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As we continue our series “the Future is Here,” Pastor Tim digs into Jesus’s warnings about those who will lead many astray — false Messiahs and false prophets.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be here with you as we come together on this Memorial Day and dig into God’s Word. As we do, we come after a day in which we’ve, of course, had a day of rest. We’ve had a longer weekend, but we also remember those who have served and given their lives to protect our freedoms, including the freedom to do what we are doing tonight, which is to freely study God’s Word.
As we think about what they have sacrificed for us, we think about the wars and the pain that we face as we see our soldiers go into war and give their lives for us. Wars bring out times of turmoil and uncertainty in us, rightly so. We don’t know how things are going to go, but we know there’s going to be pain and grief. As we think about that and we think about other times in our lives, whether it’s the pandemic that has been over the past year or times of economic uncertainty, times simply in our own lives of uncertainty, those times of turmoil, they’re not only times in which we mourn the losses, but they’re times in which we’re vulnerable to fall to those who would lead us astray.
And tonight’s passage is about that, about those who would call us away from our God and His truth. So let’s come before our God now and ask for His guidance, and then we’ll continue our series. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your goodness. Lord, we thank you tonight for the lives of those who have served bravely and given their lives to protect the freedoms that you have given to us. Lord, would you comfort those who mourn the loss of loved ones? Would you help all of us to, as we reflect on that, reflect on the weight of the freedoms that we have, but not just that, but the weight that then implies about us coming before your word and listening to it and hearing it faithfully, and following it faithfully, not ever seeing it as something light, but something to be treasured. Would you help us to ultimately remember the one who gave his life to redeem us and to save us, our Savior, your Son, Jesus? As we reflect on Him and His call to us tonight, Lord, would you strengthen us and prepare us and also give us the joy that we have in your grace? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
As we think about what I was just talking about, about that turmoil, that uncertainty that we experience, we should be prepared, because I think we would agree, yes, there are turmoils and uncertainties that have accumulated in the past, and when we spend a Memorial Day remembering what people have done in the past, that’s one thing, but we know there will be more in the future, too. We live in a world that’s uncertain. I think all of us feel that, and so when Jesus offers this warning to His disciples about what would come and what they would face, the wars and the uncertainty, the natural disasters, everything they would face, that also applies to us. It applies throughout history.
In fact, over history, when we experience it in our own lives, it often feels like, well, this must be the culmination, because this is so much worse. What we see over time is that time and again there are these waves of turmoil, and there’s a warning we need to heed as we face them. So let’s hear what Jesus has to say. We’re going to go back to some verses we looked at first last week, starting in chapter 24, verse 4, Matthew 24.
It says, “And Jesus answered them, See that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, I am the Christ, and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place. But the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All of these are but the beginnings of the birth pains.”
We talked last week about how Jesus was helping the disciples in part to understand that when the temple would fall, and when Rome would come in and would overturn everything they knew and felt comfortable with and loved about what was left of the kingdom of Israel, of this little province of Judea, that that wasn’t the end, and they should stay faithful, and they should be prepared for that. But Jesus doesn’t stop just there. He goes on later in the chapter and offers two additional warnings not to fall astray, and those seem to be more clearly situated throughout history.
In other words, throughout all time, if we’re believers, if we’re following Jesus, we’re going to face times of uncertainty and turmoil. We need to be prepared. Listen to what Jesus says in verse 11. He says many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And again, in verses 23 to 26, he says, “If they say, look, he is in the inner rooms, do not believe it.”
Jesus is making sure that the disciples of all time, those who come in the line of believers, those like us today who come before His word, understand that they’re going to be people who claim to be false Christs. And yes, some of them will actually literally say they’re the second coming of Jesus. And those are often the ones that are easiest to dismiss. We see them and think, well, that person isn’t Jesus. This is clearly a false Christ.
But He’s not talking simply about those sorts of people. He’s talking about those who would take the place of Himself in providing us with security and safety. He’s talking about those who would come and say that they understand God’s word more clearly, but then distort what it says. Of those who would say they have a new message from God and would lead us away from His word. Of those who, in other words, one way or another would come into the uncertainty and the turmoil and exploit it, that instead of us drawing closer to our God in times of uncertainty, coming before our refuge and receiving the peace that comes in being in His presence, we’d instead run to these people that offer what seems like solutions. And they come when our defenses are down because we’re scared, we’re uncertain, maybe we’re grieving. All these things that make us just want something that provides a clear-cut, easy answer. And then we jump. We don’t really think.
