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Date Posted: 08:34:09 03/21/07 Wed
Author: article posted by Joshobel
Subject: Re: The Anatomy of False Prophet
In reply to: article posted by Joshobel 's message, "The Anatomy of False Prophet" on 08:23:43 03/21/07 Wed


pt. 2


We can know when the word is out of the council of God because it has this salutary effect. It will affect the nation or fellowship in turning it toward God, rather than away from Him and from their evil ways and their practices. I can remember a full gospel breakfast where the speaker was from Sweden, a leading evangelical personality, but it could have been anywhere. He was wearing a Gucci shirt and tie and a silk-type suit, and he began by saying, "The Lord has spoken to me this morning and given me a word for you." I leaned forward to catch every syllable that had come from the heart of God. As I heard it, however, there was nothing from God at all, but clichés, evangelical phrases and full gospel hogwash. The men who were hearing that word that morning, and nodding their heads, and "amening", applauding and affirming, need to know that there are consequences when we allow that kind of monumental lie to be expressed and not to be contradicted. It will deaden and dull our sensitivity so that the next time we will be an even greater candidate for deception for anything that comes down the pike.

There needed to be someone in that audience that morning to get up and say, "I am sorry for whatever pain and dislocation I am going to cause, but I cannot allow that phrase and that statement to be made in our hearing without being contested. That was not the word of God and we dare not allow that kind of terminology to be employed merely to sanctify or to give a kind of credibility to what is otherwise just an ordinary statement." How often is that being done and to what extent has our failure to do so had a negative effect on the church today? We have paid much for cheap, casual references to God, as if we could invoke Him at pleasure or say, "God gave", when He did not give.

I attended a conference where the theme was, 'How to invoke the presence of God by our worship.' We were told that if our song liturgy was of a sufficient kind and quality, then we could actually make manifest His presence. I did speak up that time and you can be assured that I have not been invited back since. I touched a holy cow. I said, "You would be doing far better to teach people how to continue in faithfulness with God without the sensing of His presence, which is more likely to be our end-time reality, than to think that we can calculate, engineer, or evoke God's presence at our will." It was a manipulation of God, as if He is going to give Himself to the devices of men.

Generally speaking, when men will invoke the phrase, "Thus says the Lord", it is almost a testimony to the fact that the Lord is not saying. If He is saying, then we do not have to embellish the statement by authorizing it. The statement itself will ring with the truth of God and the sense of God. Is it a rhema, a quickened statement of God of an original kind that we need to hear in the crisis place that we are, or is it just some kind of an embellishment to give a charismatic aura to our proceeding? It will have the effect of cheapening the whole integrity of the prophetic thing and make it a light kind of thing that anyone almost at will can offer. I would much prefer fewer such statements, but when they come you know that God has spoken.

When Israel's prophets said, "Thus says the Lord", then you know that what is following is going to be a judgment that is so horrific that God validates even the words that bear His resonance, because they are words of an ultimate kind of judgment. It must, therefore, be clear from the inception that this is not the prophet speaking out of himself. We have it passed down to us as written prophecy of a kind that has affected the history of Israel, but in spoken prophecy we need to discern whether it is the Lord speaking by the weight of what is being said in terms of the anointing and the authority, rather than in having it labeled for us.

The same ones who will dismiss God rudely are the same ones who will invoke Him lightly. Prophets are called to come into that whole scenario, and bring the sword of the Lord, and bring the fear of the Lord, and the truth of the Lord to people who have been long spoiled by such cheapy things as I am now describing, and as every one of us at one time or another, more than we would like, have experienced. This is why we have anguished and God is calling a halt.

That is why there are false prophets. That is why, if I can say it, the Charismatic and kindred movements themselves are kind of false movements, wanting the effulgence of the Spirit and the excitement and the activity, but evading the cross and the necessity for suffering out of which the Spirit of God is given as solace, comfort and power. We come back again and again to the cross. The false prophet speaks words of comfort when God would not have His people to be comforted, but to be agitated. True prophets can bear the reprisal, the rejection and the mortification of that word coming back into their own teeth. They can bear giving the word and then someone cueing the piano player to drown it out. Prophetic anguish is to bring the word of God and then to have it refused and come right back into your teeth. It is mortifying and the antithesis of the joy and the gratification that comes when the word of God flows out of you, and through, and into the people who are receiving it. That is like tonic for your soul. We have to be as willing for the one as the other, or we will not speak the other. The call to the prophet is the call to the cross. It is a frequent, if not continual form of suffering of an exquisite and ultimate kind. Can we say, "Thus says the Lord" without actually articulating those words or implying those words in your statement, except that your word has come through the cross? It is out of a death. It is not your own word, but His, which can only come from that cross-centered place. That was true for the prophets before the advent of the cross. Elijah preceded the cross, but he knew the death of it when he said, "...there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word." Jesus knew the cross before He knew the cross. The cross only exemplified and made visible the thing to which His life was all along submitted.


