Matthew 7:15-20 Beware of the Wolves

We inch nearer again to the conclusion of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which formally concluded in verses seven to twelve. In those verses, we learned that for disciples who feel overwhelmed by the kind of kingdom life that Jesus has laid out before His disciples and those who would come after Him, we are told of our Father in heaven who supplies all that we need to live the Christian life. He calls us to come and ask, seek, and knock. That which we need in the Christian life comes from God; He will supply what we lack. We just need to go to Him. That was Jesus' formal conclusion to the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.

However, He then offers three striking challenges to round off His teaching. Two weeks ago, the Lord Jesus reminded us that the way of the kingdom is to walk the narrow way; it is to enter the narrow gate. He is saying, in effect, "This teaching of mine, this message of the kingdom of heaven, is not going to be received by the masses. It is going to be received by the few. Enter through the narrow gate." You Christian, who have entered through the narrow gate, are to walk that way that you might find life. He says, "For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it." You must enter this way; you must walk this way; proclaim this way; never forsake this way, for it is the way of eternal life with God.

This morning, Jesus moves on and develops this concept of the broad and the narrow way, and the connection is clear. Just as Jesus warned us of the broad way, He will now warn us of the false prophets on the broad way. Then, in Matthew 7:21-23, He will warn us of false Christians on the broad way as well.

So in a message I have entitled "Beware of the Wolves", I have three headings that arise from the passage. First of all, we need to identify the existence and reality of the false prophets. Secondly, we want to see the essence and nature of the false prophet. Thirdly, the end and the judgment of the false prophet.

The Existence And Reality Of False Prophets

First, the existence and reality of false prophets. Read with me again in verse fifteen: "Beware of the false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing." What or who is Jesus speaking of here? Who are these prophets? He says "beware", but we need a little help, I think, in identifying who Jesus is really warning us about. I take it and believe that "prophet" here is best understood contextually. Remember that Jesus has already told us that the Law and the Prophets—that is, all prior revelation given by God in His word—had a trajectory, a goal of preparing the ground for the ministry and work of the Messiah, of the Jews, and of the world: Jesus Christ Himself.

To truly hear God's words, Jesus teaches us, is to hear and receive His words. By "false prophets", I think the Lord Jesus is meaning, generally, those who while they claim to teach for God, but ultimately their words are opposed to Jesus' words and His message. That is who the false prophet is—those who falsely speak for God. As believers, we are to be wary of those who malign, obscure, or conceal the plain teaching of Christ. Now, we might think this is a rather easy task at this point, that we simply need to avoid those crazy lunatics, those heretics that can be easily identified, as many false prophets are.

Think about the religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam: easy to identify. However, the next clause makes us realise the sober nature of what Jesus is saying, because He says that they come to you in sheep's clothing. The idea here, in an agricultural setting, is that the shepherd of the sheep will often wear, for warmth, the skin of a sheep. A false teacher usually does not come openly denying Christ or openly disagreeing with Him. He does not come calling people to renounce Christ. No. He or she comes as a sheep themselves. They creep in unnoticed; they move within the walls of the church; they carry a Bible in their hand; they pray to God before all; they speak with winsome, Christianese language; they even cite Scripture. They are dressed as sheep, the Lord Jesus says.

The New Testament elsewhere warns us similarly to Jesus here. In 2 Peter 2, Peter dedicates a whole chapter to warning us concerning false teachers. In 2 Peter 2:1-3, he says, "But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there also will be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. Many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be maligned; and in their greed, they will exploit you with false words." Paul says in Acts 20:29-30, "I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them." So this is who Jesus is referring to here. This is who He is warning us concerning.

The Essence And Nature Of False Prophets

Under the second heading, we need to consider, where we will spend most of our time, the essence and nature of false teachers. We have been warned about their existence and reality; now we want to understand their essence and nature. Continuing in verse fifteen: "Beware of the false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit."

