Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee.
Prophetic fidelity
The crying fault of the prophets is their reluctance to preach to people of their sins. Their mission distinctly involves the duty of doing so. They should not shun to declare the whole counsel of God. It is not within the province of the ambassador to make selections from among the despatches with which he has been entrusted in order to suit his own convenience. One of the gravest possible omissions is the neglect to give due weight to the tragic fact of sin. All the great prophets have been conspicuous for their fidelity to this painful and sometimes dangerous part of their work. If we would call up a typical picture of a prophet in the discharge of his task, we should present to our minds Elijah confronting Ahab, or John the Baptist before Herod, or Savonarola accusing Lorenzo de Medici, or John Knox preaching at the court of Mary Stuart. He is Isaiah declaring God’s abomination of sacrifices and incense when these are offered by blood-stained hands, or Chrysostom seizing the opportunity that followed the mutilation of the imperial statues at Antioch to preach to the dissolute city on the need of repentance, or Latimer denouncing the sins of London to the citizens assembled at Paul’s Cross. The shallow optimism that disregards the shadows of life is trebly faulty when it appears in the pulpit. It falsifies facts in failing to take account of the stern realities of the evil side of them; it misses the grand opportunity of rousing the consciences of men and women by forcing them to attend to unwelcome truths, and thus encourages the heedlessness with which people rush headlong to ruin; and at the same time it even renders the declaration of the gracious truths of the Gospel, to which it devotes exclusive attention, ineffectual, because redemption is meaningless to those who do not recognise the present slavery and the future doom from which it brings deliverance. (W. F. Adeney, W. A.)
False teachers
1. False teachers are as grievous a plague as can be laid upon a people. They bring with them inevitable destruction (Matthew 15:14).
2. They that refuse to receive the true ministers, God will give them over to be seduced by false teachers and to believe lies (2 Chronicles 36:15; Proverbs 1:24; 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12).
3. It is a certain note of a false prophet, to speak such things in the name of the Lord as are untrue, or misalleged to please the carnal desires of the people (Jeremiah 14:13-15).
4. It is not sufficient for a true minister not to flatter; he must also discover the people’s sins unto them (Eze 13:4; 1 Kings 18:18; Matthew 3:7; Luke 3:8; Matthew 14:4).
5. The only way to avoid God’s plagues is gladly to suffer ourselves bitterly to be reproved by God’s ministers.
6. The falsehood that is taught by false prophets, and believed by a seduced people, is the cause of all God’s punishments that light upon them. (J. Udall.)
False spiritual guides lead to ruin
A short time back the papers told of a vessel that had a most unfortunate trip. The captain became blind three days after leaving St. Pierre-Martinique and no one on board was capable of navigating the ship. The mate did his best and after drifting about for twenty-seven days came in sight of Newfoundland, where some fishermen saw her signals of distress and piloted her into port. If a ship with a blind captain is poorly off, what of a nation, a church, a village, where blind men are in charge: some born blind and by nature unqualified: others blind through worldly interests and a false learning! “Blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” (Footsteps of Truth.)