How do you distinguish between true and false prophets? This timeless question, which plagued biblical communities for centuries, remains just as relevant today. In this thought-provoking episode, Professor Emeritus Richard Nysse from Luther Seminary joins hosts Katie Langston and Kathryn Schifferdecker to explore the biblical wisdom surrounding false prophets and spiritual discernment. Drawing from key Old Testament passages including Deuteronomy 18 and the dramatic confrontation between Jeremiah and Hananiah, the conversation reveals why the Bible itself doesn't simply assign "true" or "false" labels to prophets, leaving believers to wrestle with discernment in real time.

The discussion moves beyond surface-level tests like prediction fulfillment to examine deeper biblical principles for identifying false prophets. From Jesus' teaching about knowing them "by their fruits" in Matthew 7 to understanding the prophetic role as exposition rather than fortune-telling, this episode offers practical wisdom for modern believers navigating questions of spiritual authority. Whether you're evaluating church leadership, processing conflicting teachings, or simply seeking to grow in biblical discernment, this conversation provides essential tools for recognizing authentic spiritual voices while avoiding the pitfalls of false prophets who may lead God's people astray.

Welcome to another episode of the Enter the Bible podcast where you can get answers or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible but were afraid to ask. I'm Katie Langston.

And I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker and today we're joined by our dear friend and returning guest Richard Nysse who's Professor Emeritus of Old Testament here at Luther Seminary. Thank you for joining us again, Dick. ⁓ all right. Our question for today is from a listener and again, as always listeners, if you have a question for us, please go to enterthebible.org and submit your question. try to get as

to as many of them as we can. So the original question is, what do you do about teachers who are right about one thing and wrong about another? And we're not quite sure if we're addressing the original listener's question here, but we thought about the question of true and false prophets, which is a question that comes up over and over again, particularly in the Old Testament, but also in the New Testament. So how do we recognize true and false prophets? Or how do we

distinguish between true and false prophets. How would you begin to answer that question, Dick?

Well, first I'd recognize it's a question that is asked in the Old Testament itself. In Deuteronomy 18, it says, you may say to yourself, how can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken? So it's a perennial old question asked in the Bible itself. I think the main thing or the opening thing is to recognize that this problem

has many dimensions in the Old Testament. It's asked from a number of different angles. It's asked early. It's asked late in the Bible. So it's a persistent problem. And one answer in one setting doesn't work in another. So it's always paying attention to context. And therefore,

spread over several hundred years, it's going to have multiple ⁓ responses to that. How do we recognize if it's a word from the Lord?

Yeah. Well, and it continues to be pertinent today. I know I may have mentioned this to listeners before, but I taught for a year in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for the Lutheran seminary there, the Mekane Yesus Seminary. And this was a burning question really for my Ethiopian students. They asked me pretty early on, how do you tell a true prophet from a false prophet? Because in that context, there's lots of people

claiming to be prophets and not all of them for, shall we say, honorable reasons. I'll say that I think there are still prophets. I think there are still people with prophetic gifts. But as in biblical times, there's also people who are claiming to be prophets who perhaps have other motives for doing that. And even here in our country, I know there are people who

Hahaha

claim to be prophets here, probably a lot fewer, at least certainly in the mainline Protestant world. But there are certainly a lot of people who claim to speak for God, including all of us who are pastors, right? we get up in the pulpit, we're claiming to speak for God. So it's a relevant question in other words, both in biblical times and today.

Well, even one of the things in the Old Testament is the lack of the adjective, true or false. It's just prophet. And then there are prophets who, you know, it's always a descriptor of what they're doing. Nobody goes around and assigns the adjective to one or another. They just have the word prophet. So in a way, it's constantly begging the question, what adjective are you going to put in front of it?

Interesting.

when the Bible doesn't put an adjective in front of the word prophet.

Yeah, yeah.

