Traits of False Teachings

OVERVIEW

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This discussion identifies four recurring traits of false teaching, so that even when we do not yet understand the whole error, we can recognise when a doctrine has drifted from the plumb line of truth.

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INTRODUCTION — A WORD ABOUT WHY

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One can study false teachings only to hunt errors. The danger becomes that we discover an error and then pride ourselves that we are the better ones, or worse, having seen an error, we believe that whatever else we believe must therefore be correct. It is possible to be right and wrong at the same time. The purpose of discernment is so that we remain faithful and able to reach spiritual depth. Its purpose should always and only be to bring us and others closer to the Lord. 

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Bankers can spot counterfeit money without spending their days studying forgeries. Instead, they spend them handling the true — running real currency through their fingers thousands of times, until they know its weight and grain so intimately that a false note announces itself the instant it touches the hand. They detect the false not by expertise in falsehood but by intimacy with the true.

This is precisely how the Lord describes His own sheep:

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"…the sheep follow Him: for they know His voice. And a stranger will they not follow… for they know not the voice of strangers." — John 10:4-5

 

Notice — the sheep are not safe because they have studied every wolf. They are safe because they know one Voice so well that every other voice falls strange on the ear. That is the discernment we are after. Not a catalogue of every error ever devised, but such nearness to Christ that error simply feels wrong in the hand. Keep that in front of you as we go, because it is the destination of all four of our tests that follow. They are four ways of asking a single question: Is this the voice of the Shepherd?​

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Section One:

THE FIRST PILLAR — THE CENTRE

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This is the bedrock test, the one to which every other finally appeals. A teaching can be built of true-sounding parts and still be off, if the parts are turning around the wrong centre. So the test asks: what is the centre, weight-bearing hub of this doctrine? Around what does everything orbit?

 

Before you read any further, stop here a moment. Think of what your own heart focuses on most often when dwelling on your walk of faith. That one test will reveal more of your heart to you than years of study. Finding the honest answer, and — if necessary — correcting it, will bring more growth and safety than possibly anything else can.

 

What did you discover? What does your attention, your focus, your prayer-life most often drift toward? 

 

For the Christian, the Bible teaches only one true centre around which everything in our hearts should always pivot:​

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"For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." — 1 Corinthians 3:11

"…I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." — 1 Corinthians 2:2

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Christ is meant to have, in Paul's word, "the preeminence" — the first place in all things (Colossians 1:18). And here is the test made practical: when you stand back from a teaching and ask what it is really about, where does the centre-weight fall? If the answer is bloodlines, or spiritual gifts, or the end-times calendar, or a particular man, or a particular nation, or a day of the week, or any single doctrine however true — then the needle is already off, even if every individual claim on the page could be defended. A wheel whose hub sits off-centre will wobble no matter how straight its spokes; and a faith with anything but Christ-and-Him-crucified at the hub will wobble the same way, whatever true things hang from it. The surest mark of a sound teaching is not merely that it says true things, but that all its true things lean inward toward the same Centre, and that Centre is the cross, and the One who took it for us.

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We understand this may be an abstract idea, and so we will soon offer another discussion "All things in Christ" to discuss this in more depth.

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Section Two:

THE SECOND PILLAR — THE AUTHORITY

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Now we come to the weighty test. We should never ask if a teaching "sounds spiritual." Almost everything that deceives the sincere does. If we test a doctrine by our logic or reason we make ourselves the authority dividing right from wrong. But the Bible says our hearts can deceive us. So, the test is which authority should have the final say between truth and error? Is it the pastor, the prophet who has been given a word, or maybe the writings of a seer who had a visitation from an angel? What finally sits on the throne here — it should be the Word of God alone — but has a rival smuggled in beside it?

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Lay every verse Scripture gives on a subject side by side, and ask which reading lets them all stand — without a single one being silenced, bent, or quietly explained away. The truth is the position under which the whole choir sings and no voice is sent out of the room.

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"To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them." — Isaiah 8:20

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When the apostle Paul preached, the Bereans were praised not for not simply swallowing his words but for testing them first — they "searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11). They loved the truth enough to weigh the teacher against the text rather than the text against the teacher.

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Almost every serious error has a neglected or distorted passage — a text it must mute, soften, reinterpret, or quietly explain away — because that passage exposes the flaw. So you can almost run the diagnosis backwards: find what a teaching is forced to be quiet about, and you have found where it went off course. The suppressed text is the load-bearing wall the error had to knock out to stand its own structure up.

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But notice the root beneath the symptom. A verse only ever "needs removing" because something else has been seated on the throne the Word should occupy — a second book, a living "prophet," a private revelation, a chain of human reasoning, or, even a wound the person will not surrender. The discarded verse is the evidence; the usurped throne is the crime. So beneath "does all of Scripture cohere?" sits the deeper question that will sort everything below: what is actually ruling here — the Word, or a rival set up beside it?

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Again the subject of testing a doctrine against the Word deserves a deeper look, which we will address in two coming discussions: How to Study the Bible which speaks of the principles we should apply in order to reach a safe and accurate interpretation of the scriptures. Beside that stands the opposite discussion: How Error Uses Scripture. Which is equally useful in discovering how error can be drawn "from the text".

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Section Three:

THE THIRD PILLAR — THE DIRECTION

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Now follow the current of the thing. Every teaching is flowing somewhere — and there are only two directions a doctrine can finally run. It is either lifting the glory up to God, or sliding it inward onto the self.