It’s the same sort of thing, if you think about it, that we experience in a lesser way all the time. I’m sure that you’ve received an email or a text or maybe a phone call, and it’s allegedly from a store that you shop at, and it says that, you know, your order is going to be cancelled if you don’t immediately click this button and give us your credit card again. Or it’s on the phone and someone’s saying, your health insurance is going to be cancelled, I need you to give me your social security right now or you’re not going to be covered. Or it’s a text message that says, “Hey, congratulations, that contest you entered, you’ve won it, click this button and give us some information so you can claim your prize.”
We get all kinds of messages like these, they’re known as phishing emails and messages, and they’re intended to catch us while our guard is down, to make us think, oh, there’s this urgent problem with my order, I need to click this button, I don’t have time to think about whether this email is legitimate or not. Or I better give this answer to this person on the phone because I can’t risk losing my insurance. And the next thing we know, they’ve phished out our information, they’ve taken stuff they shouldn’t have, and they’ve led us astray.
Sometimes it’s even in the good times, like I mentioned the contest. They’ll do that and we think, wow, I’ve been entering contests for years and now I finally won one. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it always seems to come by setting up a sense of turmoil and uncertainty. There’s something I need to do and if I don’t do it, something undesirable will happen. I’ll lose the contest, I’ll lose my insurance, I’ll lose my order. I must do something right now and I don’t have time to analyze it, I just have to act.
And that’s what those false Christs and false prophets are going to do. They come in in those times where we feel like, I just need to act, I just need something that makes me feel secure, I just need something that’s going to take away the pain and the uncertainty. And they offer it. They offer a solution. And so then we go astray. And that’s what Jesus is warning the disciples about. They’re going to see the temple fall, they’re going to see persecution, they’re going to face horrible things, they’re going to want solutions. And if someone says, oh, Jesus is out, he’s out in the desert, go out there, the temptation to say, oh, finally, this is all over, we can just go running out there and it’ll be okay. It’s going to be really strong.
And sometimes I think we let our guards down because we’re looking for the Antichrist, some singular figure that’s going to be so awful that if we just guard against that person we’re going to be okay. And we spend our time looking for such figures. And we forget all the little false Christs, all the little false prophets out there, the ones that come in and sneak under our defenses because we don’t think they’re really a threat at all. And then we’re led astray.
And they do that not only by coming in in that time of uncertainty, of turmoil, but then they exploit wonders as well. They provide signs that seem to authenticate their message. Listen to what Jesus says in verse 24. He says, “For false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders.” These false teachers, those that are going to come and lead us astray from God’s word and lead us into paths that aren’t going to allow us to rest in God’s grace and experience His peace.
They don’t just come and say things are really bad and you should follow me, you should listen to me, you should believe me. So often they also do signs and wonders. They seem to authenticate their message by accomplishing things. And throughout scripture, we see that the simple accomplishment of something that on a surface level appears to be good doesn’t immediately indicate that the person doing it is good.
Take a look at Exodus chapter 7. Moses appeared before Pharaoh and he’s delivering the Lord’s message and he’s done some miracles to authenticate it. And it says, then Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers and the magicians of Egypt also did the same by their secret arts. For each man cast down his staff and they became serpents. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.
What does scripture tell us here? Well, for one, it wants us to hear very clearly that God is more powerful than those magicians. Aaron’s staff comes in and swallows up the other staffs. But think about that for a moment. Those magicians still managed to take their staffs and turn them into snakes. And so there’d be a temptation to think, well, these people are powerful too. Their message is accurate too because they can do signs and wonders.
Now today we often don’t see people doing things like that, genuine miracle type things, but we still see people who do things that seem to be solutions, seem to offer us a way out of whatever is bothering us. The temptation is to look at that and just look at a superficial level. Just like those watching may have been tempted to believe that those Egyptian magicians were just as powerful as the Lord. That their sources of power, whether it was different kinds of gods or some sort of just magical power, that that was just as efficient as trusting in the Lord. And they didn’t even watch long enough to see the one staff, Aaron’s, the one sent by the Lord, swallow up the others.
And we do the same thing. We need to analyze more than the surface level. It reminds me of a few years ago, we all saw these CFL bulbs, these compact fluorescents show up. You can recognize that immediately by the corkscrew and it was allegedly better. These lights were going to save power, they were going to last longer than the incandescent bulbs they were supposed to replace, there were regulations put in place to get rid of the incandescent bulbs, it was going to be allegedly better.
