Posted in theology

What false teachers think they look like, and what they actually look like

By Elizabeth Prata

False teachers creep into the church almost unnoticed. They hide their true faith, which is faith in themselves, propelled by satan and satanic desires. In other words, they oppose God in every way. They aren’t believers, but God knows this and has already marked them out for condemnation.

They think that if they adopt the right outer garments, speak the right things, adopt the right behavior and perform the right postures, they will blend in. Some do, for a while. But sin always reveals itself eventually. Either their false doctrine or their sinful lifestyle will expose them to the discerning believer. The inner becomes outer.

They think they blend in, but God has stationed discerning faithful at his watchtowers of His churches. We can spot them. This is what they look like to us. Their faces betray the twisted inner self of their nasty soul.

AI generated

Nathaniel Jolly has written an essay for G3 Ministries about the danger false teachers pose. I urge you to go to the link below and read the piece in its entirety. He goes through the book of Jude and explains the five metaphors Jude uses to illustrate the danger of false teachers. And they are dangerous.

These false teachers are hidden reefs, clouds without water, autumn trees without fruit, waves of sea foam, wandering stars.

Their aim is to corrupt your soul. If you are not a genuine believer yet, their goal is to draw you away. If you are a genuine believer, you cannot lose your salvation, but you can lose time in producing fruit for the glory of the Lord. You can be swayed from the center line of the doctrines, and minimized in your effectiveness for His church during the time you followed such and such false teacher.

Therefore, false teachers pose a very real danger to you and your local church. Many safety officers advise being situationally aware:

situation awareness
conscious knowledge of the immediate environment and the events that are occurring in it. Situation awareness involves perception of the elements in the environment, comprehension of what they mean and how they relate to one another, and projection of their future states. In ergonomics, for example, it refers to the operator’s awareness of the current status and the anticipated future status of a system,” According to the American Psychological Association.

In all the definitions I read, the ultimate goal of good situational awareness is so that the person can make good decisions. You gather intel from all the situations around you on a constant basis, being aware of locations, events, atmospheres. After collecting those elements, make your decision. It’s sometimes not even a conscious process, but it always an ongoing one. Or should be. In the case of the Christian in church, first we test all things, (1 Thessalonians 5:21), so that we can make good decisions. We collect information on teachings, hymns, concepts, of whatever comes across our path in church or out that has the name of Jesus attached to it. Then we make our decisions whether to follow that teacher, sing that hymn, watch that show. We decide whether to raise an alarm with elders, share with the spouse, or protect the kids.

As always when I speak of discernment, be vigilant. Be sober. (1 Peter 5:8). And read Nathaniel’s article! 🙂

Posted in theology

They crept in

By Elizabeth Prata

For certain people have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into indecent behavior and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. (Jude 1:4).

For context, Jude is opening his letter by saying he’d wanted to speak of the faith and their common salvation, but must change his intended topic to one of discernment. He warned against false teachers in the next verses, including the one above.

There are so many parts to this verse to explore and chew on. Today, let’s look at the first phrase, ‘certain people have crept in unnoticed’. The question is, WHY was it unnoticed? Why didn’t the people notice the false teachers among them? It all starts with destructive heresies, ungodly men creeping in unnoticed. And why aren’t they noticed?

Because Christians today all too often fail to be familiar with the real thing, foregoing Bible study, quiet time, prayers, and worship, so that when the counterfeit shows up, being only subtly different from the Truth, it goes unnoticed.

Where do they creep into? They creep into houses, as was the custom of that day, and today, by television or podcast or books. They creep into the church as a tare. They creep in to the ministry as a false teacher. They creep in, and the majority of the population of the place are unaware.

At night, especially if you live in the south, or in a city apartment building in the north, cockroaches scamper about. While you sleep, they creep in to your cupboards and nibble on your food. They scuttle in, while you are sleeping unaware. They come out at night to eat and cavort over your clean counters, they creep in and you don’t notice them…until one day you spot a dropping. And another day another dropping, then a pile of droppings. Likening false teachers to cockroaches is an apt metaphor.

They creep in, they are unwelcome, they hide as long as they can, until the putrid fruit of their presence is detected. Southerners, knowing the frequency with which cockroaches like to invade, will protect the house. They have regular pest control measures. Do you want cockroaches crawling over your baby as he sleeps sweetly in the crib? Of course not! So protective measures are taken to keep the house free of pests.

