Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on Ezekiel 13-14 in this sermon from the Gospel Coalition Library
“The word of the Lord came to me: ‘Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel who are now prophesying. Say to those who prophesy out of their own imagination: “Hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing! Your prophets, O Israel, are like jackals among ruins. You have not gone up to the breaks in the wall to repair it for the house of Israel so that it will stand firm in the battle on the day of the Lord.
Their visions are false and their divinations a lie. They say, ‘The Lord declares,’ when the Lord has not sent them; yet they expect their words to be fulfilled. Have you not seen false visions and uttered lying divinations when you say, ‘The Lord declares,’ though I have not spoken?
Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Because of your false words and lying visions, I am against you, declares the Sovereign Lord. My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations. They will not belong to the council of my people or be listed in the records of the house of Israel, nor will they enter the land of Israel. Then you will know that I am the Sovereign Lord.
Because they lead my people astray, saying, ‘Peace,’ when there is no peace, and because, when a flimsy wall is built, they cover it with whitewash, therefore tell those who cover it with whitewash that it is going to fall. Rain will come in torrents, and I will send hailstones hurtling down, and violent winds will burst forth. When the wall collapses, will people not ask you, ‘Where is the whitewash you covered it with?’
Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: In my wrath I will unleash a violent wind, and in my anger hailstones and torrents of rain will fall with destructive fury. I will tear down the wall you have covered with whitewash and will level it to the ground so that its foundation will be laid bare. When it falls, you will be destroyed in it; and you will know that I am the Lord.
So I will spend my wrath against the wall and against those who covered it with whitewash. I will say to you, ‘The wall is gone and so are those who whitewashed it, those prophets of Israel who prophesied to Jerusalem and saw visions of peace for her when there was no peace, declares the Sovereign Lord.’ ”
Now, son of man, set your face against the daughters of your people who prophesy out of their own imagination. Prophesy against them and say, “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to the women who sew magic charms on all their wrists and make veils of various lengths for their heads in order to ensnare people.
Will you ensnare the lives of my people but preserve your own? You have profaned me among my people for a few handfuls of barley and scraps of bread. By lying to my people, who listen to lies, you have killed those who should not have died and have spared those who should not live.
Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am against your magic charms with which you ensnare people like birds and I will tear them from your arms; I will set free the people that you ensnare like birds. I will tear off your veils and save my people from your hands, and they will no longer fall prey to your power. Then you will know that I am the Lord.
Because you disheartened the righteous with your lies, when I had brought them no grief, and because you encouraged the wicked not to turn from their evil ways and so save their lives, therefore you will no longer see false visions or practice divination. I will save my people from your hands. And then you will know that I am the Lord.” ’
Some of the elders of Israel came to me and sat down in front of me. Then the word of the Lord came to me: ‘Son of man, these men have set up idols in their hearts and put wicked stumbling blocks before their faces. Should I let them inquire of me at all? Therefore speak to them and tell them, “This is what the Sovereign Lord says:
When any Israelite sets up idols in his heart and puts a wicked stumbling block before his face and then goes to a prophet, I the Lord will answer him myself in keeping with his great idolatry. I will do this to recapture the hearts of the people of Israel, who have all deserted me for their idols.”
Therefore say to the house of Israel, “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Repent! Turn from your idols and renounce all your detestable practices! When any Israelite or any alien living in Israel separates himself from me and sets up idols in his heart and puts a wicked stumbling block before his face and then goes to a prophet to inquire of me, I the Lord will answer him myself. I will set my face against that man and make him an example and a byword. I will cut him off from my people. Then you will know that I am the Lord.
And if the prophet is enticed to utter a prophecy, I the Lord have enticed that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand against him and destroy him from among my people Israel. They will bear their guilt—the prophet will be as guilty as the one who consults him. Then the people of Israel will no longer stray from me, nor will they defile themselves anymore with all their sins. They will be my people, and I will be their God, declares the Sovereign Lord.” ’
The word of the Lord came to me: ‘Son of man, if a country sins against me by being unfaithful and I stretch out my hand against it to cut off its food supply and send famine upon it and kill its men and their animals, even if these three men—Noah, Daniel and Job—were in it, they could save only themselves by their righteousness, declares the Sovereign Lord.
Or if I send wild beasts through that country and they leave it childless and it becomes desolate so that no one can pass through it because of the beasts, as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, even if these three men were in it, they could not save their own sons or daughters. They alone would be saved, but the land would be desolate.
Or if I bring a sword against that country and say, “Let the sword pass throughout the land,” and I kill its men and their animals, as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, even if these three men were in it, they could not save their own sons or daughters. They alone would be saved.
Or if I send a plague into that land and pour out my wrath upon it through bloodshed, killing its men and their animals, as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, even if Noah, Daniel and Job were in it, they could save neither son nor daughter. They would save only themselves by their righteousness.
For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: How much worse will it be when I send against Jerusalem my four dreadful judgments—sword and famine and wild beasts and plague—to kill its men and their animals! Yet there will be some survivors—sons and daughters who will be brought out of it.
They will come to you, and when you see their conduct and their actions, you will be consoled regarding the disaster I have brought upon Jerusalem—every disaster I have brought upon it. You will be consoled when you see their conduct and their actions, for you will know that I have done nothing in it without cause, declares the Sovereign Lord.’ ”
This is the Word of the Lord.
