Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing 4: Their Paternity
Image by Jan Koprina
“You will know them by their fruit.”
Introduction
This is the fourth instalment in a series on Matthew 7:15-23. We turn our attention to the meaning of Jesus’ words,“You will know (epiginosko) them by their fruit.” (7:16, 20).
Since Jesus warns his disciples about prophet-wolves who come to them (7:15), the purpose of the warning is to prevent his disciples from receiving them. The wolves must not be allowed to settle in and establish themselves among the flock. Jesus is setting up an intruder alarm system. And that alarm system is the fruit test: “You will know them by their fruit” (7:16, 20). If the fruit is bad, rather than good, the “sheep” is in fact a wolf (7:16-20).
In the final two posts of this series, we will examine this fruit test to discern exactly how it works, why Jesus has great confidence in it, and why the last few years afford us with so many examples of wolves who have gone undetected before it is too late.
Series Outline
Here’s a brief outline of the series, with this post highlighted:
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing : Introduction
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Their Identity
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Their Activity
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Their Paternity
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Their Discovery Part 1
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Their Discovery Part 2
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Their Destiny
(To receive the latest posts in your inbox, you can subscribe to the blog here.)
A Wolf-Proof Test
Wolves in sheep’s clothing are recognised by their rotten fruit.
After warning his disciples about wolves in sheep’s clothing, Jesus instructs them in how to spot the wolves: “You will know them by their fruit.” (vv. 16, 20)
The basic structure of Jesus’ fruit test in vv. 16-20 is simple:
1. Assurance that you will know (epiginosko) the prophet-wolves by their fruit (v. 16a).
2. Explanation and Defence of claim that you will know them by their fruit (vv. 16b-19).
3. Reassurance that you will indeed (ge) know (epiginosko) them by their fruit in light of explanation and defence (v. 20).
The little Greek word ge, “indeed,” in v. 20 is not always brought across by translators. By it, Jesus emphatically underlines that the fruit test works. It is the foolproof method for spotting the prophet-wolves and other phoney claimants to spiritual authority.
In other words, the categorical distinction between bad trees and good trees creates a recognisable difference between them (see post 1 in this series). Do people gather grapes from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles? (v. 16). Obviously not. Why? Because they are different types of tree.
Likewise—and Jesus then overlays moral categories onto the horticultural metaphor—every good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit (v. 17). People, like trees, act in accordance with their nature. And because they always and only act in accordance with their nature, a good tree/person cannot produce bad fruit, and a bad tree/person cannot produce good fruit (v. 18).
“Simples,” as Orlov the Meerkat would say. The crafty wolves always display their wolfishness. That is why they can be detected, however cunning and well executed the disguise.
A Double-Sided Test for Double Agents
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing only produce bad fruit.
There is a double-sidedness to the fruit test: A good tree does produce good fruit and doesn’t produce bad fruit, and a bad tree does produce bad fruit and doesn’t produce good fruit.
Notice also that it’s this double-sided fruit test that applies at the final judgment. It’s not the person who pays Jesus lip service (“Lord, Lord,” v. 21) who enters the kingdom of heaven, but the person who does the will of their Father in heaven (v. 21). The phoney prophets and their like, the double agents, are obviously those who don’t do the Father’s will. Rather, they are those who do practice lawlessness (anomia, v. 23).
Therefore, there is an implicit connection between the way Jesus frames the fruit test in vv. 16-20, and the way he frames his final judgment in vv. 21-23. Both have a double-sidedness. Doing the will of Jesus’ Father (v. 21) is the equivalent of producing good fruit, and practising lawlessness (v. 23) is the equivalent of producing evil fruit.
Why is that important to observe? Because Jesus names the criteria he uses at the final judgment in a way that echoes the categories of his earlier teaching in the Sermon, where devotion to his Father is prominent, and the fulfilment of the law is a foundational theme. That’s our first clue that the fruit test itself is also linked to Jesus’ ethical teaching in the Sermon.
