Pastor John,
Is a false apostle in the same kind of condition as a false prophet? Meaning, just as a false prophet in the Old Testament once had to be a real prophet to qualify to be a false one, were false apostles once true apostles who had rejected the truth for another way?
Jerry
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Hi, Jerry.
I don’t think that false prophets in the Old Testament had to be true prophets first, though that was the case with some of them. What I have tried to convey, and perhaps poorly, is that false prophets were always men who belonged to God. The Old Testament never calls the prophets of heathen nations false prophets because those prophets did not belong to God.
Likewise, the “false apostles” of the New Testament were men who believed in Jesus and truly belonged to God. They were not unbelievers. After all, Paul said they claimed to be apostles of Christ. An apostle is one who has been sent (that’s what the word means), and even though those false apostles were not sent by God to teach what they were teaching, they had been born again.
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I was thinking about how you described Paul’s opinion of men in his day who taught lies about Jesus, versus the kindness God spoke to your father when he instructed him how to treat similar men.
The apostle Paul was disgusted with the men that he described as speaking lies about Jesus. I wondered if those men once had the truth but preferred a lie for whatever gain or reason. While the man whom preacher Clark saw on television (that day when God told him not to speak evil of anyone who was speaking well of His Son) was perhaps giving his all out of a zeal for Jesus, but was teaching wrongly because God didn’t send him to teach and he had never really known the right way of the Lord.
They sure are two different kinds of hearts. God is very kind to those who ignorantly do the wrong thing, but do it with their whole heart. I know that no one can know what God is thinking unless he makes it known, but that sounds like his goodness.
Jerry D.
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Yes, Jerry, that is true. And that may have been the case when the Lord spoke to my father.
It is certainly true that the false apostles of Paul’s day had heard the truth which Paul preached, and had rejected it, claiming instead that God sent them with a contrary gospel. That is very different from those who have never heard it, and God is very patient and merciful with such. We know that is true because we all have been in that boat.
Pastor John
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