The first thing you do when you start to watch a football game on TV, when you’ve just switched it on, is to figure out whether your team is in the white shirts or the red shirts (or whatever the color is). This doesn’t mean that your team always plays well, but at least you can identify who is on which side.
It’s a bit like the cowboy movies of the 1950s and early 60s. The good guys normally wore white hats; everybody else wore hats of different colors. This doesn’t mean that the good guys were always wise or fast or pure. It surely means nothing more than you can discern who is on the winning side. It was a kind of public marker to let you know.
Then the style of even Westerns changed, and now we delight in moral ambiguity. Everybody’s hat is a shade of gray, as a matter of principle. In some ways, in the real world, it’s a bit more like that, isn’t it? Quite apart from the fact that good and evil may be severely mixed in one individual … a David, perhaps … how do we find out which people really are on God’s side?
In any generation, there are various people speaking “in the name of God” or “in the name of Christ,” but how do you distinguish if they’re not conveniently wearing white hats or red shirts, conveniently labeled tee shirts that say, “I’m on the good guy’s side,” or something. Do you simply go with the people with whom you are most comfortable and criticize the rest?
I was brought up in a pretty conservative home. I was brought up with the King James Version. That was part of the generation in which I was reared, of course. Everybody learned the King James Version. I was brought up in French and English. On the English side, we learned the King James Version; on the French side, we learned Louis Segond. Today, there are still some people who think it is only appropriate to read the King James Bible. If that’s what you were brought up in, I can understand how that can resonate in your life.
How did you learn to pray? Well, if you were converted at your InterVarsity chapter and you’d never prayed before in your life, then the way you learned to pray was by hearing certain other students pray and beginning to imitate them. So your first prayer in public, while you were sweating buckets, sounded something like, “Jesus, we just want to thank you for being here. Amen.”
If, on the other hand, you were brought up in the kind of home that I was brought up in, the first time you prayed in public … at one of these interminable prayer meetings where everybody prayed in Elizabethan English … even at the age of 5 or 6, you inevitably sounded like this, “We beseech thee, almighty God, that in thine infinite mercies thou which wouldst thou saith to us thy grace through the merits of thy dear Son our Savior Jesus Christ.” Inevitably, that’s what you sounded like.
That doesn’t mean that one is necessarily holier than the other. It does mean that we come from certain kind of cultural, social, and religious backgrounds, and we have certain kinds of things that we’re comfortable with and other things seem slightly creepy to us. So do we just go with the people that we’re comfortable with? Is that our principle of discernment?
More clearly yet, how do you discern who is a prophet, whether prophet in some fairly narrow sense or someone who exercises what might be called prophetic ministry? So many people, after all, within the Christian tradition and even within the evangelical tradition, claim, in one fashion or another, to speak for God (I’ll give you some examples before this evening is out) and none of them wears an appropriately colored hat.
I have a friend at Trinity who thinks that it would be appropriate to develop what he calls scratch and sniff theology. He proposes that in every book of theology, you develop some chemicals in the margins of the book, and when you don’t know whether an opinion in the text is good or bad or indifferent, then you scratch the margin and sniff.
If it’s outright heresy, then out comes hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs. If it’s a wonderful christological passage, then you scratch and out comes the smell of lilies (you know, he’s the Lily of the Valley or something). If this is an astringent passage that is supposed to rebuke you for your sin, then you scratch and it smells like bleach; hydrogen chloride comes out.
That’s scratch and sniff theology. The difficulty is that somebody has to be responsible for putting the chemicals in the margins. Where, then, are the markers for us, to help us distinguish between those genuine prophetic voices and voices that are dangerous? There are really two sides of the problem, of course.
1. Discernment among the people of God.
On the one side, there’s the question of discernment among the people of God. This matter has become all the more urgent in recent years, owing to the widespread confluence of several trends.
It is now widely taught in evangelical circles that if you are sincere, God won’t let you be deceived. Let me tell you in the most emphatic terms: that is rubbish. I want to ask the people who teach that whether they ever read their New Testaments. About a third of the New Testament is directed to undeceiving people who are no less sincere that we.
You read Galatians, and it’s designed to undeceive the people of Galatia. You read 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and it’s designed to undeceive the Thessalonians with respect to quite a different error. You read 1, 2, and 3 John, and there they’re trying to be undeceived about yet something else. In fact, Jesus himself warns us, again and again, that deceivers will come.
When the apostle Paul gives his farewell address to the elders at Ephesus, he says, “Understand this: from your own midst people will come like ravening wolves, and they will deceive people.” Jesus says, Paul says, others write and say, “The Devil himself goes about deceiving, if it were possible, the very elect.” So the whole of the New Testament has this overtone of warning people that it is very possible to be deceived, and this is what you need to know to be undeceived.
It’s not just a question, therefore, of sincerity. Provided you’re sincere but as ignorant as a stone, then God won’t let you be deceived. Give me a break! When God himself has warned you that there will be many deceivers, then you ought to take his warning seriously and work hard at this business. That’s one influence.
There is an increasing postmodern reliance on personal, experiential estimates of what is good. What is good is good for us. What is good is what feels good. What is good is it has done me good. What is good is I think it’s good. Of course, what I think can be so much shaped by the flow of history or my culture or my experiences that, at the end of the day, I might be kidding myself. What we do is unwittingly step back from the norms of what God says is good.
