Whether you are sitting in church, reading a book or listening to a podcast, we hear a lot of false teaching. Do false prophets know that they are false prophets?
A false prophet/teacher is not simply someone who does a poor job of teaching the Bible. We could simply call those people unprepared teachers.
The term is quite specific in scripture (Check out 2 Peter 2 or Jude).
The main condition is that they are an unbeliever – they have no relationship with Jesus at all, yet for personal reasons they want to gain by influencing the church and so they take on the persona of teacher.
So how would they view themselves? Possibly quite similar to ourselves before coming to faith - they don’t know what they’re missing.
While they may recognize they are taking advantage of people, recognize they have selfish desires, it is doubtful they recognize they are those who have been prophesied in scripture to be coming to deceive the church.
From their point of view, church is all a game, all an opportunity.
Ultimately, false teachers are unbelievers who are involved in a charade of ministry for selfish reasons, for the most part unaware of their greater role.
