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Here’s an excerpt from the blog post.
False teachers were a recurring problem in the first-century church. It would seem that there were as many, if not more, false teachers than faithful ones. Growing up in church, as you do in West Texas, I heard about false teachers only on occasion and only in the Bible stories. By college, I would occasionally hear someone throw around the term "false teacher" to describe this radical preacher or that one. But even then, false teachers seemed to be a rare occurrence.
Now, with a few decades of ministry behind me and more thoughtful consideration of texts like this one and the one we will see in Jude, I find myself believing that false teachers are a bigger problem than most churches seem to acknowledge. (I often wonder if it is because many of those churches have false teachers at the helm, but we can discuss that another time)
In the days of Paul, false teachers often, if not always, fell into the category of people who were teaching the works of the law as necessary for salvation or righteousness. Preaching Christ Jesus PLUS circumcision wasn't just a poor teaching but a damnable one. I wonder if Paul would consider the teaching of today that intermingles the works of law along with faith in the doctrine of false teachers. I don't know how he could arrive at any other conclusion. What if much of what we call "weak" or "powerless" preaching is truly an abomination?
Thankfully, I don't have to hand down judgment as to whether a teaching is faithful or unfaithful. For "If God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; he knows how to keep the unrighteousness under punishment until the day of judgment." And that is a terrifying thing.
We should be considerably more cautious in who we listen to and who we set before us as shepherds.
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