Can you be RIGHT about the Heretic and Still Wrong Before God?

We live in an age of hypercriticism. Say out loud that there is a biblical way to bring correction, and somebody will accuse you of going soft on false doctrine. Insisting on a biblical process is how error actually gets eliminated. The man who wants heresy dealt with should be the first man in the room demanding that we do it God’s way.

No amount of “yeah, buts” can justify an unscriptural process or excuse a wrong spirit. Two wrongs have never made a right, and the second wrong is usually committed by the person who was right about the first one. Read that sentence again. This is hard. I’m preaching to myself. We will all miss it. We must still strive to be biblical.

Paul was clear: “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1). Notice who is charged there: the spiritual one, the one who is right. The correction is aimed at the corrector, and the safeguard is that he keeps one eye on his own heart at all times.

Right about here somebody stops reading and starts typing, “…yea but… are you saying…” I’m saying we should be scriptural in all things. That includes these scriptures:

Paul warned the Ephesian elders that grievous wolves would enter in among them, “not sparing the flock” (Acts 20:29).

John said of the man who brings another doctrine, “receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed” (2 John 10).

There is a category of person you do not hand a platform to, and I am not asking anybody to pretend otherwise. Now read the verse that governs how you arrive at that conclusion: “A man that is a heretic after the first and second admonition reject” (Titus 3:10).

Peter shows us what real heresy is. False teachers bring in damnable heresies, “even denying the Lord that bought them” (2 Peter 2:1). Notice what he names: the denial of Christ. Real heresy strikes the person and work of the Lord Jesus, and it damns the people who swallow it. John gives the same test: “Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist” (1 John 4:3). Paul pronounced the anathema on any man, or any angel from heaven, who preached another gospel than the one they had received (Galatians 1:8). The apostles put the line in the same place every time.

So here is what actually belongs in the category: denying that Jesus is God in the flesh; denying the bodily resurrection, which Paul said empties our preaching and leaves us still in our sins (1 Corinthians 15:14, 17); denying salvation by grace through faith and adding a work to the finished cross; denying the authority of Scripture; preaching another Jesus, another spirit, another gospel (2 Corinthians 11:4); teaching that grace gives us license to sin, which Jude said was the mark of ungodly men turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness (Jude 4). That is heresy. Every one of those cuts a man off from Christ Himself.

Which means a brother who lands somewhere different than you on the timing of the rapture, the operation of the gifts, church government, worship style, or the age of the earth is not a heretic. Someone who operates in deliverance in a way that you feel is wrong or even dangerous is not a heretic. A person who does honor and offerings differently than you is not a heretic. All of these things can be dangerous and need to be dealt with and can lead to heresy, but we’re not in the business of pre-crime. We have to deal with what we have in the spirit of love. If it is not a core salvific issue, you are dealing with a brother. Paul himself got called a heretic: “After the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers” (Acts 24:14). The men who hung that label on him were certain they were defending the Scriptures.

Even when dealing with a heretic, look at what Paul says we should do in Titus 3:10. What’s the process? A first admonition. Then a second one. Rejection is the end of a process. What happens online is rejection as the opening move, aimed at a man nobody has admonished once, by people who have never spoken to him and never intend to.

This is tough, especially in the age of social media, and we generally feel that public error should get a public answer. That is correct, and I will go further on it than some of my friends will. Paul withstood Peter to the face at Antioch and rebuked him before them all, then put the whole account in a letter the church has been reading out loud for two thousand years (Galatians 2:11, 14). Paul told Timothy, “Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear” (1 Timothy 5:20).

Public doctrine can be publicly answered. That is settled and I am not trying to unsettle it. Now read the verse directly above it, because Paul set the two side by side on purpose: “Against an elder receive not an accusation, but before two or three witnesses” (1 Timothy 5:19). The same apostle who authorized the public rebuke put an evidence standard in front of it. You do not get verse 20 without verse 19. A screenshot is not a witness. A clip is not a witness. A man who told you a story about a man is not two or three witnesses.

In every instance where Paul brought public correction, he had a personal connection with them. This should be taken into consideration as well.

But, “Jesus called them whited sepulchres. Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal. Are you saying they were wrong?” Of course not, and the comparison falls apart the moment you look at what those scenes actually were. Jesus said it in their presence, to their faces, as the sinless Judge who knew their hearts perfectly and had every right to name what He saw (Matthew 23:27). Elijah stood on Carmel addressing pagan idolaters in a contest they had agreed to enter, with fire about to fall as the verdict (1 Kings 18). Bring me a man who has walked up to the teacher he opposes, said it to his face, and staked a public test on the outcome, and I will hear him out all day long. That is a different creature from a man at a keyboard announcing the heart motives of a stranger to an audience that will never hear the reply.

