So often I hear people speaking about the Old Testament versus the New Testament as if the two tell a story about two different Gods. The implication is that the Old Testament was hard. The New Testament is easier because of grace. Nothing could be further from the truth as evidenced by Acts 5, which begins in the context of the conclusion of Acts 4.

“Now the full number” means everyone obeyed the Holy Spirit. There was no confusion. No prophet needed to declare “thus saith the Lord!” because everyone was in perfect submission to Jesus through Holy Spirit. That obedience can be likened to my right and left hands obeying my head. My left hand does not need to hear from my right hand to know the will of my head. It simply does what my head says.

Enter Ananias and Saphira a proverbial right hand with a will of its own. They altered God’s (the head’s) word that the rest of the body obeyed without question.

“So what if they saved a bit of the money for themselves?” cries the voice of contemporary society.

That rationalization is the first mistake. The issue was not the amount or value of what they held back. The issue was their rebellion against God! Rebellion is not measured according to stuff. Rebellion is determined by disobedience.

Biblicaly there is no such thing as partial obedience.

The rebellion of Anaias and Saphira was the same rebellion when Moses struck the rock instead of speaking to the rock as God commanded in Numbers 20. The carnal mind might justify the action because the people got the flesh-saving water they needed. But water was not God’s primary purpose. His purpose was to show Himself Holy (Set apart). And God said to Moses,

It was the same rebellion that exposed the true heart of Saul and ended his reign over Israel in 1 Samuel 15. Saul disobeyed God and kept some of the spoils of the Amalekites then rationalized and justified his disobedience by claiming he was doing it for the Lord. Saul was not concerned with pleasing the Lord or he would have obeyed.

Saul was concerned with promoting Saul. 

God cut Ananias and Saphira off for disobeying His word and so that others would fear (phóbos – terror) lest the rest of His body be infected with their witchcraft and idolatry.

The Root of Disobedience

Most theologians hold that the Fall from grace began with Satan’s question,

Eve was beguiled by Satan and ate the fruit. Then Adam relinquished his position as the head of his wife and was led into sin by Eve.

In his book Spiritual Authority, Watchman Nee points out that Eve’s rebellion began with her reply.

But God had said,

Eve added the words, “neither shall you touch it…”

Once again, contemporary reason declares,

“Oh my gosh, Brian. That’s so religious! Why are you splitting hairs? Get a grip, you Pharisee!”

Watchman Nee says reason is the problem. Reason is the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil whereby people do what is right in their own eyes in Jesus’s name.

We are not commanded to justify, rationalize, minimize, and generalize, a.k.a. reason our thoughts and actions, then sprinkle Jesus on it all. We are commanded to obey. Saying that God said something He didn’t or changing the words He said is rebellion of the first degree. This is why Paul so strongly emphasizes this warning in Galatians.

This is why I shudder when I hear the nonchalant propagation of false prophetic words and or eisigeis in place of exegesis. “Oh, they are just learning to hear,” we minimize, never once considering the wreckage that is left in the wake. It’s as if the God of all creation has become some namby-pamby daddy who doesn’t take himself seriously, so why should we?

False Teaching

Paul covers the subject of false teachers and teachings extensively in 2 Timothy. He praises Timothy for having

Correct doctrine is correct teaching concerning the word of God apart from which obedience is impossible. Correct teaching is always exegetical not eisegetical.

We must divide what is there, not what we imagine is there. We divide Truth from untruth. Paul gives an example.

Hymenaeus and Philetus engaged in profane and vain babblings via their eschatological claim that the future bodily resurrection promised in Mathew 24:29-30 and 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 had already taken place. The Sadducees taught that there is no bodily resurrection at all. Keep in mind, the context of this chapter is false teaching. Paul’s point was not to enter into a debate about eschatology. Rather he was illustrating the seriousness of false teachings that produce ungodliness to the point of falling away from the faith.  Godliness is eusébeia (Greek) – holiness. False teachings make one unholy regardless of how sweet they sound.

Paul concludes 2 Timothy 3 with a foundational presupposition in our Acts 17:11 Bereans Bible study.