On top of all of that, there is, I think, in the West, rising biblical illiteracy in the church. As a result, we know less of what the Bible says and have less of a standard by which to judge things. Then we are always in far more danger. We’ve picked up a few scraps of biblical knowledge somewhere, but we don’t have the big picture. We don’t have the sweep of history. We don’t have God’s word so hidden in our hearts that we have a kind of instinct about such things when they show up.
It wasn’t more than a generation ago that the overwhelming majority of Christian families had family devotions and personal devotions. It was just part of what was expected of Christians. I tell you, frankly, that in the vast majority of evangelical churches now, that kind of discipline is rare. Many is the Christian who has never read the Bible right through, let alone read it through regularly.
“Your Word have I hidden in my heart that I might not sin against God.” Nowadays, it’s more like, “Your Word have I hidden in my hard disc that I can access it quickly with a nice search program.” Let me tell you that that doesn’t do anything, by itself, toward making you holy
2. The responsibility of the would-be prophets and prophetic voices themselves.
So, on the one hand, there is the question of discernment among the people of God. On the other hand, and this applies especially to you folks … You folks are more serious. You folks, I take it, are reading your Bible, or you wouldn’t be here. You folks expect to be leaders in the church. You folks are not only going to be asked to discern about other leaders, but you’re going to be these leaders.
That brings about the other side of this question: the responsibility of the would-be prophets and prophetic voices themselves. Let us grant, then, that we’re not going to sort out such matters on the basis of different hats. Are there some principles that will help us? Yes, most certainly. If we had time, we would find many passages in Scripture that would help us.
In these two chapters, there are five principles of extraordinary importance. They pertain, of course, in the first instance, to the situation in which Ezekiel finds himself, but if we think them through carefully, they apply to our day in telling ways.
A. What is spoken by the genuine prophet comes from God; what is spoken by the false prophet is nothing but fertile imagination.
Of course, we still haven’t sorted out how you can tell the difference, but we’ll get there. Nevertheless, let this distinction be made right at the beginning. It is the point of chapter 13, verses 1 to 9. Here, quite blatantly, Ezekiel is called upon to denounce other prophets. To put it in contemporary terms, he’s a clergyman called upon to denounce other clergymen. How would you like that job?
The denunciation is grounded not in any heresy (not immediately) or any immorality, but in the way that they generate their prophecies. Verses 2b and 3: “Say to those who prophesy out of their own imagination: ‘Hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing!’ ” In other words, they claim to have seen some vision, but they haven’t really seen anything at all.
Or verses 6 and 7: “Their visions are false and their divinations a lie. They say, ‘The Lord declares,’ when the Lord has not sent them; yet they expect their words to be fulfilled. Have you not seen false visions and uttered lying divinations when you say, ‘The Lord declares,’ though I have not spoken?”
The genuine prophet had such a real encounter with God that it could not easily be confused with a merely fertile imagination. The prophecy from God was not simply from the human mind or heart or imagination. I’m not for a moment suggesting that in prophecy that God has given, there is no human thought or skill involved.
It does mean that this is not something merely subjective, simply worked up like the priests of Baal on Carmel, crying to their god and working themselves up into a frenzy, an ecstatic fury. No, this is something more objective. It is more powerful. It is more compelling. It results in an Amos saying, “The Lord has spoken—who can but prophesy?”
This is especially aimed at prophets and would-be prophets. We have not aimed the text at discerning which is which. This is now aimed at the prophets themselves who are claiming things that are not rightly theirs. Let us acknowledge that genuine and well-intentioned mistakes sometimes happen.
One of my great heroes of the faith is George Whitefield, perhaps the most effective evangelist in the history of the Western church. He crossed the Atlantic 13 times to preach the gospel. He had the kind of voice that, believe it or not, could preach to 50,000 people in the open air without at PA system and be heard (of course, he had a sounding box behind him, and he liked to do it in valleys and downwind). Fifty thousand people was not a ministerial estimate. That estimate came from Benjamin Franklin, who was no evangelical.
Benjamin Franklin was a friend of Whitefield’s, and at one of the big meetings, he sort of went around the outside of the crowd, to the outmost limits at which he could still hear George Whitefield. Then he calculated the square yards in this patch of ground, wandered through to figure out, on average, how many people per square yard, and he figured that 50,000 people could hear George Whitefield.
George Whitefield was a mighty man of God, and he saw countless tens of thousands converted in days before there were videotapes, books, or things like that that were easily circulated. But George Whitefield had a slightly peculiar marriage, partly because he was away so often. He sired one son, and the son fell ill. George Whitefield felt he had a word from God to the effect that God would spare his son, and he told everybody about it. The son died. George Whitefield went into a six-month tailspin because of that.
Even with genuinely good people, mistakes happen … let me be quite frank … yet the language that God uses to denounce the false prophets is striking. Look again at verses 2b and 3: “Say to those who prophesy out of their own imagination: ‘Hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing!’ ”
To proclaim words and messages as if they were from God, when they are not, is a terrible thing. Not to communicate true words from God is also a terrible thing. With these people (verses 4 and 5), they’re doing no good. They’re digging their own holes in the rivers, but they’re not building foundations that last.
Verse 3: “Woe to the foolish prophets …” The word for foolish here means more than stupidity. In the Bible, it’s associated with atheism in Psalm 14. It’s associated with blasphemy in Psalm 74. It’s associated with gross immorality in 2 Samuel 13. It’s associated with being churlish and arrogant in 1 Samuel 25. It doesn’t just mean intellectually stupid. It means so would-be independent that they’re defying God himself.
