False Prophecy & Second Heaven Revelation

Anytime a person claims to speak for God and says something God is not saying, that is false prophecy. Not all false prophecy comes from the devil. In Jeremiah 23:21, God says, "I did not send these prophets, yet they have run with their message; I did not speak to them, yet they have prophesied." He goes on to explain where their motivation is coming from in verses 25 to 26: "25 I have heard what the prophets say who prophesy lies in My name. They say, 'I had a dream! I had a dream!' 26 How long will this continue in the hearts of these lying prophets, who prophesy the delusions of their own minds?

Manipulation and False Prophecy

There are manipulative people in the world who will use whatever tactic they can to get you to do what they want you to do, and some of them have found their way into the prophetic. The try to convince you that God is telling you to do what they want you to do. It might be giving them some money, or it might be giving them some sort of status or power, or doing something to make their lives more comfortable. But whatever it is, you can be assured they have their own good at heart, not yours.

We have an alarming example of this in 1 Kings 13. This details a story where God sends a prophet from Judah to Bethel to confront Jeroboam for his idolatry and to destroy his altar. They have a power encounter and God wins. As a result the king offers to reward the prophet financially, but the prophet refuses. He explains that God gave him specific instructions to fast and not to backtrack. Of course, everyone is impressed by how powerfully God moved through this Judean prophet and he becomes the "talk of the town.

Verse 11 tells us that there was a retired prophet who lived in Bethel, and he heard about this power encounter. He decided that he wanted to have this Judean prophet come to his house for a meal. The passage does not clarify his motives, but it was most likely a status thing. In that society, if you have an important person to come as a guest to your house, it raised your status in the eyes of all your neighbors. (In fact, that thinking still common in many parts of the world today.) Whatever his reason was, the retired prophet wanted to get this prophet come eat at his house.

So he got on a donkey and went after the prophet. When he found him, in invited him to come for dinner. The prophet declined and explained God's instructions to him about fasting and not backtracking. Verse 18 tells us that the retired prophet responded by lying to the real prophet. He did this to get his way, to manipulate the prophet into coming to eat at his house. Verse 18 tells us, "The old prophet answered, 'I too am a prophet, as you are. And an angel said to me by the word of the Lord: "Bring him back with you to your house so that he may eat bread and drink water."' (But he was lying to him.)"

That was a drastic misuse of the prophetic: lying to manipulate the man to do what he wanted him to do. In this instance, it had dyer consequences for the person who believed the lie and acted on it. He backtracked to the retired prophet's house and broke his fast, and as a result God struck him dead for disobedience.

Sadly, prophetic manipulation still happens today. Some people will lie to you in the name of the Lord. They will claim that God is telling you to do something that they want you to do. This is not an uncommon practice. It is manipulation and control, and it makes God very angry. But people still do it today.

The 1 Kings 13 story has a really alarming part. God knew the prophet had been lied to, yet He still held him accountable for his disobedience. The prophet knew God's original instructions and choose to discard them because the new instructions sounded better to him. If he had taken the time/effort to seek God about this supposed change of directions, God would have let him know the truth. But he did not do that. He simply believed the lie and acted on it. As a result, he suffered the consequences for disobeying God. In short, God allowed him to suffer the consequences of acting on the lie that was told to him in the Lord's name.

This still happens today. When someone gives us a manipulative prophecy, God will show us the truth if we seek Him for it as we prayerfully judge the word. If we don't do that and we act on the manipulative prophecy, it is not uncommon for us to suffer the negative consequences that come with being manipulated, just like the prophet in 1 Kings 13 did.

Let me give you a real-life example of a person who used the prophetic to manipulate others for her own gain. This story took place years ago when I was still new to the prophetic. I had a friend named Sally (not her real name) who fell prey to prophetic manipulation by a person named Tina (again, not her real name). Sally and I were both new to the prophetic and we were both looking for someone to mentor us in it.

One day Sally met Tina online. Tina did not get out of the house much, but she would to go into various Christian chatrooms to prophesy to people, then to talk to them for hours in private chat. One day she prophesied to Sally and after that the two of them chatted together online every day for about three weeks. Then Tina offered to mentor my friend. At fist this seemed like an answer to Sally's prayers. It turned out that Tina lived about a six-hour drive from Sally's home. So Sally began to drive out to Tina's home for the weekend two or three times a month to be mentored and to have Tina speak into her life.

After three or four months, the nature of the words Tina gave Sally began to change. It seemed that God was appointing Sally to be financially responsible for Tina. Tina's husband did not have a steady job and the family was frequently in financial trouble. One day Tina's family car broke down. The following weekend, she gave Sally a word that Sally was to give her car to Tina's family. She did so, over her husband's objections. Sally began to get more and more financial words from Tina. She began giving her more and more money until her husband forbid her to give away any more of his hard-earned money. After that, "the Lord" suddenly had new direction for Sally, given to her (of course) when Tina prophesied to her. Sally was instructed to get a part-time job and to give the salary from that job to Tina, because "God appointed her to provide financially" for Tina.

Of course, Sally's husband objected to this, because Sally was supposed to be a stay-at-home Mom to take care of the kids. That lead to some marital strife and finally Sally began to cry out to God about why He would direct her to do something that was harmful to her marriage. At that point, she figured out that she was being manipulated by Tina and that the words she had been receiving were from Tina instead of from God. That, of course, ended the mentorship. It is never a good thing when someone uses the prophetic as a guise to manipulate another person.

Woundedness and False Prophecy

Some false prophecy comes from human woundedness and immaturity, where a person truly desires to speak for God and begins to "do so" even when God is not speaking through them. Perhaps they want to "feel important" or feel they are of value, and they perceive that speaking for God will make them important. So in their own woundedness, they convince themselves that God has given them an important message to proclaim for Him when He has not done so.

Sometimes their false message is harmless and other times it is extremely harmful. Most of the time these wounded false prophets sabotage them- selves because their issues are so "raw." They have problems interacting with others and they are not received--based on their inappropriate interactions. Much of the time they tend to alienate people until the people don't want to be around them any more. Then they think they are being rejected because of the message they carry, but they are really being rejected because of their own issues and their inability to interact effectively with others. They will be the ones who believe that a prophet's lot is lonely and to be rejected.

(Please note that not all people who are rejected because of their own issues are false prophets. Some truly have a message from God, but they have not yet had their character refined enough to deliver it yet. There are wounded "true" prophets as well as wounded false ones. But if someone is a true prophet of God, then God will begin to work on that woundedness and character issues and bring them to a place of wholeness where they will stop getting in the way of the message God has given them to proclaim.)

At times false prophets are not received because they have obvious sin issues in their lives. Other times they are like con-men and they have so much charisma that they are received for a season. But over time their character shows through and people become repulsed when they see the underlying motives and true character.

The people who are false prophets because of their own woundedness usually alienate people. They may even cause people to become leery of the true prophetic. At times they can be hurtful, misdirecting a person in their own spiritual growth and development and relationship with God. They can do great harm to a person emotionally. Some false prophets try to build co-dependent relationships with people, making the person dependent on them instead of on God.

It is never a good thing to misspeak on God's behalf. God doesn't like that and ultimately we will appear before Him and have to give account for our actions. I would not want to be in their shoes on that day. But this does not mean that every false prophet is a pawn of the enemy. Some are just very wounded people trying to feel important in the church. In other words, not everyone wounded "would-be prophet" is the enemy counterfeit of the true prophetic -- sometimes the false prophetic comes from their own spirit, not from the devil.