Jesus says here that they have the appearance of sheep; they have the appearance of true Christians—that is, at times it looks to all like they are on the narrow way. But inwardly, secretly, not always easily detected, they are like wolves. Without human shepherding and care, we know that sheep are vulnerable, are they not? Sheep need a shepherd. Wolves, on the other hand, are apex predators.

I heard the story of a farmer in Wisconsin, USA some time ago. It read, "On July 8, my father-in-law walked down to the sheep pasture to check on the flock, the same way he has for over twenty years. It was a beautiful summer morning, feeling much cooler after a spell of heat and humidity had just ended, but only one ewe greeted him. It was by the grace of God that she was there. As he began checking fence to see where the sheep might have gone, he saw a sight straight out of our worst nightmares. He started to find the massacred remains of our family’s flock of sheep. Imagine waking up one morning and everything that you have worked towards for the last thirty years is gone. In a blink of an eye you have lost over thirty years of genetics." You see, Wolves had got in and slaughtered all but one of the vulnerable sheep.

This is the image and urgency, the horror, that Jesus would have in our minds as we consider false prophets. False prophets are wolves among the sheep. These are those who claim to represent Christ, but in fact represent Satan and the broad way that leads to destruction; and all who follow them are consumed with them.

The false prophet leaves in his path a spiritual massacre. In 2 Peter 2:17-19, the apostle says, "These are springs without water and mists driven by a storm, for whom the black darkness has been reserved. For speaking out arrogant words of vanity, they entice by fleshly desires, by sensuality, those who barely escape from the ones who live in error, promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption." Friends, we ought to feel the weight of Jesus' words here. These are words of life or death.

Notice next that the essence, the nature of the false teacher, is revealed by their fruits. In fact, this is a marker that we are given to identify the false prophet, the false teacher. Jesus repeats it a number of times: "You will know them by their fruit." Just as a bad, diseased tree will produce bad fruit, so it is with the false prophet. While you may not be able to tell at first whether they are a faithful witness to Christ, by their fruit, meaning their outputs and outcomes, you will know them.

So what is meant by "fruit" here? I like what the Puritan Thomas Watson said: "Error damns as well as vice; the one pistols, the other poisons." The fruit here covers the false teacher exposed as a heretic by his teaching as much as it exposes the false teacher who is a hypocrite in their life.

In fact, I just read this morning of another mega-church pastor in the US who has been exposed for his double life of a sexual nature. He was living a double life for many years. He was a hypocrite. He was exposed as a false teacher. He did not know Christ. No honour for Christ.

We see examples of both teaching and lifestyle inherent to the false prophet in different places in Scripture. In context, it is the fruit of teaching itself, that is, doctrine, that Jesus has in view here. As Calvin comments, "under the fruits, the manner of teaching is itself included and indeed holds chief place." For example, it is the fruit of teaching, prominent in 2 Timothy 2:16-18, where Paul names two men, Hymenaeus and Philetus. He names these as men who have gone astray, defected from the faith and from the truth, teaching others. They teach that the "resurrection had already taken place", that is, the general resurrection at the end of the age. Paul says that they have "upset the faith of some." By their pervasive teaching, they show themselves as false prophets, like ravenous wolves among the sheep.

Now, one difficulty you might have to hurdle is this discussion of the nature of understanding what are primary, secondary, and even tertiary matters of Scripture. For instance, in the history of the Church, Christians disagree on countless doctrines: baptism, end times, even things on liturgy of service. Christians disagree; there are different denominations. However, there are clearly primary truths which touch at the heart of the gospel, and we discern those things that we would say are errors from those things which are heresies.

If you have one view on baptism and you have another Christian who has a different understanding of baptism, you would say to each other, "I believe you are in error, but I still see you as my brother or sister in Christ." With heresy, it is different. Heresy puts one outside of the realm of what is the Christian faith, and to deny these truths is to deny the faith itself. These are matters of the person of Christ, His deity, His humanity; salvation by grace alone through faith alone; theology proper, who God is; bibliology, the inspiration of Scripture. These are matters of primary, core truths.

