Podcast Episode: Understanding False Teachings in Today’s Church

Pip: There's a question that's been following believers around for about three thousand years, and it goes like this: what happens when the people entrusted with the Word stop reading it?

Mara: That's the thread running through cj's recent writing on The Way of the Rabbi — false teaching, the authority behind it, and what the Scriptures actually say about how to spot it. Let's start with the heart of it: what false teaching looks like in the church today.

Understanding False Teachings in Today's Church

Pip: The post opens with a sharp diagnostic: the church has no shortage of prophets, pastors, and platforms — but the people following them largely aren't checking the source material. The question the post is asking is whether that's an accident or a preference.

Mara: The post goes straight to Jeremiah for the answer. Here's the verse it opens with: "The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule by their own power; And My people love to have it that way. But what will you do in the end?"

Pip: That last line is the weight-bearing one. It's not just a critique of leadership — it's a warning aimed at the people who are content to be misled. The congregation is implicated, not just the pulpit.

Mara: Right, and the post makes that explicit. It draws a contrast with the Bereans, who searched the Scriptures daily to verify what they were being taught. The concern here is that followers are doing the opposite — accepting teaching wholesale without that kind of scrutiny.

Pip: TikTok prophets is a phrase that earns its place in a theological argument, I'll give it that.

Mara: The post does use that language, and the point behind it is serious. The argument is that unschooled teachers are circulating false doctrine not always out of malice but out of ignorance — reading one false prophet and passing the error along.

Pip: And the test the post offers for spotting them comes from Matthew 7. Yahoshua's warning about wolves in sheep's clothing, and then the harder follow-up: "I never knew you; Depart from Me, You who PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS (TORAHLESSNESS)."

Mara: That word — Torahlessness — is central to the post's argument. The claim is that false teaching, at its root, is teaching that leads people away from the commandments. Deuteronomy 13 is brought in to reinforce this: a prophet whose signs come true but who directs people toward other gods is still a false prophet.

Pip: So the fruit test and the Torah test are the same test, essentially.

Mara: That's the post's position. Yahoshua's own words in Matthew — "I did not come to abolish but to fulfill" — are read as a direct refusal to set aside the commandments. The post argues that righteousness, by definition, is obedience to Torah, and that the Pharisees were wrong not because they followed commandments but because they substituted human tradition for divine ones.

Mara: The post closes where it opened — with Jeremiah's question. "What will you do in the end?" It's less a rhetorical flourish than a genuine appeal.

Pip: The stakes are personal, not just institutional — and that's what makes the question land.

Pip: Three millennia of the same warning, and the post argues it's still the most urgent one on the shelf.

Mara: The thread between Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, and Matthew is tighter than most people are taught. That's the kind of connection worth sitting with before the next episode.