Sermon Tone Analysis

7:15 Beware Meaning “be alert” or “be watchful.”

false prophets Refers to those whose teaching contradicts Jesus’ teaching.

Beginning in , Jesus has reinterpreted the established religious and social norms of His day.

Here, He portrays those who contradict His instruction as false prophets—people who falsely claim to speak on God’s behalf (compare and note).

sheep’s clothing Refers to disguises that portray innocence.

ravenous wolves Describes those seeking to undermine Jesus’ teaching for personal gain.

Faithlife Study Bible

Then Jesus warns against false prophets (vv.

15–23).

The false prophets popularize the broad road by advocating a lawless way of life.

They are easily recognized, for what they do reveals what they are (vv.

15–20), and what they do contradicts what they say (vv.

21–23).

In verse 23b “evildoers” (lit.

workers of lawlessness) shows that the antinomian does not really live without law; he chooses his own law instead of God’s.

ALMOST every phrase and word in this section would ring an answering bell in the minds of the Jews who heard it for the first time.

The Jews knew all about false prophets.

Jeremiah, for instance, had his conflict with the prophets who said: ‘ “Peace, peace”, when there is no peace’ (Jeremiah 6:14, 8:11).

Wolves was the very name by which false rulers and false prophets were called.

In the bad days, Ezekiel had said: ‘Its officials within it are like wolves tearing the prey, shedding blood, destroying lives to get dishonest gain’ (Ezekiel 22:27).

Zephaniah drew a grim picture of the state of things in Israel, when ‘The officials within it are roaring lions; its judges are evening wolves that leave nothing until the morning.

Its prophets are reckless, faithless persons’ (Zephaniah 3:3–4).

When Paul was warning the elders of Ephesus of dangers to come, as he took a last farewell of them, he said: ‘Savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock’ (Acts 20:29).

Jesus said that he was sending out his disciples as sheep in the midst of wolves (Matthew 10:16); and he told of the good shepherd who protected the flock from the wolves with his life (John 10:12).

Here indeed was a picture which everyone could recognize and understand.

He said that the false prophets were like wolves in sheep’s clothing.

When the shepherd watched his flocks upon the hillside, his garment was a sheepskin, worn with the skin outside and the fleece inside.

But a man might wear a shepherd’s dress and still not be a shepherd.

The prophets had acquired a conventional dress.

Elijah had a mantle (1 Kings 19:13, 19), and that mantle had been a hairy cloak (2 Kings 1:8).

That sheepskin mantle had become the uniform of the prophets, just as the Greek philosophers had worn the philosopher’s robe.

It was by that mantle that the prophet could be distinguished from other men.

But sometimes that form of dress was worn by those who had no right to it, for Zechariah in his picture of the great days to come says: ‘They will not put on a hairy mantle in order to deceive’ (Zechariah 13:4).

There were those who wore a prophet’s cloak but who lived anything but a prophet’s life.

There were false prophets in the ancient days, but there were also false prophets in New Testament times.

Matthew was written about AD 85, and at that time prophets were still an institution in the Church.

They had no fixed abode, and had given up everything to wander throughout the country, bringing to the churches a message which they believed to come directly from God.

At their best, the prophets were the inspiration of the Church, for they had abandoned everything to serve God and the Church of God.

But the office of prophet was singularly liable to abuse.

There were some who used it to gain prestige and to impose on the generosity of local congregations, and so live a life of comfortable and even pampered idleness.

The Didachē is the first order book of the Christian Church; it dates to about AD 100; and its regulations concerning these wandering prophets are very illuminating.

A true prophet was to be held in the highest honour; he was to be welcomed; his word must never be disregarded, and his freedom must never be curtailed; but ‘He shall remain one day, and, if necessary, another day also; but if he remain three days, he is a false prophet.’

He must never ask for anything but bread.

‘If he asks for money, he is a false prophet.’

Prophets all claim to speak in the Spirit, but there is one acid test: ‘By their characters a true and a false prophet shall be known.’

‘Every prophet that teacheth the truth, if he do not what he teacheth, is a false prophet.’

If a prophet, claiming to speak in the Spirit, orders a table and a meal to be set before him, he is a false prophet.

‘Whosoever shall say in the Spirit: Give me money or any other things, ye shall not hear him; but if he tell you to give in the matter of others who have need, let no one judge him.’

If a wanderer comes to a congregation, and wishes to settle there, if he has a trade, ‘let him work and eat’.

If he has no trade, ‘consider in your wisdom how he may not live with you as a Christian in idleness … But if he will not do this, he is a trafficker in Christ.