In verses 8 and 9, these prophets will face severe judgment, indeed, precisely what they fear: rejection by God, a place of ruin. They will never return to the city. Understand, then, that whatever the psychological dynamics, whatever the temptation we may have to say, “Thus says the Lord,” in our preaching, we who will be leaders in the church, we who will be thought by others to have prophetic voices in the church, must never, ever use the pulpit as a voice for what is nothing more than fertile imagination.
God will hold us accountable, as he holds us accountable to say all that he says. That’s part of the watchman theme that we saw briefly in chapter 3, and it recurs in chapter 33. God holds us accountable to say all that he says; he also holds us accountable not to say more or other than what he says. What is spoken by the genuine prophet comes from God; what is spoken by the false prophet is nothing but fertile imagination.
B. What is spoken by the genuine prophet never papers over decay and judgment; what is spoken by the false prophet is satisfied with a short-term daub of whitewash.
That’s the burden of chapter 13, verses 10 to 16. The extended picture, here, is of a flimsy wall with major structural faults in it. Instead of fixing the faults so that the wall is secure, these prophets have, as it were simply slapped over a coat of thick paint: whitewash. It covers all the cracks. It looks good. It looks structurally sound.
Everybody, on a short-term basis, can say, “My, what a great preacher. Here is a mighty wall, a bastion of the truth,” but eventually, the storms come (verses 12, the end of 15, and 16). These storms not only wash off the whitewash, but there’s hail in there and strong winds so that the walls themselves are overturned. In other words, the stupidity of the whole thing is exposed, and then the whole thing is destroyed.
In what way had the false prophets been guilty of flimsy construction, masked to look fine? Historically, that’s clear enough. In verses 10 and 16, they say, “Peace,” when there is no peace. Or, again, we are told that these people of Israel claim to see visions of peace for Jerusalem when there was no peace. That is, they claimed that God was going to spare Jerusalem, that there would be peace and no judgment, and that God would preserve the people. But, of course, God was pronouncing judgment on the people.
So instead of calling the people to repent lest God turn from his pronounced judgment, they were merely coating over all of the religious sentiments, the political anxieties, and the religious concerns with a coat of whitewash. “Listen. God is a good God. He’s a gracious God. He’s the God of the covenant.”
On the one hand, in the last 15 or 20 years, I have heard countless prophecies to the effect that revival is around the corner, some of them connected with explicit dates. Those false prophets are still prophesying. No one would like to see genuine revival in Western nations more than I would. I’ve been in parts of the world where I’ve seen small touches of revival, and it is a wonderful thing to see. I’d love, with my whole heart, to believe that revival is around the corner, but I can’t see it.
I think some of these prophecies are bound up with the fact that there is enough uncertainty in the culture, enough uncertainty in the church, enough of a feeling of malaise, that it kind of papers over the cracks. If you can just get somebody up there saying, in the name of the Lord, that we are about to have massive revival, amen, then everybody stands up and claps.
But suppose we’re heading for cultural decline. Suppose we’re heading for persecution. Wouldn’t our responses be somewhat different then? The decisions we’d make? How we’d go about our vision of ministry? Here is the biggest test: Do these prophets call men and women to repentance, to biblical knowledge, to integrity, and to fidelity? Or are they just papering over the cracks, painting the ridiculous foundations in whitewash?
It doesn’t have to come just out of that camp. It can come out of ridiculously naÔve, optimistic, humanistic camps in which, somehow, we think we’re climbing higher and higher and getting better and better. There was a long time when that was just about dead in this century. It was very strong at the end of the last century and at the beginning of this century.
This optimism was full of religious language: “We are getting better and better and higher and higher, and by our missionaries and our educational systems and our structures, we will bring in the kingdom. We will educate the natives around the world. We will be strong and righteous and glorious. Amen!” Then we were hit by World War I, and then we were hit by World War II. In between, we had the Great Depression. Then there were the various genocides around the world, followed by the Cold War and nuclear threats. Suddenly, all of this optimism took a nosedive.
Here and there, I hear the thing beginning to rise again. We haven’t had a world war for a while. The GDP has been looking good for 12 years. People have short memories: “A 12-year GDP on the rise seems awfully good! The Cold War is over! Oh, there are struggles here and there, but that’s over there. Here it’s all right, isn’t it?”
It is important to build our ministry for the long haul, never being satisfied with a quick fix, not just telling people what they want to hear according to the cultural tides. It’s important to hear the Word of God, and one of the tests for the Word of God in any generation is whether it continues to deal radically with sin.
This does not just mean the sins that are particularly disgusting in your group because there are some Christian groups that are very good at denouncing sins of the other people. Rather, the test is whether it really does deal radically with biblically defined sin wherever it’s found, always digging it out, and refusing to indulge in whitewash but always building the foundations again.
Isn’t that what this text says? What is spoken by the genuine prophet never papers over decay and judgment; what is spoken by the false prophet is satisfied with a short-term daub of whitewash. That’s one of the reasons, of course, why, on the whole, prophets in the Old Testament are not all that popular.
C. What is spoken by the genuine prophet is stamped by integrity and freedom from superstition; what is spoken by the false prophet is mercenary and superstitious.
