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-- © GodSpeak International 2006 --
-- Do not republish without written permission from <copyright@godspeak.org> --

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CONTRIBUTING RESOURCES
Author: Teresa Seputis <ts@godspeak.net> http://www.godspeak.net

Prophetic-School Course #38

False Prophecy & Second Heaven Revelation

By Teresa Seputis

Lesson 1
Why Study Them?

Whenever God does something that builds His kingdom, this takes ground from the devil's kingdom; it tears it down. So Satan tends to counter what God is doing. Every area where God has a strategy, Satan comes up with a counter strategy. For instance, God introduced conviction and the devil introduced condemnation. God introduced being filled with His Spirit, which brings true peace and joy. The devil introduced being inebriated with "spirits," where people are lulled into a false sense of joy that only lasts as long as the liquor is in their system, and many people drink to forget, giving them a false sense of peace. God introduced agape love, truly caring for one another in the love of Christ. Then the devil introduced "free love" or sexual immorality, where sex becomes so casual that it is freely practiced between strangers who have not relationship at all, such as people going "to bed" together on the first date -- a false intimacy. This is a pattern that has been going on for a very long time. Whenever God does something good, the enemy counterfeits it in some twisted way.

That is also true in the prophetic. The prophetic is a very good thing, where God desires to speak to His people. He wants to lead and guide them into His truth and victory, He wants to speak encouragement to them, to build them up, to strengthen and equip them to do His will. The enemy has a counterfeit for this as well.. the false prophetic. In fact, there are four main thrusts to the devil's counterfeit of the prophetic.

One of these counterfeits these is teaching false "revelation" or "secret truths" that are designed to led God's people astray. They are designed to get people to break God's commandments and move them out of right relationship with Him.

The second counterfeit of the true prophetic is false condemnation--speaking judgments in God's name that God is not speaking.

The third counterfeit is manipulation and control, pretending to speak for God only to manipulate people to do what the false prophet wants them to do in the name of God. There is a human counter-part to this type of demonic false prophecy, but the kind I am talking about here is initiated by the demonic realm, unusually under the direction of a spirit of Jezebel. The person speaking for this spirit is not manipulating people for their own gain, but at the demon's direction. In fact, this person may be so deceived by the demon that they think they are speaking for God.

The fourth is to evoke fear, to attempt to paralyze God's people with apprehension about upcoming disasters and/or cataclysmic events. We often refer to this as "Second Heaven" revelation, and it frequently takes the form of visions of destruction. It doesn't matter whether or not the vision is accurately telling the future, because the source of the vision is the devil and not God. We are not to operate on those visions.

There are other forms of false prophecy as well. These are not Satan's counterfeit of the prophetic, they are human in origin instead of demonic origin. This includes things like speaking from our own woundedness or immaturity. It includes manipulating people in God's name to do the false prophet's own personal agenda. It also includes those people want to impress others by seeming more spiritual than they are by pretending to operate in spiritual gift they don't really have. Also, at times those truly gifted in the prophetic make mistakes that can result in erroneous words when they are first leering to move in their gift.

We are going to look at all of these things in subsequent lessons. You may wonder why we are discussing the topic of false revelation. The reason is because we need to be able to recognize and reject false prophecy as part of the process judging prophecy and receiving God's true word.

In 2 Timothy 2:15, Paul instructed the young pastor Timothy to "study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" (KJV). This was practical instruction to a young pastor. I believe that if Timothy had been a young prophet instead of a pastor, Paul would have phrased his instruction something like this: "Study to show yourself approved. Learn to tell the different between when God is speaking and when someone is imitating His voice. Never prophesy anything that comes from any source other than God, and help others to learn to discern what is really God's words and what is not." And that is the main goal of this teaching series.

I had been thinking about writing this series for a long time but I always put it off. Why? Because I don't like to focus on the enemy and his strategies. God is so much bigger and stronger and smarter and glorious and more powerful than the devil. I hate to give the devil any glory by focusing on him. I don't want to make him appear to be more important than he really is, because God is the One Who is really important in our lives. But we do need to study and be aware of the enemy's tactics, so that we don't fall prey to them.

The Lord began telling me to write this series a few days ago. You know how He begins bringing things to you in a way that makes you think, "I wonder if God is trying to tell me something." One of the things He did was have me trip across a short teaching I'd written on Second Heaven revelation when I was looking for something else. As I read it, the Lord began speaking to me that I have not done a very thorough teaching on Second Heaven Revelation and False Revelation. I began thinking that maybe I should write one sometime soon. I put that on my "to-do" list but it was at a very low priority. I figured I'd get to it sometime in about six or seven months. God was not satisfied with my timeframe.

The next morning I got a "false prophecy" from someone who I don't know. That prophecy was worded in a very spiritual sounding way, but the content was alarming. Basically it instructed me to throw away all God has ever taught me, all He has ever done through me, all I know about God and start over as though He had never revealed anything about Himself to me. It told me to go into a "cocoon" to pursue "inner wisdom" instead of hearing His voice and depending on Him to lead me. The prophecy also asked me to quit ministry and get rid of my supporters. In addition, it accused me of not being yielded to the Holy Spirit and came with a stern warning (e.g. a threat of punishment) if I did not soften my heart to Him.

Whew! Where did that come from? My response on my first reading of this was to think "this is not right!" But, of course, I did not want to reject in outright just in case it really was God and I was somehow being blinded to His truth and stubborn and rebellious against Him in some area of my life. My heart's greatest desire is to be fully yielded and pleasing to Him, to be someone who causes Him pleasure, to be someone He wants to work through to accomplish His purposes. If the Holy Spirit was rebuking or correcting me in an area, I did not want to ignore Him. This did not sound like something I thought the Lord would say to me, but I did not want to take the chance of missing God. That meant that I had to go through a serious and prayerful process of carefully judging this word.

I am not going to go into detail on how I judged it, but it took me many hours to work through this process; to pray, to listen to God, to carefully examine the word, and to do a bit of Spirit-guided research based on what God was speaking to me about this. By the end of that process I felt that I had heard clearly from God about this "word," and He had given me some confirmation on what He said to me as I judged this word. I had carefully examined my heart before the Lord and God assured me that I was in right relationship with Him. I judged this word to be the enemy trying to shut me down rather than God rebuking me, and I rejected it.

God said something very important to me near the end of that process. He said, "There are many others of My own who have hearts after Me like yours, but who don't really know how to judge prophecy. If the enemy gave one of them a false word like this, they might now know how to determine that it was a false word from the enemy. They might be deceived into thinking it was a true word from Me." Then God told me that He wanted me to teach people how to sort through this type of thing and be able to recognize a demonic false prophecy given in an attempt to take them out.

That is why I am writing this teaching series.


-- © GodSpeak International 2006 --
-- Do not republish without written permission from <copyright@godspeak.org> --

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