That 'seducing spirit' is your preacher!

In the old days when you went to church, there were two books in the pew rack in front of you—the Bible and the song book full of standard old classic hymns.

“One of the ways you know apostasy has struck, get out a song book in the average church today and notice what’s missing,” said Jordan in a recent Sunday service. “Back in the ’70s, they took out all the songs about the Second Coming of Christ. I was raised in a denomination (Methodist) where there weren’t any songs about the Second Coming.

“Then they began to take them out of the fundamentalist circles. There’s some absolutely fantastic songs about the Rapture and the Lord’s Coming that you’ve never heard because they aren’t in the song books anymore.

“I’ve been trying to teach you that song about ‘Some Golden Daybreak,’ that used to be standard in a song book. Now nobody even knows what it is.

“You take people’s hope out and you take that truth away. Paul says, ‘Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.’ The idea is you're putting the Word into your heart and the song helps you to remember the Word and rejoice in it.

“Paul writes in I Timothy 4:1, ‘Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.’

“That’s what they’re doing and you can spot it a lot of times in the songs people sing. To depart from the faith is what we call ‘apostasy.’

*****

“The word ‘apostasy’ is an English word that finds its origin etymologically in the Greek language. So when you use the English word ‘apostasy,’ you’re using the Anglicized form of a word from the Greek that means ‘to depart, to leave, to go away from where you ought to be.’

“The ‘doctrines of devils’ is effective on people if they’re not established in Paul’s doctrine. If you don’t get the godly edification, and your inner man established in the truth that is operative today so you can be what 3:15 says (‘the pillar and ground of the truth’), you’re going to be assaulted by the Adversary.

“It’s in Acts 20 where Paul says there are two sources of opposition. One, there are going to be ‘grievous wolves’ that come in from outside and attack the assembly, and then there are going to be people IN the assembly ‘who seek to draw away disciples after themselves.’

“The objective is to get you to depart from the faith and the faith is the doctrine committed to you through the Apostle Paul. You cannot go into apostasy unless you leave Paul’s doctrine. That’s why Paul says in II Timothy 1:13, ‘Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.’

“II Timothy 3:12 says ‘evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.’ What do you do in the face of that? Verse 14: ‘But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them.’ Notice Paul doesn’t just say ‘continue in the truth, continue in the Bible.’

*****

“Paul says they give heed to seducing spirits. When you give heed to something, that means you pay attention to them, you listen to them. You give them credence.

“If you go back to II Timothy 1, the departing from the faith here is not simply becoming a modernist. It’s not simply becoming a liberal in your theology, denying the virgin birth of Christ, or the deity of Christ, etc.

Paul says in I Timothy 1:6, ‘From which some having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling;
[7] Desiring to be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.’

“There’s some people who departed from the word rightly divided. They didn’t become unscriptural, they just quit studying the Bible dispensationally.

“First of all, you need to know what a seducing spirit is. He’s talking about preachers. He’s not talking about some cloud floating around in the room trying to find an airhead to go into.

*****

“I John 4:1 says, ‘Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.’

“The spirit he’s talking about is connected with a false prophet. In other words, it’s a preacher that you’re trying. You’re trying the words that a preacher’s preaching.

“Verse 6 says, ‘We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.’

“So when it talks about trying the spirits whether they be of God, it’s talking about listening to the WORDS that come out of the mouth of the preacher. The preacher is preaching and there is a spirit that comes out in those words. It could be the spirit of error or the spirit of truth and you need to be able to test them; check them out.

“The seducing spirits are coming out in the WORDS the preachers are speaking. You spirit has a knowledge base to it; there’s information being communicated. The words that come out of your mouth are what demonstrate what’s in your heart.

*****

Luke 9:54-55, for another illustration, says, ‘And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did?
[55] But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.’

“Now, how did Jesus Christ know what manner of spirit they were? Well, He identified it by the words that came out of their mouths. The words communicated what was inside and there was this spiritual identification and revelation of what was inside of them based on the words the came out of their mouth.

“There’s a great verse in Job 34:3 about this: ‘For the ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat.’ You know what, bologna and corned beef don’t taste alike. You can always tell the difference. Well, just like your tongue can distinguish, your ear can try what’s going on in words.

“In Job 26 is a series of questions. Somebody suggested to me one time that these would be good questions that might appear at the judgment seat of Christ when God’s going to try the quality of every man’s work by fire.

“What Job is doing is responding to Bildad’s charges. The passage reads, 1] But Job answered and said,
[2] How hast thou helped him that is without power? how savest thou the arm that hath no strength?
[3] How hast thou counselled him that hath no wisdom? and how hast thou plentifully declared the thing as it is?
[4] To whom hast thou uttered words? and whose spirit came from thee?

“You see, when you talk, you reveal what’s inside of you and that comes out of you, and it’s either the spirit of truth or the spirit of error, so when Paul talks about seducing spirits, he’s talking about, ‘Here’s some preachers that when they communicate, what they’re communicating is designed to seduce—seducing words of man’s wisdom.’

