Sermon for Flinders Park Church April 2019
We have already seen in the previous chapter that the apostolic testimony is true, as is the Old Testament scripture. We have this sure source of the truth by which to compare any teaching which makes its way into the church. However, not everyone in the church (and I mean the wider church, not just people in this little group) speaks truth. False teachers and the heretical teachings that they propagated were the major issue for the church that Peter wrote to. It is to these false teachers that I will now turn.
1 But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. 2 Many will follow their depraved conduct and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. 3 In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated stories (2 Peter 2:1-3a).
First and foremost we must be aware that false teachers exist in the church. As Peter points out here, there were false prophets in Israel and there will be false teachers in the church. Life would be simple if all the false prophets and false teachers were in the world and not in the church. It would then be easy to tell which was which. But it is never that simple. So we need to be alert and to have our eyes open. We need to be aware of what is true so that we can spot what is false. Not every person who claims to be a Christian or claims to teach the Bible is actually going to preach the truth. In fact there are a huge number of false teachers in the wider church.
This chapter gives us some insight into what false teachers do, what they are like, and what will become of them. However, I have realised that I cannot cover the whole chapter in one hit, so I will only make a beginning in this message. Apart from the fact that false teachers are bound to make their way into the church, the first thing Peter does is to compare them to the false prophets in Israel. So let’s consider some of the false prophets in the Old Testament to see what they prophesy.
A very good example of a false prophet is found in Jeremiah 28. “1 In the fifth month of that same year, the fourth year, early in the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, the prophet Hananiah son of Azzur, who was from Gibeon, said to me in the house of the LORD in the presence of the priests and all the people: 2 ‘This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says “I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon. 3 Within two years I will bring back to this place all the articles of the LORD’s house that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon removed from here and took to Babylon. 4 I will also bring back to this place Jehoiachin son of Jehoiakim king of Judah and all the other exiles from Judah who went to Babylon,” declares the LORD, “for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon”’” (Jer. 28:1-4).
There are several things of note in this passage. First of all, Hananiah spoke to the people in the house of the LORD and in the presence of the priests. He was not some pagan from outside of the people of God, but someone from Israel. False teachers don’t come from outside the church; they exist within the church and look like Christians. We are not speaking here about cults like Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. We all know that these people will teach falsely. I am talking about people who teach and call themselves Christians. They are not so easy to spot.
Hananiah spoke in the name of the LORD. He claimed that the God of Israel was speaking through him. He was not humble or lacking confidence; he was bold and forthright. He had what we might call “passion”. False teachers will act like this. They won’t be shrinking violets, but rather bold as lions, making claims that they are speaking what God has to say. One of the problems present in the church at the moment is that when it comes to discerning truth or error, teachers are often judged on whether they come across as passionate about God. But this is precisely what false prophets and false teachers do; they appear to be passionate about God. They speak as if they know what God thinks. They are bold enough to act like the mouthpiece of God. But we must be aware that boldness and passion are not indications of truth. Truth is truth.
Next, Hananiah prophesied in a way that sounded like scripture and yet distorted the scripture. It was true that God had rescued Jerusalem in the past. Other invaders had come along and threatened Judah and God had intervened. God was in covenant relationship with Israel and hence he was for them. This is the kind of argument Hananiah was using. No doubt he could find some Bible passage to use to back it up. But his argument was distorted because it was one-sided. Hananiah spoke as if God gave favour to Israel with no expectation of obedience.
This leads to the next problem, which is a denial of judgement. This is something which Peter addresses at length in this chapter. But let’s just consider one aspect of this problem. Hananiah, and indeed many false teachers in the church, deny that sin is an issue. They thus deny that God is holy. Christians don’t tend to speak about sin any more. It is all about how God loves us and wants to bless us. Koorong is filled with books that don’t speak about sin. They speak about how to get God’s blessing or how to get rich or how to be successful in business or how to be healed or how to have a great marriage etc. Sin is a completely unpopular topic. Repentance is an unpopular topic. But God’s word tells us: “Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up” (Jas. 4:9-10 NIV).
False prophets prophesy peace. The false prophets of Jeremiah’s day did just this and Jeremiah complained to the LORD about it. “But I said, ‘Alas, Sovereign LORD! The prophets keep telling them, “You will not see the sword or suffer famine. Indeed, I will give you lasting peace in this place”’” (Jer. 14:13 NIV). False teachers are very similar. They teach things that make people happy. Paul warned Timothy of just that. “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Tim. 4:3 NIV). How many times have you heard Christians say that they don’t like to hear negative things? Only speak positive and uplifting things; don’t speak about difficult things or about sin or repentance. No one wants to hear about those things. False teachers are in the business of giving people messages that make them feel good, and therefore those messages don’t deal with sin.
Let’s get back to 2 Peter. In the second half of 2:1 Peter says, “They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves.” It is not that the heresies are secrets as such. It is more that they introduce the heresies from outside the church and bring them into the church. The teaching of the false teachers has its origins outside of the apostolic testimony to Christ. It comes from pagan ideas or godless philosophies. In the case of the false teaching that is invading the church at present, the teaching is often just the excesses of culture baptised to make it sound Christian. This is the problem with the so called Prosperity Gospel. Our culture is bent on self-aggrandisement and self-advancement. Healing and wealth for everyone sounds wonderful and we want these things so we listen eagerly to the false teaching. It is possible to get the Bible to say all kinds of things if you cherry pick verses and ignore others.
