They know the shepherd will give them food, and like most people they seek after themselves, what they don't know is that after the shepherd has fleeced them, he will send them to the slaughterhouse. We need to ensure we follow the GOOD shepherd.
Have you ever heard spring lamb's bleating on the day of slaughter?
That sound will cut your heart to the quick.
We are told to beware of false teachers. Indeed, some who teach false doctrine may not even be aware. Led to that understanding due to generations of false understanding that preceded them. Their family staying faithful to a church that teaches false doctrine, as example.
We are told to rightly divide the word of truth. When we start to interject our own words, understanding, preference for context, into God's own words, we become that; false teachers. And we are responsible for this and shall answer before God.
That's why we are told to study and show ourselves approved.
This world prefers quick fixes in most everything. People who have abused themselves for decades with food, drugs, alcohol, any vice, when it comes time to pay the fiddler, poor health, cancer, etc... want a quick fix that saves them. They want it now, when it took years to lose their health.
That's what we witness in false teachers as well. When rather than being an anointed minister of God's true words, are instead exhibiting a materialist doctrine ensconced in a faith and practice of that of entitlement and positive thinking. Sometimes called the, name it and claim it doctrine.
He is a false teacher, as was his father before him.
Countless souls lost to that kind of ministering to materialism?
God's word is easy to understand if we let our own preference for being coddled and enabled to do as we always did but with the name of Christ upon us. Which isn't really bearing the name of our Lord at all.
You've been criticized mightily here for your understanding and defense of that as pertains to scripture. You know your heart. Never be one who is so proud they cannot learn something they do not truly know. God's word stands forever. Our opinion of it does not.
Jesus instructed people using parables so that not all would understand.
The Book of Matthew chapter 13
12.Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. 13
This is why I speak to them in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.’ 14In them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers
(13) Because they seeing see not.--As the words stand in St. Matthew, they might mean that our Lord adopted the method of parables as a condescension to their infirmities, feeding them, as babes in knowledge, with milk, and not with meat. In St. Mark and St. Luke the reason given assumes a penal character, "that seeing they might not see;" as though they were not only to be left in their ignorance, but to be plunged deeper in it. And this, it is obvious, is even here the true meaning, for only thus does this clause answer to the conclusion of the proverb of
Matthew 13:12, "From him shall be taken away even that which he hath." In one aspect, then, the parable was a veil hiding the truth from them, because they did not seek the truth, and this was the working of the divine law of retribution. But even here we may venture to trace beneath the penalty an element of mercy. The parable could, at all events, do men no harm. It could not rouse the fierce enmity that had been kindled by truth spoken in its plainness. And it might prepare the way, might set men thinking and questioning, and if so, that was at least one step towards the "having," though it were but a very little, which might place them among those to whom more shall be given.