Beware of such’ (Didachē, chapters 11–12).

Past history and present events made the words of Jesus meaningful to those who heard them for the first time, and to those to whom Matthew transmitted them.

KNOWN BY THEIR FRUITS

Matthew 7:15–20 (contd)

THE Jews, the Greeks and the Romans all used the idea that a tree is to be judged by its fruits.

‘Like root, like fruit,’ ran the proverb.

Epictetus was later to say: ‘How can a vine grow not like a vine but like an olive, or, how can an olive grow not like an olive but like a vine?’ (Epictetus, Discourses, 2:20).

Seneca declared that good cannot grow from evil any more than a fig tree can from an olive.

But there is more in this than meets the eye.

‘Are grapes gathered from thorns?’ asked Jesus.

There was a certain thorn, the buckthorn, which had little black berries which closely resembled little grapes.

‘Or figs from thistles?’

There was a certain thistle which had a flower which, at least at a distance, might well be taken for a fig.

The point is real, and relevant, and salutary.

There may be a superficial resemblance between the true and the false prophet.

The false prophet may wear the right clothes and use the right language; but you cannot sustain life with the berries of a buckthorn or the flowers of a thistle; and the life of the soul can never be sustained with the food which a false prophet offers.

The real test of any teaching is: does it strengthen people to bear the burdens of life, and to walk in the way wherein they ought to go?

Let us then look at the false prophets and see their characteristics.

If the way is difficult and the gate is so narrow that it is hard to find, then we must be very careful to get ourselves teachers who will help us to find it, and not teachers who will lure us away from it.

The basic fault of false prophets is self-interest.

True shepherds care for the flock more than they care for their own lives; wolves care for nothing but to satisfy their own gluttony and their own greed.

False prophets are in the business of teaching not for what they can give to others, but for what they can get out of it for themselves.

The Jews were alive to this danger.

The Rabbis were the Jewish teachers, but it was one of the most important principles of Jewish law that a Rabbi must have a trade by which he earned his living, and must on no account accept any payment for teaching.

Rabbi Zadok said: ‘Make the knowledge of the law neither a crown wherewith to make a show, nor a spade wherewith to dig.’ Rabbi Hillel said: ‘He who uses the crown of the law for external aims fades away.’

The Jews knew all about teachers who used their teaching self-interestedly for no other reason than to make a profit for themselves.

There are three ways in which teachers can be dominated by self-interest.

(1) They may teach solely for gain.

It is told that there was trouble in the Church in the Scottish town of Ecclefechan, where Thomas Carlyle’s father was an elder.

It was a dispute between the congregation and the minister on a matter of money and of salary.

When much had been said on both sides, Carlyle’s father rose and uttered one devastating sentence: ‘Give the hireling his wages, and let him go.’

No one can live on nothing, and few can do their best work when the pressure of material things is too fiercely on them; but the great privilege of teaching is not the pay it offers but the thrill of opening the minds of children, and young people, and men and women to the truth.

(2) They may teach solely for prestige.

They may teach in order to help others, or they may teach to show how clever they are.

The theologian James Denney once said a savage thing: ‘No man can at one and the same time prove that he is clever and that Christ is wonderful.’

Prestige is the last thing that the great teachers desire.

J. P. Struthers was a saint of God.

He spent all his life in the service of the little Reformed Presbyterian Church when he could have occupied any pulpit in Britain.

People loved him, and the better they knew him the more they loved him.

Two men were talking of him.

One man knew all that Struthers had done, but did not know Struthers personally.

Remembering Struthers’ saintly ministry, he said: ‘Struthers will have a front seat in the kingdom of heaven.’

The other had known Struthers personally, and his answer was: ‘Struthers would be miserable in a front seat anywhere.’

There are some teachers and preachers who use their message as a setting for themselves.

False prophets are interested in self-display; true prophets desire self-obliteration.

(3) They may teach solely to transmit their own ideas.

False prophets are out to disseminate their own versions of the truth; true prophets are out to proclaim God’s truth.

It is quite true that we must think all things out for ourselves; but it was said of John Brown, the eighteenth-century minister of the Scottish town of Haddington, that when he preached, repeatedly he used to pause ‘as if listening for a voice’.

True prophets listen to God before they speak.

They never forget that they are nothing more than voices to speak for God and channels through which God’s grace can come to men and women.

It is the duty of every teacher and preacher to bring to men and women not their private ideas of the truth, but the truth as it is in Jesus Christ.

THE FRUITS OF FALSENESS