Join us as we journey through the Bible with Dr. McGee, taking a closer look at how to arm ourselves against the subtle infiltration of false teachings. This episode is not only informative but also deeply moving, sharing stories of perseverance and hope. We are reminded of the critical role we play as listeners and supporters of ministries that bring light where darkness prevails. Our collective prayers and efforts contribute to transforming lives, as exemplified by Brother Ami’s story of faith and redemption.
00:00:00 Introduction and Message from 2 Peter 2:1
How firm a foundation, ye saints, of the Lord is laid for your faith.
SPEAKER 03 :
But there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you. Welcome to Through the Bible, where our teacher, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, begins with the passage that I just read from 2 Peter 2 at verse 1. I’m Steve Schwetz, your host on this five-year study through the entire Word of God, and I’m so glad that you’re here as we embark on a study that will help us understand how we can quickly identify a false teacher and then recognize their deceptive strategies. But first, Greg and I want to invite you to pray with us for a really special group of listeners, listeners that we hear about quite frequently.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, Steve. All around the world, we often talk about this. Christians are suffering for their faith. I’ve heard statistics as high as 200 million or even above Christians who are genuinely persecuted for their faith. Not just that it’s difficult or people don’t like them, but we’ve talked about the effects of persecution. People are expelled from their family. They’re fired from their job. They’re fined by the government. They’re beaten. They’re tortured. Sometimes they’re even killed. Yeah. This is a wonderful thing about the ministry God has put in our hands, and it’s why we treat it just with such sacredness, really. We are in the position to spread the seed of the gospel in places where missionaries can’t go. And so this is really a special, special part of radio, of satellite TV, of digital ministry. And we have a story today to share from a ministry that’s very well respected in our missionary world. That’s Voice of the Martyrs. They minister to the persecuted church. And, Steve, I think it would be great if you could share this story with our listening family.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, this is actually from one of the leaders of Voice of the Martyrs. His name is Brother Ami, and it talks about how he came to know Jesus Christ as his Savior, and it is such an encouraging letter. Here’s what it reads. We didn’t have the satellite channels. We had only radios. And I was listening to TWR. That’s Transworld Radio. And I had heard for the first time good stories about Jesus. I wrote down the address and sent them letters trying to convince them that they were wrong. They sent me back a letter, and I opened the letter, and I found in it a copy of the Gospel of Luke. That copy of the Gospel was designed to look like a normal letter so that they could send it to Saudi Arabia, to Iran, to Algeria. I opened the Gospel of Luke, and I started reading. As if something was happening inside me, as if I was thirsty and this was the kind of water that I was looking for. I think that’s the Holy Spirit doing his job. I said, OK, I will show this Christian that their Bible is falsified. So I started to write something. But at the end of the homework, I found that this Bible is the truth. How can the Bible be false if it encouraged me to love my enemy? I said, for us in the Quran, we are exhorted to fight back, to take revenge. But Jesus here is encouraging us to love our enemies. I started comparing the two teachings and… At the end of the road, I found myself having to make a decision. Which is from heaven and which is earthly? Which is from another source? I remember I was listening to TWR to a program whose name is Through the Bible.
SPEAKER 01 :
It is so cool.
SPEAKER 03 :
It was in Arabic and the presenter just invited the listeners to give their life to Jesus. It was October, I think 1989. I was a teenager and I knelt down and I prayed after him the prayer of salvation. This is how I come to know the Lord. And this is incredible that now Brother Rami is now part of the ministry of Voice of the Martyrs.
SPEAKER 04 :
Steve, you know me, and you know I could go on and on about this story, this letter. There’s so many wonderful elements. But one thing I just feel really compelled to say to our longtime listeners, if you’ve been listening since before 1989 and praying through the Bible, perhaps giving, but just supporting this ministry, you’ve been part of this family, I want you to think about something. You have a stake in this brother’s story. Because you supported us, we were able to be out there broadcasting. Isn’t that powerful to think about?
SPEAKER 03 :
It is incredible.
SPEAKER 04 :
And you and I both have had the privilege of working in different capacities with Through the Bible since that time. It’s just very powerful. And so we also want to point out that so frequently God does this. He reaches somebody and then they become a leader. So this was 30 plus years ago that this man was reached. Imagine all the people that he’s ministered to. So very, very powerful. And Steve, I think we have just enough time. Would you pray for our listeners and particularly the persecuted listeners around the world?