There are many important things in our walk with God. Yet nothing is more important than the ability to rightly divide the word of truth. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth who leads us into all truth. He brings scriptural truth to remembrance. John 14:17 If the spirit within us speaks contrary to the word of God, then that Spirit is not Holy Spirit. At best, it is our soul, namely our mind, will, emotions, and the stories we create to make sense of our experiences. At worst, it is a spirit of antichrist masquerading as an angel of light. One thing is certain. God’s voice will never contradict His word.

Period!

Except for the Book of Philemon, there are warnings against false teachers and false teachings in every book of the New Testament. That should tell us something. No wonder James warns that,

If I say or write something wrong and you love me then you will correct me. If you can show me I am wrong I will thank you and I will repent. 1 John 1:9 I don’t much care about the tone you use, provided the correction is true, and rooted in scripture. I learn by being corrected by Holy Spirit and by my Holy Spirit-filled brothers and sisters.

Why then do so many minimize and even sanction the falsification of God’s word?

So often I hear people defend their preferred teacher or preacher based on their kindness, compassion, and caring approach toward their flock. Some well-meaning followers become enamored with a personality or a person’s charisma and mistake it for anointing. Anointed is Christ – Christos, in Greek, and means one with the authority to speak on God’s behalf. Jesus warned of many false Christos in the end times. Many times sincere and honest seekers can’t fathom that someone so influential in the body of Christ could be so wrong or worse, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Others succumb to confirmation bias. They hear what they want to hear because it makes sense according to their experience and or what they have been taught. Or it suits their own passions and they simply disregard anything that opposes their point of view. Passion does not always imply blatant sins of the flesh. Passion could simply be

“My reasoning, my altruistic will in Jesus’ name”.

What we often end up with today is that people embrace the heresy and rebuke anyone who calls out the heresy. No one considers the seriousness of Anaias and Saphira in the context of

The God who does not change.

At the end of the day and the current age, it doesn’t make a lick of difference in how sweet, joyful, gentle, kind, gifted, intelligent, loving, etc. someone appears if they are twisting God’s words or proclaiming what God never said. Hence, in 1 Corinthians 4 Paul exhorts us to

This was a huge problem in the church of Corinth. It is a huge problem in the church today.

When we study and endeavor to rightly divide the word of Truth, we need to be certain we are reading what was actually said at the time it was written. We need to understand the cultural and literary context. We need to know something about the audience to whom the message was given. We need to be sure our Bible translation accurately reflects the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek lest we produce a doctrine out of our own eisegesis. That’s how all cults begin. We need to follow the tradition of the Acts 17:11 Bereans and search the scriptures to see if what a given teacher or Bible translation says is true. Those who insist on an eisegetical, “God told me” even though scripture contradicts it approach may find themselves in the same proverbial boat with Eve, Saul, Ananias, and Saphira.

The following example is going to ruffle some feathers.

There is a popular Bible translation within the charismatic stream that is really an eisegetical interpretation. The author makes all sorts of radical prophetic claims about himself all of which glorify himself. One of these is that God took him to heaven and revealed an added chapter 22 to the book of John. Galatians 1:8-9 aside, the ubiquitous, undeniable spiritual proposition, “God told me,” shuts down most naysayers. After all, who am I, a mere man, to argue with God? Hence, Paul’s admonition to the Church in Corinth, “Let every word be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.” Those witnesses are scriptures, not your friend’s opinion masquerading as Holy Spirit. We also have Paul’s instruction to the church in Thessaloniki  “Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.”

While I felt a check in my spirit, my initial response when I heard of the Passion Translation at Harvest School in 2016 mirrored that of Jeremiah to Hananiah in Jeremiah 28.

I wanted the author’s claims to be true.

In the end, the Lord rebuked Hananiah through Jeremiah.

God killed Hananiah for speaking what He did not say.

The fact that God hasn’t killed all the fake prophets today does not mean that God has changed or His word has changed. It means there is mercy and time to repent. After all, accursed means

“Going to Hell.”

The Passion author Brian Simmons also claims the God ordained authority to correct all other translations. I guess that makes the Passion the only correct translation. Many in our stream subscribe to the Passion. I suspect this is because it is more poetic, gentle, and loving according to contemporary definitions of “loving”, and therefore more palatable.

“I just feel like the Lord is pleased with it.“

I’ll admit, the poetic license Simmons uses frequently sounds a lot sweeter than other versions. We purchased the Passion Psalms and Proverbs after Harvest School and loved them at first.

