In this sermon, the speaker addresses the issue of false watchmen in the church. He mentions previous predictions of a global economic meltdown due to embedded microchips in computer systems, which did not come to pass. The speaker emphasizes the importance of true watchmen who are scripturally based and give clear signals. He also highlights the need for self-control, as the fruit of the Spirit, and warns against irrational behavior. The sermon concludes with a call for real watchmen who stand on the word of God and alert God's people to truth and reality.

Hello, dear friends. Greetings in Jesus. This is Jacob Platt speaking to you today. We're looking at the subject of watchmen who are not watchmen. Watchmen who are not watchmen. In Ezekiel chapter 3, verse 17, and Ezekiel 33, verse 7, Ezekiel speaks of watchmen, those who would take a place upon the wall of Jerusalem and warn what was coming. They're associated generally with a particular kind of prophetic ministry, a kind of prophetic ministry who cite dangers coming to God's people. Sometimes today, watchmen ministries are called discernment ministries. Others are called apologetic ministries, from the Greek word apologia, defending what you believe. They see cults, Eastern religions, and other things as a threat to biblical Christianity, and they warn about the influences of these things coming into the Church. There are many, many fine watchmen-type ministries today, if we want to use their terms. Many I would personally endorse. I thank God for the ministry of my brother Dave Hunt, or Dave Wilkerson in the United States. I thank God for Pastor Bill Randall from America, and for Al Bagger, also in the States. There are others based in Great Britain, and even here in South Africa. I thank God for Gormany Soons in Cape Town. Many, many fine watchmen-style ministries. But we have another problem today. Watchmen who are not watchmen. Several months ago, there were people telling us that there would be a global economic meltdown, triggering political and environmental and even strategic crisis, due to mass computer failures, because of the problem of embedded microchips in the world's computer systems. Everything from the collapse of banks, to global financial chaos that would come from it, governments becoming insolvent, shortages of everything from food, water, electricity, utilities, telephones, all not working, even command and control systems for nuclear weapons not being operational. They predicted riots in the streets, food shortages, hunger, even starvation, and global chaos that would come as a result of this. These people called it their ministry to alert the Church as to what was about to come upon the planet. Well, friends, nothing happened. Nothing more than the occasional glitch here and there. Our ministry warned people nothing major would happen, and Dave Hunt wrote a book in America about Y2K, saying it was just mass hysteria. Who were these people who took it upon themselves to make themselves, quote-unquote, watchmen, and tried to warn all of us as to what was going to come and what was going to happen? And where are these people now? How many of them have had the integrity to stand up and repent, or even step down for their ministry, having misled God's people with what amounted to nonsense? I want to say that I personally am angry at nobody, but there is a problem. The problem is the boy who cried wolf. You see, when events of a prophetic significance do happen, when things that are biblically and prophetically important do take place, nobody will listen. They'll think it is just a lot more nonsense by the same kinds of people who blew the false trumpet about Y2K. The worst of these were extreme Calvinists, led by the Reconstructionists in the United States, people like Gary North. He was saying that this chaos would come upon the planet. But, of course, it didn't. I haven't seen anything from Mr. North since. There are others, however, who should have had more sense. I've always appreciated the evangelistic ministry of my friend Gary Smith, and I've appreciated the Bible teaching of Chuck Missler from America. But my friend Gary Smith and Chuck Missler both went on a rampage about this Y2K intending disaster that never happened. These men are not crackpots. They are dear brothers in the Lord, but they behave like crackpots, and we all know they wound up making public fools of themselves in the eyes of the church and the secular world. They left themselves looking ridiculous. This is very, very sad. Jesus told us, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat, what you should drink, what you should put on. But some of these discernment ministries went crazy telling people to buy everything from generators to medical supplies to plasma packs for blood transfusions to bottled water. God knows how much money was squandered for something that never came to pass. My real fear is that when something does come to pass, people will no longer listen to the boy who cried wolf. That is part of the reason the devil helped engineer this Y2K fiasco. So people will become hard of hearing and think that when something really happens, it's just another false alarm from the same crackpots who gave us the false alarm last time, those silly born-again Christians. This is tragic. I hate to say anything good about the devil, but he certainly knows his business. It goes beyond this, though. There are many other kinds of watchmen who are not watchmen. Jesus and the apostles warned repeatedly, as did the Hebrew prophets, of false prophets who come in the last days. The Hebrew term for a false