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“What does it mean to test the spirits?”

When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians not to despise prophecies but to “test everything; hold fast what is good”, it was around the middle of the first century in one of the first books of the New Testament committed to parchment. The infant church was still in its initial growth spurt, most of the second half of our Bibles was still unwritten, and God spoke frequently through Christian prophets when the Old Testament was insufficient to meet the spiritual needs of gathered believers and provide them with necessary direction from the Head of the Church.

Because prophecy was so frequent, false prophecy was also frequent, so it was necessary to determine when God was really speaking and when he was not.

Forty Years Later

When John wrote, “Test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world”, the situation was a little different. It was perhaps forty years later, and most of the New Testament had now circulated in the churches. If there is any correlation between the number of mentions of the prophetic gift and the frequency of its usage in the church by AD90, then true prophecies were now few and far between, as we might expect with a nearly-complete New Testament canon available and in accordance with Paul’s teaching that “prophecies will pass away”.

Still, large numbers of false prophets plying their trade remained. I find it interesting that John says they had “gone out into the world” rather than “into the churches”. If they were in the churches and the believers tested the spirits as both Paul and John instructed, they would not remain there for long.

Making Fools of Themselves

Within a few years, the scriptures were complete and prophecy ceased to be a gift given by the Holy Spirit to new believers. If you stand up today and tell me you have a prophetic word from the Lord, you will have to excuse me if I tell you to sit down and stop making a fool of yourself. The sort of “prophets” that exist today are a bad parody of the real deal. R. Loren Sandford, who himself believes in modern-day prophecy, bluntly confesses today’s prophetic voices are not getting the job done. “Prophecies over the nation and the world spoken by recognized voices have too often fallen to the ground,” he says. “Too many predicted timelines and dates have passed without real incident.” Yes, because there’s no prophetic gift there. When Agabus foretold a famine across the world, that’s what happened. When he said Paul would end up in captivity if he went to Jerusalem, that’s what happened.

Often, first century believers could test the spirits for truthfulness by waiting to see if a prophecy came true. A famine that didn’t happen would thoroughly discredit the prophet who predicted it, in the same way that R. Loren Sandford’s putative prophets continue to discredit themselves.

Testing Instructive Prophecy

But not all prophecies are predictive. Many of the New Testament prophecies shared with the churches were instructive. The test of a predictive prophecy was time and conformity with reality, but the test of an instructive prophecy was conformity with the teaching of the apostles. The apostle John declares, “Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” That, right there, is testing the spirits.

Jezebel called herself a prophetess, but she was a liar. How could the church at Thyatira test the spirits when Jezebel spoke? Well, she taught sexual immorality and eating food sacrificed to idols, both of which contradicted the edict issued by the church in Jerusalem, not to mention the teaching of the apostle Paul. If she got her message from a spirit, we can be sure it was not the Holy Spirit! Paul repeatedly stresses that he taught the same things in all the churches, so it would be understood that the spirit of a prophet who contradicted Paul’s teaching would inevitably be lying. Likewise, a prophet who contradicted the teaching of the Old Testament was a liar and a false prophet. He too did not speak by the Holy Spirit, who led along the prophets of old.

This is what it meant to test the spirits in the days when the New Testament was being written: to compare what the spirits were alleged to have said with reality and the written word of God to determine their truthfulness. With the passing of the prophetic gift and the completion of the New Testament, this testing process was no longer necessary.

Testing the Spirits Today

Can we still “test the spirits” today? Certainly, in much the same way the first century believers did, even though most Christians already know the answer they will surely find. Our problem today is not so much false prophets, whose falsehood is obvious, but false teachers, whose falsehood may be much more subtle.

R. Loren Sandford’s “prophets” fail because their predictions do not conform to reality. He believes the problem may be spiritual, that “those speaking prophetically missed the heart of the Father and therefore spoke from their flesh and from hardness of heart or personal desire”. Alternatively, I might posit they are trying to make use of a gift the Holy Spirit is no longer giving (or masquerading at doing so), and their repeated failures to accurately predict the future are simply evidence of this. Likewise, a so-called prophet who offers instruction inconsistent with the teaching of the New Testament is a transparent fraud. He does not speak by the Spirit of God, who never self-contradicts. Even the would-be prophet who offers instruction consistent with scripture is at best redundant. He is giving us nothing we couldn’t get from our own Bible reading or the local church platform on a Sunday morning.

On what basis might we refer to him as a prophet at all?