Let no one depend on the words of a prophet. They are capable of lying and fabricating. Moses is commended for his faithfulness in all of his affairs, and yet we see that he was not allowed to enter the promised land because of personal misbehavior, namely, unfaithfulness. What can we say about the many prophets who are unfamiliar with God’s word? What can we say about those who do not know the languages in which the sacred texts were written? What good is a prophet who is incapable of properly interpreting the written word? The sin of the prophet gets multiplied infinitely to the extent that everybody becomes engaged in foolishness.

Dire circumstances result from lying prophets

“Therefore the Lord does not take pleasure in their young men, Nor does He have pity on their orphans or their widows; For every one of them is godless and an evildoer, And every mouth is speaking foolishness. In spite of all this, His anger does not turn away And His hand is still stretched out. For wickedness burns like a fire; It consumes briars and thorns; It even sets the thickets of the forest aflame And they roll upward in a column of smoke. By the fury of the Lord of hosts the land is burned up, And the people are like fuel for the fire; No man spares his brother.”

(Isaiah 9:17-19, NASB)

Not only does foolishness proliferate, but compassion is removed from the heart of people who believe lies and glorify things that do not matter. It is easy for a prophet to ignore the fact that scriptures are the safeguard of truth, that an impression, from any source, does not suffice for good feeding of the mind. Prophet can not just jump up or fall down and say they had a vision or something landed in their spirit. We have seen that people have relied on the phenomenon of a person falling to the ground as proof that the spirit of God is at work. We have also seen that the vision assumed to be behind prophetic expressions is assumed to be reliable because the person with the vision has an extraordinary experience of something that looks like death or supernatural strength.

Let no one depend on his fellow man. We are living in an age when people have access to the word of God, and it is laziness and neglect to be personally unfamiliar with God’s written word.