They are sneaky, sensual, self-centered, and self-willed. While any true teacher might lapse into one or more of these sins periodically, the false teacher is consistently marked by these defects. His life and ministry are characterized by rejecting the authority of God’s Word, establishing himself as the authority, and promoting himself for his own wealth and gratification. Furthermore, these rebellious and selfish acts are done secretly to preserve the ruse of authenticity. 

To identify false teachers, we must understand that they come disguised as true followers of Christ. Exercising discernment, therefore, demands that we examine those who claim to speak God’s Word to distinguish who is true from who is false. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught us that one way we distinguish between true and false teachers is by looking at their fruits. What is the product of their lips, their lives, and their leadership? Good fruit indicates someone who is a genuine follower of Christ speaking His Word faithfully. Bad fruit, conversely, exposes someone as a false teacher.

One person present when Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount was the Apostle Peter, and he also gave instructions to help us identify deceivers in the church. Peter knew that his time remaining on this earth was short, so he felt a significant urgency in writing this letter, with the ultimate goal of preserving his readers’ faith in the truth of the gospel (2 Peter 1:12-15). However, merely giving a positive exposition of the truth was insufficient for the task. If his readers were to remain faithful to the truth as it is in Jesus, they also would need to be armed with the ability to identify and avoid false teachers who would seek to distort, pervert, and corrupt that truth. Peter, therefore, spent most of chapter two in his letter exposing the characteristics of false teachers. While we cannot cover everything Peter wrote in this chapter, let’s consider four of these destructive traits.

First, false teachers are sneaky. 2 Peter 2:1 tells us that false teachers introduce destructive heresies secretly. Like Jesus warned the disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, Peter urges his readers to realize that false teachers are deceptive by nature. They do not advertise their false teaching, and most of the time they do not place it front and center. False teachers will look for vulnerable members of the church who might be open to false teaching, and they begin to sow the seeds of their false doctrine with them first. They try to keep what they are doing under the shadow of secrecy so as not to be discovered until they have formed their own following. Another tactic they use to hide their destructive heresies is that they seek to add to the truth rather than take away from it. When Peter says that they “secretly introduce heresies,” the language used speaks of bringing something in addition to something already there. False teachers do not always speak against what is accepted as Christian doctrine, but they sometimes seek to add to what people in the church already believe. They introduce novelty that they claim will only enhance what a Christian practices. By seeking out the vulnerable and pretending to believe the same things the church believes but with a few innovations, false teachers craftily sneak in their destructive heresies, often undetected. Christians need to beware of those who innovate with God’s Word or who seek to isolate younger believers as unsuspecting targets.

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