freedom. And so they will quickly destroy themselves. Many people will follow them in the morally wrong things they do. And because of them, others will say bad things about the way of truth we follow. These false teachers only want your money. So they will use you by telling you things that are not true. But the judgment against these false teachers has been ready for a long time. And they will not escape God who will destroy them. (2 Peter 2:1-3)

We are living in a time when believers are bombarded on all sides by one teaching after another - in media of all forms, in personal contact, and even from our public 'pulpits'. We must know how to evaluate the teaching of those we choose to listen to as wise students of the Word. We must learn to filter out the truth from the lie - God gives us the ability to do so, but so many choose just to 'blindly believe' all they hear and see. Understanding in the spiritual sense is never from a man's own understanding - it has come because God has granted that individual the wisdom to understand. We need God's protection over our lives in order to avoid falling prey to any manner of 'false teaching'.

Ideas that will cause people to be lost - those words really say it all. We would not believe an outright lie, would we? We might believe it if it was 'sandwiched' deep inside some truth from God's Word, though. That is how the false prophet works - he brings the 'untruth' with just enough truth that we imagine it must be true, as well. Eventually, that untruth will take us down paths God says we were to avoid entirely, but we were 'duped' into believing it was okay to travel them anyway. One thing about those who bring false teaching is pretty apparent - they 'use you by telling you things that are not true'. If we were to evaluate their teaching against truth in God's Word, we might find little bits and pieces of 'untruth' has been mixed in - muddying the teaching of God in small ways at first and then in bigger ways later on.

This is why it is so important for us to discover God's Word for ourselves. We must allow it to get into our hearts and spirits so we can recognize any untruth when it is cleverly masked within truth. God also gave us his Holy Spirit who will bear witness to truth but will also give us an uneasy feeling toward any untruth that we may encounter. When that uneasiness comes, we can either reject it and continue to just go along with the false teaching, or we can heed it, rejecting the teaching as unwise, unhealthy, and untrue. The Bereans were commended as those who took every teaching and compared it to the scriptures. They 'tested' the teaching they heard to see if it was true. We'd do well to do the same! Just sayin!