prophet is a nevesheker, a nevesheker. The only thing a false prophet is is somebody who prophesies falsely in the Lord's name. We are told in such passages as Jeremiah 28 and Deuteronomy 18 how to identify a false prophet. That is a nevesheker. They predict things in the name of the Lord that fail to happen, concerning time and date specifically. You know, I'm not looking to attack anyone, but the fact is we can easily document that such men as Benny Hinn, Mike Bickle, Paul Cain of the Kansas City Prophets, General Coates in the United Kingdom, and, above all, Rick Joyner in the United States of America are all men who, by the definition of Scripture, are false prophets because they have all made God's people trust in lies, as the prophet Jeremiah put it in Jeremiah chapter 28, verses 15 to 17. They all made major predictions in the name of the Lord that failed to happen. The Bible says directly that those who continue to follow such people after they make these predictions are in rebellion against the Lord. You know, things are getting worse and worse in this regard. Just as the Lord Jesus warned they would. There are lots of ministries, but there are many false lots of ministries. There are true prophets, but there are certainly many false ones. My own family are Israeli Jewish believers, Messianic Jews. I have no doubt and no question that the events we see happening today in the Middle East are of prophetic significance. But we have people coming to Jerusalem from all over the world saying and doing ridiculous things that are not in agreement with Scripture. Again, I'm not interested in attacking anyone, but I am interested in looking at what the Word of God says. There were people who prophesied several years ago that the lasting and drunk-in-the-spirit revival, quote-unquote, would be a revival that would result in many people being saved. You know, in Great Britain, where our ministry is mainly based, since the lasting-in-the-spirit revival that came from Toronto and Pensacola in Florida, more mosques have been built in England than churches, and church attendance has decreased radically in Great Britain. We've had such things as homosexuals and lesbians meeting in our cathedral, homosexual clergy holding hands and kissing on national TV while Christians were all rolling on the floor laughing and hysteric, saying God was doing a great thing. We've had women dancing topless in churches. At Toronto, meetings called Alternative Services. And the world, of course, saw it. Yet there were those predicting this was going to bring revival. It brought no revival or no mass repentance. It discredited the Church. In most countries, both Islam and Romanism say that Christianity, in its mainstream form, is failing to give a moral direction to society, so they are here to fill in the gap and restore the moral fabric that nations like Britain and South Africa once had but no longer do. This is most unfortunate. No revival came from these things. Yet, in Jerusalem, Lance Lazard, at one time a respected Christian writer who tries to alert Christians about the prophetic significance of things happening in the Middle East, teamed up with one of the most extreme proponents of Toronto-style charismania, for want of a better term, and I myself believe in the gifts of the Spirit, understood biblically. He teamed up with Mahesh Savada and his wife, Bonnie. These were people who ran around shirtless, swinging swords and yodeling. It was sad for me to see a man like Lance Lambert go in with this kind of thing. On the Mount of Olives, there's a woman called Ruth Heflin who was claiming that gold dust was falling and coming into people's hair, but in many ways just took some of the gold dust and had it analyzed and found out it was toaster glitter that you would purchase in a stationary shop made basically out of plastic. The whole thing was a fraud and was published in a major Christian magazine. Again, getting into the secular press and even discrediting much of the Church. These are not Watchman ministries. These things have nothing to do with true Watchman ministries, in the sense the Bible teaches them. When I was living in Israel, someone came from America. His name was Michael Brown, who is now at the Brownsville Assembly of God Church in Pensacola, Florida, where there's a Toronto experience type of movement going on. Michael Brown came and he said that God is going to pour out His Spirit at a second Pentecost event. And he interpreted a national disaster of forest fires called the Sharaf, where about 20% of Israel's national forests were destroyed in horrific firestorms, as God pouring out His Spirit. And he had people staying up all night at a conference in Jerusalem waiting for the second Pentecost event to happen. Well, obviously nothing happened. Mr. Brown disappeared from Israel and showed up a few years later at the Assemblies of God in Brownsville, Florida. But what happened there? More of the same. The pastor of that church said on national media in America that God in three months was going to bring down Hank Hanegraaff, who opposed the extremism of what was happening in places like Toronto and Pensacola. And Mr. Sir Patrick, the pastor, gave a prophecy saying God was going to bring down Hank Hanegraaff in three months. And the people involved in Pensacola began cheering and shouting. But at the end of the three months, God did not bring down Hank Hanegraaff. Instead, the pastor of Pensacola, Frank Kirkpatrick, fell off a roof, smashed his pelvis, and was brought out in a wheelchair. At the same time, a financial scandal was reported in the secular