Because in the Bible, if I'm remembering correctly, especially in the Old Testament, a prophet is a kind of role that's recognized in society, right? And these folks are what they talk to political leaders, right? They have, at least in some religious contexts, they seem to have some sort of function, like cultic function. Am I getting that correct? Like, what is, I guess, what is a prophet from the...

standpoint of the old test.

word cultic out of it. still institutionally, ⁓ when would somebody walking down the street of Jerusalem say, goes a prophet? I'm not sure how often that would be. Unlike saying today there's a pastor or there's a priest or something like that. Would it have been a formalized rule? Well, to the degree it is, the kings have them. David had his Nathan, Ahab has 400 of them. ⁓

Right. No less. That are his prophets. Well, now Jeremiah or Amos or Hosea are never labeled as the king's prophet. But the same term is used for both of them. Again, to go back to the lack of an adjective in front of it. But you have institutional prophets and then you have those are the kings attached to the royal, not attached to the priestly, not to the temple, but actually to the king.

part of the court. And so you'd say, well, could you say the true prophet, he's adding now our adjective, is a true prophet, one who's not paid, therefore not part of the entourage of royalty and sold out, presumably sold out. Well, I'm not sure. Samuel clearly is getting paid during some of his stuff.

is that.

would be one of the court prophets who turns out to be true in our labeling. And he's clearly eating at the royal table. the paid, unpaid doesn't exactly work either. In the case of Amos, sometimes that text one in chapter 70s with the priest name Messiah tells him he can't preach against Jeroboam because the temple in the Northern Kingdom

where he's preaching that temple belongs to the king. It's the king's house. You are not to speak here. So he says to him, go prophesy there. That means in the South, go do your thing over there. Right. Well, that's an argument about jurisdiction, not an argument about paid or not.

Right, or content even.

No jurisdiction here. This is the king's place and you're not authorized. often it's tried to squeeze that in when he says, I'm not a prophet. That's the response of Amos. I am not. Well, that's a little Hebrew grammar comes into play there because there is no tense. It just says, not prophet. Now, I'm not a prophet. Then it would work. I don't, I'm not employed that way.

But if it's, I was not a prophet, but the Lord said, go prophesy. Well, then it's, I wasn't, but I am now. So I think that one's not about employment at all. It's about jurisdiction. Go do it over there, out of the King's territory. And what he says is, I was called, or the Lord said, go prophesy. And then the last two verses of that section are a

devastating prophecy that he announces. You say, do not prophesy while watch me. That kind of thing. It's really some of hardest language in the Bible is the last verse of that statement on the part of Amos.

So,

Dick, you mentioned Deuteronomy 18, where you're right. So, Moses, this is starting in verse 15. Moses says, the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people, you shall heed such a prophet. And then, you you may say to yourself, how can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken? Prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, but the thing does not take place or prove true.

it is a word that the Lord has not spoken. Earlier it says, any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak, that prophet shall die. So there seem to be two criteria, at least in that passage, right? Like if the prophet speaks in the name of another god, that's not, you you shouldn't

take heed of that prophet's words. And if what the prophet says doesn't come true, you don't need to pay attention to it. So yeah, do you want to expound on those or?

Well, many of the criteria that do occur in the Old Testament eliminate, they can be used to eliminate some people, but they don't establish the person. And right there, if they speak in some other God's name, well, that's not allowed. That's disestablished. But what if the fulfillment, unfulfillment criteria comes up? In chapter 13, it says people see visions and all that, and some of it happens.

but they lead you to a wrong God, then it's false. You don't trust that person. ⁓ You shouldn't obey them. But they met the fulfillment, non-fulfillment criteria that chapter 18 brings up. chapter 13, chapter 18 have two different utilizations of the fulfillment, non-fulfillment piece.

So I think if you take the non-fulfillment, what you got is you have a historic record. You might say, this guy's been wrong 30 times in a row. So now what do we do? Well, but you don't know the next time. So the present tense issue is always there. In the current moment, when I hear what this person just said,

Ha ha!

Ha

Fulfillment, non-fulfillment doesn't help me. than a track record.

Right. Yeah, that was going to be sort of my next question, which I think goes to the original question, which said, what do do about teachers who are right about one thing and wrong about another? sometimes, if they get it wrong, does that then tell you, okay, they're not worth listening to across the board? Or is it just about that one thing that they said? What do you think the text is trying to instruct there?

it changes though if you say they're right. And now what do you do with that? I mean, if they're wrong, I think we'd start to lose audience pretty quickly. The deeper problem is when they're right. And it is like, to use the Old Testament language, it is a fulfilled prophecy that they've been right quite often. But are they right the next time? Well, they may not be. It may be a word that's self-serving. It may be a word that the king wants to hear.

or some other odd supporter. So it may be saying, peace, peace, where there is no peace. I'm left with, you know, I'm always left with the predicament of what do I trust in the present tense. I think it's very different question retrospectively.

