…for the people could not have been deceived except by their own consent. – Jeremiah 14:16, Amplified Bible

Nobody likes bad news. In the book of Jeremiah, there was a lot of bad news thrown at the nation of Israel, and Jeremiah had the terrible privilege of doing the throwing. In chapter 14, Jeremiah not only had to deliver bad news, he had to compete for the people’s attention against a band of false prophets engaged in preaching a prosperity gospel. Furious with the situation, God informed Jeremiah that He would destroy the false prophets and the people who listened to them.

The natural question that pops into mind is, “Why should the deceived be punished with the deceivers? They were the victims of deceit, not the perpetrators.” But the Supernatural answer to this natural question can be summed up in one word: Poppycock!

As God tells us in Jeremiah 14:16, “For I will pour out their wickedness upon them [and not on their false teachers only, for the people could not have been deceived except by their own consent].” The Israelites were deceived only because they wanted to be deceived. With the Old Testament at their disposal, they could have detected falsity by measuring the false prophets’ message against the revealed Truth of God. In addition, prophets and false prophets alike had lived in Israel for generations. This meant the Israelites had at their disposal a historical record that could teach them how to spot a fake from the real thing. But they ignored the revealed Truth of God and their national experience in proving prophets because they were more interested in someone blessing their sin than in yielding themselves to God. They wanted to live their way, not God’s, so they gave ear to the people who preached prosperity rather than repentance.

We do the same thing. There is a choice before us. The Word of God and our experience with God both tell us to take one path. But we want to take the other path. We hesitate, looking for justification to take the wrong path, looking for some sign to convince us that the wrong path is actually the path God wants us to take. Finally, a false prophet comes along and says something that gives us the justification we need to do the wrong thing under the guise that it is right. Or, worse yet, a true prophet says something that we twist in our minds to mean something it was never intended to mean, and we use the twisted truth to launch us on our way. No matter how we slice it, we were deceived simply because we wanted to be deceived. We knew better. God knows we knew better. And God will punish us for choosing sin over Him.

Beware of having the itching ears God warns us of in 2 Timothy 4:3, seeking teachers who will justify your actions rather than preach the truth of God. Instead be like the Bereans who “received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11, KJV)