That’s the burden of chapter 13, verses 17 to 23. Here, the dangers are specifically leveled against certain prophetesses. There were, of course, great Old Testament prophetesses: Deborah, Huldah, Miriam (Moses’ sister).
However, these ladies in this passage were clearly tied to superstition, religious cant, and the profit margin. (That’s a different kind of profit. I sometimes say I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, and I teach at a non-profit organization. Everybody gets the pun!) These people were into prophecy, well, they were into a profit, all right!
This passage refers to superstition (verse 18), as well as money (verse 19). Religious quacks often abound in times of stress, decay, or decline. What all of these practices are is not absolutely clear. Some of them are pretty obvious. Sewing amulets or magic charms on wrists (verse 18) is probably to symbolize the binding power of some spell over demonic force.
The veils for their heads to ensnare people, possibly of different lengths for different people was likely treating people with just the right degree of respect in order to snooker them as clients. In verse 19, there is payment, cheap payment sometimes, which is perhaps for auguries used to determine, for example, whether a child would die or whether the crops would be good.
What would the Lord do to them? Verses 20 to 23. Eventually, the people will see through them and be set free. Why? Because in the long haul, these superstitious approaches to controlling the future dishearten the righteous. Do you ever get discouraged by the sheer numbers of people who don’t do things without reading their horoscope? On one level, you can laugh it all off, but it’s on the rise again. There are rising numbers of people for whom this is their whole guidance system. What do you do with it? It gets a bit discouraging, doesn’t it?
Moreover, they failed to encourage the wicked to turn from their wicked ways. Here, again, is the point from all the previous section, isn’t it? Genuine prophets call people to righteousness. They’re not so much interested in telling you the next five stages of your life as calling you to integrity in all of your life.
The way they have gone about this is, of course, by focusing on the wrong things: horoscopes instead of righteousness and domesticated gods instead of the God of truth and integrity. Do I have to give you some examples? Have you ever heard of Popoff? Some of you who are a little older nodded. Popoff was an American faith healer based in California. He had a peculiar gimmick.
When people entered into his large meetings, he would suddenly say, in the midst of the meeting, “There is a woman … section F, row G, seat 13 … she has a terrible back problem. In the name of Jesus, I command you to come forth and be healed!” Lo and behold, she had this problem. She’d come forth, and he’d lay hands on her. Thousands attended. He was never wrong. When reporters checked it out with these people, they weren’t plants either.
Then an ABC television crew spotted the fact that Popoff had a hearing aid. Now what a faith healer is doing with a hearing aid might be open for discussion in any case, but they spotted that he had a hearing aid. One of them just wondered if it was a radio receiver. When people entered into these large meetings, they filled out little prayer request cards.
Mrs. Popoff was scanning them, and anything that looked like a good psychosomatic ailment … not terminal cancer or a leg amputated that needed to be restored but a good, decent psychosomatic ailment … she’d pull them out, follow these people to see where they sat down, and make a note on the card. In the midst of the meeting, she had a little radio where she signaled into Popoff’s receptor: “There’s a woman in section F, row G, seat such-and-such. Her card says …” and then he’d perform.
So the ABC television crew went in there with a radio scanner. For the non-technologically blessed, a radio scanner just goes back and forth across the various possible frequencies, picks up the strongest signal, and locks onto it. They locked onto this signal and recorded it all. Then on national television, they played first of all what it looked like without the message, and then they played it again interposing the message from Mrs. Popoff. At the risk of a terrible pun, Popoff’s ministry popped off. That was the end of him for all intents and purposes.
Don’t misunderstand me. Not for a moment am I suggesting that every faith healer is in that camp. Not for a moment. I’m not a cessationist who thinks that God can’t perform miracles in this day and generation. Understand this, however: the overwhelming majority of people who went to that kind of meeting were, in fact, some brand or another of evangelicals who were being snookered. They were gullible. This isn’t an example of faith; it’s an example of sheer gullibility.
My only regret in that whole episode is that I wish somebody from the Christian camp had exposed this jerk, rather than ABC, because that is exactly what Ezekiel was called to do in his day as well. Popoff was doing damage to the people of God. He was using the name of Jesus blasphemously. He was corrupting the faith of the people.
He was directing people away from Jesus Christ, what genuine salvation consists in, and genuine truth into a kind of gimmicky Christianity in which he was made out to be a great seer with tremendous powers. He was elevating people’s hopes that they would be cured of a variety of ailments on the basis of psychosomatic illnesses carefully selected.
It was manipulation. It was cruel. Shouldn’t it be exposed? It is not a mark of Christian courtesy to pretend that that sort of man is a brother in Christ. I’m afraid that I could give you a lot of examples, but I spare you. When you’ve spent enough time counseling the people who’ve come through such meetings, picking up the spiritual debris in their lives, you realize that these false prophets are evil.
D. What is spoken by the genuine prophet is in line with the great central lines of revealed redemptive history; what is spoken by the false prophet moves from that central line into idolatry, which is, itself, a mark of the judgment of God.
(I wish I had the gift of zippy one-liners that summarize the whole truth in a clichÈ, but I don’t.) Chapter 14, verses 1 to 11.
On the face of it, verses 1 to 3 of this chapter, on first read, seem to establish a new setting, a new set of problems. Elders were showing up and wanting some counsel. Yet when we read through all of these verses, especially all the way down to the end in verses 9 to 11, we discover that we’re still facing the same sort of issue: the issue of genuine prophets, false prophecy, and the like.