Yeah, it's much easier to say if someone is a prophet or not from the future perspective. Hindsight is 20-20. The problem is often in the moment we need, or at least pretty soon we need to figure out whether this person is someone worth following or someone worth trusting, whether they're actually speaking for God or not. So that's the dilemma, I suppose.

Exactly.

Well, I think a good illustration of that is to go to Jeremiah 28 with Hananiah. Hananiah is labeled a prophet, as is Jeremiah. Hananiah is going to in the narrative be a false prophet, but he bears only the label prophet to repeat what I said earlier. There is no adjective. Even in the retrospective of writing that chapter, it doesn't call him a false prophet. He acts that way, but that you don't know until the end of the

chapter, he says that in two years, all the Babylonian oppression is going to be gone. And Jeremiah's response to it is, amen, I hope that's the case. In the moment, he couldn't prove that he was wrong. So Jeremiah abandons the setting and then later receives a word from God that no, Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonians are not going to go away in two quick years. No way. He goes back

and preaches that, Hananiah says, thus says the Lord, it's going to go all right. Well, Jeremiah says, you're going to die. But it's two months before he dies. So even in that two months, Jeremiah still doesn't know for certain other than his confidence that God has spoken to him, but he can't prove it to the public. That sets the scene.

Mm-hmm.

I think very acutely is that even Jeremiah for two months can't persuade a third person. Yeah.

Back to that story. So, Jeremiah has been saying to the people of Jerusalem and the people of Judah, submit yourselves to Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon, you know, because they're going to come and take this city. And Hananiah says, no, you know, God's going to protect the city and the Babylonians will be no more. And you're right. I mean, Jeremiah says, amen. I hope you're right.

But, and I should quote it, I should read it exactly, but he says something like, all the prophets before us prophesied judgment, right? So the prophet who prophesies peace, you you have to wait and see whether that, it's kind of like the prophet who prophesies peace has a higher bar to me.

Yeah, that's good. You added that because he does talk about what our predecessors have done. And he emphasized war, famine and pestilence. So that's sort of saying, that's why I'm saying amen. But I don't really think so because the prior stuff has been judgment. Now, if we take that instance and try to generalize it, we're going to lose a lot of the

written prophets. Comfort, comfort, my people says your God. A ⁓ whole big bunch of Isaiah goes. Nahum is all good news to Judah. We got large sections of the biblical prophets that would be eliminated if war, pestilence, and famine were what true prophets said.

Right, right,

Yeah. No, that's true. That's true. So it's not just that, it's not that a prophet has to only prophesy judgment, war, and pestilence, but that attention to what's come before, think that's a good point, Dick. That's the larger lesson, I think, to take from that.

Another

way that maybe try to untie this Gordian knot, so to speak, is to say that the prophetic word is a word that meets with resistance. When they do war, pestilence, phem, you can imagine why the resistance is there. But if you read a section like Isaiah 40 to 55, the prophet works awfully hard.

because the audience keeps saying, my way is hidden from my God. God has put us in exile. He's abandoned us. The judgment is final. To overcome despair with hope is as hard for a prophet to do as to overcome false optimism with judgment. So there again, it would say what's happening in any given context and where is the resistance coming from?

Yeah, yeah, good point.

because just because it's a good word maybe that's hard to break through despair.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good point. I'm reminded of a teacher of mine back in my seminary days who said, you know, the spirit moves in new ways and gives new words and, you know, whether that's judgment or hope or something else, but what the spirit says should bear a family resemblance to what's come before, which I think is a bit along the lines of what you were talking about, Dick, right? Think about what the prophets in the past have done before. Certainly God

does new things, but they shouldn't contradict what's come before. should, they should. I like that phrase, family resemblance. They should have some resemblance to what has come before.

there, if you take the prophets that are in the Bible now and aggregate, especially the written ones, what's come before is both judgment and hope. Both have family resemblance. Is the good news consistent with the good news of the prophetic word?

Right.

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

because- Yeah, that's what I meant. Yeah.

they

do have both judgment and hope, but what they don't have is, you know, and do these four things and you're going to get rich or, you know what I mean? know, exactly. Like there are things that don't bear a family resemblance that are quite popular and things that people teach that, you know, that aren't in alignment with kind of what we understand God's Word has been throughout the ages.

God wants you to be rich, wealthy, have a mansion.

Yeah, and I think a useful contrast for me is that it's to remove the word prediction. Yeah. And think of prophets much more as exposing. Yeah. So many of their sentences, know, sentence in, sentence one after another is more what you have been doing. You strip the clothes from the debtor, you press the widow and the orphan. Right. There's no prediction there.

