You Will Know Them by Their Fruit

After speaking about the narrow way, Jesus turns His focus to false prophets. It does not matter where we find ourselves on the timeline, false prophets have always been a problem for the believer.

"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves." Matthew 7:15, NKJV

The thing with false prophets is that they know exactly what they are. They purposely put on sheep's clothing to disguise there true appearance. Spurgeon wrote, "These affect the look, language and spirit of God's people, while they really long to devour souls, even as wolves thirst for the blood of sheep." "A man is what he is inwardly." The appetite of the wolf does not change just as the appetite of the sheep does not change. The purpose of the wolf is not to convert the sheep to his cuisine, rather it is to devour the sheep.

"You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?" Matthew 7:16, NKJV

Jesus gives us a simple litmus test, "You will know them by their fruits." Fruit is merely a product of a tree. As the fruit is picked from the tree, the quality of the fruit is known. Notice too, how the Lord uses a plurality of the word fruit. Paul wrote in Galatians 5:22, "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance..." There is a singularity in the fruit whereas the false prophets bear bad fruits.

Even so, Jesus goes on to describe the picking of fruit. Grapes and figs are not gathered from thorn bushes and thistles. One can look at a bush and see that it does not bear the fruit that they are looking for. "Every doctrine and doctrinaire may thus be tried." (Spurgeon) A false prophet can be tried and tested the in the same fashion. One does not have to ingest the words of the false prophet to know that the words he speaks are bad, he needs only to hear them.

"Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit." Matthew 7:17-18, NKJV

This is a spiritual truth, good produces good and bad produces bad. Another truth is that good cannot produce bad and bad cannot produce good. It is impossible for a good tree to produce bad fruit; if this is the case then the tree itself is bad. Neither can a bad tree produce good fruit. In short, no good can come from the false prophet.

"Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them." Matthew 7:19-20, NKJV

The ultimate end to a tree that bears bad fruit is to be cut down and thrown into the fire. This end will be covered more in the next blog entry. But this truth remains, by their fruits they will be known.