'Can a man hide himself in hiding places, so I do not see him?' declares the LORD. 'Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?' declares the Lord. I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy falsely in My name, saying, 'I had a dream, I had a dream!' (vs.24-25).

The heart of the offense in being false before God is that all of this takes place as if He is not seeing and does not understand and is not aware of what is being done. It is an enormous presumption that God takes note of, though we do not. It is a complete absence of the fear of God or the reverence for God as God. They really believe that they are hearing from God and what they are communicating is the council of God. They have reached such a place of deceit, that they have persuaded themselves that when they say, "Thus says the Lord", it is the Lord saying. We can come to that condition by a gradual erosion, a little day-by-day, slight kind of a thing, that when the process is finished, one is not only false, but one thinks that one is still true. There is a daily vigilance required over the issues of the heart in order that deception does not have its ultimate work, where the man deceived thinks that he is in the right and leading many to their doom. That is why God urges us to exhort one another daily while it is still day, because tomorrow is already too late.


...who intend to make My people forget My name by their dreams which they relate to one another...(v.27a).

That is to say, to communicate a sense of God that is not God and allow those listening to think that it is God because they have fastened the name of Jesus to it. False prophetic things and things that are deceitful will affect how people perceive and understand God, especially if they are affirmed in their shallowness, or if a certain lightness and frivolity is communicated. God cannot help but suffer loss. They are prophesying in the name of the Lord, but because it is false, the effect of it is to get people to forget His name, which is to say, to lose the sense of God as God, and the character of God intrinsic to His name.

How do we know that it is God's word and God's council? It is because it is likely to be the word that is expressed in verse 29:

'Is not My word like fire?' declares the LORD; 'and like a hammer which shatters a rock?'

In other words, "My word is not some soulish 'making nice'. My word breaks up the deeps; it demolishes and it burns." That is how you can tell whether it is a false word or a true word. If you want to distinguish between a prophetic word that is God's word and a prophetic word that is assumed by man, conjured out of his own mind and imagination and that is false, then here is the distinction: God's word is like a fire. His word burns and is like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces. It is devastating and brings an effect and contains a power that breaks in or burns through. It will never be some innocuous, syrupy thing that confirms us in what we are doing, especially when our lives are slovenly and slack. His word should burn in our heart and reveal the true condition of it and not as we thought it to be.

Every true word requires, and if we do not respond, then it means that we have not really heard. "Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts (Heb. 4:7b)." If we have heard, then it should evoke a response in us. Not to respond is to harden. There is no such thing as neutrality. The word of God when it is the word of God has to have consequence for ill or good. We can never ignore it or allow it to pass and nod our heads by saying, "Yes, that was a good and interesting word. I enjoyed that." It requires or we harden, and that is why we find so many people in a hardened condition and then God's last appeals would be a prophetic cry, but it has got to be like a hammer upon a rock that breaks through until the necessary repentance and release.

A prophet has got to speak what is true. Men who are man-pleasers and will not risk the consequences are those who become false prophets. We will be continually searched and tested in this. It is not established for all time and you are the one or the other. There is always a continual tension of standing before men, and if there is anything that yet craves recognition, acceptance and approval, then we will likely find ourselves compromised and yielding to the enormous pressure of 'going along'.


"Therefore behold, I am against the prophets," declares the LORD, "who steal My words from each other. Behold, I am against the prophets," declares the LORD, "who use their tongues and declare, 'The LORD declares.' Behold, I am against those who have prophesied false dreams," declares the LORD, "and related them, and led My people astray by their falsehoods and their reckless boasting ('and by their lightness'- King James Version); yet I did not send them or command them, nor do they furnish this people the slightest benefit,"declares the LORD (vs. 30-32).

