How to identify false prophets

This discussion on how to identify false prophets and teachers is a sequel to the previous one on using holy water with caution.
There was a special point that came out; namely that some of the acts of true prophets may not always have direct biblical precedent and so their acts should not be dismissed solely on the basis that they lack precedent in Scripture.
This special point has led us to the present discussion on how to separate true prophets and teachers from the false ones.
Perhaps there is need to ask more basic questions first. The first one is: What exactly is prophecy? It is foretelling the mind of God and foretelling future events by the Spirit of God.
Its primary purpose is to turn people from sin and to encourage them to have greater dependency on the word of God than anything else so that God’s plans for their lives can be fulfilled.
The second one is: Does God use prophets today? Neil T Anderson answered this basic question in a balanced way in his book, Living Free. He said, “Most biblical scholars believe there are no longer any prophets and apostles who speak with the absolute authority of ‘Thus saith the Lord.’
“We may not accept what today’s prophets say as authoritative for the church in the same way we understand Scripture to be. Yet one can’t exclude the possibility that God could send someone to function as a prophet or apostle again.”
I agree with him. True prophets and apostles may still exist in the church today but since the canon of Scripture has been closed, we need to examine everything carefully and beware anyone who claims new revelation beyond the Scri-ptures or new revelation in addition to the Bible.
Of all the gifts, that of prophecy is highly misused and abused hence the need to “examine everything carefully; and hold fast to that which is good.”
The existence of false prophets and teachers is not a new thing. In the Old Testament false prophets existed and God gave certain ways by which to identify them. Firstly, in Deut. 18:20-22 God said that if one’s prophecy failed to come to pass, he was a false prophet. The predictions of a true prophet must always come true because the source of inspiration, God, cannot lie. If what a prophet said did not come true then a false prophet was in town. However, that test worked only on the foretelling aspect of prophecy.
 Secondly, some prophets who could work signs and wonders in the name of the Lord would be discovered to be false if their hidden agenda was to lead people astray from the Holy One of Israel to serve other gods (see Deut. 13:1-3).
If a prophet sought secretly, through the working of signs and wonders, to get people dependent upon miraculous interventions instead of the word of God, that one was a false prophet.
The word of God is set forth as the only authoritative and infallible primary means by which to know God’s will. We all love the supernatural but the supernatural that do us good is that which proceed from God only.
Thirdly, the prophet Jeremiah warned of prophets who placed their dreams above the word of God (Jere. 23:21-32). Such false prophets would highly value their dreams as coming from God and they would go on to prophesy in the name of the Lord. But substituting the chaff of dreams for the wheat of biblical truth disqualified one from being a true prophet.
Fourthly, some false prophets would not wait for revelation in the presence of God to hear Him speak to them but they stole God’s words from other prophets and shared it with other people as though they heard it firsthand from God (Jere. 23:30).
In other words plagiarism was a characteristic of a false prophet. But how does one test the genuineness of today’s prophets and prophecies? Check out in the next article for the answer.
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