But this aside, how can the average Christian in the pew detect the false teacher? It is not always the case that the false prophet reveals themselves by what they do say, but often, usually I would say, it is by what they do not say. Follow me very carefully here. Under the false teacher, you will always feel comfortable, always comfortable.

I think Martyn Lloyd-Jones gets it exactly right when he says, "What is wrong with their teaching? The most convenient way of answering this is to say that there is no straight gate in it; there is no narrow way in it." The thing about the false teacher is that you realise that while much of their language is the same as any faithful Christian, there is a gaping hole in the overall content of their message and ministry. There is no narrow way. You will never hear them arrest men in their sin and hold them to the purity of God's holy law. Never will they speak of the hell that is to come for the enemies of Christ. Never will the law be shown to condemn us. Never do they show people that there is no good in us, no redemption apart from Jesus, no eternal life without the cross. The false prophet has a friend in the world because they do not confront the world. They have no straight gate in their gospel. And so everyone is the friend of such a person; their preaching is loved by all, the liberal, the modernist, even the atheist might enjoy listening to them because he subtracts the offence out of the gospel message.

He will gladly speak of the love of God all day long, but never of the wrath of God. He will speak of the joys of heaven, but never tell people of the realities of hell. As Lloyd-Jones says, far better than I ever could, "We have somehow got hold of the idea that error is only that which is outrageously wrong, and we do not seem to understand that the most dangerous person of all is the one who does not emphasise the right things. That is the only way to understand rightly this picture of the false prophets."

Now, illustrations are a dime a dozen. Consider the popular Roman Catholic bishop by the name of Robert Barron, an intellectual in the Catholic world. A couple of years ago I think it was, he appeared in an interview with Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire, a news network in the United States. Ben is a Jew, and he asked the bishop a very good question: "What's the Catholic view on who gets into heaven and who doesn't? I feel like I lead a pretty good life—a very religiously based life—in which I try to keep not just the Ten Commandments, but a solid 603 other commandments as well, and I spend an awful lot of my time propagating what I would consider to be Judeo-Christian values, particularly in Western society. So what's the Catholic view of me? Am I basically screwed here?" He puts it right there before the bishop.

Ben asks whether, as a devout practicing Jew, he will get to heaven. Any Christian should know exactly what to say: No, Ben! "By the works of the law no flesh shall be justified in His sight" (Romans 3:20), and then point him to the necessity of placing his faith in Christ as the Messiah and Saviour. The Catholic bishop, a man of enormous intellectual capacity, well-read, older, wiser, should have no problem with immediately preaching the hopelessness of trying to attain salvation by works and preaching the exclusivity of Jesus Christ alone. But what does he do? He denies the existence of a narrow way and says this: "The Catholic view, go back to the Second Vatican Council, it says very clearly Christ is the privileged route to salvation, that God so loved the world, He gave His only Son that we might find eternal life... However, Vatican II clearly teaches that someone outside the explicit Christian faith can be saved. Now, they are saved through the grace of Christ indirectly received; so the grace is coming from Christ, but it might be received according to your conscience. So if you are following your conscience sincerely, or in your case," speaking to Ben "you are following the commandments of the law sincerely, yeah, you can be saved." And with that, one of the foremost Roman Catholic intellectuals of the world, before an audience of hundreds of thousands of people who would hear it at some point, denied the truth of the gospel and of the narrow way. "They come to you in sheep's clothing," Jesus says, "but inwardly they are ravenous wolves." No straight gate.

The End And Judgment Of False Prophets

The third heading is this: the end and judgment of false teachers. The end and judgment. Matthew 7:19: "Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." I will not say much at all here, so we can conclude with some application. In the end, these false prophets who do not know Christ, who deny the gospel or the narrow way, however it is that their fruit manifests in heresy or in hypocrisy or in both, they meet their reckoning in the final judgment when their deeds, their hearts, their motives, their lies, are exposed before the Lord. The broad way, said Christ, leads to destruction; and to destruction and eternal death they go.