What I think most of us quickly found is they weren’t really better. For one, if they fell and broke, they had toxic gases they released. And even when they did work, their light was unpleasant, it flickered, it cast this sort of uncomfortable color. I’ve only talked to maybe a very small number of people who actually liked the way the light looked. And so they had toxic chemicals, they made unpleasant light, yeah, maybe they took less power, but generally speaking, they weren’t really better. People jumped and bought all these bulbs and put them in, and it turned out to be a disappointment.
And when we chase after those who come in and say that they have a solution, those that exploit turmoil and show wonders, and try to convince us that they’re the answer to whatever’s going on, whether it’s a war or a natural disaster or a disease or whatever, and we start to elevate them and hear them as essentially, in some sense, a messiah, as some sense a prophet from God, what do we find? They’re going to be just like those compact fluorescents, we’re going to screw what they offer into our lights and get them all in and turn on the light switch and the light is going to be flickering and it’s going to be that uncomfortable color, because they’re offering a mere imitation of what’s good.
The wonders we tend to think of as the end, wow, this person can accomplish things, he or she can get things done, he or she seems to be accomplished and important in whatever ways I’m measuring. And we think, well, therefore this person should be listened to, and yes, if they seem to be contradicting scripture here and there, it must just be me, because they seem to be good.
But what we need to remember is that these wonders are not ends unto themselves. The desire to have tension resolved is not an end unto itself. God’s glory is an end to itself, and we should be focused on God’s word, constantly coming back to it, hearing what the Lord tells us, so that when we see people who claim to be the solution to whatever our current problem is, that we analyze that they both are giving ideas that are in accordance with God’s word, and that their actions, their way of living is in accordance to God’s word.
Because the false prophets, the false teachers, the false Christ, are going to be at some point in conflict with God’s word. Either they won’t be living God’s word, or they won’t be teaching God’s word. And in doing that, but doing it in a way that appears so attractive and so alluring, they actually exploit believers, and that’s what we see in verse 24 at the end of that verse. Jesus says they’re going to do all these things so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect, even God’s chosen.
Even the elect? Think about that for a moment. Jesus is saying, if possible, they’ll even take away those who are mine. Now, I think we want to say here, it’s really clear by the way Jesus phrases that he doesn’t mean that they actually will, at least in an ultimate salvation type sense, that we need to be constantly afraid that someone’s going to sneak in and just steal our salvation away from us, and we’ll lose God’s grace. God gives us His grace. No one else can take it away. And we see theologians from all sorts of different schools of thought coming in and recognizing that. I think that’s an incredibly important point to say up front. Maybe we can have peace in what Jesus offers us.
And for example, let’s take a look at John chapter 10, verse 28. Jesus says, “I give them eternal life, that is, those who follow Him, and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand.”
But why does Jesus give this warning? If no one’s going to snatch His followers out, why does He say, if possible, they’re going to take away even the elect? I think it’s to remind us of two things that we need to be on guard for. And the first one is simply, we cast false teachers as being unappealing. And what Jesus is saying is that these people are going to be so appealing that even those who are my followers, even those who have received my salvation and my grace and experienced it, are going to be tempted to follow these false teachers because they speak to our biases, they speak to our fears.
Those phishing emails and phone calls, they look and feel real. They seem like something we should respond to. And so do the threats that we see in our culture. We see in the early church examples of false teachers, of false prophets, of false Christ. And oftentimes in the setting of the early church, what do they do? They exploit one of two areas that would be appealing to the early believers.
Some of them were the Gnostics. They were those who imbibed in Greek philosophy and they would take God’s word and distort it to make it fit better with Greek culture. And if you’re a convert to Christianity, you aren’t really completely familiar yet with God’s word, but you are familiar with the teachings of your Greek culture. Imagine how attractive that sounds. The idea of someone coming in and saying, well, the Bible really teaches this that fits better with everything you’ve already known.
On the other hand, there were the Judaizers who went the exact opposite angle, going to those Jewish converts and even some of the sympathetic God-fearing Gentile converts who thought, well, I know the Old Testament and I know the law there, and maybe I really just need to follow all the law exactly as it was in the Old Testament, complete all the ceremonies, because that’s the solution. That’s how I get salvation. It’s not through Jesus’s grace.