Those, like these elders, who set up idols in their hearts (verses 1 to 3) like to listen to false prophets, and false prophets find a hearing there. The ultimate issue, both for the false prophets and for their hearers, is who God is. When your heart is so turned to the living God and all that he is and all that he has revealed, you develop a kind of nose against the false stuff. Whereas, if you have idols in your heart, then you may formally go along with the established religion but, in fact, you are open to everything that seems to reinforce those false idols and you get snookered.
Listen to the scorn in God’s voice in verse 3: “Son of man, these men have set up idols in their hearts …” They’re not so brash as to set them up in their hearths or in their homes, but in their hearts they love false gods. “… and put stumbling blocks before their faces. Should I let them inquire of me at all?” You see, they’ve maintained a certain kind of formal adherence to God, yet in their hearts, they have already been seduced in some measure by local Babylonian deities, perhaps. They have idols in their hearts that become a stumbling block.
When such people, the text asks, seek God’s face through a prophet, as they’re now seeking God’s face through Ezekiel, should God even listen to them? What will God do in that case? That’s the problem that is presented in verse 3. The answer is then given in another oracle (verses 4 and 5).
The general answer, here, is this: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: When any Israelite sets up idols in his heart and puts a wicked stumbling block before his face and then goes to a prophet, I the Lord will answer him myself in keeping with his great idolatry.” That’s a threat. That’s not, “I will answer him and tell him what he wants to know.” It’s, “I will answer him all right! He’ll get an answer from me.” Then keeping with this idolatry, “I will do this to recapture the hearts of the people of Israel, who have all deserted me for their idols.”
So the answer, in brief, is, “No, such a person won’t be given the kind of answer that he wants, the answer to his question or his problem, but I’ll answer him all right. I’ll answer him. I’ll answer him myself.” The language is pervasively threatening. Why will the Lord respond this way? Because his long-term aim is to engender a kind of disillusionment with idolatry and thus, recapture the hearts of his people. That’s what verse 5 says.
Moreover, if any apparent prophet gives the response to people like this, as if it were genuinely an oracle from God, you can be sure it is false and that God has deceived him. That’s what the text says. Verses 9 to 11 (for enticed, read deceived; the Hebrew really is that strong): “And if the prophet is deceived to utter a prophecy, I the Lord have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand against him and destroy him from among my people Israel.”
On first reading, this is shocking language. Is it God’s business to go around deceiving prophets? It even presupposes that at certain levels, these false prophets may even think that what they’re passing on is the truth, and God has snookered them. But it is very important to pause for a minute and reflect what is and is not being said.
This is not a case of God arbitrarily telling the truth to certain neutral people and arbitrarily deceiving others. It’s not as if there are a whole lot of would-be neutral prophets out there and God says, “I’ll tell the truth to some of them. To the others, I’ll tell a pack of lies, and then I’ll laugh as they try and sort it out.” That’s not what’s going on here.
Nor is it a question of God standing behind good and evil in exactly the same way, as if he stands behind Mother Teresa and John Calvin, on the one hand, and Adolf Eichmann and Pol Pot, on the other hand, in exactly the same way. This would make God simply amoral. Rather, it is a question of God being utterly sovereign and thus providentially in control and so working that these people … who prefer lies, who want false gods, who love untruth … God will confirm them in the desires, and they’ll have their untruths.
God’s sovereignty is so extensive that at one level, it embraces both good and evil in the sense that you can never escape the outmost bounds of God’s sovereignty. The Devil himself can’t do that. Read the first chapter of Job. It’s very important to see that, but that doesn’t mean that God stands behind the good and the evil in the same way. All the good is creditable, finally, to God. The evil is always creditable to various secondary causalities.
Let me give you just one biblical example. It’s the most important one in all of the Bible. There are dozens and dozens of examples. I’ll just give you one, but it’s the most important one in all of the Bible. It’s found in Acts chapter 4. In Acts, chapter 4, the Christians have just faced their first real whiff of persecution. In verse 23, Peter and John, who have had to face up to it, return to their own people (that is, to Christians) and report all that the chief priests and elders had said.
So the church gathers to pray. They pray, “Sovereign Lord, you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them.” In other words, in the midst of persecution, it’s important to remember who is still in charge. God is still in charge, even in the midst of persecution. “You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David …”
Now they quote Psalm 2: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Anointed One?” In other words, they say that there is biblical sanction for thinking that there will be persecution against the Lord and against his Anointed One, against his Messiah. We shouldn’t be surprised by this.
They said, “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed.” It was a wicked conspiracy that corrupted justice. That’s what put Jesus to death. Then they say, “They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.” That’s what put Jesus to death.
Let me tell you frankly that you can’t be a Christian unless you believe both of those things at the same time. You can’t be. You see, if you believe that Jesus death was simply the result of a sharp-ended political conspiracy in the first century, then there is no sense in which God sent him to death to pay for my sins.
The whole of the Bible is bound up with the fact that God has these sacrificial systems running (a priestly system, lambs and bulls, and so on) that all point to the need for an Ultimate Lamb of God. That’s why the book of Revelation can picture Jesus as the Lamb who was slain before the creation of the earth. In God’s mind, it was already done.
It came about at a certain point in history, but it was going to happen. God had planned it. In that sense, Pontius Pilate and Herod and the others were just doing what God had planned. You have to believe that God sent Jesus to the cross or else you can’t believe that God sent him to the cross to pay for your sin.