press in Pensacola that of the $6.6 million U.S. collected commissions, 2% went to missions. And then it lifted all of the mansions, the luxuries, the extravagant living, the second mansions that the leaders of the revival, so-called, in Pensacola were having. No, these men who prophesied falsely, like Michael Brown and John Sir Patrick, they are not prophets. They are not watchmen. They are watchmen who are not watchmen. They are what the Hebrew texts of the Scriptures call a neve shekev. But going back to the Y2K predictions, that never happened, that many people who should have known better became caught up in and began troubling and exciting the Church in the wrong way about. This was not new either. Throughout the history of the Church, going back to the early centuries of Christianity, we had groups like the Montanists. We had Post-Revolution in the 10th century. We had the Mozart Anabaptists in the 16th century. The Shakers at the close of the 18th century. The Millerites in the 19th century. It's no surprise that we had people saying similar such things, of coming apocalyptic cataclysm at the end of the 20th century. Neither is it any coincidence that many of the people caught up in this absurdity were people who previously were involved in other groundless acts. You know, I speak the Hebrew language at home to my wife. It's our main tongue at home. And there was a book called Bible Codes written by someone called Michael Brosnan, an unsaved Jewish man. Now, I do not deny there is a numerical pattern to Bible texts. This goes back to a Russian mathematician called Ivan Tanin. But some Israeli mathematicians and computer scientists using various kinds of computer programs and highly powerful supercomputers at the Technion and other such places in Israel looked for evidence of mathematical coding of the Bible. And they determined that the odds are at least 50 to 1 that the book of Genesis had one author, dismissing by simply computer analysis the long-founded belief by liberal theologians that there were four sources of the Torah and of the book of Genesis, known generally as J-E-D-P, from the first initials of the names of God used in the book of Genesis. This was known as Wellhausen's Theory of Pentateuchal Sources, but debunked by modern computer analysis. I've never questioned these findings. The leading Israeli computer scientist was Dr. Eliyahu Ripple. But along came someone called Michael Brosnan and began looking at acrostics and trying to find secret messages by throwing three letters across and two down, predicting such things as the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Anyone who knows Hebrew would know that this is utter nonsense. The Hebrew language has no vowels, as we know them. Later on in the Middle Ages, the rabbis injected or introduced little gaps or points called nekudot to compensate for the fact that there were no vowels. But the language itself and the Bible manuscript have no vowels. In a language with no vowels, you can find almost anything. You could find Mickey Mouse Eats Cheese Omelette for breakfast if you look long enough and hard enough. Yet many evangelical Christians jumped on board with this nonsense. Again, people who should know better, such as Chuck Nistler. Someone like Grant Jeffries from Toronto, Canada, another Pentecostal writer. Someone called Jacob Ramsel. Again, these men obviously did not know the Hebrew language. They also did not seem to realize that that is not how biblical prophecy works. Where did Jesus or the apostles or Hebrew prophets ever look for hidden messages by saying it's forfeited with letters in biblical text? Once more, we have watchmen who are not watchmen. Now again, there are others who are watchmen, serious people. We have the Christian journalist David Dolan, based in Jerusalem. If you want to read a Christian's perspective of what's happening in the Middle East, read his book. We have Bill Elmore, again, a lecturer in journalism in the United States who writes superb books on what's transpiring in today's world in light of what the Bible predicts. I don't say there are not true watchmen. Again, I pointed out there are men like Dave Hunt in America and David Wilkerson, who are well worth listening to. But they always give a clear and biblical signal. They are always scripturally based in what they do and say. These are watchmen. It's very sad when those who should know better become involved in nonsense that they shouldn't, or when they fail to give a clear signal. You know, we are told in Galatians by St. Paul that the fruit of the Spirit is self-control. The Greek word is ekrete. Ekrete in Galatians. If you see people out of control, falling down in a drunken stupor, laughing and hysteric, doing irrational things, this is not ekrete. This is not the fruit of the Spirit. It's the opposite of it. And it automatically tells you this is not of God. And I say that and point it out as one who is personally a moderate Pentecostal. I was very disappointed when a Baptist Bible teacher named David Paulson, based in the United Kingdom, wrote a book asking, is the blessing biblical? Because many people were looking to him to explain to them whether or not the Toronto blessing, or the Toronto experience, and hence the COVID that came from it, whether or not blessings were of God and the root of revival. David Paulson concluded by saying that the light was not green to go, nor was it red to stop. It was yellow. Proceed with caution. He came down on the fence. The prophet Isaiah warned about this in Isaiah chapter 28, verse 7. He said, They render while rendering judgment. These