Those of you who spend a great deal of time watching Christian televison or listening to Christian radio will attest there is no shortage of media prophets on the air today. How are we to know which ones are real and which ones come as ravenous wolves in sheep's clothing? Being a blogger for a Christian theme blog, I am being sent things in my email from readers and friends asking my opinion on a variety of things; one of which is sometimes a prophetic message given to someone in hopes of spreading it via the Internet. In the Sermon on the Mount, Mathew 7:15-20, Jesus warns us to beware of false prophets. How are we to know them? According to Jesus, "We are to know them by their fruit."
What is a prophet? Being a prophet is not neccessarily someone who fortells the future. A prophet is a proclaimer of truth; a person who speaks for others. Many of the people today are of the misconception that it is only a person who fortells of certain events is a prophet; for example, the destruction of the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001. There were a number of people who made this prediction, one of which was Tom Clancy in his book, THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, in a strikingly similar scenario where radical Islamic jihadists crashed planes into the World Trade Towers. Of course, when Hollywood got into making the book into a movie, the bad guys were Neo Nazis, not Islamic jihadists. This prediction was relatively easy to make since there was a prior attempt to bring down the towers in 1992. The point here is, that it is easy for someone who made this prediction to be sucked into the belief that he or she is a prophet; and I know of one such self proclaimed prophet who has done just that. Most of his other predictions have either failed to take place, or were completely wrong to start with. He is now circulating via the Internet a prophetic message concerning the current President of the United States. While his prophesy is a possibility, it is diametrically opposed by others who do not shout out the fact that they are prophets,by consensus that the opposite will happen. The reason why they have not shouted their message is that they feel if they did, it would hurt the person whom the prophesy concerns, causing ridicule and fuel for criticism, something this person doesn't need at this time. I did a little checking into this particular prophet and found that his track record was not very good. It seems that you only hear of the predictions that he got right and not the ones he didn't. Most prophets who stick their necks out with times and dates usually end up regretting their decision to go public with their prophesy. Even people like Benny Hinn and Rod Parsley. Does this mean that they are false prophets? No. It means they are human and like everyone else, they can be presumptive, they can misspeak and they can be wrong. The Apostle Paul mentions on more than one ocassion how the tongue can get us into trouble if we are not careful.
The false prophet is one who uses deception to mislead, and often leads away from the Word of God, in the arena of cultism for power or money. Jim Jones, the so called spiritual leader of the 909 people who drank the kool aide laced with cyanide, in a mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in South America, back 1978 was probably the best known false prophet that I know about in my lifetime. Jones, whose ministry, Peoples Temple Agricultural Project headquartered in San Francisco, at one time, was operating under the guise of the Gifts of the Spirit in gathering his believers.
In researching this article, I went on the Internet to find references to what a modern day false prophet may look like. There is an over abundance of websites whose sole purpose is to expose false prophets. According to one site I visited, anyone who has a television program is a false prophet; people like, Joyce Meyer, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Fred Price, T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, John Hagee, and scores of others whom I have a great deal of respect. This site doesn't give the person's name who is making these charges, but he is just one of many such bloggers or webmasters that have this opinion. Frankly, there are times when I think there is a little too much show biz associated with a particular TV program, however, there are a lot of good, well meaning people in the ministry who have at one time or another put their foot in their mouth. That goes for myself as well and certainly most everyone who stands behind a pulpit every Sunday.
Dan Casey