On the other hand, if you only believe God’s sovereignty and do not also believe that all of the human agents involved were wicked when they acted this way … that Pontius Pilate was wicked, that Herod was wicked, that the Jewish leaders were wicked, in fact, that we are wicked and our sins were placed on Jesus … then, of course, why did Jesus have to die at all if there was no sin to pay for, if we are just puppets in the sweep of history?
Christians, therefore, must believe, will believe, and do believe that human beings are responsible under the matchless, and sometimes mysterious, providential sovereignty of God, but God remains God. The good is creditable, finally, to God. The evil is creditable, finally, to secondary causalities like me.
God, in his perfect wisdom, uses even my evil, on occasion, to bring him glory. He used even the evil of Pontius Pilate to bring about his long-planned redemption. So also here. These prophets are speaking lies, but don’t, for a moment, think that God is asleep when it happens. They may be preaching lies, but God is still sovereign and their very lies are part of his own judicial pronouncement upon them. There are other examples.
In 2 Thessalonians 2:10–11, Paul writes of certain people, “They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason …” That is, because they refused to love the truth. “For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie.” Do you hear what that text is saying? It’s not saying that God is dealing with neutral people whom God deceives.
He’s dealing, rather, with people who love lies. They love their own man-made religions. They can’t bear the gospel. They can’t bear the God of the Bible. They won’t believe the truth. So at some point, God comes down in judicial sentence and says, “All right. You love the lie, so I condemn you to believing the lie.” They get what they want. That’s what the text says. “For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie.”
That’s what’s going on here too. The fact that God is still merciful in all of this is bound up with this simple point. God, in his mercy, through Ezekiel, tells them what he’s doing. If you heard Ezekiel’s message and you were a preacher in that day, if you had any sensitivity to the ways of God, don’t you think you’d examine your heart and say, “God, are you talking about me? Am I leading the people astray? Have I listened to false voices? Lord God, help me see the truth.”
However, if what you want is the people’s popularity and money … (Always find out in religion where money is going. Always. Where there are televangelists or anybody else, always find out where the money is going.) If what you want are popularity and money, then you won’t listen and will condemn yourself to believing a lie. God deceives the prophet as a mark of his judicial action upon them.
Let me tell you one more story. A couple of years ago, I was in a far-Eastern country (that probably should remain nameless) speaking at a missionaries’ conference. Somewhere along the line, I made a slighting remark about rebirthing techniques. In case you haven’t heard of rebirthing techniques, I need to tell you what they are since the story depends on it.
Rebirthing techniques were developed in American psychology to deal, especially, with mostly women (also some men) who were abused sexually, usually by their fathers or uncles or somebody, when they were very young. There is a non-Christian version, but in the christianized version of rebirthing techniques, the people are taken into a small group and are asked to imagine their birth again, to go through their birth in their imagination. That’s why it’s called rebirthing: not in the John 3 sense, but to go through their original birth, again, in their imagination.
As you are coming out of your mother’s birth canal, there is Jesus. This is all being talked through to help you as you sit there will your eyes shut and imagine what’s going on. There is Jesus, ready to catch you and to ease you out of the birth canal. He is the one who clamps the umbilical cord and cuts it. He is the one who slaps your bottom so that you take in the first breath of life. He is one who wipes the yuck off of your face, holds you, cuddles you in his arms, and makes you feel warm and cherished and loved.
Some people who go through these rebirthing techniques then say that for the first time, they really do believe that Jesus loved them from the beginning and that he was really there. It was so hard for them to understand that anybody loved them, considering all the abuse that they went through when they were 4 and 5 and 6 and 14. But there was Jesus loving them from the very beginning, and it becomes, for them, a very cathartic experience.
I had made some cheap shot about rebirthing techniques on the way by, in this convention. A couple then stopped me at the door, somewhat steamed, and said that they needed to talk to me. So I went around to their place. They were very courteous about it all, but the long and the short of it was that the fellow in this couple said, “Look, I’m a classic case. I was raped by my father when I was 5. I was sodomized. That went on for years and years. Eventually, I ran away from home. Eventually, when I was 17, I got into a church and was converted.
Eventually, I met this lass. We went to Bible college and seminary, and here I am, training to be a Bible translator. All along, although I knew
. “For the first time,” he said, “I cried for 40 minutes as I thought about the love of Jesus. I knew I’d been loved from the beginning. As a result of that, I love my wife better and am better able to receive love from my wife. My whole life is a little more unified. Why do you have the temerity to criticize something that God has used so powerfully for healing in my life?”
That’s a good question, isn’t it? So I said to him, “My dear brother, if you really are largely healed by this, I’m not going to throw stones at you. I’m glad if you love your wife better and are better able to receive her love. But if you really want a serious answer to your question, I have to ask you a couple of questions and where we’re going is going to hurt. Do you want this?” He said, “Yes, I really do.”
I said, “All right, I have two questions you have to answer first. The first is this: where, according to the Bible, is the love of God most clearly and powerfully demonstrated?” He said, “Oh, in the cross.” I said, “I agree. I assumed you would say that, but I wanted to be sure that you would because I wanted to hear it from your own lips. My second question is this: Could you imagine that you might have had the same cathartic healing experience if someone had taken you very carefully and gently and firmly through, let’s say, a passage like Ephesians 3.
