Contemp Prior to Investigation

    

 For some reason, my car's radio started picking up XM for a few weeks. I don't know why it was happening, but it was nice not having to hear the same mainstream music for a change. As I was strolling through the stations one morning, I found one that I was very curious about. It was the Joel Osteen station. So, I kept it there and listened to a few of his sermons.

     Now, let me give you a little synopsis of my knowledge of Joel Osteen gathered over the years:

      He's a false prophet.
      He preaches a prosperity gospel.
      You shouldn't listen to him because he doesn't teach the bible.
      
     Mind you, none of these conclusions were gathered on my own, but rather handed to me from outside sources. So, for as far as I can remember, I've had contempt prior to investigation in the matter. Well, I finally got the chance to investigate this false prophet.

      And, what I found was this:

      I've never heard a pastor encourage his congregation as much as I heard him do in those few sermons. 

     What does that mean?

    Well, when Paul talks about false prophets, he uses words like corrupt, despise, arrogant, abuse, blaspheme, unreasoning, harm, carouse, and adultery.

    He uses phrases like corrupt desire and despise authority and seduce the unstable and experts in greed. (All these are taken from 2 Peter 2).

     In Joel's sermons, I heard phrases like trust in God and stay strong and you are conquerers and take care of yourself and God loves you. So, what I heard firsthand didn't line up with what I had heard secondhand for all these years . . . 

     . . . which brings me to an important point. 

     When writers of the scriptures warned people of false prophets, they weren't warning against teachers who were putting a fresh spin on the scriptures and adding new elements to their teaching styles. 

      The false prophets they warned about were really bad dudes. We like to think that we know of false prophets today. Do names like Robert Tilton, Benny Hinn, or Rob Bell ring a bell (pun intended)? But these names represent people who had (and have) mass followings and received national television time. While we love to throw around the phrase false prophet when we hear someone teach in a way that rubs us the wrong way, tagging that identity on well-known preachers doesn't quite capture who Paul was talking about.

    The people Paul was warning his audience about were doing things that were obviously against what Brian D. McLaren calls "the dream of God." They were successfully trolling churches to seduce people away from the movement that was constantly catching momentum (called The Way). They would hang around the edges of the gatherings like private investigators, watching for any weak followers, then lure them outside so they could financially feast on them.

     And usually, the weakest victims were the poor, the lonely, the marginalized.

     And so these people would be promised unrealistic things by these teachers, they would join up, and then these teachers would feast on them financially like vampires.

     If a teacher is on TV, chances are they're not financially desperate. I don't think Benny Hinn or Joel Osteen ever needed to go troll churches to create a following. People follow them on their own. Regardless of whether you think their messages are "bible-based" or not, people have to choose to walk through their doors and listen to whatever the sermon is that day. While they may be building their wealth through the congregational contributions, people are choosing to build their wealth for them. 

    In Paul's day, you had two messages that were colliding with each other: the first was, you don't have to sacrifice anymore because this God loves you independently of all that. The second was, you do have to make sacrifices because if you don't, God won't forgive you. 

    And, the latter was used to create a whole network of fraud (which, by the way, didn't start in the New Testament but was a common theme throughout Israels' own history). In order to make sacrifices, you had to buy whatever animal or incense was required. Which means you had to pay someone for that animal or incense. And what a better way than to kill two birds with one stone and sell the animal and incense right in the temple (remember Jesus' temple campaign?)? Not only that, but wouldn't it be even more efficient to make the "priest" the salesman as well?

   See where this is going? 

    The truth is, while there were some people getting baited away from these gatherings, there was no momentum. The message that was spreading and sweeping people off their feet was this message of a God who loves us independently of what we do. How freeing is that? 

   You mean, I don't have to do anything? Yep. 

    So, while I don't doubt there are false teachers hidden in the shadows across this country, I don't believe they're as prevalent as we make them out to be. They wouldn't have a following that gets on national television every week (and every day). 

    I do believe that certain religious circles have become very skeptical of other religious circles (aka Christianity and Catholicism, Baptist and Methodist, etc.) But all this really is, is

    contempt prior to investigation.

     We're really good at forming generalizations before we investigate things ourselves, which leads us to our final thought:

    Why not write down one thing that we have formed a negative opinion about over the years. Ask ourselves, "Did I come to this conclusion myself or did I just take this from someone else?" Make an effort to investigate the person or place or situation or thought or whatever it may be, and you may come out the other side wondering how you ever let yourself be persuaded so easily about something that you'd never done the research on.