“That word ‘seduce’ is an interesting word. In a nice flowery definition, it means ‘to draw away from the path of rectitude (right doing) with the promise of physical ecstasy or delight.’ The enticement is, ‘I’m going to give you some experiential delight. I’m going to give you something that’s going to make you happy, excited and it’s going to thrill your flesh.’

“What you’re talking about is a religion based on performance and experience. Sound doctrine is spirit-based and you know it by the words that come out of somebody’s mouth.”

*****

On this same subject of apostate preachers is an old study by Michigan preacher Tom Bruscha that I first posted several years ago. Here it is:

“What people come to realize is ‘right division’ of the Scripture IS what the Scriptures teach! And when the Scriptures teach it, everything becomes clear.

“The question everybody has when they finally see this truth is, ‘How come everybody’s not teaching this?! Don’t they know?!’

“Well, they know it. They got other names for it: Ultra-dispensationalism, hyper-dispensationalism, etc. They know what it is.

“So, why is it you can look at it and see, ‘Man, look how many verses now go together! Look how many times Paul says he’s the Apostle to the Gentiles!’?

“You know it’s there! It doesn’t take a whole lot of searching to see it! And so young believers in right division always wonder why the preachers don’t see it.

“Well, I Timothy 6 says, ‘If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness;
[4] He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
[5] Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.’

“If a person doesn’t teach those things, what does the Bible say? ‘He is proud, knowing nothing’! I look at some of these guys who don’t know right division and I say, ‘Well, they know SOME things.’

“You know they got some good things to say, but the Scripture says that the man who’s not acknowledging the truth of right division, which is on all the pages of Paul’s epistles and even in Peter’s epistles, that that man is ‘proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings . . .’

“The Bible speaks for itself, doesn’t it? I guess you have to decide whether you want to be likeminded, right? Likeminded with the prideful speaker who denies the truth of God’s Word or likeminded with God’s Word that you need to separate from that man.

“What hinders common people from understanding grace truth are the preachers that are out there. Pride is the No. 1 problem in the ministry and the verses speak for themselves concerning that.

“No matter where you are and how you present yourself, deep down inside you’re No. 1 problem in your life is pride.”

“It manifests itself in different ways but pride, when you think about the Bible’s sins—when it talks about not bearing false witness, not committing adultery, not stealing and thou shalt not kill, those are certainly things you sin against other people.

“But when it comes to the sin of pride, pride is a spiritual sin. It’s when, like in I John, it says, ‘All that’s in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. They’re not of the Father; they’re of the world.’

“The pride of life is really a sin deep down inside each one of us that really there’s no way we’re going to control that in our own flesh because it’s THERE. You can be, as we joke about, ‘proud of your humility,’ because, deep down, you’ve got a pride problem.

“It will manifest itself in different ways, so when Paul says, ‘Don’t do anything through strife and vainglory,’ we got to knock the pride down, knock it out and we’re not going to be able to do that. It’s going to take the Word of God and it’s going to take the Spirit of God in us to understand what God’s Word says about these things so we can combat it.

“It’s a spiritual sin. The word strife actually means contention. And when Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he says he heard there were contentions among them. In chapter 3, he says those contentions are carnal, whereas there’s envy, strife and division among the people.

“It is the very sin when Satan appeared to Adam and Eve and he wanted to tempt them, the thing that he said to them was, ‘Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’

“So immediately there’s that deep-seated pride to be as gods. For Adam and Eve to understand that there are beings beyond them and that there are powers beyond them, and they can be like them and that temptation was the temptation that caused them to disobey God, thinking that God was withholding something from them.

“So, it was that direct disobedience through that temptation of the idea they could be as gods. That is the very root of sin itself.

“Proverbs 13:10 is a simple verse but, boy, you can’t get around it no matter what you do. It says, ‘Only by pride cometh contention: but with the well advised is wisdom.’

“When the disagreement becomes contentious, and there’s strife within an assembly or a home, you need to stop and look at that verse and realize, ‘Wow, if there’s contention then certainly there’s pride causing the problem.’ You then have to stop and ask, ‘Okay, is it my pride?’ and it’s going to be the first step toward remedy to recognize the pride in your own life.

“I probably use that verse in marriage counseling more than anything else because, by the time they come and talk to me, there’s so much contention that they can hardly sit in a room together and talk, and you know you got a real BIG pride problem there, and mostly on both people’s part for the problem to get that bad!

“But that’s the source of it and people need to recognize the source of it so they can realize they need to get off the throne. They need to quit thinking that they’re God and then look to God for the answer to these things.

“Proverbs 6 says, ‘These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him:
[17] A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood,
[18] An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief,
[19] A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.’

“Just a prideful look itself is something that is something God hates! The last thing on the list is he who causes ‘discord among the brethren,’ so there’s that contention!”