Fruit in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew, and the Bible
The Sermon on the Mount, Matthew’s Gospel, and the Bible teach us what the fruit is.
In Matthew’s Gospel, the metaphor of fruit is associated with repentance (3:8), with good or evil speech (12:33-34), with the effects of a real understanding of the word of God (13:23), and with the corruption of the temple regime (21:18-20, 34, 41, 43). The image is strongly ethical in flavour.
This fits with the Bible’s broader use, where fruit is associated with righteousness (Amos 6:12; Rom 6:21-22; Phil 1:11; Heb 12:11; James 3:18), and love (John 15:1-10; Gal 5:22), and their opposites. As in Mt 12:33-34, it describes words as well as deeds (Prov 12:14; 13:2; 18:20; James 3:10-12), since both are the outgrowth of the heart.
Within the context of the Sermon, and against this biblical backdrop, fruit naturally evokes the linked ideas of kingdom righteousness (5:17-20) and the love-fulfilled law (5:21-48). The Sermon is structured with particular heart dispositions (e.g. poor in spirit, meek, pure in heart, merciful, 5:1-12) and summary characterisations (light, salt, 5:13-16) leading into distinct behavioural manifestations which conform to the Jesus-fulfilled law (5:17-7:12). Therefore, conduct as an expression of character is an idea baked into the Sermon. That is what the image of a tree and its fruit represents. It’s a new image within the Sermon, but it is far from being a new idea.
Fruit includes a person’s speech (Mt 12:33-34), since out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks (15:18-19). Speech functions as a behavioural barometer of the heart’s ultimate allegiance and character. Words can attack. They can deceive, mislead, dissemble, and make empty promises. They can slander, berate, boast, and mock. They can do all this on Monday, having just preached a doctrinally sound sermon on Sunday. A person loyal to the Lord, someone with a good heart, will speak what is good, true, and righteous both in private and public, both in and out of the pulpit. True doctrine taught by impure, lying lips is not a mark of a true prophet but of someone who pays God lip service.
R. T. France (Matthew, NICNT, 291) similarly concludes that the fruit in Mt 7:16-20 is “predominantly an ethical metaphor [and is] based on the assumption that true loyalty to God will issue in appropriate behavior by his people. However plausible their words, it is by the life they live that you can recognize those who are not true prophets of God.”
In summary, in the Bible, in Matthew’s Gospel, and in the Sermon, fruit is the ethical conduct that manifests a person’s inner character.
Fruit and the Serpent’s Seed
The fruit test reveals a prophet’s paternity (God or the devil) not their performance
Jesus presents a binary choice: someone is a good tree or evil tree. There is no third option. As such, the issue the fruit test addresses is not how good or bad a person is, but the type of person they are; not who they are (as in ministry position or function), but whose they are (of God or the devil); not their performance, but their paternity.
The prior reference to fruit in the Gospel, on the lips of John the Baptist, comes in the context of a challenge to the Pharisees who come to check up on him:
“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.’” (Mt. 3:7-10, ESV)
The next reference to fruit in the Gospel, after Mt 7:15-20, comes in 12:33. Again, the Pharisees are in the frame. And again, they are warned in severe terms, this time by Jesus:
“Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Mt 12:33-34, ESV)
In both passages there is an association between the serpentine Pharisees and the imagery of (bad) trees and fruit. Between them sits Jesus’ use of the tree-fruit metaphor in the Sermon on the Mount:
3:7-10, Vipers, Trees and Fruit
7:15-20, Prophet-Wolves, Trees and Fruit
12:33-34, Vipers, Trees and Fruit
The connection between these three passages is significant, not least because this accounts for all the fruit imagery in Matthew’s Gospel up to this point.
In all these passages, the fruit metaphor is used to denote a type of tree/person, as being either good or bad. In the first and third passages (3:7-10; 12:33-34), the bad tree and fruit corresponds to the viper-like Pharisees, who belong to the serpent’s seed, rather than Abraham’s seed. In the second passage (7:15-20), the bad tree and fruit describes a wolf in sheep’s clothing, one who is deceitful and destructive.