Here is one example that sparked my concern.

Ephesians 5:22-33 is foundational to all of the counseling we do with couples. We would go so far as to say that all marriage problems would be solved if couples would simply obey these verses as they are written. If you want to know more about our counseling approach, you can read Husbands  Love Your Wives.

Simmons claims that Ephesians 5:22 should actually read, “Wives be tenderly devoted to your husband as the church is tenderly devoted to Christ.” 

That seems nice.

Should a wife be tenderly devoted to her husband? Sure. There’s nothing wrong with tenderness. A mother should also be tenderly devoted to her children. Tender devotion is not the operative question at hand. The English word Devotion occurs twice in the New Testament ESV. For example,

The KJV uses the word simplicity.

That’s not what Paul is commanding in Ephesians 5:22.

Simmons further claims that Ephesians should be translated from Aramaic because Jesus spoke Aramaic. But Ephesians was written Greek to people who spoke Greek.  Therefore the correct meaning of this God breathed passage is only found in Greek.

The God breathed word in Ephesians 5 says, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.“

As Cathy says, tender devotion works great when things are going great. The true test of submission is when things are not going great or the wife vehemently disagrees with her husband’s decision. There have been times when Cathy disagreed with me and I was wrong. But she submitted to my final decision anyway out of obedience to the Lord. Tenderness and devotion toward me may are may not have been there in the moment. That put me in a position to be corrected by God which He eventually did. Having sailed from Hawaii to Thailand on a thirty-six-foot sailboat through a hurricane, Cathy will be the first to tell you there can be only one captain when the storm hits.

Paul isn’t giving his opinion or preferences regarding how he would like to be treated. He is declaring the God breathed word. He uses the picture of husband and wife, rightly related to one another, such that two become one flesh, to depict Christ’s relationship to His church. Marriage is unique and distinctive from all other relationships on earth. It is “a mystery” that can only be apprehended through obedience. Hence, submitt means submit. Meanwhile, the husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He gives himself up for her. He is fully prepared to die for her if necessary. When both parties are obedient to the word they submit to God before each other to form a triangle with God at the apex. The closer they grow together. The closer they grow to God and vice versa.  At the root of every marriage in crisis is the failure of one or more parties to obey the Word of God in Ephesians 5. Obedience to the word by both parties brings healing to the marriage one hundred percent of the time. By rewording this one verse Brian Simmons effectively altered God’s blueprint for marriage and God’s depiction of the mystery of two becoming one in marriage and the church.

That should strike Phobos in our hearts.

For the record, Brian Simmons seems quite likable. He seems gentle and kind, and well-meaning. He seems like the sort of person with whom most believers wouldn’t mind fellowshiping. Like so many charismatic celebrities, his gifting and charisma led many believers to dismiss the warning in Galatians 1:8-9 entirely.

“Oh, it can’t be that bad.” We say. “I mean look at him. He’s so gentle and kind and loving…”

You might disagree. But here is the problem as I see it. Sometimes we are too willing to compromise in the name of love. We compromise because we have been indoctrinated, albeit subconsciously, to believe that tolerance is love. This is largely due to our collective worldview being tainted by an educational system rooted in Postmodernism and Critical Theory instead of Biblical truth that says obedience is love.

We tolerate blatant error and even heresy rather than confront it because love has been framed as tolerance. The Bible says we cannot love until we have purified our hearts through obedience to the truth.

Tolerance prioritizes people’s feelings. We don’t want to risk hurting people’s feelings so we don’t tell them the truth. We claim to care about others. In reality, we are terrified of being disliked. We say we love God. But how can we love God if we are willing to compromise His word for the sake of being liked by people?

Other times we won’t confront an error because we don’t want to be confronted ourselves. We tell people they are “amazing” because we want to hear that we are amazing. The Bible says we should fear the pursuit of personal affirmation and accolades.

Therefore I exhort you.

God doesn’t change.

Do not dismiss the potential depths of disobedience.

Again, I realize that some people are not going to like, let alone agree with what I have written here. That’s fine. If I am anything, I am a watchman. Believe and do as you will. My obedience to God on this matter is complete.

Maranatha