After writing about that whole “reverse rapture” prophecy, with all its specific, verifiable claims that we can check against reality on September 24, this one question keeps bugging me:
What makes people fall for this stuff? Over and over again?
You’d think that by now, after enough failed rapture dates and “God told me about Bitcoin” prophecies, Christians would develop better discernment. But every few months, someone with a YouTube channel releases another “word,” and just like clockwork, it spreads through church WhatsApp groups like wildfire.
I so wish it was just stupidity or lack of Bible knowledge. There’s a whole ecosystem that creates this vulnerability. Lemme give you a quick introduction to the types of people you'd meet there.
The Shortcut Seeker
I meet these Christians all the time. They want prophecy, fire tunnels, soaking sessions... anything except the slow work of sitting with Scripture. They’ll chase the latest “deep revelation” but won’t work through a basic Pauline argument in Romans.
They want spiritual six-packs without doing the reps. But there’s no shortcut to what only time and deliberate, dedicated surrender can build.
The Disillusioned Drifter
These break my heart. They’ve been burnt by church (sometimes legitimately). They saw hypocrisy, bad leadership, maybe even abuse. But instead of healing through the Word, prayer and humbly seeking out healthy fellowship, they ran from church entirely.
Now they don’t trust traditional church, but they’ll trust Telegram groups full of “anointed intel” with no accountability, no test, no grounding. In American-ese, they rejected one kind of Kool-Aid and started drinking another.
The Chronically Undiscipled
Let’s be direct: many of our churches failed these people. They can quote Philippians 4:13, but they’ve never been taught how to handle Scripture properly. If their pastors had substance, they might have wondered if they'd lose attendance from the services by feeding the people anything more substantial than sermon-ites for christian-lites. Oftentimes, fearing that they would lose their congregation to the latest fashionable church, the pastors dilute and dumb down the meat of the Scriptures. End result? A flock who are fundamentally children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, (Ephesians 4:14)
So when someone says to them “God showed me Ezekiel 40 is about cryptocurrency,” they genuinely can’t tell if it’s false teaching or just revelation they’re too immature to understand yet. They’re not gullible because they’re stupid. They’re gullible because they’re starving. And sometimes they don't even know it...
The End-Times Entrepreneur
This type fascinates me. They love prophetic charts, geopolitical decoding, Nephilim timelines, AND they also believe God wants to make them rich through end-times investments. They don’t want discipleship. They want to front-run the apocalypse and call it obedience. That's fine if they keep to their own circles, among people with their kind of appetite for risk. It isn't that fine if they drag in the church janitor and the small scale English Tutor and lose their money in some fancy investment scheme that collapses just before the returns were supposed to be paid out.
The Hungry and Overlooked
These are the ones who really get to me. They’re not trying to manipulate anyone. They’re just lonely, powerless, spiritually malnourished. Nobody ever discipled them properly or taught them how to test prophecy. When someone finally tells them they’re part of a chosen remnant about to receive wealth and purpose, they believe it. Because they desperately need to. They’re not chasing prophets. They’re chasing hope.
They are often the sort who are quiet at church, who might turn up for events a few times and realize no one notices if they were there or not, then quietly fade back into the woodwork. They don't fit into our preconceived image of the successful churchgoer, those who have the best faith, the right doctrine, the pithiest sayings of "humble" yet confident faith. God sees them as important, but do the rest of us at church show them how God sees them?
Why This Matters
False prophecy spreads in an ecosystem of shallow teaching and deep spiritual hunger. Behind every ridiculous YouTube prophet is a crowd of Christians who never got the tools to distinguish truth from garbage. We can’t just cringe, roll our eyes and move on. If we want people to stop falling for this stuff, we need to address the conditions that make them vulnerable in the first place.
So, yes - first go read your Bible. Really read it. Not for quotes or proof-texts, but to let it train you. There’s no substitute for that slow, sometimes boring work of learning to hear God’s actual voice. Then open your eyes at church and see if you recognize amongst your churchmates any of the above groups I brought up above. Or the next time God lays on your heart someone you haven't seen in church for a while, you might want to send them a text and just see if they are doing ok.
Because sometimes the best defence against false prophecy isn't just good doctrine, it's a church community that actually sees and cares for its people. This is how we stop having to ask this question again in six months...
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