Either way, they were appealing to both a fear and a cultural bias of the people whom they were trying to mislead. And today the same thing happens. We need to be on guard against those who speak to our biases and our preferences, who say things that make our ears feel happy, that seem to be suggesting the solutions that we would like to hear, and yet in that are pulling us away from what God actually wants us to hear. That’s the first thing they do.
And because of that, even if we can’t lose our salvation, even if they’re not going to actually steal that ultimately from us, they can make us less effective. As they lead astray believers, not in an ultimate salvation type sense, but in the sense of capturing our attention and drawing us towards them instead, we’re less effective. We’re not able to communicate God’s word to others. We’re not able to glorify Him in the things we’re doing because instead we’re feeding into what these false teachers and prophets want us to hear.
So are we secure? Yes. Again, John chapter 10, verse 28: They will never perish who are Jesus’s. But He gives us this warning because we can still be led astray. He wants us to know there’s a danger, a danger to our witness, a danger to our work that He’s given us. And so even if they can’t take everything away from us, they can mislead us. And we need to be on guard. We need to make sure we’re not looking in the wrong places. We need to make sure that the sources that we allow to feed into our heart and into our mind are sources that are drawing us closer to what God has given us in His word and not further away.
I think that brings us to an honest question we need to ask all of ourselves. We need to actually not sort of put up a facade and not really let ourselves dig into our hearts, but really just tear it apart and ask what’s really going on inside. And that’s this question: Do we spend as much time in God’s word as we do with our favorite commentators? And those can be talking heads on cable news. Those can be bloggers and social media meme generators and whatever else. It can be all sorts of different sorts of sources. We all have our preferences. Maybe it’s talk radio. Maybe it’s a newspaper. Maybe it’s authors.
But are those people, are we giving them more access to our hearts and our minds than we’re giving God’s word? If you get the little report on your phone that tells you how much screen time you’ve been using in the past week, if you could do that for your mind and heart instead, and it said, here’s how much percentage of your heart’s been devoted to worrying about politics and worrying about sports and worrying about work and so on and so forth, what percentage would be worrying about what God’s word says? I think that’s convicting to us. I think all of us, if we look at it, will realize that the answer is less has been devoted to God’s word than it should be.
And what happens when we do that? We allow ourselves to be whipped up into a frenzy. We allow those voices from outside, those who may even be somewhat well-intentioned, but not grounded in God’s word to draw us away. And we do so because they speak to the things that motivate us. So often they speak to things that worry us. And in some sense, it feels almost more appealing than sitting down and reading God’s word. Because we listen to this commentator on cable news, for example, and that person is blasting the people that we think are the problem. And that revs us up. Or we go online and everyone’s liking certain things and we want to like it too.
God doesn’t call us to do that. God doesn’t call us to feed into our fears. He doesn’t call us to feed into what other people like. He calls us to feed on His word, to feed on Him and Him alone. And in that, to be ready for what comes. Here’s the thing. I think sometimes we think we’re actually preparing ourselves better to be faithful Christians by feeding on this cultural menagerie that’s out there of things that beckon us. Because we think, well, if I listen to these people, and I think these people are spot on on the situation in our world, the situation in politics, the situation in the workplace, I really think these people are on top of it. I’m going to be ready. And when things get tougher, and when the people who are the whoever I think are causing trouble are going to cause trouble, I’ll be ready for them.
But notice Jesus doesn’t say, worry about what the Roman government’s going to do. Worry about the situation over across the continent. Worry about any of that stuff and make sure that you have that down because you need to be ready for that. What does He do time and again? He calls people to focus on His kingdom, to focus on what God truly cares about. That’s what we’re called to do. And we’re not going to somehow be less ready for the ultimate end when Jesus comes because we’re not busy feeding on what the culture thinks is going to be the end.
If we go further in this passage, listen to what Jesus says. He says, “For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.”
Think about these two pictures. They’re very visual pictures. And Jesus says, first off, the Son of Man, when He comes, it’s going to be like lightning shooting across the sky. And when we’re in the midst of a storm, we’ve had a few storms already this year here. When we’re in the midst of a big old thunderstorm, you’re not going to miss it. And the lightning shooting across the sky and the thunders roaring, we know it’s happening. The brightness of the light is overwhelming. The thunder shakes us. We’re not going to miss it. Jesus says that’s true of His return as well. He says it’s like vultures circling over a corpse. If you’re out on a hot summer day, out someplace where you have a clear view of the sky, and you see those vultures circling, you can’t miss that there’s something that they found. It’s going to be obvious, He says.