Conclusion

But I want to conclude on some points of application. What do we do with what we have learned this morning? I hope you understand something more of it now. Here are three points of application.

First of all, we want to be people of the book. People with only a surface level understanding of the doctrines of Scripture are ripe for the picking by false teachers and can easily be led astray. We want to be like Timothy, whom Paul exhorted in 1 Timothy 6:20: "O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you." It does not mean you have to be an ivory tower Bible scholar; just be an ordinary Christian who reads their Bible every day.

An elder of a church in Auckland told me that one of his newer members, a quite naive lady or perhaps a new Christian, a bit of a combination there, just about got sucked away into one of the cult groups in Auckland. I forget which one now; perhaps it was Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormon. She thought they were Christians as well and started getting involved with them, nearly getting pulled into their cult. She did not understand; she did not know the word yet. She was a new believer.

To be people of the book, first, we need to be sitting under regular Christ-centred, biblical preaching as our top priority. This is always the first port of entry for Bible knowledge, hearing good preaching. Secondly, we ought to supplement our learning from preaching with daily Bible reading, to get to know Christ and to know His word a little bit every day. Thirdly, we should seek, if at all possible, to be involved in additional opportunities to learn from the word of God. That might be a midweek meeting; it might be a conference that comes up every so often. Be involved, that you might learn and be saturated in the word of God. May we, as Peter says in 1 Peter 2:2, "like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation." The false teacher has no foothold when the people before him actually read their Bibles and know what is in it; they cannot be deceived.

Secondly, we ought to exercise careful discernment regarding what we hear regularly and from whom. "Heresy," said the Puritan John Trapp, "is like leprosy of the head." False teaching spreads; it captures the mind and poisons the soul. A friend told me yesterday of some contact he had in Gisborne with what is called "the Church of God of Zion", a Korean cult who refer to God as their mother and believe that Christ is going to return secretly as a Korean man. This is a crazy cult. I actually had contact with them in Dunedin as well, a number of years ago. It is a pervasive group, very active on the streets of New Zealand, at universities, in different places. We must not allow ourselves to be blown around by such strange winds of doctrine, but hold to the faith once for all delivered.

And beware of those such as Jeremiah warned in Jeremiah 6:14: "They have healed the brokenness of my people superficially, saying, 'Peace, peace,' but there is no peace." Jeremiah's words actually remind me of preachers like Joel Osteen. You might have seen him on YouTube or on TV. I do not know what the latest figures are, but apparently some ten million people have contact with the teaching of Joel Osteen every week. The man is a false teacher, plain and simple; always something nice to say; always a Bible verse to go with it. Never the gospel, never Christ, never the cross, never sin, never a holy God. It is moralistic, therapeutic deism with a light sprinkling of convenient Bible verses on top. He talks about Jesus as a great example who wants to make your life in this world wealthy, wonderful, and worry free. And so the masses tune in, walking the broad way; no straight gate.

A third thing, finally, and this is a word of comfort: we need not fear nor be afraid if we know Jesus. Think back to the story I told earlier of the Wisconsin farmer who lost all but one of his ewes to the wolves. These realities we have considered this morning may make many believers afraid, perhaps fearing they might be gobbled up by false Christianity, led into a lie as so many are. Remember that one ewe that the farmer found. I want you to remember that in the end, Christ's true sheep are like that lone survivor the day the wolves came in at Wisconsin.

Jesus said in John 10:11-14, "I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and is not concerned about the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and I know my own, and my own know me." Christ is the true believer's shield against the whims, heresy and hypocrisy of the false prophet. Dear friends, Jesus holds and keeps His own.

Like a single lamb in a great flock of sheep that can still detect the sound of its mother's bleating, so the true Christian knows the call and voice of Christ. Paul writes in 2 Timothy 2:19, "The Lord knows those who are His." That is our guard against the false prophet, for we in ourselves could be deluded by a whole matter of things, but Christ, His voice comes through in the Scripture to His people; they hear it, and they follow Him only.