“All of this gives cover to false teachers.” It does the opposite. A mob makes martyrs. When error gets handled outside of Scripture, the man in error gets to point at his accusers and change the subject, and he is usually right about them, and his people close ranks and never once hear the actual argument. Doing it God’s way is the only method that has ever removed the error and kept the person. Nothing here asks you to be quieter. We’re simply asking, how do we do it the right way?

Now understand why this is harder in our generation than it has ever been.

There was a time when this kind of cultish groupthink was harder to achieve. It took a mega ministry, a private office, a green room, a staff, and a travel schedule thick enough that a man could go years without ever hearing the word no. Only the uber-successful could afford to buy that kind of agreement. The rest of us had to sit in real rooms with real people who told us we were wrong to our faces, and we had to learn how to handle it.

That protection is gone. Social media handed every believer with a phone the same insulation the old leaders spent years building. Your feed learns what you like and gives you more of it. Your followers select themselves. Your comment section is a choir. You can spend eight hours inside a stream of content confirming everything you already believe about a man you have never met, then walk away convinced you did your homework. You did not do your homework. You did a lap around the inside of your own head.

This is where righteous indignation gets counterfeited. Confirmation bias disguises itself as a Bible verse. Irving Janis named the group version of this in 1972 and called it groupthink. His symptoms included direct pressure on anyone who dissents, self-censorship by the ones who privately have doubts, an illusion of unanimity, and what he called mindguards, the loyal insiders who keep unwelcome information away from the leader before it ever reaches him.

The people defending a ministry are sealed in just as tight as the people attacking it.

Solomon saw this three thousand years ahead of the algorithm: “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him” (Proverbs 18:17). The first case always sounds airtight. That is the nature of a first case. The screenshot, the clip, the thread, the ten-minute takedown—every one of them is the first case, and almost nobody stays in the room long enough to hear the other side. Ready, fire, aim!

Ahab had four hundred prophets telling him exactly what he wanted to hear and one man in the whole nation willing to tell him the truth. Listen to how the king described that one man: “I hate him; for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil” (1 Kings 22:8). Four hundred voices agreed. Four hundred voices were wrong. Ahab rode into that battle with the applause of his own echo chamber in his ears and came home dead.

We are spoiled, plain and simple. We have been handed the ability to never be contradicted; we took it with both hands, and now we call what comes out of it discernment. That posture hardens into cult behavior faster than anybody expects, and it never announces itself. The mission becomes supreme. The brand becomes sacred. The smallest divergence becomes a capital offense. Every minister reading this needs to ask: how much disagreement do I have around me, and what do I do when those who are under me have questions?

I love and honor the generation of leaders that came before me, and I will still say this: they lost the culture war in part over this exact problem. They fell out over every small thing. They divided. They spent their strength building personal kingdoms while the body of Christ went unbuilt. They never learned how to disagree without being disagreeable, how to receive correction, or how to keep a friendship alive through one honest conversation. We inherited the ground they surrendered. We will hand our children the same loss if we run the same plays.

We had the strongest church in American history, with more Bible knowledge and technology at our fingertips than we could have used to win a generation. Did we? No—because one didn’t like how the other received offerings or performed deliverance or their worship.

So no matter how heretical the teaching, no matter how dangerous the man, you do not get a pass to violate Scripture in your response. Ranking his sin above yours does not delete yours. Michael the archangel contended with the devil himself over the body of Moses and still “durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee” (Jude 9). If the archangel would not take that liberty with Satan, you cannot take it with a brother.

Which brings this all the way down to your thumb. Before you hit post, run these questions: Have you said it to him, or only about him? Did you go to him a second time? Have you heard this man at length in his own words, or only in clips selected and captioned by people who already hate him? Does it fall under the category of heresy mentioned above, or is it a secondary issue? Would you say that exact sentence, in that exact tone, with him sitting across the table from you? Solomon settled the whole matter in a single line, and it was written for men with far less information than you have: “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13).

Now you can respond with a bunch of “yeah buts” in the comments or get in the Bible, find out what it has to say, and do that. I aim to do the latter.

Thank you for your support.

If you appreciate the work we do to spread the good news of Jesus Christ, please consider giving a gift to help us continue this work. Maranatha!