Thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing!
Woe unto the foolish prophets - through vaunting as though exclusively possessing "wisdom" (1 Corinthians 1:19-21); the "fear of God" being the only "beginning of wisdom" (Psalms 111:10).
That follow their own spirit - instead of the Spirit of God. A three-fold distinction lay between the false and the true prophets:
(1) The source of their messages respectively: of the false, their own hearts;" of the true, an object presented to the spiritual sense
(named from the noblest of the senses a seeing) by the Spirit of God as from without, not produced by their own natural powers of reflection. The word, the body of the thought, presented itself not audible to the natural sense, but directly to the spirit of the prophet; and so the perception of it as properly called a seeing, he perceiving that which thereafter forms itself in his sour as the cover of the external word (Delitzche); hence, the special expression, seeing the word of God (Isaiah 2:1; Isaiah 13:1; Amos 1:1; Micah 1:1).
(2) The point aimed at: the false "walking after their own spirit;" the true, after the Spirit of God.
(3) The result: the false saw nothing, but spake as if they had seen; the true had a vision, not subjective, but objectively real (Fairbairn).
A refutation of those who set the inward word above the objective, and represent the Bible as flowing subjectively from the inner light of its writers, not from the revelation of the Holy Spirit from without. 'They are impatient to get possession of the kernel without its fostering shell-they would have Christ without the Bible' (Bengel).