And there's no announcement of hope in that particular sentence. It's an exposure. And in that sense, the prophets move from if-then kind of thing. If you do this, then that. Blessings and curses in Deuteronomy and Leviticus lining up to something more. This is, this is what the current condition is.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Describing things as they are and then I think a lot of times we think of prophecy or the prophetic word to be about predicting the future or fortune telling or something like that. But what I'm hearing you say, Dick, is that it's a lot more about sort of correctly interpreting what's going on and then perhaps extrapolating.

You have been doing yeah

from that, both by the spirit, but then probably there's just some good common sense and understanding of human nature that might be a part of that whole art. ⁓

At one point, they're maybe, say, they're calling people to return. Sure. Here you are the people of God, this is your Exodus experience, this is your wilderness experience, then live that. And now what you're living is in contradiction to that. Repent or else. The or else isn't a prediction, because presumably if you repent, then it's not going to happen. Sure.

Right. Yeah.

But that shifts to flat out announcements of judgment. You have done this and this, therefore, and that's a whole different thing than if you don't stop, this bad stuff's gonna happen. When they announce judgment, there's no contingency. This is the future. But they always give a rationale. There's that hinge word, therefore. Here's the indictment.

Here's the sentence, the kind of thing. When it comes to words of hope, it isn't because you repented fervently, this will come. Hope is always predicated on the heart of God. ⁓ God is this way, God can't let go, therefore, how can I forsake you, Ephraim, Ephraim, my people, my son? The pathos of God leads to the announcement of hope.

That's really interesting. ⁓

The

judgment is your conduct. ⁓

You are the basis for the judgment. God is the basis for the hope.

And

that if that stuff is not there in front of an announcement of hope.

Yeah, yeah, that's really beautiful too. I feel like we need to bring in at least one New Testament tape. Yeah, right, right.

And I was going to say too in our last few minutes also, I think, yes, bringing in the New Testament and then also tying it back to that question. You know, we're talking a lot about, you know, what's going on biblically speaking, but how do we do this today? How do we discern? How do we tell? How do we know who to listen to and what guide might the Bible be? Not just for us interpreting the texts from the past, but also, you know, living as people of faith in the present.

So the New Testament text I'm bringing up may help address that. this is Matthew 7 at verse 15. So Jesus is speaking to the crowds and he says,

are grapes gathered from thorns or figs from thistles in the same way every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits." So this isn't, there's not a lot of gray area here in the, we know in real life. I mean, in our lives there is gray area, but I think that that's worth bringing up because we can

in the present time, often, or at least in the near future, see the fruits of someone's teaching or preaching. I mean, to take probably the easiest example, for those self-declared prophets who seem to be in it for money or for fame, who preach something, asking always for money and are flying around in private jets or have a couple of mansions or whatever.

I think those kinds of fruits are pretty obvious and obviously not what the biblical prophets were doing. I think about the story of Naaman the Syrian and Elisha. Elisha heals Naaman the Syrian and Naaman tries to give him a bunch of goods and gold and silver and Elisha refuses that. So the prophet of God doesn't seem to be in it for the money. And it is helpful, I think, to look at the

at the fruits of whatever preacher or prophet's teaching might be.

not sure how much that would fit the context for Isaiah or Jeremiah or Amos or Hosea. Yeah. It's pretty clear they weren't making money off of it. No, no. the absence of that, but also the absence of any reference to it. don't think it was much of a threat. I tend to think it's helpful, especially with the negative words. Well, I'll do it with negative and positive. The word that the prophet

preaches is first of all a compelled word. So many times it's preface. Thus says the Lord and they dare to take on the voice of God. Now what do they do with that? There's no place that the prophet exempts themselves from the judgmental words. There's no statement that Isaiah or Jeremiah had a free pass just because they were

speaking truthfully. One of the outgrowths of that is their sense of lament. Jeremiah is burdened by having to preach this. He argues with God about it. It's very Moses-like arguing with God about, they're your people, come on, you can't do this. So on. So the prophetic laments grow out of the non-exemption of the prophet from the very hard words he speak. Now make that impositive.

Right, right, right.

The future hopeful word is one the prophet that is equally in need of and dependent on. So you could say the word through the prophet is first the word to the prophet. So if we're going to speak or preach today, what must I preach? What must I hear and therefore preach? So the word to me, through me.

kind of thing, think for me opens up a little bit something a little different than looking at the bank account and the private chats or so. That's almost too easy.

