Acts 17:10-11 “The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue. Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.”
One of the things that has proliferated with all forms of media, including social media, is the number of Bible teachers and preachers to which one one can be exposed. There are men and women who have been given a platform to preach to thousands – even hundreds of thousands. There are churches with memberships exceeding 10,000. There are multiple TV channels that are given fully to one preacher after another speaking to anyone who will listen 24 hours a day. So, with so many choices, what should we listen to, if we listen to any, that is? To whom should we listen when there are so many teaching styles to pick from and so many varying theologies in that teaching, some diametrically opposed to each other? It’s like a cacophony of preaching calling out for someone to listen. How does one sort out all this noise?
Well, one way, of course, is to not listen to any of it. Perhaps that’s how one can avoid the many false teachers that the Bible warns us about in so many places. However, the Bible also says that teachers are necessary for us. God has called and gifted certain people for this task. But from the very beginning, the issue of multiple teachers and false teachers has faced the church. In Corinth Paul spoke of this with these words: “When one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:4-7). In other words, to argue about which teacher is “the best” is pointless. Each God-ordained teacher fills a role, and God knows how to make it all work together.
Yet, all Bible teachers are human and have their human faults. Some are flat-out false teachers and should be rejected out of hand. But even those who are clearly God-called and Spirit-led are nevertheless, human, and we should never swallow everything anyone says for that very reason. It’s to this very thing that the Bible speaks in the verses above. Here we are told that the believers at Berea were “more noble” than those at Thessalonica. And why was that? Well, the believers at Thessalonica had swallowed some erroneous teaching about the second coming, which becomes apparent as one reads 1 and 2 Thessalonians. They had not been discerning. They were gullible. The Bereans, on the other hand, while eager to learn and hear what Bible teachers had to say, “examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.” They didn’t take anyone’s word at face value. They studied God’s Word themselves to make sure that what was being said was accurately being taught. And every teacher of the Bible should encourage just that.
Listen to these words from the apostle Paul, whom God inspired to give us 13 of the letters that comprise the New Testament: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:6-9).
What a sobering warning that we be discerning about anything we take in! But how frequently do people actually examine the Scriptures daily to see whether what they are hearing is truly consistent with what God has said in His Word? May God keep us from the gullibility that is so prevalent in this day and age when so many voices and so many messages are available to us. May the Lord give us the discernment and discipline that is required to “rightly handle the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).
To Encourage You 
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