two rear with wine. Thinking such as Mr. Paulson's comes from the fact that there seems to be a mixture in such phenomena as laughing revivals and drunken revivals. And so because of the mixture, we should keep the good and get rid of the bad. Is that biblical? No, it is not. That is man's wisdom. It is not the wisdom of God. The New Testament speaks twice clearly of the danger of a mixture. In the Greek text of 2 Peter, chapter 2, verse 2, Peter warns of something called parasoxusin, parasoxusin, false teachers and false prophets who would come along and secretly introduce destructive heresies. What this Greek word parasoxusin is is a mixture of truth and error. They put some truth next to the error. They use what is right and biblical to camouflage what is wrong. Indeed, I'm not attacking anyone, but even many evangelical Christians who don't agree with Mormonism would agree with much of what the Mormons say. They'd agree with much of what the Jehovah's Witnesses would say because they would see it as parasoxusin, putting something biblical next to something that really isn't, in the opinion of evangelical or born-again Christians. By virtue of the fact that you have parasoxusin, a mixture of truth and error, or putting truth next to error, that tells you it's not of God. The other word the New Testament uses is in Thessalonians. Here the word is ekathosis. Ekathosis, in 1 Thessalonians 2, verse 3. What ekathosis means is impurity. Impurity, meaning a mixture of truth and error. Well, there's some good in it. By virtue of the fact there is some good in it, that tells you automatically it's bad. It is a mixture. It is like an omelette where two of the eggs are good and one is rotten. And someone tells you, Bon appétit, monsieur. Goody good appétit, déjeuner. Good eating. Would you like some breakfast? No, monsieur. No, merci. No, thank you. Not today. I don't want to eat an omelette just because two of the eggs are good and one is rotten. But that is exactly what ekathosis is. You know, David Pawson is a man who knows the Greek language and the scriptures as well as I do. Yet instead of saying, the light is green or the light is red, all of a sudden, for the sake of what appears to be political expediency, the light is yellow. I'm not committal. Go head into Toronto and Pensacola, but go cautiously. No. Don't go at all. And again, I say that as a Pentecostal. After all these years, it hasn't fought revival. Those who said it would are false watchmen. But finally, there's another kind of false watchmen today. These are people who set themselves up to protect us from all manner of error and deception. Poorly speaking, they are known as Ruckmanites. Ruckmanites. The followers of Peter Ruckman. You know, Peter Ruckman is a man who has used the word nigger and racist terms regularly from the pulpit and on recordings. He once said Elvis Presley, first he began to sing like a nigger, then he began to dress like a nigger, then he began to walk and talk like a nigger. I find that kind of language offensive from anybody, especially a Christian, and especially a preacher. Yet, Mr. Ruckman is on his third divorce. He's the father of Ruckmanism. What is Ruckmanism? Ruckmanism. Ruckmanism is the view that the King James Bible is the only authorized view of the Scriptures that is authorized by God. Mr. Ruckman goes so far as to say that even the later editions of the 1611 version of the King James Bible are further revelations. In other words, the Greek and Hebrew were not enough. What the apostles and Hebrew prophets wrote were not enough. God gave further revelation in 1611. Friends, this is heretical. One of the main proponents of what is broadly called Ruckmanism is a woman in America called Gail Ripplinger, who wrote a book on Bible versions, New Age Bible versions. You know there are a lot of bad Bibles today. There are paraphrases, there are inclusive versions that seem to be politically correct. We have a real problem here of deviation from the original meaning of the original text. There is a threat on the integrity of the Word of God. However, when you say only the King James Bible is right and the others are wrong and that they're all New Age versions, I myself don't like the New International Version. The reason I don't like it is because it is thought by thought, not word by word. That leaves too much scope for interpretation instead of translation. But I wouldn't say it's a heretical Bible. The New American Standard is very close to the Greek and Hebrew. Yet they point out that there are deviations from the Textus Receptus and the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament. They say the Textus Receptus is the only manuscript of the New Testament that was not mutated by Oregon and his followers in Alexandria. The others are all corrupted. Well, friends, the Textus Receptus didn't even exist until Erasmus of Rotterdam just before the Reformation. And it is made up of four earlier Byzantian texts which are also found in other translations of the Bible. More than that, the King James itself deviates from the Textus Receptus in more than one place. Most seriously, it upholds in one place the Jehovah's Witness Doctrine that the Holy Spirit is not a person but an it. The King James actually calls the Holy Ghost an it. Well, you can't blaspheme an it. You can't grieve an it. You can only blaspheme a person. Now, I don't throw away the whole King James because there's one mistake, but there are mistakes in it. Again, I read the Hebrew language. The King James claims to follow the Masoretic Text as the one authorized Old Testament text that