Well, yeah, it is an easy example and most people aren't quite that blatant. But I think your point is a really good one, Dick, that the prophet speaks the word of the Lord. And sometimes if we take the biblical prophets as witness, often doesn't want to speak that word, right? ⁓ It's a difficult word, but is compelled. The prophet is compelled to do that. I like that word play, right? The word through the prophet is also a word to the prophet.

Of the word even.

First a word to the prophet. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. ⁓

So that when you preach, sense, the congregation should have a sense that the hope to which you point is one you're as dependent on as you're asking them to depend on. Yeah. Co-dependent, to use a negative term.

Mm.

in the best sense of the word.

on

that gospel word. Now another little criteria that comes up is maybe chronological. Joel talks about the day when young men, old men, women, everybody's going to speak by the Spirit. There's going to be outpouring of the Spirit. For the bulk of the Old Testament, the people that speak by the Spirit are prophets.

You got the judges who are raised up by the spirit. Saul's kind of a transitionary figure. David may be one reference. Solomon, Hezekiah, none of them speak that way. A prophet does. It's sort of like the office of the judge split and the prophet is the counterbalance to kingship. so Joel's talking about that happening for the whole community and Acts picks it up.

on Pentecost. So maybe we're going to say, who is the prophet today? Every baptized Christian is a prophet. The office has been democratized through Pentecost. Well, okay. I don't know that we at best then we all are prophetic. Maybe we're not all prophets. We're maybe not the noun, but use the adjective. all have a prophetic role to play. ⁓

Or at least test the potential.

Right.

mutual consolation of sister and brother. That's offering the gospel to despairing friends and relatives. That's a proclamatory role. That's a prophetic role. So in that sense. Now another one you might just simply say go to Zechariah 13 and if anybody has a vision, they deny they've had it.

They don't want anything to do with it. If a kid looks like a prophet, the parents are supposed to kill it. There is no true prophetic word in Zechariah 13. It's all done with. Well, then you might say the prophets existed for a certain period of time. There weren't apostles then. And after which there are no more prophets. So there weren't apostles. There's a time before which there were apostles. There's a time after which

there aren't prophets. That's a chronological criteria. Well, we're not going to do that because the New Testament uses the word.

Yeah, Paul talks about the gift of prophecy.

Yeah, it's on the list.

I like the Joel to Acts chapter two is so we all have a prophetic role. then maybe communally, right, we have a prophetic role. Yeah. Yeah. Not so much the individual, but our communal gathering. ⁓ The other thing, little stream of consciousness here, I'm sorry, but it's when you talk about the fruits and so on, and these people jetting around.

Yeah.

There's so much care for the widow and the orphan and the sojourner. I mean, it's down in the muck of life, not skimming over the top of it. That's how find the prophets located.

Exactly.

Yep, exactly. Yeah, Elijah takes care of the widow of Zarephath. Prophets are responsible to Torah, responsible to God, right? They're not going to preach or act in a way that is contrary to...

And so it's not power over somebody. I don't know what you experienced in Ethiopia, but I think a lot of people that get on TV and do that, there is a lot of power over. That is not, I don't see that as a role in the Old Testament. Certainly not in the original.

the

prophets. not for the prophets. If anything, they're rejected and prosecuted, right?

You're still powerful.

You're

not seeking power over.

Right. They're not seeking power.

That goes back into it being a compelled word.

I don't want to to do this or say this, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's really helpful. Thank you so much for those reflections. And thank you to the listener who submitted that question to us. I wish I could give you a checklist and say, here's how you know a true teacher or a prophet, here's how you know a false one. I think as this kind of conversation showed us, it's something that takes care and discernment and an understanding of scripture and what...

what God's Word has been in the past and continues to be in the present.

I could put a footnote in there. Yeah. Maybe the prophet, if we're looking for a prophet, try Isaiah, Jeremiah through Malachi. You'll have your hands full with them without finding some more contemporaries to deal with.

I love that. is wonderful. Thank you. And thank you to those of us who have joined us today, whether you're listening on your favorite podcast app or watching on YouTube, we appreciate you being here. And you can get more great resources like this, conversations, reflections, commentaries, courses, anything that you could need as you dive in and enter the Bible with curiosity and faith. We have a brand new newsletter.

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