So it should be with churches. Jude is a protective measure, dispensing wisdom from experience and a purity of truth from the Holy Spirit

Peter also is a protective measure against the pestilence of false teaching and the people who bring it. There is a parallel verse to Jude,

But false prophets also appeared among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. (2 Peter 2:1).

Barnes’ Notes on Peter’s verse: “[T]here were artful and wicked men who had crept into the church, pretending to be religious teachers, but whose doctrines tended to sap the very foundations of truth. The apostle Peter, describing these same persons, says, “who privily shall bring in damnable heresies.” See the notes, 2 Peter 2:1. Substantially the same idea is expressed here by saying that they “had crept in unawares;” that is, they had come in “by stealth;” they had not come by a bold and open avowal of their real sentiments. They professed to teach the Christian religion, when in fact they denied some of its fundamental doctrines; they professed to be holy, when in fact they were living most scandalous lives. In all ages there have been men who were willing to do this for base purposes.”

They creep in, and insinuate themselves into the minds and hearts of their prey. The prey, (us), are unaware they are being devoured by a predator, and when discovered can’t believe the wolf is really a wolf. “But he’s so nice!” they say. “She helped me!” they cry. “It can’t be true!” and they disbelieve this person or that certain person is really false. Like kudzu, overnight the tentacles have grown and clung on. Disentangling now is unworkable and difficult.

Meanwhile, as Barnes mentioned, what are the ‘base purposes’ for which they have crept in? We know one of them is greed. (2 Peter 2:3, 2 Corinthians 2:17). They have other appetites they want to satiate, too. (Romans 16:18). Whatever their base desires, they are immoral. Greed, lust, fame, pride…whatever it is that the false teacher seeks, they find it by preying on unwary Christians. They peddle His word for dishonest gain. They contradict holy precepts and upright living required by God of His people and especially of His ministers.

Too often we forget we are in a war. With all the talk of winsomeness and seekers and love…we forget that we give sin no quarter. We kill it. We forget that there are active and present enemies out to kill US, to draw us away, or to pollute our souls, or to deceive us. The enemy wants to destroy our witness. He wants to do anything against Christ that he can, and will stop at nothing short of God’s own boundaries to get it done.

We slay sin, we tear down philosophies, we anathematize false teachers. Those are fighting words. So, dear sister, fight!

EPrata painting

Posted in discernment, Uncategorized

Michael did not rebuke satan

But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.” These men, however, slander what they do not understand, and like irrational animals,  (Jude 1:9-10a).

V. 9. The archangel Michael was sent to bury Moses’ body, but … the devil argued with the angel about the body, apparently claiming the right to dispose of it. But Michael, though powerful and authoritative, did not dare dispute with Satan, so he left the matter in God’s hands, saying, The Lord rebuke you! The false teachers Jude spoke of had no respect for authority or for angels. The apostates’ slandering of celestial beings (v. 8) stands in arrogant contrast to the chief angelic being, Michael, who would not dare slander Satan, chief of the fallen angels.
V. 10. Whereas Michael did not dare accuse the devil, these apostates, by contrast spoke abusively against what they did not understand. This abusive speech may refer to their slandering of angels (v. 8). Their understanding was debased, for it followed only natural animal instinct. The apostates’ only “reasoning” was like that of unreasoning animals. Rather than comprehending what was above them (the angels), they really understood only what was below them (the animals).

Pentecost, E. C. (1985). Jude. In J. F. Walvoord & R. B. Zuck (Eds.), The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures (Vol. 2, p. 921). Wheaton, IL: Victor Books.

And yet today, how daringly some make claims and slander celestial beings. People prance around, “binding” satan, calling him names, asserting power over territory, and claiming to have understandings that only show their brutishness as unreasoning animals.

We (I) should be careful not to disrespect saints, pagans, or celestial beings of God’s order. Glimpses of angels holy and unholy in books like Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, and glimpses like this one in Jude of the archangel Michael, show how majestic and powerful they are. We don’t have the right to slander them, or each other, nor certainly Jesus. Yet we hear things all the time that impugn Jesus’ nature or His created order and His people.

Today’s prayer:

Lord help me to mind the example shown to us here in Jude. I pray for your intervening help on matters involving satan, let me not rebuke him but rely on You and Your power only. Help guard my tongue, let me speak holy things, helpful things, hospitable things. In Your name I pray this.

abilgaard

N.A Abilgaard, L’Archange saint Michel et Satan se disputant le corps de Moïse, 1782, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Danemark.