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This is the oldest tell of all, for it was the mechanism of the very first deception. The serpent's whole craft in the garden was a flattery of the self: "ye shall be as gods" (Genesis 3:5). And it was his own ruin first — the five proud "I wills" of his fall, I will ascend… I will be like the most High (Isaiah 14:13-14). So this is the family fingerprint of every lie that has ever worn sheep's clothing: somewhere in it, quietly, the self is being enthroned, satisfied, told it need not surrender. The teaching makes you special — chosen, advanced, let in on a secret the common believer has missed; or it soothes a wound while leaving you, and your grievance, comfortably on the throne. Somewhere within it, the self is usually being protected, flattered, vindicated, or spared surrender.

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The gospel runs the other way entirely, and cannot be made to run any other:​

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"…If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." — Matthew 16:24-25

 

So the test is plain: has the focus turned inward, to the elevation and comfort of man — or does it still run upward, to the glory of God and the emptying of self? A doctrine that leaves you more impressed with yourself, more special, more separate, more secretly superior, has already told you which father it is echoing. Truth always keeps Christ lifted up and loosens the self from the throne. That is the direction of grace, and it never reverses.

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Section Four:

THE FOURTH PILLAR — THE FRUIT

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The first three tests examine the teaching. The last one examines what the teaching grows in a life — and it is the one our Lord named for this exact problem:

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"Ye shall know them by their fruits." — Matthew 7:16

 

A doctrine is a seed, and seeds declare themselves in their harvest. So look at the lives the teaching actually produces. Does it grow the fruit of the Spirit — "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness" (Galatians 5:22-23)? And chief among these is the most selfless fruit of them all, love:
 

"By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." — John 13:35

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"He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now." — 1 John 2:9

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Does the teaching grow the works of the flesh — pride, the need to control, a suspicious and superior spirit, self-preservation or ambition? Or does it lean toward lifting each other up, toward forgiveness, kindness, generosity, mercy and brotherly love?

But remember that fruit can ripen slowly, and it may take time to reveal itself, because the deceiver himself "is transformed into an angel of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14), so a thing may look fair for a season before its harvest shows. Given time, though, it will always reveal itself because a tree cannot forever hide the fruit it bears.

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Section Five:

HOW ERRORS DIFFER — A WORD ON SEVERITY

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These four pillars will expose an error, but not all errors are equal. There are, broadly, three depths.

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Imbalances that even true brothers carry:
The mildest are not really "false gospels" at all, but errors of proportion. Here Scripture still rules the throne; the fault is one of emphasis — the centrality of Christ is allowed to dim. These do not cost a soul its salvation. But they are not nothing, for they lay a quiet blockage across the road into the deep things of God, stalling a believer's growth where he ought to be pressing on. Such errors are carried by sincere and beloved brothers, they deserve to be addressed with great gentleness.

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A different gospel:
When an added authority, requirement, or revelation begins to alter how salvation is received, who Christ is, or whether His finished work is sufficient, the gospel itself has been changed. These are more serious by far. They set a second authority beside the Bible: an extra body of text similar in weight to Scripture — the words of a modern prophet, an ongoing stream of revelation treated as "truth". The damage here is not to emphasis but to the gospel itself — to how salvation is received and what the good news even is — for the moment anything is added to Christ's finished work, the sufficiency of that work is quietly denied. Paul named this exact thing: "another gospel: which is not another" (Galatians 1:6-7). And it must be said tenderly, because those who find themselves here are often among the most sincere lovers of Jesus you will meet — they simply have not yet seen how the addition betrays the "It is finished" of the cross. 

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Deceptions wearing Christian dress:
And then there is the gravest depth, where Scripture's authority is not merely added to but swapped out — its place taken by human logic spun into a system, or by claimed revelation or worse. These are doctrines that imitate Christianity from the outside while being built, inwardly, on another foundation altogether. They tend to snare the deeply wounded, for they carry a dark heart that pretends to soothe a real and justified injury while quietly letting the person keep their anger or pain — wrapping bitterness in the language of faith. These can genuinely destroy. This is not the honest inconsistency of a sincere brother; it is another gospel with another spirit, and needs to be named if we are to help others out of it. 

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We offer one such discussion here: The Truth About Eden.​

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COME BACK TO THE VOICE — FROM KNOWING ABOUT, TO ENTERING IN

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We could spend a lifetime cataloguing errors and grow only more anxious for it. So hear where all of this has been leading, because it is not where a suspicious heart would expect. Scripture says discernment is the mark of the mature — the strong meat of those who have grown up:

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"…strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil." — Hebrews 5:14

 

By reason of use. Discernment is not a clever technique you acquire; it is a faculty that grows, like a sense, through long and loving use of the truth. Which carries us straight back to the sheep and the Shepherd's voice. The safest believer in the world is not the one who has memorised every heresy — he may not be able to name a single one — but the one who has spent so many hours in the company of Christ that the stranger's voice simply cannot fool him. He knows the true so well that the false declares itself.

 

And that is the marvel hiding inside this whole sober subject. God has not made the safety of His sheep depend on cleverness, or scholarship, or a flawless map of every wolf — for if He had, only the learned could be safe, and the gospel would belong again to the strong. Instead He has hidden His little ones in the one place no deception can reach: nearness to Himself. The simplest soul who truly knows the Shepherd is kept by that knowing, guarded not by a technique but by love. So the way to become undeceivable was never to study the darkness until you mastered it. It was to press so far into the Light that the darkness lost its power to convince you. Do not, then, close this and go hunting wolves. Go to the Shepherd. Learn His voice until it is the most familiar sound you know — and you will find you have become, almost without trying, the kind of soul that error cannot keep.

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"Now unto Him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever." — Jude 24-25

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