SPEAKER 03 :
Sure. I’d love to, Greg. Heavenly Father, I pray specifically for the persecuted church all around the world, as well as for those who don’t yet know you and live in places where literally having a copy of the book of Luke would mean potential death for them. I pray that you, through the power of the Holy Spirit, would open their eyes and that they would be thirsty, just like brother on me, to know that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior and that they would have the love of God as a result of being exposed to the ministry of Through the Bible. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. Now here’s Through the Bible with Dr. J. Vernon McGee.
SPEAKER 01 :
We come back today, friends, to this very marvelous little epistle of 2 Peter. It’s swan song, as we said before. Now, we have seen so far as we began the epistle, the addition of Christian graces gives assurance. As you and I grow in grace and the knowledge of Christ, and the emphasis has been upon growing and knowledge, why, it gives us an assurance. And then we saw last time the authority of the Scriptures attested by fulfilled prophecy. And today we come to apostasy brought in by false teachers. Now that begins here with chapter 2 at verse 1 and takes us actually through the entire chapter. This is quite a remarkable chapter. Now we saw last time that we have a more sure word of prophecy that’s more reliable, and your eyes are your ears. I was at the Parthenon, the ruins of it, there on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, and I always examine this to make sure I’m accurate about it, and that is that there’s not two parallel lines in the place. There’s not a straight line in the place. If you go at one end and you look down, you’ll see it comes up to a hump in the middle and then goes back down. The Greeks learned that the human eye never sees anything straight that is straight. And that’s the reason I think God says to us we are to walk by faith and not by sight. After all, you can’t even trust your own eyes, can’t trust your own ears. But you can rest upon the Word of God. And the great proof that this is the Word of God is the fact of fulfilled prophecy. Now, over one-third of the Scripture was prophetic when it was first written. And it’s not to be treated as speculation or superstition because of the fact that it has been literally a great deal of it fulfilled. Every 21 verses of Scripture is prophetic. And someone has said, “…prophecies the mold in which history is poured.” Now, fulfilled prophecy is, to me, one of the great proofs of the accuracy of Scripture. we have a more sure word of prophecy. That’s what Peter says back here in the first chapter. And one-fourth of prophecy is fulfilled. That is, one-fourth of one-third of the Bible is fulfilled prophecy. And man can’t guess like this. You see, there are 330 prophecies in the Old Testament concerning the first coming of Christ. They were all literally fulfilled. Now, would you look at that for just a moment? Man can’t guess that accurately. I might say to you today, I’d say it’s going to rain tomorrow. Now, I stand a 50-50 chance of being right because it’s either going to rain or it’s not going to rain. But according to the law of compound probability, I could be 50% right. I might stand a pretty good chance. Now suppose, though, that I say it’s going to start raining at 11 o’clock in the morning. That’s added another uncertain element. Now I only stand one-fourth of a chance. Now suppose I say it’s going to stop raining at 2 o’clock. And that adds another uncertain element. And now that has to be divided. And I stand now 12 and a half percent chance of being right. Now, you add 330 of those friends and see where you come out. Why, actually, you’d never have a chance. of it being right at all. And that’s the reason that some of the so-called prophets today, every now and then they hit it. But these so-called prophets even today miss it. They miss more than they hit. And in Israel, a false prophet was stoned to death. If what he prophesied didn’t come to pass, they just stoned him to death. That ended his career as a prophet. Well, here you have a book, and here you have fulfilled prophecy, and you can’t gainsay that type of an argument. On the basis of that now, he says, “…but there were false prophets also among the people.” Now, there were not only true prophets who prophesied, but we know that there were false prophets among the people at the time that Ahab and Jehoshaphat went out against the Syrians. You will recall that they called in a bunch of the false prophets of Baal, and they urged Ahab to go. And Jehoshaphat saw immediately they weren’t getting a word from God. And he says, don’t you have a true prophet of God here? And he said, yes, I keep him in prison because he never says anything good about me. A great many people don’t like a preacher unless he just says something nice about them all the time. Well, that was Ahab. And this prophet Micaiah just told him the truth. So they brought him in and he told him, he says, if you go to battle, you’ll be slain. And Ahab turned to Jehoshaphat and says, See, he never says anything good about me. Well, it’s too bad Ahab didn’t listen to him because he was slain just as Micaiah said he would be. But there happened to be several hundred false prophets that were there. Now, he says here, Peter does, But there were false prophets also among the people, that is, the people of Israel, even as there shall also be false teachers among you. And Dr. Vinson, in his very fine word study, says that this word for false teachers, which