False Prophets Among Us

Matthew 7:15-20 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, you will recognize them by their fruits.” 

From the beginning of His earthly ministry, Jesus warned those around Him that there would be false prophets among them. He also told them how to determine the false prophet from the true prophet. Today is no different. There are false prophets and true prophets, and we can still use what Jesus told His followers two thousand years ago to distinguish between them.

I am writing this article out of love. My love for the people of God is too great for me to allow those false prophets to continue being part of everyday life for people. I will be naming names. Some of these names will be familiar and some may not. With the rise of the Internet, some of these people are only found on YouTube, TikTok, or their own websites.

I think these YouTube prophets may be the most dangerous. They are on platforms that allow them to make their videos with no accountability, curated to the type of people they want to reach, and release at times of the day or week when their audience may be most available. They use the algorithms on the websites to their advantage to get more clicks and views, thus leading more people to their false prophecies.

Before we get into the details of any of these false prophets, I want to make sure we understand how to identify a false prophet.

First, there is the fruit of their ministry and lives, as Jesus pointed out. We need to examine the fruits of these people. Are they producing good and lasting fruit? Or is the fruit they produce bad? What does good prophetic fruit look like?

To answer that last question, we need to look at another passage of Scripture, this time from the Old Testament.

Deuteronomy 18:20-22 But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’ And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?’— when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him. 

Looking at this passage, verse twenty-two is our key to understanding good prophetic fruit. It says, “When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken.” Under Old Testament Law, a prophet who spoke in the name of the Lord without the words coming from God would be put to death. Today, that same kind of person should be ignored.

This brings us to the second way that we can know whether a prophet is true or not. We simply answer this question: Does what the person prophesy come to pass or come true? Now, many will argue that this was an Old Testament test of a prophet. And I will say, “Yes, it was.” However, that does not excuse the fact that when a person speaks in the name of God and the word does not come to pass, they are making God out to be a liar.

God is holy. He is sinless. He is incapable of telling a lie. If someone is putting words into His mouth and saying, “Thus says the Lord…” then the thing does not come to pass, the supposed prophet is not the one who is brought under suspicion, at least in the eyes of the world. They look at something like that and they think, “Well, this God these people serve said this would happen, then it didn’t. That must mean that this God is a liar, and I can’t trust a liar.”

I hope you get the point I am trying to make. When someone says, “The Lord told me…” and God had nothing to do with the words that come after that phrase, they are playing a dangerous game. Their fruit is bad because the tree is diseased.

Should this apply to every prophetic word given?

The short answer: Yes.

It should apply to every prophetic word given because a prophet is speaking in the name of God and in the place of God. If an ambassador stands in a foreign land and speaks on behalf of the people of his country, he is not thought to be acting alone. His words are considered the collective words of the government he represents. The same is true of a prophet who stands before God’s people, or sits in front of a camera as the case is with many, and says, “The Lord told me…”

Now that we have that settled, let’s get into the meat of this article. Some of these names are going to be familiar and some might not be. They are in no particular order, except that this first one is gaining some traction here lately because of a supposed prophecy he gave concerning the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

Brandon Biggs

Brandon Biggs is a YouTube prophet who does videos where he gives supposed prophetic words, financial advice, and other things in the name of God. He is making the rounds right now because he supposedly prophesied the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. He even went live on his YouTube channel shortly after the shooting with an “I told you so” video. However, when we look at the videos he made before the attempt on Trump’s life, and then the videos that came out afterward, there are some major differences.

His first “prophecy” came out in December of 2023. In it he describes the scene. Let me give you a rundown of what Brandon Biggs saw.

·         An outdoor rally with a lot of people

·         Trump wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie

·         Mountains in the background

The next “prophecy” came in March of this year. Here is what he describes.

·         A bullet flying past Trump’s ear

·         The sound waves of the bullet bursting Trump’s eardrum

·         Around this time Trump falling to his knees in repentance

Now, unless you have been living under a rock, everyone knows that there was an assassination attempt against Donald Trump recently. Here are the details from that event, as it pertains to Brandon Biggs’s “prophecies.”

