While continuing to deal with false teachers, Jesus also added the results of false teaching in Matthew 7:21-23 — a powerful deception that leaves people who embrace the false teaching in a state of delusion.
It is not the mere verbal profession of faith that ensures a person actually knows Christ as Savior, but the consistent life of obedience to God’s Word as interpreted through His Son.
Christians are saved by grace, but the grace that saves always results in works that God has prepared. Grace is never an excuse for willful disobedience to God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew about the teaching of cheap grace in the Lutheran church of Germany, and he was critical of it. In his book “The Cost of Discipleship,” he wrote, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, and without Jesus Christ living and incarnate.”
A life made new by the grace of God will result in a motive to live holy. In Jesus’ day, people were making “professions of faith,” but their words of affirmation contradicted their behavior and betrayed the real condition of their hearts. People were calling Jesus Lord and claiming to be His follower. They had orthodox spoken beliefs, did religious service, prophesied and exorcised demons in Jesus’ name, and even performed “miracles” in His name. The last one is bewildering. Many attempts to explain this have been offered by a variety of Bible students. John MacArthur believes there are three possibilities regarding these miracles: They were done in Satan’s power, they were allowed by God, or their claims were false.
At judgment time, the false teachers and even their delusional followers will offer God reasons for their justification. No one ever deceives God. He knows everything. On that day Jesus will say, “I never knew you; depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.” For anyone to say they are a follower of Christ and consistently live a life of disobedience (that is, practice lawlessness) is a contradiction. That kind of profession of faith was only verbal and never life-changing. As John R.W. Stott has written, “Although they used His name freely, their name was unknown to Him.”
When Jesus says He never knew them is not to imply He had no knowledge of their existence, but to emphasize that He had no relationship with them. It is not a case of someone losing their salvation (an impossible notion), but a revelation of the fact they were never truly born again.
False teachers and their disciples may do what appears to be many benevolent works. They possess a religious vocabulary that sounds godly to the unsuspecting. One of the founding fathers of the Southern Baptist Convention, John Broadus, observed that many of the false prophets come from traditional or orthodox religious training, and their outward morality gives the impression of spiritual reality that helps to more thoroughly perpetuate the deception.
False teaching can even influence genuine believers. Subtle errors can easily lead us to wrong conclusions. Our anchor and authority is always the Word of God itself. The people of Berea are a healthy example of careful discernment: “Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily, to see whether these things were so.” Still, false teaching is often appealing, while misleading. Jesus’ warning is clear, and we do well to regard His counsel highly: Beware the false teachers.