is pseudo-didaskaloi, this is the only place that it occurs in the New Testament. False teachers. Now, false teachers are what the church is to beware of. And as we said last time, we don’t need to pay any attention to a false prophet. He’s out of business the minute that you get around to the fulfillment of his prophecy. And you can pay no attention to false prophets. But false teachers are the danger today. And believe me, they are dangerous. Now, what is a false teacher? Well, let me give this definition. A false teacher is one who knows the truth. But he deliberately teaches lies for some purpose, either for some selfish reason, or he wants to please people, or he does it for money. And there are many that are like that today. They preach and say what people want them to say. And they’re false teachers. And some of them know what the truth is. Now, that is a false teacher. Now, a man that does it ignorantly, and some of the great reformers of the past and the post-apostolic fathers, many of them believed and taught some things that we do not hold to today. We believe they were entirely in error on those things. Now, they were not false teachers. they believed they were teaching the truth. A false teacher knows what he’s doing, and he does it deliberately because he goes on to say here, “…even as there shall be.” Now, Peter puts it out yonder in the future because it would be beyond his depth. Jude will cover very much the same ground here. And by the way, the very fact that Peter and Jude are so much alike has caused some of the critics to say one copied from the other. Let me state it a little different way. When God wants to emphasize something, he says it twice. And that’s the reason when the Lord Jesus said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, one verily is enough from him. But when he says it twice, you better sit up and listen. And so here, this is something that God considers rather important. But Jude says they’re already false teachers. So they came into the church quite early, by the way. And they’ve been in it ever since. False teachers among you who secretly shall bring in actually destructive heresies. Now, the thing that actually identifies them is that they deny the Lord that bought them and bring upon themselves swift destruction. Now, I think that you have here in this verse a good definition of false teachers. They will appear in the church as members of the church. They will claim to be Christians. And they worked secretly under cover of hypocrisy. I heard recently of a church that many years ago was a very fine, fundamental church. I’ve preached in that church, and the people love the Word of God. Well, they called a man to that church, and they questioned him about whether he believed the Scriptures or not, whether he believed in plenary verbal inspirations. And he agreed to every question they asked. And I was in that city. I won’t say where it is. After that, about two years after that, and all the members had scattered. They were going to other churches. And they said, this man, absolutely, he misrepresented. That’s what the nicer people said. And some said, he lied to us. Well, that’s exactly what he did. He came in, actually, and was a hypocrite. He said one thing and he actually believed another. Now, they have some true doctrine. There’s not a cult that I know of that does not have some truth in it. That’s the thing that makes it very dangerous, that makes it 10,000 times more dangerous than if it was 100% in error. And these teachers generally believe some things that are true. And our Lord identified them as wolves in sheep clothing. And Paul, you remember, told the church in Ephesus, he says, I know that after my decease that there will come in among you wolves in sheep clothing, and they will absolutely destroy the flock, scatter the flock. Now, that is the thing that would happen. Our Lord made it clear when he gave a picture of the condition of the kingdom after his rejection and crucifixion and resurrection. He would not establish it then, but the kingdom of heaven would. would be like a sower, it would be like a mustard tree, and it would be like leaven. And leaven has got in today to the bread. The bread is the Word of God, and there’s a lot of false teaching that goes out in that way. Now, these false teachers, they do it for a purpose, of course. Now, will you notice verse 2, “…and many shall follow their pernicious ways.” by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of. Now, they are pernicious, if you’ll notice. These false followers will go after false teachers. And I do not believe, frankly, that God’s elect can be permanently deceived. If you want to know why I believe that God permits a lot of the cults and isms is to draw away that which is false. Because those that are phony will go after that sort of thing. And that’s exactly what Paul said would take place in 1 Corinthians 11, 19. Listen to this. For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.” In other words, the genuine child of God won’t go in that direction. The Lord Jesus said, “…my sheep hear my voice.” And they won’t follow a false one. Well, when you see people take out after one of these false teachers, they’re either ignorantly deceived or they are deliberately deceived. That is what they believe. That’s what they wanted to hear all the time. Now, if you’ll notice here, there’s something that is quite interesting in the next verse. He says, “…and through covetousness shall they with fain words make merchandise of you, whose judgment now for a long time lingereth not, and their destruction