The devil himself, of course, is the archetypal liar and murderer. He has been a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44). His aim is to destroy (John 10:10). And his native language is lying (John 8:44). From him all falsehood comes (Mt 5:37). As the master of masquerade, disguising himself as an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14), his modus operandi is destruction through deceit (Gen 3:1-7).
Within the Bible’s narrative arc, a wolf in sheep’s clothing stands in a long line of kingdom enemies who operate as the devil’s agents in the world. Each time, therefore, that the tree-fruit metaphor appears in these three passages it is used to describe people who are devilish. It reveals whether a claimant to spiritual authority operates according to the devil’s modus operandi, destruction through deceit; and whether he or she belongs to the brood of vipers, the serpent’s seed.
In other words, the fruit test is a paternity test, not a performance test. This is a crucial distinction.
There is a great difference between treating the fruit test as a performance test (how good/bad is their behaviour?) and treating it for what it is, a paternity test (whose likeness do we see here?). My impression is that the scandals within evangelical churches and organisations over recent years spotlight the repeated tendency to treat the fruit test as a fire alarm rather than an intruder alarm. When used as a paternity test, it functions as an intruder alarm, and wolves are caught before they kill sheep and set the building on fire. When used as a performance test, it functions as a fire alarm, and wolves are only stopped when the blood stains are too hard to ignore and the integrity of the building is at stake.
In the next post, I will explore the practical application and misapplication of the fruit test, by drawing out this distinction further.
Do Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Know They are Wolves?
Wolves in sheep’s clothing live in spiritual darkness
In closing, I want to address a question often raised about the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Do they know they are wolves? I don’t think so.
Behind every attack, there are two evil agents at work: the wolf in sheep’s clothing, pursuing his or her ungodly desires at the expense of the sheep; and the master of masquerade himself, the devil, using the wolf to accomplish his own purposes. We do not know how exactly those two agencies relate.
To take just two hellish scenarios (among many):
a prophet-wolf who knowingly exploits the flock for financial reward, twisting the Scriptures to promise health and happiness to the duped sheep, behind whom lies the devil whose desire is to both physically impoverish and spiritually eviscerate God’s flock.
a prophet-wolf who genuinely believes he or she is a Christian doing the Lord’s work, but who, to maintain power and tight control, unleashes a tumultuous, violent, implacable nature at will, and always dissembles and deceives for self-protection, thereby bullying, dividing, and demoralising the flock, causing some to leave the narrow road to life, behind whom lies the devil who seeks the flock’s division and eternal destruction.
Even in the first scenario, the wilfulness of the wolf does not, of course, mean that he or she knows they are an agent of the devil. If the devil’s modus operandi is to destroy through deceit, we certainly can’t rule out that those who are co-opted in his work are themselves deceived. Indeed, I think the most natural reading of 7:22-23 (“Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name … do many might works in your name” etc.) is that those false prophets demonstrate self-deception.
Think of the Pharisees, called a “brood of vipers” by John and Jesus, whose father is the devil (John 8:44). They certainly didn’t think they were vipers. They thought they were the bona fide representatives of God’s will, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth. Such is the deceitfulness of sin, a wolf can wilfully injure a sheep and simultaneously believe his or her will is aligned with God’s. Isn’t that part of the frightening pathology of the Pharisees of the Gospels, eager to send an innocent man to his death at the same time as fastidious in upholding purification laws (John 18:28-31)? Sincerity is not a mark of good fruit. Integrity is—the alignment of heart, speech, and action with the will of God.
The worst thing that could happen to us is not falling into great sin, but falling into a state of deep spiritual blindness from which we are not even able to see who we really are, or what we are actually doing. If such darkness does not lift, there is no way out to repentance. And repentance is the only way forward for all of us, sheep and wolves alike.
“Repent for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.” (Mt 3:2; 4:17)
The next post will consider how the fruit test gets misapplied as a performance test, and what it practically means to use it as a paternity test.
Share this post:
