This book that I've found, Church History in Plain Language, is awesome! It has made so many things clearer to me, and I've only read 5 chapters so far! (There are 49 chapters all together.) This last chapter I just read was on Gnosticism and early heresies. This explains to me why there are so many warnings against false teachings throughout all the Epistles in the New Testament.

And now I make one more appeal, my dear brothers and sisters. Watch out for people who cause divisions and upset people's faith by teaching things that are contrary to what you have been taught. Stay away from them. Such people are not serving Christ our Lord; they are serving their own personal interests. By smooth talk and glowing words they deceive innocent people. (Romans 16: 17-18)

Be on guard. Stand true to what you believe. Be courageous. Be strong. And everything you do must be done with love. (1 Corinthians 16:13-14)

I am jealous for you with the jealousy of God Himself. For I promised you as a pure bride to one husband, Christ. But I fear that somehow you will be led away from your pure and simple devotion to Christ, just as Eve was deceived by the serpent. You seem to believe whatever anyone tells you, even if they preach about a different Jesus than the one we preach, or a different Spirit than the one you received, or a different kind of gospel than the one you believed....But I will continue doing this to cut the ground out from under the feet of those who boast that their work is just like ours. These people are false apostles. They have fooled you by disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. But I am not surprised! Even Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light.(2 Corinthians 11:2-4, 12-14)

Now, what on earth were these false teachers teaching, exactly? Before I started reading this book, I had a vague idea, but this explained what early Gnosticism was. Non believers today have a hard time getting past the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin. Gnostic followers had a hard time getting past the fact that Jesus was born, i.e. that He was flesh and not a Spirit.

The basic belief of the Gnostics was what we call dualism, that is, they believed that the world is ultimately divided between two cosmic forces, good and evil. In line with much Greek philosophy, they identified evil with matter. Because of this, they regarded any Creator God as wicked....Their own Supreme Being was far removed from any such tendency to 'evil'. (p51)

Then how did they explain the origin of the world? They thought of creation as a series of emanations.. These emanations produced inferior powers until they had created a long line of divine creatures, each one inferior to the one above it, until the last one was silly enough not to see that creation itself was evil. This last one was the God of the Jews....I think we can see now why there were so many warnings about false teachers!

However, we are not free of false teaching. I recently saw an article in the paper about the chaplain at the National Cathedral accepting gays into ministry and in the congregation. He said that he was trying to create a "more enlightened church." He's got it all wrong...the church is called to be holy, set apart, different from the world. The world's idea of enlightenment is actually darkness....Jesus Himself warned us about this. We need to heed these warnings! There are plenty more warnings throughout the New Testament about false teachers...we need to watch out.