One thing that this text reveals is the lightness that is intrinsic to false prophets. There is a certain levity, a certain kind of air of casualness, that seems to prevail in conferences and sessions where men who have not been sent of God have had opportunity to speak as if they had been sent of God. I have observed that very same levity prevailing in the very place where the man who was introduced to the congregation was introduced as the 'oracle of God' and the 'prophet of God for the hour'; and yet not only was his own speaking disappointing, though biblical, there was a levity and a kind of lightness, a kind of a joking spirit, that even when it was over that same spirit prevailed in the audience.

The unhappy thing is that great numbers of Christians in the world have never heard a true prophetic word spoken in the authority of God, and all they have ever heard they assume is normative, and think that this is what the prophetic word is. They have no basis for comparison. To hear such a word once, however, is to be ruined forever for anything less. There is, therefore, a great cry and need for that word and that authority to come into the earth, that the church might be rightly ruined and made candidates for the truth.

False prophets steal God's words from each other and often speak the same kind of word. I have been around now over thirty years as a believer, and I have to say, that what I have seen is a succession of fads, panaceas, gimmicks and things that we latch onto. There is a way in which we can put our finger up: "Which way is the wind blowing? What is current? What is now popular? I know that if I speak on faith, the people will love it; or prayer, or worship, or church growth, or power evangelism." We seem to go through periods where certain themes have found a place of acceptance and then you just move in that, and you pick up what others are saying, and then you say it. You know you are going to find an acceptance because it has been proven.

There is a difference between speaking about, for example, the 'Mystery of Israel' because it is in vogue and because you can learn it as anyone else, as opposed to waiting for the revelation when it is given. The speaking will employ unavoidably very much the same words, and yet for the hearer, the hearing of the one and the hearing of the other is a profoundly different experience. One communicates information while the other communicates revelation and life, and in so doing it becomes an 'event'.

There is a place for simplicity of lifestyle and dependency upon God that has very much to do with integrity and the quality of the word that is issued. There is something about poverty that is more than accidental. I know that religiously we can perform at it and make a cheap kind of thing as Catholicism has done. I would suspect, however, that the men who are saying, "Peace, peace..." and are bringing comforting messages, are somehow not living in that poverty. In fact, the very popularity that comes with speaking messages that are approved and that men want to hear will assure you of response both in admiration, applause and in giving. I am not demeaning the motives of men to say they are choosing a wrong message in order that their lifestyles might be maintained and subscribed, but somewhere in the realm of the labyrinthine corridors of the soul, somewhere someone must know that to be accepted, to be popular and to be approved, is also to prosper. To speak a word that is unpleasant and contradictory is somehow to ensure that you are going to cut yourself off from the kinds of things that would have maintained a lifestyle that you would have thought appropriate.

God knows and sees through it all, and there is nothing that He will judge more severely than men who say, "Thus says the Lord", when God has not said. I wish that we could come to a place of real brokenheartedness over this, that somehow our travail over what has already so saturated the Body of Christ through cheap utterances and pseudo-prophecies could somehow be removed from the mind and the memory of God's people in order that they would be made virginal again; and that they would be brought to a place of appreciation, and expectation, and willingness to wait for a true word when it comes. For when it comes, that word alone brings life-changing power. There is a waiting that requires as much a dying in the church as the dying in the man who is sent. As I have said, to fight your way through to the secret council of God, and to be in His presence—not just on the hit-and-miss basis to obtain the word, but as a communing that is consistent, out of which the word will come when God chooses to give it—is so rare, so painful and so difficult, that the flesh shrinks from it. It is easier to hear the word from other men and to imitate and repeat that, knowing that it is already popular and has found approval. We desperately need to hear what is on God's heart now, and the only one who can communicate that is he who is close to His heart. Everything conspires against it, including your own flesh and the things that are legitimate—your family, the light bulbs, the dogs. There is a dying to find your way into the place of the secret council of God, but it is in that place that the word of the Lord will come—and no other.


<a rel=nofollow target=_blank href="http://www.benisrael.org/OnlineBooks/prophetic_call/ProphCall_03.htm">http://www.benisrael.org/OnlineBooks/prophetic_call/ProphCall_03.htm</a>

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