The saying is true: “A good gardener must not only love flowers; he must also hate weeds.”
One reason the Lord Jesus qualified to be God’s ruler is stated as follows: “You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness” (Heb 1:9). While the previous chapter warned against the obvious evil of worshiping false gods and maintaining idolatrous places, Deuteronomy 13 discusses more subtle enemy attacks. First is the danger of pseudo-prophets (vv 1-5). God had a zero-tolerance policy about this: “that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death” (v 5). Anyone falsely claiming to be God’s spokesman was to be permanently silenced! The Lord wants us to trust what He says to the nth degree, and the effect of listening to such false messages would be “to turn you away from the Lord your God,…to entice you from the way in which the Lord your God commanded you to walk” (v 5). This is not only an ancient problem; today the airwaves are full of false teachers. How to detect them? First, they will speak of things “which you have not known” (v 2). We must “contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jud 3). Usually new things are not true things. Second, “you shall not listen to the words of that prophet” (Deut 13:3) if you are being enticed to diminish your view of the Lord (see v 2). Most false cults undermine either the person or work of Christ. Third, false teachers test your love for the Lord (v 3)—they claim the loyalty that only Christ deserves. Finally, the best antidote is to “walk after the Lord…obey His voice, and…hold fast to Him” (v 4). Let’s ask God’s Spirit by His Word to help us “test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 Jn 4:1). But there are more dangers, says God, as we’ll see in our next study.