Posted in discernment, Uncategorized

Jude’s dreamers and Beth Moore’s necromancy

Consider this statement from Jude 1:8. Jude is talking about ungodly people, false teachers who are already marked out for condemnation, grace-perverters.

Yet in like manner these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones.

Look at the part of the verse which casts a negative light on their reliance on dreams, where I’d underlined. What kind of dreams are meant here? MacArthur Commentary,

The wicked behavior of such men derives from their dreaming a term that Jude uses to identify these apostates as phony visionaries. The New Testament normally uses the noun onar to refer to dreams (Matthew 1:20, 2:12, 13, 19, 22, 27:19), but here Jude chose a form of the verb enupniazo, which is used only one other place int he New Testament, Acts 2:17. In that passage, Peter (preaching on the Day of Pentecost) declared, “‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

Joel’s prophecy (Joel 2:28-32) and its affirmation in Peter’s sermon show that the dreams in question may refer to revelatory dreams (rather than normal dreams). During the Tribulation, prophecies, revelations and visions that have now ceased will return, along with divine revelation. God will speak to people through dreams, just as he did earlier in biblical history )e.g., Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, and others).

False teachers often claim dreams as authoritative divine source for their “new truths” which are really just lies and distortions. Such claims allow apostates to substitute their own counterfeit authority for God’s true scriptural authority

At this point in writing the essay I decided to Google some quotes where a famous false teacher had mentioned dreams and end it there. I started with Beth Moore because she’s been around longest and had a higher likelihood of a quote somewhere regarding being a ‘dreamer’ as Jude puts it. I was absolutely shocked as this result came up on Youtube. It is a clip from the LifeToday program on television with James Robison from 6 years ago. At least, Moore mentions that she was 53 years old in the clip and she is 59 years old as of this writing. The 10-minute clip shows Moore describing a dream that she had had, and then its meaning and interpretation. But it’s worse than just a revelatory dream. Much worse.

In the clip, Moore fervently affirms that she just loves Jesus so much and the dream ‘he’ gave her just makes her love ‘him’ all the more. Moore’s friend is Mary Beth Chapman, wife of Grammy and Dove Award winning recording artist, Steven Curtis Chapman. About a year and a half prior to Moore’s dream, her friend Mary Beth had tragically lost her adopted Chinese daughter Maria to a car accident. Mary Beth had been in deep grief.

Moore opened by explaining that in all her 53 years she did not dream that vividly and she never had a dream from God. Though she’d repeatedly prayed and asked for Him to send her a dream,  she explained that God ‘said’ to her that “some people are just safer with the Word on the page.” (1:31 in the clip. By the way, this is an admission that Moore seeks extrabiblical revelation, and that she knows exactly that dreams are extrabiblical revelation).

Her dream involved seeing Mary Beth at a sound stage about to speak to an audience, with her dead daughter holding her hand, in a body and dressed in a white shirt with chunky bangs. At the time, Mary Beth Chapman hadn’t written her book and was not touring sound stages speaking to audiences. Not yet.

The glaring problem with Moore’s description of the dead child is that the redeemed of heaven do not have bodies yet.

Moore explained that every night she prays He would send her a dream or a manifestation, she seeks it earnestly. Luke 11:29 and Luke 11:16 state that an evil generation seeks a sign. So her first mistake was to test the Lord by continually asking for a dream or a manifestation. (her words).

Her second mistake was not recognizing instantly that the dream she’d had was not from the Lord. Why? God abhors communing with the dead. It is a practice that He strenuously forbade the Israelites to engage in (Deuteronomy 18:10-12), calling it an abomination. The New Testament is also firm against sorcery, divination, and necromancy. (Galatians 5:19-21, Revelation 21:8).

Necromancy is defined as the conjuring of the spirits of the dead for purposes of magically revealing the future or influencing the course of events. In the Bible, necromancy is also called “divination,” “sorcery” and “spiritism” and is forbidden many times in Scripture (Leviticus 19:26; Deuteronomy 18:10; Galatians 5:19-20; Acts 19:19) as an abomination to God. It is something that the Lord speaks very strongly against and is to be avoided as much as any evil. (source

There is no reason to believe that a deceased person has any ability to leave heaven or hell in order to visit his living family members. Any such claim is a demonic deception (2 Corinthians 11:14-15). God declared such practices to be abhorrent to Him, and those who did practice such things in Israel were to be put to death (Leviticus 20:27; Deuteronomy 18:10-12). Satan would like nothing more than for people to dabble in the occult world of spiritism and necromancy. (source)

Moore’s third mistake was interpreting the dream herself. Genesis 40:8 plainly says that interpretations belong to God. Moore went on in the clip to interpret the dream herself. She said that the dream meant that Mary Beth was being called by God to speak in front of audiences. She further interpreted that God sent the dream to Moore and not to Chapman because it was too soon after the accident for Chapman as a mother to be able to handle seeing her daughter.