There, Paul prays that you, ‘together with all the saints, may have the power to know how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge,’ all in the context of the gospel. Supposing somebody had taken that passage and explained gospel love of you very closely and applied it to you in your circumstances, might you not have had the same healing cathartic experience?”
He thought about it and said, “Yes, I can imagine it might have happened that way, but my point is that it happened this other way.” I said to him, “But now you’ve told me all that I need to hear. I want to know when someone comes to you with a similar problem, a background of abuse, whether you will direct him to the Jesus of the imagination whose stands between your mother’s legs and wipes yuck off your face, or to the Jesus of the cross?”
Do you see the point? The Devil isn’t going to come to mature Christians, people like you, potential leaders for the church, and say, “Look, here is a great big load of codswallop. Here is a lot of theological blarney. Go ahead, take it!” because you’re not going to be interested. You’re not stupid, and neither is he.
But he may well come to you and say, “You know, I’m glad that you love Jesus and all that, but there’s something else you need if you’re going to be really whole and really healed.” So he starts you off on a track that offers you a slight variation on Jesus. It’s only a small 5 percent deviation. That’s all. But I want to know where that’s going in 20 years. I want to know if, in 20 years, you’re still going to be preaching the Jesus of the cross, or the Jesus of popular American psychology!
Because the test, finally, is not whether you can get your emotional act together with some Christian counseling. Of course you can. I’m not denying that this did him some good. Of course it did him some good, but he could have had a better good. All that he received of good might have been presented to him under the aegis of the gospel, under the God who is there, under the God who has disclosed himself, and not under a technique which, on the long haul, has every hope of taking you away from what is central.
If, at the end of the day, you become so passionately committed to a therapeutic approach to people’s concerns, then sooner or later, you’ll believe the delusion, and you’ll no longer be passionate about the gospel.
5. In decaying times, what is spoken by the genuine prophet is accepted by small numbers of transformed individuals; what is spoken by false prophets is accepted by large swaths of the culture but without culture reformation.
In times of revival, everybody is on board. Or, at least, large, growing numbers of people are on board.
In decaying times, however, what is spoken by the genuine prophet is accepted by small numbers of transformed individuals. What is spoken by false prophets is accepted by large swaths of the culture … that’s what makes it a decaying time … yet there’s no genuine culture reformation, just popularity.
That is the burden of chapter 14, verses 12 to 23. The initial point of these verses is very simple. What God says is that even if people as righteous as Noah and Job and Daniel were in the culture, if God says that the city is going to be condemned, it will be condemned. Noah, of course, we’re told, was a righteous man, blameless in his generation who walked with God. Job, we’re told, was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.
Daniel was a contemporary, but even as a young man, he was already known as having taken on the courts of Babylon, insisting on eating kosher food, and being wise. So whether you’re talking about the ancients like Noah and Job, or a modern young man like Daniel, if those people were present in the culture, it wouldn’t matter. God would still destroy the city.
Now it’s applied, in verses 21 to 23, to Jerusalem with these four dreadful judgments of famine, sword, wild beasts, and plague. God will send forth these judgments and condemn Jerusalem. There’s an implication in all of this, however. It means that Ezekiel is expecting only very small numbers of righteous people. That vast majority are going to walk away. That’s always the way it is in a declining culture.
Let me conclude. Brothers and sisters in Christ, I really don’t mean this to be a discouraging message. I really don’t mean it to be that. It’s meant to be partly a warning but partly an encouragement to read and re-read and re-read the whole Bible and learn the whole counsel of God. Learn to be discerning.
That is hard in a world that hates distinctions. It is hard in a world that increasingly dislikes people saying, “This is right, and this is wrong,” because, in this world, right and wrong depend on your point of view. That’s all. But the fact of the matter is that God has warned us. God has told us.
Did you know that you can prove almost anything from the Bible? It used to be that John 3:16 was the best-known verse of the Bible. I don’t think it is anymore, at least not in the West. The best-known verse of the Bible, nowadays, is Matthew 7:1, “Judge not that you be not judged.” Of course, you rip that text out of context too.
A few verses on, it says, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” which means that somebody has to figure out who the pigs are! Do you see? In the context, “Judge not that you be not judged,” does not mean, “Never make any moral distinction whatsoever about any conceivable thing.” The verb to judge, in the original, takes on different flavors in different contexts.
It means, “Don’t be judgmental. Don’t be harsh. Don’t go around judging people. Don’t be judgmental because the same kind of judgment that you use will be turned again on you on the last day.” It certainly doesn’t mean that there is no moral distinction to make whatsoever, or else the entire Sermon on the Mount would have to be scrapped.
No, what we need is the whole counsel of God. I was a pastor for enough years to meet a number of elderly men and women without much education, no seminary training, no theological degree, no SLT behind them, but about 65 years of reading their Bibles. They had a kind of twitchy nose for heresy.
It wasn’t that they were harsh. They were simple folk, but their minds were so steeped in Scripture that when they heard something that was off-beat, they would wrinkle up their nose and say, “Well, what about that text? What about that text?” Their minds were so full of the way that God thought that they had become discerning by virtue of the fact that they knew the Word of God. “Your Word is a Lamp to my feet and a light to my feet.”
Brothers and sisters, you’re at the young end of potentially immensely strategic ministry in a world which, if it continues in the present trends, is not going to like people who are discerning. But be thankful, know the Word of God, and be discerning, for Jesus’ sake.
