Matthew 7:15-20 — Trees & Fruit

FRANK: Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus stops describing the narrow road and starts warning about the people standing beside it. Matthew chapter seven, verses fifteen through twenty. "Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, by their fruit you will recognize them."

LINDA: One test. Jesus could have handed us anything to spot a fake with... a creed to check, a miracle to demand, a list of credentials, and instead he gives us fruit, which is the slowest test in the world. You plant, you wait, and a whole season goes by before you find out what you've got.

FRANK: A whole season, yes, and I'd say by the end of today that slowness turns out to be the mercy in it. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, I'm Frank Edwards, glad you're here with us.

LINDA: I'm Linda Brown. Today it's six verses about wolves, wool and weeds on a hillside, and I'm going to make Frank convince me that a test this slow is worth anything to a sheep standing next to a wolf right now.

FRANK: Wolves in sheep's clothing—that's where the argument starts, with the costume. Jesus doesn't say false prophets look like wolves. He says they come in sheep's clothing, and then he calls them, in Greek, lykoi harpages. Harpax is a snatching word. It's what a raider does, grabbing and carrying off. So you've got a predator that has learned to look like prey, moving through the flock until the moment it starts taking. Why would his hearers need that warning? Because their own history was full of it. Moses, in Deuteronomy thirteen, had already told Israel that a prophet might even work a sign that comes true, and if he said "let us go after other gods," he was to be rejected anyway. Signs weren't enough. The question was always where the man was pulling your heart. Then think of Jeremiah, spending his entire ministry against prophets crying "Peace, peace, when there is no peace," or Micaiah, one man standing against four hundred court prophets who told King Ahab exactly what he wanted to hear. Four hundred. The false ones were popular. They were well dressed. They were on the payroll. That was the point... they looked like the real thing.

FRANK: A disguise can imitate everything except the yield—that's the claim this passage is built on. A wolf can put on wool. It cannot grow figs.

LINDA: On the payroll. You're telling me the wolf usually isn't sneaking in from the woods, he's already got a desk inside the building.

FRANK: Very often, yes. Ezekiel thirty-four is God indicting Israel's shepherds, the men appointed to guard the sheep, for feeding themselves while the flock scattered and became food for the animals of the field. The danger held the staff. Paul says the same to the Ephesian elders in Acts twenty: savage wolves will come in among you, and then the line that should make any church leader swallow hard, "from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things." Peter warns of false teachers who secretly bring in destructive heresies and exploit believers with invented words. So if the wolf is inside, wearing the right clothes, using the right vocabulary, what exactly are you supposed to look at?

LINDA: The fruit, apparently, except I don't believe verse eighteen. "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit." Good people have ugly days. Genuinely awful people volunteer at the food bank and mean it. That sentence sounds like it was written by someone who has never met a human being.

FRANK: It would be, if Jesus meant single acts. Look at the word for the bad tree. It's sapros, and it means rotten, decayed, gone soft and putrid through the wood. It's the word you'd use for fish left too long in the sun. So this isn't a healthy tree that dropped one bitter apple. It's a tree whose core has turned, and Jesus is making a claim about nature, not about Wednesday afternoon. Scripture has been saying this since the first page, where God makes trees bearing fruit "after their kind." What a tree is sets what a tree yields. In Matthew twelve Jesus comes back to this same image and traces it to the root himself: "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." The word karpos, fruit, points you to a harvest, the yield over seasons, the pattern. One bad berry tells you very little. A basket full of them tells you what the roots are drinking.

LINDA: Seasons, though, that's my problem. The harvest takes years, and meanwhile the wolf is eating. A test you can only run in hindsight is great for historians and not much comfort to the sheep who's standing next to him on a Monday morning.

FRANK: Hindsight is part of it, and I won't pretend otherwise. But think about the image Jesus actually uses. On the Judean hillsides there's a thornbush, the naboq, that puts out small dark berries in the dry season, and from a distance a clump of them can pass for grapes. Certain thistles have round buds that, unripe and glanced at carelessly, look like a young fig. You don't find out by admiring the bush from the road. You find out when you reach for it. And there's fruit you can reach for right now, which is what the teaching itself produces. God says in Jeremiah twenty-three that if those prophets had truly stood in his counsel, they would have turned people from their evil ways. So you can ask, today, in the room: does this voice make people love God more and hate their sin more, or does it make them comfortable, and make him bigger?

LINDA: Comfortable, and him bigger. I'll grant that one can be asked this week. What about someone who passed all of those checks for twenty years and then the whole church found out what he'd been doing the entire time?