 Chapman said in an interview that she had desired a dream, too. She and her husband desired to see their dead daughter.

After the accident, we avoided the house for several days. We were begging God to show us himself in this, because this was clearly the darkest place he had taken us, and we were drowning. We were like, God, please, let us see. Let us see Maria. Let us have a dream. Let us see something so we know that you’re here. (Mary Beth Chapman)

The scriptures say,

For the living know they will die; but the dead do not know anything, nor have they any longer a reward, for their memory is forgotten. 6Indeed their love, their hate and their zeal have already perished, and they will no longer have a share in all that is done under the sun. (Ecc 9:5-6)

The dead no longer have a share in what is done under the sun. As for the desire to see a dead person,

Scripture never indulges that desire. In the Old Testament era, every attempt to communicate with the dead was deemed a sin on par with sacrificing infants to false gods (Deuteronomy 18:10–12). The Hebrew Scriptures say comparatively little about the disposition of souls after death, and the people of God were strictly forbidden to inquire further on their own. Necromancy was a major feature of Egyptian religion. It also dominated every religion known among the Canaanites. But under Moses’ law it was a sin punishable by death (Leviticus 20:27). Dead Men Tell No Tales

Moore’s dream is the exact definition of necromancy. In OT times, doing what Moore did, summoning a dream or a manifestation of a dead person and basing personal interpretations of future events on that dream was punishable by death.

Jude disparaged ‘dreamers’ and their reliance on their ‘dreams’ because dreaming is a dangerous activity. Sin never sits still. It deepens. It begins with one little sin not repented of, and another and another. It continues with straying from church, the Bible, prayer. It deepens with increased satanic activity surrounding you, traversing the abominable territory into personal revelations. Once a false teacher is comfortable with constant alleged personal revelations, then come the dreams, and then the necromancy, and finally, death, either sooner or later.

In Saul’s case, in the one and only case of communing with the dead, the Lord allowed a summoning of Samuel the Prophet through the Witch of Endor to demonstrate to Saul how far gone he was into the deep things of satan.You also notice that the witch already had a “familiar spirit.” (KJV). Samuel’s appearance was only to confirm Saul’s imminent doom.

This essay has a two-fold purpose. One, to show you again, how deeply Moore is apostate, and to warn you to avoid her. Secondly it is to remind you (and me) that sin never sits still, it is always on the move, prowling. (1 Peter 5:8). As sin moves, it deepens. It gets worse over time if unrepented of, never better.

There are only two ways to go in our walk on earth. One will be on the narrow road or on the broad road. One leads to destruction and eternal death, one leads to eternal life. Walk, or as Paul sometimes said, run, indicates movement. Sin never stays still. You either move toward the “deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10) or you move toward the deep things of satan (Revelation 2:24). When one begins to seek voices and personal direct revelation from God and accept them, one is already far down the path of the deeper things of satan. When one dreams and believes the dreams are from God, it’s a dangerous thing. You then begin relying on the dreams and not “the Word on the page” (as Moore admitted above). Jude says of those who rely on dreams “defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones.” When dreams turn to summoning the dead, and interpreting their activity into future earthly events, you’re already an abomination to God because you are a necromancer. Necromancers do not go to heaven.

Don’t dabble in dreams, nor should we ask for them. Don’t accept personal revelations, but repent of them. That Beth Moore did not recognize her necromancy dream as an abomination but attributed what was in fact the deep things of satan to God, just shows her blindness and abominable status before our holy Lord. Jude was serious, saying

Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. (Jude 1:3-4)

———————————————

End Note:

I’m posting these screen shots of the video with closed captioning in case the video is deleted (which Moore’s criticized videos often are.) I also saved the transcript of the video and I’ll post that if the video is deleted later.

Here, Moore admits she constantly asks God to show her a manifestation or give her a dream.

Here, Moore claims to see Mary Beth Chapman’s dead child Maria in body and describes her face, hair and clothes.