We don’t need to be preparing by looking for cultural signs and symbols of the end so that we can be on guard and be the best soldiers in some kind of battle that we think we’re going to solve. We’re called to be part of God’s kingdom. We’re called to be focused on Him. We’re not going to miss Jesus. We’re not going to do like some false teachers about the end times will say, where there’s some kind of already happening secret return of Jesus that somehow we missed and we need to react to. We don’t need to listen to those people who say, you’re going to somehow accidentally receive the mark of the beast by signing up for some kind of payment system or medication or whatever else.
These things are what our culture exploits and our fear. What Jesus says is His return is going to be clear. We’re not going to mistake it. We’re not going to miss it. But we should be prepared in the way that God calls us to be prepared, by studying what is true and what He has taught us.
Speaking of lightning, here’s a nice picture of lightning. I caught this a few years ago. I am so happy that I got some lightning bolt pictures over the years. Have you ever tried to take a picture of lightning? It’s really, really hard because it’s only there for a moment. And maybe if I had enough scientific equipment, I could try to predict exactly when it was going to strike. Or at times I’ve tried to measure how often the frequency of lightning is occurring and be ready for it.
But do you know how I caught this picture and the other ones that I do have? I took my shutter button and I put my finger on it and I just kept hitting the shutter button over and over and over again. I kept doing what I needed to do to capture the lightning so I wouldn’t miss it. I was prepared, in other words, and not prepared in trying to predict it or trying to analyze it, but simply doing what I knew I needed to do in order to capture it.
That’s what Jesus calls us to do. In order to not be led astray, we need to stop trying to analyze and understand the signs of the times in some way that we’re going to somehow be ahead of the curve and make sure we’re going to do our part to make sure God’s victorious. He already is, just as that lightning is already going to strike. What we need to do is keep doing what He’s told us to do. Keep pressing that shutter button. Keep being ready so that when that lightning does come, when the Son of Man does return and we celebrate that Jesus is here, we’re doing exactly what He’s called us to do and we can have that joy of coming before Him and glorifying Him and experiencing all that He has ahead for us.
Let’s keep thinking about that as we go through this series. He calls us to focus on Him. He calls us to focus on His Word. Let’s pray that He helps us to set aside those other things right now. Let’s pray.
Lord, too often it feels like everything is urgent and every solution is appealing other than to simply rest in Your grace and in Your Word. Because we want to chase after what seems so promising. We lack often the patience to wait and to hear what You’re saying and doing. But Lord, would You help us? Help us to flee those things that capture our attention wrongly. Help us to flee those that exploit our fear, that show signs and wonders but aren’t faithful in word and deed to You. Lord, would You help us to rest in Your grace and the confidence that we have in Your grace that we can confess our sins, we can come before You tonight, and You will never let us go. Even as we rest in that, that we would be on guard, not that those around us would snatch away Your salvation, but those around us are constantly trying to call us away from being effective, of testifying to Your truth, of being all that You’ve made us to be. Would You help us to flee those things and to hold on to You? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, next week we’re going to pick back up and we’re going to continue this series by looking at a topic that isn’t particularly pleasant but it’s really important, and that’s the subject of persecution. No one likes to think about being persecuted, but this is so important for us to think about because the Bible says it’s going to happen over and over again. Following Jesus is hard and that’s why we need to know that security we have in Him. We need to know that the people that would exploit us when we have times of fear are false teachers, because we’re going to have those times of turmoil. And when they come, the Bible tells us how it plays out and calls us all the more to hold on to Him.
So I hope you’ll come next week, join me for that. If this series is helpful to you, please consider sharing it and help others who are struggling with the present times or how to make sense of the promises of the end times, anyone that would benefit, that they could come and study with us and dig into God’s Word. And I hope that you’ll join me again next week at 7 p.m. as well for that.
If there’s any way I can be praying for you this week, if you have any comments or questions, please feel free to shoot me an email at the email address on screen or leave a prayer request or question in the comments below. I’ll make sure to interact with it, and if it’s a prayer request then all of us can pray for you together.
It’s always such a joy. We have this confidence, we have this hope in Jesus, and we get to share it together. And I can’t wait to do that again with you next week. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your Memorial Day and a blessed week. Thank you for joining.
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