FRANK: Jesus doesn't promise the harvest comes quickly. He says "you will recognize them," future tense, and the recognition is sure even when it's slow. There's a line I find strikingly honest: "Some part of their temper and conduct is contrary to the mind of Christ." Some part. Not always the preaching, not always the doctrine. Often it's the temper... how the man treats the assistant who books his flights, what happens to his face when he's contradicted in a meeting. When a church looks back, the story almost always includes people who saw that part and were told it didn't matter because the sermons were so good.

LINDA: Some part is enough, then. The temper shows up in the staff meeting long before it shows up in the headlines. I'm persuaded the test is real. I still wish it were faster, and I don't think the text is going to give me that wish.

FRANK: It isn't, no. And that brings up the misreading I'd most want to clear away. A lot of us hear "fruit" and think results. Attendance, buildings, downloads, the size of the platform. Output, in other words, the same way your job measures you. But when Paul tells us what the Spirit's fruit is, in Galatians five, he lists love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and he uses karpos in the singular, one harvest, as though it all grows together from a single root and you don't get to pick the appealing ones and leave the rest on the branch. What's on that list? Nothing you can fake under pressure for very long. Patience with the difficult person. Gentleness when you're crossed. Self-control when nobody's watching. And set that next to the works of the flesh just before—strife, jealousy, factions, rivalries, which is so often exactly the trail a charismatic deceiver leaves behind him. A crowd is not fruit. A crowd might just be a very large thornbush.

LINDA: You're eleven hours into a shift that was supposed to be eight, and the new hire, who thinks you hung the moon, asks whether she should pick up the extra weekend. The honest answer is no, she's exhausted, she'll burn out by spring. The convenient answer is yes, because you need the coverage and she'll do it if you say it's a good idea.

FRANK: The test just turned around, didn't it? You can't spend very long inspecting other people's fruit before you look down into your own basket. And what you've just described is the wolf's oldest instinct in miniature, the shepherd feeding himself from the sheep, except it doesn't read as predatory from the inside. It reads as helpfulness. The serpent in Genesis three didn't come with fangs. He came with a question that sounded like concern, "Has God really said?", and a promise, "you will be like God." The first false prophet in Scripture offered good-sounding words that bore deadly fruit. So when you're the one with some authority, even small authority, a junior colleague who trusts your take, the pull to nudge them toward what serves you is the very thing this passage is exposing. Can you see why it's so easy to miss?

LINDA: Because the advice would sound kind. It costs me the coverage, and it costs me being the easygoing one she likes, and all I'd have to say is something she wants to hear... "sure, it's good experience."

FRANK: Peace, peace, when there is no peace. Scaled down to a break room.

LINDA: Verse nineteen scares me now, though. Every tree that doesn't bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. If I'm the tree being inspected, then every Monday inbox where I snap at someone, every meeting where I shade the truth to protect myself, is going into the file.

FRANK: [short pause] Follow the logic of the passage one step further, because it goes somewhere better than fear. If fruit flows from nature, then good fruit is impossible until the nature is changed. You can't staple figs onto a thistle. Isaiah sings about God's vineyard, planted and tended, that brought forth wild grapes anyway. The outside looked like a vineyard; the fruit told the truth. So Jesus does not stand in front of rotten trees and tell them to try harder. He makes new trees. The church calls this regeneration, being born again, God giving a new nature at the root. And then he says, in John fifteen, "I am the vine, you are the branches... apart from me you can do nothing." That's union with Christ: your life joined to his so that his life flows into yours.

FRANK: That joining was paid for at another tree—the tree Christ was hung on, where the curse fell on him so that dead branches could live. Righteousness that saves can't be worn like wool. It has to be grafted in.

LINDA: Grafted in, not strained at on a bad Monday—the fruit comes from a root he put there, not from me straining to manufacture it.

FRANK: Straining, yes, that's what the false prophet is doing, sewing the costume tighter. The fire in verse nineteen is a real warning, and it's aimed at trees whose religion was only ever clothing. For a branch grafted into Christ, what comes to you isn't the axe. It's the pruning, and the Spirit's own harvest, which Paul says is his gift before it's ever your labor. The Monday snapping is real and it should grieve you. It's also exactly the kind of thing a living branch confesses, and a costume hides.

LINDA: Confesses versus hides. That might be the fastest version of the test I've heard all day, and it works on me as well as on the man at the podium.

FRANK: It does. Repentance is fruit too, and a wolf almost never grows it, because repenting means taking the wool off in front of people. And that answers the thing you opened with, Linda. Out of every test Jesus could have given, he gave the one test a disguise can't pass, because a costume can be put on in a morning and fruit takes a lifetime. The slowness is the protection. Time is the one thing a wolf can't outlast.

LINDA: [quietly] Then let the passage have the last word. "Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves... So then, by their fruit you will recognize them."

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