Apologetics

FALSE PROPHETS

by May Langlois
09/07/20
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We live in an age of false prophets. Every age has had their false prophets, but with social media and mass media, the platform for false prophets is bigger and broader than it has ever been. The size of the stage has caused these false prophets to multiply like plague locusts.

I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church. When we thought about it at all, we assumed that prophets belonged only to Biblical times. We read their stories and applied the lessons to our lives, but we never contemplated any notion of modern day prophets.

I first encountered modern ‘prophets’ when I was exposed to a Pentecostal church and community through a branch of my family. I was in my mid-twenties at the time, taken along to services by my well-meaning relatives when staying with them on an extended vacation.

I discovered that the Pentecostals are a form of Christianity that emphasise the Gifts of the Spirit including speaking in tongues. One of these gifts is prophecy.

The New Testament lists the Gifts of the Spirit in more than one place and there is variation between the lists, but the gift of prophecy is mentioned Romans, 1 Corinthians and Ephesians. Other gifts include serving, teaching, exhortation, giving, leadership, mercy, word of wisdom, word of knowledge, faith, gift of healing, miracles, distinguishing between spirits, speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues, miracles and administration, among others.[1] Some of the gifts are roles within the church including apostle, evangelist and pastor.[2]

My mental images of prophets up to that point included the wild and woolly John the Baptist, out in the desert eating locusts and honey or the resentful and grumbling Jonah who was swallowed by a whale when he ran away from God’s plans. I liked the impassioned Jeremiah who complained bitterly when things got really bad, which they did - frequently, and the theatrical Elijah drawing down fire from heaven in duels with pagan priests. My favourite was the intellectual and probably aristocratic Isaiah, who liked accusing the kings of his day.

In contrast, the modern day ‘prophets’ I was encountering looked depressingly  ordinary. Middle-aged men and women that I would not turn my head to look at on the street, dressed with painful respectability in their Sunday best. There was no strange fire in their eyes, no powerful charisma and no odour of sanctity. I missed the sheer eccentricity of the Bible prophets. Perhaps my Roman Catholic imagination expected too much.

An Encounter with a Modern ‘Prophet’

There was great excitement when a famous, guest ‘prophet’ came to the church during my visit. My Aunt insisted I attend the service and I have to admit, I was curious.

During the service, people formed into queues and headed to the stage to be individually prayed over by the ‘prophet’; a depressingly commonplace looking woman with unnaturally black hair.

“Ask her to pray for impartation,” my Aunt hissed, as we neared the front.

I had no idea what that meant. Did it mean I would get some of her prophetic gift? What would that mean for me? Would I end up with queues of people wanting me to pray over them one day? Did I want that? I wasn’t sure I believed any of it.

When I got to the front, I stuttered out my request and the ‘prophet’ looked at me strangely, as though I was something she didn’t understand and wanted to go away. I’d seen that look before on the face of genuine psychics and it made me nervous.

She stretched out her hand, palm forward, at the level of my solar plexus and prayed with her eyes closed. She didn’t touch me, but I felt heat coming from her hand and it was too far away and too hot to be just her body heat. I was surprised but not alarmed. I’d experienced something similar with Reiki. I didn’t think too much about it.

What I did think about, with a great deal of perplexity, was the motivations of those around me. It was apparent from conversations that I overheard that people wanted a ‘word’ from this so-called ‘prophet’ about their own lives.

For many of them, it had to do with their own ambitions. They wanted to hear that they had some great spiritual gift to the world that was about to blossom and rocket them to fame once they had dealt with whatever was “blocking the flow of the Holy Spirit”.

Some were struggling in their personal lives. They were desperate for a child and had been unable to conceive or were single and craved marriage or they were married but their marriage was in trouble. In one way or another, they were all seeking hope from the ‘prophet’.

This all struck me as very strange. What was the difference between this seeking of a ‘word’ about their ambitions and personal problems, and someone going to see a psychic for a ‘reading’ which was strictly frowned upon? Wasn’t it basically the same thing? They all wanted to peer into their future.

A Critique of Modern ‘Prophecy’

I had a number of issues with all this.

The source of the knowledge was my first issue. The Pentecostals would say that seeking a ‘word’ from God is entirely different from a psychic reading where the knowledge comes from an unknown, unnamed, ephemeral and highly suspect source.

Their intent may be genuine, but does it work in practice? How do you know that the ‘prophet’ is really hearing from God? Because the things that she says come true? The things that psychics say often come true as well. It turns out that a psychic’s sources can also be reliable, so that test doesn’t stand up.

Pentecostals will also use the prophet’s Godly life as proof of the source of knowledge, but the Devil can appear as an angel of light[3], so that argument doesn’t convince me either.

My second issue came down to the fact that people were overtly pursuing their own will. From one perspective, their actions could be seen as seeking a ‘word’ about God’s will for their life, but in practice it seemed more as though people simply wanted God to come into line with their own will for the future and were seeking a ‘word’ to confirm their own desires.

Would the childless couple have accepted a ‘word’ that told them to adopt or pour their energy into children’s charities instead? Would the single person craving marriage have accepted a ‘word’ that they had been given the gift of celibacy? Would the ambitious student in divinity school accept a ‘word’ that they would spend their life serving the poor in obscurity?

My third issue, and the thing that bothered me even more, was the abuse of the gift of prophecy.

The prophets of the Bible did not use their gift to tell people what they wanted to hear or to further their own ambitions[4], which is exactly what I had been observing. Their role was to proclaim God’s instructions and judgments for His people, including challenging the authority of the day when they saw injustice. God defined the role of the prophet in Jeremiah 1:10 – “to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant.”

The Danger of False Prophesies

During my vacation with my family, I had prophesies spoken over me (unasked for), which I instinctively knew were untrue and would never happen. I knew these ‘prophets’ were merely projecting their own hopes and dreams onto my life and telling me what they thought I wanted to hear.

I was told that I would marry and have children, something that I had never desired. For most people, this would be a pretty safe prophecy. The majority of people will marry and have children at some point in their life.

Upon hearing this ‘prophecy’, the relief of my family was profound. Up until that point, they had been convinced that I was going to end up a sad spinster.

My naïve twenty-five year old self thought perhaps God would fundamentally change me in some way so that I would wake up one day and want to get married. I wanted to want to get married; it would make life a lot easier.

It never happened. I’m now forty-seven and none of those prophesies have come to pass. Some of them are now physically impossible, unless God wants to work a miracle and make me like Sara, which I doubt. If anything, what God has done over the years is make me more like myself, for better or for worse. I’m the spinster my family feared I would become, but I don’t feel sad at all. I’ll leave the unnecessary sadness for the family.

The thing that angers me about these false prophets is how they victimise and exploit vulnerable people who are already suffering.

They victim blame by accusing people of having hidden, unconfessed sin that is ‘blocking’ the action of the Holy Spirit to bless them with whatever it is their heart desires whether it is healing or love or relief from poverty or a child, etc.

False prophets undermine the dignity of human suffering by inferring that everyone can be rich, healthy, have flawless marriages and perfect children, create world-changing ministries and build turbo-charged careers. And if they don’t, it must be due to some deep spiritual fault.

This completely denies the Christian teaching that we are living in a fallen world ruled by Satan. From this perspective, it can be seen as pure heresy.

It also burdens a Christian with false expectations. Many people wait for years, some wait for decades, to see these prophesies come true, only to be ultimately disappointed. When the prophesies don’t eventuate, they’re told they “lack faith” which circles right back to victim blaming. In the worst case scenario, this can lead to apostasy.

Divination Disguised as Prophecy

Another strange phenomenon I’ve come across recently is the growth of dream interpretation in Christian circles. Dream interpretation is linked to prophecy. Daniel is the most famous dream interpreting prophet in the Bible, having interpreted dreams for King Nebuchadnezzar and King Belshazzar of Babylon as well as having prophetic dreams and visions of his own.

We see God acting through dreams in the Bible as early as Genesis with the story of Jacob’s ladder[5] right through to the New Testament with Joseph’s dream to take Jesus to Egypt as an infant to escape King Herod.[6]

What we don’t see in the Bible are prophets creating a nice sideline for themselves by making podcasts about dream interpretation and writing books with dictionaries of symbols that people can use to interpret their own dreams.

In the Bible, is quite obvious that the dream or vision is either very clear and direct in its meaning or the interpretation is sent by divine inspiration only. None of the Biblical prophets had to consult a dream dictionary or keep a dream journal in order to understand what God was communicating. These techniques are simply unnecessary. To put it another way, there is no need to worry about missing God; He can find you.

These techniques of dream interpretation are simply thinly disguised techniques of divination and fortune-telling. There are so many warnings against divination and fortune-telling in both the Old and New Testament that this article does not have the scope to cite them all. Any dream interpretation that requires a dictionary or journal is pure New Ageism and has nothing to do with Christianity.

The so-called ‘prophets’ promoting these ideas are more interested in self-promotion and creating income for themselves than helping anyone hear from God. Once again, the most vulnerable and desperate are being exploited. Rather than being given the practical help, sympathy and comfort they need, they are being lied to and led down spiritually dangerous paths.

As mentioned at the start, this is not a new phenomenon. The evil effects of false prophets are discussed literally from one end of the Bible to the other – from I Kings[7] to Revelations[8]. 2 Peter predicts with chilling accuracy the activities of these modern ‘prophets’:

False prophets appeared in the past among the people, and in the same way false teachers will appear among you. They will bring in destructive, untrue doctrines, and will deny the Master who redeemed them, and so they will bring upon themselves sudden destruction. Even so, many will follow their immoral ways; and because of what they do, others will speak evil of the Way of truth. In their greed these false teachers will make a profit out of telling you made-up stories. For a long time now their Judge has been ready, and their Destroyer has been wide awake! [9]

Conclusion

Can the gift of prophecy exist in the modern day? Yes, it can, but be wary of anyone who is making money out of it or just telling people what they want to hear. If part of a prophet’s role is to “to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down” they’re unlikely to have people throwing money at them or to be universally popular.

God reveals His will for a person’s life through their journey and life circumstances. There is no need to give time, energy and money to false prophets who set people up for disappointment and undermine and corrupt their faith.