Other false teachings come from the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. I went to a conference at a church last year and what they taught there was basically Gnosticism dressed up with a few Bible verses taken out of context and distorted. This false teaching is infecting a large amount of the church. What do these Gnostic teachings say? Gnosticism is about secret knowledge. It denies the value of physical existence and emphasises the need to become spiritual. The false teaching in many churches is based on this. They teach that humans are spiritual beings wrapped in bodies. It emphasises the spiritual over the physical as if we do not serve God in our bodies. I don’t have time to go further into this particular heresy at this point.
Instead let’s consider the next point that Peter makes, that is, false teachers deny the sovereign Lord who bought them. False teachers may deny the sovereign Lord who bought them either by their teaching or by the way they live. Let’s consider the teaching first. One specialty of false teachers is to imply that the blood of Christ is not enough to bring us to God. No one comes right out and says, “Jesus is not enough. You need to do this and that extra.” But they certainly imply it by the way in which Jesus is sidelined in their teaching. I often joke about writing a book called Seven Steps to Something or Other because that is the way to make money. People write the kind of books that tell us seven steps to entering the presence of God, or seven steps to answered prayer, etc. Everyone likes a formula and these kinds of teachings pander to that need. At the root of this is the idea that Jesus is not enough to take us to God; we must do something further. This is one way to deny the Lord who bought us.
Another kind of false teaching that effectively denies Christ is to make Jesus nothing more than an example. Sometimes Jesus is put on the same level of example as Moses or Daniel or another Bible character. We know that Jesus is not merely our example in the faith, although he certainly is at least that. But Jesus is not on the same level as other biblical characters. Moses is not the Saviour of the world. Daniel is not God come in the flesh. Peter and Paul are not the King of kings or Lord of lords. False teachers tend to downplay the truth about who Jesus actually is as Lord, King, Creator and Saviour. They may not outright deny his deity, but often they simply don’t bring this up at all.
Because false teachers downplay the significance of Christ, we would have to include certain Anglicans in this list, such as those who deny the resurrection of Christ or who deny that he did miracles or who deny some of the words of Jesus. For these people salvation comes to us another way, not through the blood of Christ and his resurrection. It is all about being a moral person or through pursuing justice. Neither being moral nor being concerned with justice is wrong, but they certainly don’t save you. In addition, morality and justice end up being defined by the false teacher instead of by the Bible. So it is wrong they say, for example, to deny homosexuals the right to marry. Justice, they claim, requires that we fight for this right.
The other way in which false teachers deny the sovereign Lord who bought them is by their lives. As I already noted, false teachers often ignore the topic of sin altogether because it is unpopular. But they also live as if God is not holy, that is, in self-indulgent living. There are no biblical boundaries to their behaviour. Since sin is not something to consider at all, there is no reason not to be immoral.
But it is not just the false teachers who end up living immoral lives, but those who hear their teaching. “Many will follow their depraved conduct and will bring the way of truth into disrepute” (v 2). This is the nature of leaders. If someone who sounds amazing and looks powerful and influential comes along, we are wont to follow after that person. If that person is immoral it gives other people licence to do the same (compare Heb 13:7 about following godly leaders). Christians can be easily led astray by false teachers. This is one very important reason why the false teachers must be exposed for what they are. What people believe flows out into what they do.
When Christians follow the immoral and unholy behaviour of false teachers, this brings the way of truth into disrepute. People outside the church see what Christians do and how they act. So if we live immoral lives then it is difficult to preach the gospel successfully. If there is no godliness in the church, then who would be bothered with becoming a Christian? I think that we have all seen the fallout of the child sex abuse scandal and how that has undermined the proclamation of the gospel. Pagans can see that abusing children is wrong. So if Christians do this people are completely turned away from God and the truth.
But the false teachers do not really care about the gospel. “In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated stories.” They are, according to Peter, motivated by greed. We might hope that Christians are motivated by the glory of God and a desire to see the kingdom of God come on earth. However, false teachers, at least the kind spoken of in this letter, are not truly Christians but only masquerading as Christians. It should not come as a complete surprise to us that there are false Christians in the church since “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14 NIV). Greed is a great motivation. It motivated Judas to betray Jesus (Matt. 26:14-16 NIV) and it motivates others to abandon truth and righteousness in order to satisfy their desires.
The false teachers exploit people with fabricated stories. Peter was turning the accusations of the heretics back on them. They said that the apostles made up stories about Jesus. Peter denies this and insists that he is an eyewitness. He turns it back on the heretics and says that actually they are the ones who invent tales in order to exploit others. Many years ago there was a woman going about claiming that she had been healed of breast cancer. She claimed that she had had a double mastectomy and God had miraculously grown new breasts. Eventually she revealed that she had lied. Those who peddle fabricated stories do so because by these they can make money and sometimes also become famous, and fame is certainly a motivation for some people.
There is a lot in these three verses, so I will sum things up. False teachers are present in the church and we must be aware of their existence. We must pay attention to what people are teaching and how they are behaving. It matters. False teaching leads people away from Jesus and thus away from salvation. It leads people into confusion and stops Christians living fruitful lives for God. And false teaching sometimes results in people living immoral lives and giving the gospel a bad name. For these reasons we cannot just ignore the false teachers that inundate us with their books and videos and sermons.