Word for Wednesday
But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. 2 Peter 2:1
Our text has some strong language as it talks about the false teachers. Peter felt very strongly about these evil people who were doing so much damage to the work of God. The words ‘damnable’ and ‘swift destruction’ are not words that any Christian – and especially Peter – would use lightly. But Peter uses them here. And if we dig a little deeper, we will find ‘damnable’ and ‘destruction’ to be the same word. What a deeply serious thing it is for anyone to take upon themselves to teach false doctrines! And there is a huge warning here, because Peter tells us that these false teachers will be among us. And they will work privily, which means using sneaky and devious tactics.
One of the false teachers’ most successful tactics is to question the Bible’s record of creation. Because the world either rejects or dismisses God as relevant, the world has no problem accepting the lies of the evolutionists. But there is a theory that some Christians agree with and even teach, that says God initiated creation billions of years ago and allowed it to evolve into what we have today. That disagrees with Genesis 1, and it disagrees with the overwhelming evidence produced by creation scientists and researchers. It’s nothing but the false teachers’ sneaky way of asking ‘Yea hath God…?’ By questioning Christ as Creator, the false teachers enable the questioning of God’s Word as accurate, Jesus Christ as God incarnate, and Christ’s redemptive work as sufficient. And that’s just the start.
Another of the devious tactics of false teachers is to bring in among the Lord’s people Bibles that differ from what the apostles delivered to us. Most of the modern-language Bibles in use today are based on a set of manuscripts known as the Alexandrian text. These manuscripts, corrupted by so-called scholars in the early centuries, disagree in many points with the manuscripts used for the Textus Receptus, the Majority (95 percent of all manuscripts) text used by the King James Version translators. They also disagree among themselves, but they don’t talk about that. Their work is just a thin edge of another wedge to water down the doctrines on which our faith is based.
One of the attributes of God that is prominent throughout the Scriptures is His holiness. Over and over we read of the absolute holiness that God requires to meet His standard. But the false teachers of today would shrug off that aspect of God, declaring Him to be a loving Father Who will overlook the indiscretions of people. They downplay God’s declaration that fornication, homosexuality, and other vile practices are sinful and wrong. Young people are especially vulnerable to this false doctrine, but it can affect any of us.
The sneaky lies of the false teachers will produce nothing but destruction. May it not be the destruction of the testimonies of God’s dear people! – Jim MacIntosh