is authorized by God. In fact, it is a rabbinic revision. And even so, the King James does not always follow the Masoretic Text. In Psalm 22, there's a mistake in the Masoretic Text that the King James itself corrects. More than that, in Psalm 137, we read iman yesh ha-heketh Yerushalayim tishi hekh yemeni if I forget thee, O Jerusalem, nay forget my right hand. The right hand of Yahweh is an Old Testament metaphor for Jesus. But the King James doesn't say that. The King James says, may my right hand forget its cunning. And it paraphrases things like this. There's no such thing in the Old Testament. There's no such thing in Psalm 137. The King James has it wrong. Now, it's a valid version of the Bible. I thank God for the faith of Coverdale and Tyndale and of the other men going all the way back to Wycliffe who gave us the manuscript that eventually became the King James. But you know, if those brothers like William Tyndale and John Wycliffe were alive today and had access to the manuscript we have instead of the Vulgate or a limited assortment of Greek texts, I believe they would have interpreted the Word of God differently. We have today the Dead Sea Scroll, one of the most powerful weapons against liberal higher criticism. I believe that it was the hand of God. It's fortuitous that those scrolls were found in our lifetime. They debunk the claims of liberal theologians that the Bible was mutated and changed over the centuries. The 23 or 24 percent of the Dead Sea Scrolls that have been published show very clearly that the Word of God has not changed. It is not changed. There have been no changes in the Hebrew canon. The liberals have been wrong. I'm supposed to put my faith in Bibles that don't take into account the best collections of manuscripts? You know, I have a King James Bible. I read it devotionally. I like it. I love it. I love its prose. But to tell me it's without error? Why is it if the Meseretic is the only valid version of the Old Testament of the Hebrew text, how come the New Testament repeatedly quotes not the Meseretic, but the Septuagint? How come the New Testament writers don't agree? Again, the King James is a valid Bible. But the arguments of these people are ridiculous. When the Christian Research Institute sent one of their top scholars to interview Gail Riplinger this was published in America, she was debunked as a fraud and a charlatan. The woman could not even read the Greek language. She was a total con artist. She misrepresented herself as some kind of an expert with a graduate degree from Harvard University. Indeed, she has a master's degree from Harvard University. Is it in Biblical Criticism? No. Is her degree in Hebrew or Greek Linguistics? No. Is her master's degree from Harvard University in Theology? No. Gail Riplinger's degree is in Home Economics. And yet, people will read this rubbish and believe it. On the Internet there's a whole cyber-cult of Rachmaninids following the idea of Gail Riplinger. You find people in America being carried away with it. Their names are by and large not worth mentioning, so I won't do it, but I will point this out. Even for people who take a more serious scholarly approach and arrive at points of view supportive of the King James, such as the Sinitarian Bible Society, they have issued a statement distancing themselves from Gail Riplinger and the Rachmaninids and will have nothing whatsoever to do with it. These people are not watchmen. They are watchmen who are not watchmen. But it goes even beyond them. Another example are people who are influenced by things like the Identity Movement and British Israelism. In South Africa, there are Afrikaans people who have a similar view that they are the lost tribe of Israel. These ideas have absolutely no biblical or anthropological foundation whatsoever. And when you look at what these people are saying, there is invariably an incipient and an inherent anti-Semitism and anti-Jewishness in their points of view. Many of them, for instance, will try to warn Christians about the Star of David. Look out for the Star of David. It's an occult symbol. Is it? What are they saying? First of all, in Judaism, it's not a star. It's called Margendavid. It's the shield of David. It is true it was a pre-Christian and a pre-Jewish pagan symbol in Phoenicia, Babylon, and Egypt. But you know, the first symbol of the Church was not a cross, it was a fist, a fish called Ictus, an acronym Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. The fist was also a symbol of Dagon, the fish god that we read about in the Old Testament. Were the early Christians wrong for using a fist because it was a pagan symbol? Well, the Jews had a menorah. Later on, the Star of David was adopted, but they didn't see it as a pagan symbol. The rabbinical interpretation is that it is the configuration of the tribes of Israel around the Ark of the Covenant sojourning through the wilderness. It is what the symbol means in its own cultural and historical context that determines whether or not it is paganistic or wrong or demonic. Again, such people are given to pseudo-scholarship. They are not anthropologists. They are not theologians. What they largely are, are a particular kind of track time. Watchmen who are not watchmen. Dear friends, in these last days, we need watchmen. Those who, as it were, will take their stand upon the wall. Look out from the Word of God as Habakkuk did, taking their stand on the Watchtower and alerting God's people to truth, to reality, to what is coming based on the Word of God. We need watchmen. Real watchmen. This is Jacob Platt. God bless you and thank you.