·         An outdoor rally with a lot of people

·         Trump wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and red MAGA hat

·         No mountains in the background, instead, people sitting on risers

·         A bullet was fired from a rifle and struck Trump’s ear

·         Trump’s eardrum was not damaged, the doctor who treated him later confirmed his hearing was fine during an interview at the RNC

·         Trump immediately fell to his knees, because Secret Service agents rushed him when they realized he was in danger, not because he was repentant

Here is where things get really messy. In Brandon’s first video after the shooting, he came out saying, “I told you this was going to happen,” and then came up with new details that were not in either of his prior videos. He claimed to have seen the blood on Trump’s face and that he had said which ear would be damaged. Neither of those details was in his earlier videos and the other details that he got wrong are completely ignored, that is until he came out with another video later.

In this later video Brandon Biggs comes out saying that he did not see what happened because in his initial vision he was at the wrong vantage point to see for sure what happened to Trump’s ear when the bullet went past it. He saw the sound waves off of the bullet and assumed that it was his eardrum that was damaged because he saw blood on Trump’s face in his vision.

This one incident is enough to label him a false prophet based on his own admission of getting it wrong. However, there are numerous other prophecies that he has gotten wrong over the years, and he still has not learned his lesson. For a highly detailed, in-depth dive into the lies this man has told, check out this video by Mike Winger.

Please, if you follow YouTube prophets, stay away from Brandon Biggs. Actually, do yourself a favor and stay away from all of them. If you want a word from God that desperately, open your Bible.

Benny Hinn

Next on my list is Benny Hinn. I am not going to go into detail about how this man is a charlatan, a thief, or a man who preys on the innocent, weak, and poor to make himself rich. Instead, I am going to focus on one of the major failed prophecies of the last few years that has come across this man’s lips.

We have all seen the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Hamas attacked Israel. Israel retaliated. A lot of people have died in the ensuing war. What a lot of people do not realize is that Benny Hinn made one of his biggest prophetic blunders just months before this began.

In a televised and subsequently streamed “prophetic word,” Benny Hinn claimed that God showed him that Israel was about to enter into a time of great peace which would spread, not only throughout the Middle East, but also the rest of the world. Not only did Benny claim that this would be a time of peace, but it would be a time of economic blessing and prosperity like has never been seen.

Oops!

The worst part about this gaffe is that it is almost verbatim the exact same “prophetic word” concerning Israel and the Middle East that Benny Hinn gave back in the 1990’s. Yes, he has been regurgitating his prophetic words! He is not “hearing from God,” he is revisiting old “prophecies” that he gave thirty years ago.

If you or anyone you know still listens to this man, please do yourself a huge favor and cut him and his lies out of your life forever. If you want to listen to someone named Hinn, I recommend Benny’s nephew, Costi Hinn. You can find his YouTube channel here.

I can hear people saying, “But Benny Hinn is getting old, he can’t have that much influence much longer.” Directly, no he can’t have that much more time left to continue spouting out false prophecies. However, there are at least two generations of ministers in the world who have modeled themselves after Benny Hinn. His influence spreads beyond just the people he can personally infect. Two rising stars here in the United States are direct disciples of Benny Hinn: Vlad Savchuk and David Diga Hernandez. While he may not be here forever, his poison is still spreading, and we need to keep warning people about it.

The Kansas City Prophets

So, this is more than one person. Actually, it is a rather large group of people. It began in the late 1980’s and has grown to one of the largest movements in the hyper-charismatic world. Today, thousands of churches are influenced by the Kansas City Prophets, either directly or indirectly.

The Kansas City Prophets (KCP) are part of a larger group of ministers and ministries who formed the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement. While pinpointing specific prophecies would be difficult, it is not difficult to explain why the KCP is so dangerous.

It was the KCP who redefined prophecy for the age in which we live. A summation of the new definition of prophecy, at least as I was taught, is this: ‘No longer is it necessary for a prophetic word to be 100% accurate, or even remotely correct, to be considered a true prophetic word. There are instances in which the human mind gets in the way of what God is saying and the words get jumbled. If some of what is said is true, then it is still a word from the Lord, the prophet just got in the way of the rest of the word and added his or her own message to what God was trying to say.’

In other words, if the “prophet” gets a few things right but a lot of things wrong, it is okay.

But that doesn’t hold up according to Scripture. Deuteronomy clearly says that if a prophet says something in the name of the Lord and it doesn’t come to pass, that person is a false prophet.

They also claim that intercessory prayer can change the results. Yes, they say if a word of prophecy comes out and it is said that something is going to happen, then intercessory prayer can change that thing and it will not happen.

Again, that is not found anywhere in Scripture. The closest we might come is the story of Abraham asking God about saving Sodom and Gomorrah based on the number of righteous people that are found there. But even that would be a stretch to say that it would be normative for God to change His mind based on the prayers of people. Either God is sovereign, or He is swayed by people. I’m going to stick with what Scripture says, God is sovereign.

One of the leaders of the KCP, Bob Jones (not the fundamentalist with the college) has garnered a huge following over the last thirty to forty years. In fact, two people who had a gigantic man-crush on this false prophet are Bill Johnson and Kris Valloton of Bethel Church in Redding, California. Yes, the Bethel Church that writes a bunch of worship music today is led by men who were influenced by a man who directly opposed Scripture and was involved in gross sexual sin.

It has come out that most of the men involved in the KCP movement were involved in sexual sins of some variety or another. Bob Jones would have women strip in his office before giving them a “prophetic word.” Paul Cain, another of the founding members of the KCP, was a homosexual and alcoholic. Mike Bickle’s sin has just recently been revealed as he was forced to step away from his church and ministry in Kansas City, effectively shutting the Kansas City International House of Prayer down in the process.

Bill Johnson and Kris Valloton

What can I say about these two men?

Apart from treating the late Bob Jones, of the KCP movement as mentioned above, like he was a god among men, their antics and actions have promoted them to being the laughing-stock of anyone who holds even a half-orthodox view of Christianity. From their school for children which teaches transcendental meditation and astral projection, to their school of ministry which promises to teach people to “Navigate a seismic spiritual shift and prophesy the world into a new era,” (whatever any of that means) these two men are a train wreck.

Their “School of the Prophets” is holding classes this August, coming up rather quickly, which promises to help attendees “Recognize cultural shifts through God’s lenses. Learn to walk in Biblical wisdom for judging prophetic words and releasing them with accuracy and clarity. Emerge with personal clarity and understand how your season connects to the global season shift.”

Kris Valloton states, “We are living in unprecedented times, a seismic spiritual season shift unlike anything we've seen in years! As prophets and prophetic individuals, we are called to sound the trumpet, guide others through the shaking and usher the world into a new era. At School of the Prophets 2024, you will be equipped with the knowledge, wisdom, and community you need to navigate this shift with grace and confidence.

I invite you to join us for 5 days of rich Biblical training, prophetic activation, and connection with other like-minded people. Together, we will prepare a wineskin for the Lord to send new wine to His Church, and prophesy the world into the new era!

I hope you’ll join us.”

None of this can be backed up by Scripture. None of this can be backed up by church history. I’m not even sure any of it can be backed up by a bad dream after eating too much pizza. It is a bunch of nonsense that they are spewing out so they can teach others to spew out more nonsense. Yet, there are people who buy into this kind of thing. People fall for it all the time.

What people do not realize is that these false prophets are teaching them to prophesy the way they learned to, from their heroes, like Bob Jones and Paul Cain. Men who changed the meaning of prophecy to allow for human error. This “school” is teaching others to tap into their own minds and “prophesy” lies…or, as I like to say, prophelie. (Yes, I make up words sometimes. It’s okay. It makes sense in my brain.)

Where does the church, the true church, draw the line?

When do we say that we have had enough?

How long are we going to continue to allow these people to have influence over us?

You may think that they do not have any influence over you, but if you are allowing your worship team to play songs by Bethel, Hillsong, Elevation, or other worship artists that are funded by these churches led by the false prophets, you are being influenced by them. Don’t listen to their music. Don’t listen to them on the radio, Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, or any other streaming service. Don’t buy their books, even if it looks innocent or even helpful.

The names listed above are just a few in a long list of people who are known to lie about what God has told them. False prophets are among us. They have been from the beginning of the Church Age. Jesus warned us about them. Peter warned us about them.

2 Peter 2:1-3 But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed, they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep. 

John warned us about them.

1 John 4:1-3 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. 

False prophets are here. It is up to us to know how to spot them and what to do with them once we know who they are. Call them out, warn others about them, and stay away!