BE AWARE OF FALSE PROPHECIES

Searching for God among Many Voices

False prophets have been and will always continue to be a very serious threat to the Church and to Christians.  We are surrounded by many voices.  There’s rarely a moment within our waking lives that someone or something isn’t calling out to us and, even in our sleep, dreams and nightmares ask for our attention.  And each voice has its own particular cadence and message.  Some voices invite us in, promising us life if we do this or that; others threaten us.  Some voices beckon us towards hatred, bitterness, and anger, while others challenge us towards love, graciousness, and forgiveness.  Within all of these: Which is the voice of God?  How do we recognize God’s voice among and within all of these voices?  Which is the voice of the good Shepherd, the True Prophet? 

That’s not easy to answer.  There’s no easy answer and sometimes the best we can do is to trust our gut-feeling about right and wrong.  But we have a number of principles that come to us from Jesus and from the deep wells of our Christian tradition that can help us.  God, as the scriptures tell us, is the author of everything that’s good, whether it bears a religious label or not.  Hence, God’s voice is inside of many things that are not explicitly connected to faith and religion, just as God’s voice is also not in everything that masquerades as religious.  But how do we discern that?  The voice of God always invites us to live beyond all fear, even as it inspires holy fear.  The voice of God is recognized wherever one sees life, joy, health, color, and humor, even as it is recognized wherever one sees dying, suffering, conscripted poverty, and a beaten-down spirit.

In today’s postmodern society it is not considered politically correct to speak this way because people wrongly believe that everyone who claims to be a Christian is a Christian, regardless of what they believe, teach or confess.  Yet, Jesus warns us in His Sermon on the Mount about false teachers and false prophets and describes them as wolves in sheeps’ clothing. 

Let us pray to God for guidance and keep our self-awareness alive.