slumbereth not.” Now, the word here is that they use fain words. Now, that word fain, and I have gotten down fair’s Greek lexicon to look at this word fain, and I’m going to pass on to you what he says it means. The Greek word is plastos. And it means molded or formed like clay and wax and stone. Now, plastos, does that sound like some word you’ve heard of? Yes, we have a new word. The word wasn’t even in existence in Peter’s day, and yet it was. Plastic, that’s the word that he uses here, and I love that. Now, you can buy a plastic pitcher, you can buy a plastic bucket, you can buy plastic dishes, you can buy plastic toys today, you can buy a plastic most anything today, because it can be molded into any shape that is possible. And may I say this, and I want to say it kindly, and they’re plastic preachers also that can be molded and shaped by the people that they serve. They say what the congregation wants to hear. And that’s the word that is used here. And why do they do it? And I will tell you, Simon Peter just puts it right out here in the open and through covetousness. They do it because they are covetous. Now, covetousness actually is a form of idolatry today. They use these plastic words, and that’s quite interesting. That was the thing that neo-orthodoxy, when it first appeared, deceived so many people. When I came to Pasadena, there was another preacher came about the same time. He was an outstanding liberal. I’ll not call his name. He’s known, I guess, pretty much all over the world today. And a member of his church attended my Bible class. And she said, oh, he is a sound in the faith because he uses the same language that you do. Well, I said, fine, but does he mean what I mean by it? Oh, she said, he must. And so on Easter Sunday, she called me, Dr. McGee, you’ve been wrong in criticizing this man. He spoke of the resurrection of Jesus today. And I said, did you go up and ask him afterward whether he believed that Jesus was raised bodily from the tomb? And she said, well, I’m sure he meant that. I said, I’m sure he didn’t. But you asked him. And she called me the next day and she’s weeping. And she said, you know, he just ridiculed the idea of the bodily resurrection. And I said to her, I said, you know, these fellas, they use our vocabulary, but they don’t have our dictionary. In other words, they say one thing, but the important thing is it’s not what they say, it’s what they mean by what they say. And so they are doing it for a purpose. Sometimes they’re covetous for a position, for a name, for popularity. A great many go after that. And then covetous of money. Actually, a great many are covetous in that particular connection. Now, I’m not today talking through my hat, friends. I have before me the statement that appeared in one of the very fine publications, Christian publications, and I’m not going to call names at all. And it tells about a service of a well-known evangelist, and I’m not going to give his name. I’m not telling very much today, apparently. Now, this is a service. that was written up. The pastor introduced the speaker, and he says, he’s a man after my heart because he loves money just like I love it. And the evangelist got up to speak. He was forceful. He was dynamic. He put on quite a show. And for 45 minutes, he did not read one scripture, nor did he quote one text of scripture. He quoted partially three or four verses. He used the personal pronoun I 175 times. He only referred to Jesus Christ 11 times. And there was laughter every two minutes in his message. He was quite a comedian. And an invitation was given. Some 20 young people responded to the urgings of this evangelist, and they went forward. For what? They never heard the gospel. And that is the thing that is abroad today in our land. The average church member, and I’m trying to say this kindly, but the average church member doesn’t know the gospel when he hears it or when he doesn’t hear it, which is more important. And that is the tragedy of this hour in which we live. Why? Because there are many false teachers. I could give you instance after instance that I am not talking about a theory, but I’m talking about the fact that there are false teachers abroad today. And that’s the reason I said the other day, check on all of us radio preachers. Check on me. Am I teaching the Word of God? Well, check the Word of God and see whether I am or not. And I think that every child of God should examine himself to see whether he’s in the faith or not. And that includes the one speaking to you today. I must stop until next time. May God bless you, my beloved.
SPEAKER 03 :
One of my favorite things that Dr. McGee said is that false teachers use the same vocabulary but not the same dictionary. In other words, they sure sound like us, but does what they say have the same meaning? Well, Dr. McGee’s not done with our study on false teachers, so why don’t you join us tomorrow? To get your heart ready, read ahead in 2 Peter. I know I will too. And if you’d like to spend more time pondering Dr. McGee’s message today, it’s available anytime at ttb.org. or call us at 1-800-65-BIBLE if we can help you find a resource to deepen your time in God’s Word. I’m Steve Schwetz, and I’ll be here tomorrow saving a seat on the Bible bus just for you.
SPEAKER 1 :
All to him I owe.
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Sin had left a crimson stain. He washed it white as snow.
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We’re grateful for the faithful and generous support of Through the Bible’s partners whom God uses to take the whole word to the whole world.
