Summary: Jesus warned that in the last days there would be false prophets and there has been much speculation over who these false prophets will be. Those who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe they are being led by true, living prophets of God, but there are some who believe that these are the false prophets Jesus was talking about. Since these men don’t claim to be infallible, therefore, it is argued that what they tell us may not always be true and that we shouldn’t always listen to what they tell us. This article examines this belief to see if it is valid or not.
In the gospel of Matthew, we read of an incident when Jesus “sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” One of the things he warned them about was that in the last days “many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many” (Matthew 24:3.11).
There has been much debate among biblical scholars over who these false prophets will be but among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they believe they are being led and guided by men who are true prophets of God. However, many critics of this church believe that these are the false prophets Jesus talked about. It’s their contention that since we have the words of God’s ancient prophets as recorded in the Bible, we have everything God intended for us to know, therefore, he no longer speaks to man through the medium of prophets. Therefore, they contend that anyone who claims to be a prophet of God is a false one.
The fallacy of this argument is that Jesus didn’t say that in the last days anyone claiming to speak for God would be a false prophet. In fact, in order to determine if someone was a “false” prophet, there would also have to be true prophets. But if there are true prophets on the earth, then it becomes important to determine who is a true prophet and who is a fraud. This is the point Jesus was making.
Jesus elaborated on this when he said that the false prophets would be able “to shew great signs and wonders insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (verse 24). If all prophets in the latter-days were going to be false, then it would be impossible for them to deceive those who are the very elect. The only way that could happen is if the elect had trouble distinguishing between who was a real prophet and who aren’t.
However, there are some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who still apply this argument to God’s true prophets. According to them, prophets are fallible, and they themselve do not claim to be infallible. Therefore, it is argued that what they tell us may not always be true. In other words, since they are subject to making mistakes, then sometimes what they tell us may not be God’s words, but their own words, therefore we should not trust everything they tell us..
There are two fallacies to this argument.
It’s true that we shouldn’t follow the prophet based solely on blind faith, meaning we shouldn’t blindly accept whatever a prophet says. In fact, our modern-day prophets have said that if we ever wonder if what they tell us is true or not, we should “ask God, the eternal father, in the name of Jesus if these things are true. And if we ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Jesus, he will manifest the truth unto us” (Moroni 10:)
Unfortunately, too often, when someone disagrees with what the prophet has said, and then prays to know if their words are true or not, instead of praying with a sincere heart and with real intent, most frequently they will not accept an answer that doesn’t agree with what they want to believe. Stated differently, the answer they claim to receive comes more from their own spirit than it does from the Lord’s Spirit.
What this kind of mindset implies is that we are the judges of whether the prophets are telling us the truth or not. But this would require us to be smarter and more inspired than the prophets themselves and if that were the case, then there would be no need for us to have prophets in the first place because we could depend on just our wisdom to know what we should do. But if that were the case, it would require us to be superior to God’s prophets.
However, there is no scriptural justification for such an idea. In fact, the scriptures say just the opposite. For example, when Noah was building a large ship, he told the people of his day to repent, or God would destroy them with a flood.
In those days, the people mocked Noah because there was no water anywhere around when he was building his ark. In fact, the weather no doubt looked beautiful during the one hundred years it took Noak to build his ship and supply it with animals and food. Therefore, all the evidence seemed to strongly suggest that Noah’s prophecy was impossible to come true
When Moses was leading the children of Israel through the wilderness, they constantly complained about his leadership, questioning many of the decisions he made. When he sent spies to check out the land God had promised to them and saw there were “giants” in the land, they didn’t think they could defeat them. When Moses told them that God would give them victory, they refused to believe him because the evidence didn’t suggest he was right.
Isaiah prophesied to his people that if they didn’t repent, God would destroy their city, however no one believed him because they thought the walls of Jerusalem were too strong for any army to break through. Furthermore, for the next one hundred years life went on as usual, so for them this was proof that Isaiah’s prophecy was false. For this reason, when Jeremiah came preaching the same message, no one believed him either, But in 589 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem and carried away those who had not been killed by the sword.
For Christians, the greatest apostle was Paul, whose writings make up most of the New Testament. Today we say that every word he wrote is the absolute word of God, but that was not how the saints of his day felt. He strongly taught that Gentiles who accepted the gospel didn’t need to be circumcised or follow any of the ordinances of the law of Moses, but many Jewish Christians strongly disagreed with him. In fact, they were so convinced he was teaching a false doctrine that they sought to kill him when he visited the temple in Jerusalem.
What we find in the scriptures is that those who didn’t follow what the prophets said, were the ones who were eventually proven wrong, even when all the evidence seemed to go against what the prophets said. Therefore, to set ourselves up as judges of whether what a prophet says is from God or not, is contrary to what the scriptures teach.
When God has called someone to be his spokesman, when they are acting in the capacity as his authorized servant, then what he tells us is what God wants us to know.
