Which preachers are false prophets

He invades the Sunday school, the youth department, the Christian education program, and even the pulpit. Thousands of uninstructed Christians are being deceived today. False teachers use high-sounding words that seem like the height of logic, scholarship, and culture.

They are intellectually clever and crafty in their sophistry. They are adept at beguiling thoughtless, untaught men and women. These false teachers have departed from the faith of God revealed in the Scripture. So they themselves became the mouthpiece of Satan, speaking lies. Because the Church, in turning to naturalistic religion, increasingly proclaims a humanistic gospel, thousands of laymen and clergymen alike are asking penetrating questions about the purpose and mission of the Church.

Thousands of loyal church members are beginning to meet in prayer groups and Bible study groups. Many of them are becoming disillusioned with the institutional church.

They are hungry for a personal and vital experience with Jesus Christ. They want a heartwarming, personal faith. Although man was expelled from the Garden of Eden, he still carried a God-consciousness within his heart. Thus centuries ago came false, counterfeit, or naturalistic religion. The two altar fires outside Eden illustrate the difference between true faith and false faith. One belonged to Abel, who brought of the first of his flock as an offering to the Lord God.

He offered it in love, in adoration, in humility, and in reverence, and the Bible says that the Lord had respect for Abel and his offering. This story teaches that there is a right way and a wrong way to worship God.

Abel made his sacrifice humbly and reverently, and he came the way God told him to come. Cain made his sacrifice grudgingly, selfishly, and superficially; and he disobeyed God in the way he came, because he came without true faith. When God did not sanction and bless his sacrifice, Cain became angry and used violence—he killed his brother.

This is the position some of our church leaders would have us take today. They have become angry with the world and are determined to use violence to change the social structures of society. Here we see the emergence of a stream of false faith. From that time to this, man has been continuously torn between the true and the false, the worship of idols and the worship of the Lord God, the lure of humanism and materialism and the plain biblical teaching of the way of salvation.

This tension exists in the Church today. There are those who hold that even evangelism should be reinterpreted along the lines of social engineering, political pressure, and even violent revolution. We are witnessing today the greatest emphasis on ecclesiastical organizations, resolutions, pronouncements, lobbying, picketing, demonstrating—and now even a call for violence—to bring into being and enforce the social changes envisioned by church leaders as a part of the world where the Church shall be the dominating influence.

They feel that society must be compelled to submit to their ideas of social change. They say that this is the major part of the Christian mission. However, the vast majority of pastors and Christians throughout America believe that the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ is redemptive. But the Church today is in danger of moving off the main track and getting lost on a siding.

We have been trying to solve every ill of society as though society were made up of regenerate, born-again men to whom we had an obligation to speak with Christian advice. We should realize that though the law must guarantee human rights and restrain those who violate those rights, whenever men lack sympathy for the law they will not long respect it, even if they cannot repeal it.

The government may try to legislate Christian behavior, but it soon finds that man remains unchanged. The only way to change men is to get them converted to Jesus Christ. My heart is hungry for spiritual nourishment. A President of the United States once said that he was sick and tired of hearing preachers give advice on international affairs when they did not have the facts straight.

I am convinced that if the Church went back to its main task of preaching the Gospel and getting people converted to Christ, it would have far more impact on the social structure of the nation than it can possibly have in any other way. And he said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? Here was a test case. A man brought an economic problem to Jesus. In this case, perhaps the younger son was claiming more than his third, or perhaps the older brother had seized more than his allotted two-thirds.

It is not likely that this man would have faced Jesus with an unjust or an unreasonable demand. We therefore give him the benefit of the doubt. In response, troops hired by the city's prince-bishop laid siege to the city. Fifteen months later the besieged inhabitants were starving, and, in the dead of the night, five men slipped out. Separated from his fellow escapees, Henry Gresbeck gambled with his life by approaching enemy troops.

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