To illustrate this, nearly all Christian believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, meaning that everything written in the Bible is absolutely true. But Paul was not infallible, and neither was Peter, or John, or any of the other apostles. They were all human and therefore subject to making mistakes.
If we say that our modern-day prophets are fallible and therefore what they tell us could be wrong, then we can say the same about what Paul, or Peter, or Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote. If we use the same criteria for determining whether what they say is true, then we can go through the Bible and say, “I agree with what Paul said here, but I disagree with what he said there, therefore he must be wrong because I’m smarter than he is.”
When someone exhibits that kind of an attitude, whether it’s with ancient or modern prophets, they are making themselves superior to the prophets of God by acting as though they know the word of God better than God’s divinely chosen spokesmen.
But worse than this, prophets have been called by God himself to declare his word, but those who claim that the prophets’ words are not correct have no divine authority to support their accusation. Therefore, they are speaking for themselves and not for God
However, such critics counter by saying they have prayed about it and the Spirit has told them that God’s prophet is wrong. But, as we discussed earlier, in nearly all such cases (and there are many stories too numerous to cite) the answer they received didn’t come from God but from their own reasoning, and in some cases, may have come from an evil spirit.
But there is a second fallacy to their argument, which is that they use incorrect logic. To illustrate this, in formal logic we can say that if A is the same as B, and B is the same as C, then A must be the same as C. However, if A has some similarity to B, and B has some similarities to C, it cannot be said that A is the same as C.
The logic that the critics of the prophets use is: if prophets are humans, and humans make mistakes, then prophets make mistakes in what they tell us God said. This is like saying: if a tennis ball is yellow and a lemon is yellow, therefore a lemon is a tennis ball. Everyone knows that such a statement is not correct, but this is the same kind of false logic that people use when questioning the words of prophets.
Peter was human, and so was Paul but we don’t ever question that what they said could be wrong, and that’s because they were acting as God’s ambassadors, delivering his message. To put this in perspective, suppose the King of England wrote a proclamation saying he was raising everyone’s taxes beginning next month. And suppose he gave that proclamation to one of his servants to go throughout the countryside reading what was written on that proclamation.
Could we say that when the king’s servant read what was written on that proclamation that what he said was wrong because he is human and makes mistakes? And if the reason why we think he made a mistake is because we don’t want to pay higher taxes, does that then justify us not believing what the king’s servant told us? Of course not, and no one would think so.
Yet when a prophet of God speaks in his official capacity as God’s spokesman, there are some who will say he is only expressing his own personal opinion and since they disagree with what he said, therefore, he must be wrong. The fact that a prophet makes mistakes in his personal life has to do with humanity, but not with his position as a prophet.
Imagine a police officer giving us a ticket for speeding and telling us what day we should appear at court if we wish to dispute the ticket. Just because the officer makes mistakes in his personal life doesn’t mean he made a mistake in giving us a speeding ticket if his radar clocked us going over the speed limit. The fact that the officer makes mistakes in his personal life is irrelevant to his authority to give us a ticket. Imagine what a judge would say if we tried to argue that we shouldn’t have been given a ticket because the police officer once made a mistake with his bank account.
The fact that we don’t want to get a speeding ticket doesn’t determine whether what the police officer did was wrong, yet that is the kind of so-called logic people use when determining whether what a prophet tells us is right or not. It has never mattered that our opinion of what a prophet says determines whether or not his words are true. The validity of what a prophet says is not based on whether we agree with him or not.
But this is nothing new, because this has been the attitude of people throughout history. Jesus criticized the Pharisees saying, “Woe unto you! For you build the sepulchres of the prophets and your fathers killed them” Luke 11:42).
And why did their fathers kill God’s prophets? For the same reason that the Pharisees killed Jesus, which is, they didn’t like what he had to say. Were these prophets infallible? Of course not, because they were humans, but that had nothing to do with the message God gave them to deliver.
Today people revere the dead prophets and speak glowingly of them as being great men of God while acknowledging they had weaknesses. Moses was one of the greatest prophets and yet he murdered an Egyptian taskmaster in cold blood. Peter denied he knew Jesus three times, and Saul of Tarsus went about trying to destroy the believers in Christ, and yet no one says we should doubt what they say because they were fallible men.
Yet there are some who say they have a testimony that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is God’s true church on the earth today, that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, that the Book of Mormon is as much the word of God as is the Bible, who quote the words of the dead modern-day prophets, such as Brigham Young, David O. McKay, or Spencer W. Kimball, but who will disagree with what the living prophets say, simply because they don’t like their message.
Jesus told his disciples that there would be false Christ’s and false prophets who would show forth “great signs and wonders insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.” The elect of God are those who have a testimony of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ but they can be deceived into following the mistakes that God’s people have made in the past, which is, questioning the word of God’s prophets.
Related articles can be found at The Nature of God