Beasts in the Pulpit: The Animal Instinct of False Teachers

There is a certain kind of religious leader who walks into immorality with a swagger. He doesn't tiptoe. He doesn't tremble. He sins brazenly, confident he will never be caught, never be exposed, never be judged. Jude saw him. Peter saw him. And in his commentary on 2 Peter and Jude, Richard Bauckham helps us see him too—and what we see is not a sophisticated spiritual rebel, but an animal.

Freedom That Looks Like a Cage

The false teachers in 2 Peter loved to talk about freedom. They preached liberty. Jude says they “pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality” (Jude 4). They positioned themselves as enlightened, liberated, superior to the rule-bound believers around them. But Bauckham, drawing the thread from Jude 10 into 2 Peter 2, exposes what their freedom actually was: bondage to instinct.

“The false teachers are like animals who live not by reason but by mere instinct,” Bauckham writes. They had so deadened their moral reasoning that they were no longer making thoughtful choices about right and wrong. They were simply reacting—to appetite, to opportunity, to desire. The same impulses that drive a beast to eat, mate, and dominate were driving these men in clerical garb. Jude says as much in v. 10: “and the very things they do understand by instinct—as irrational animals do—will destroy them.” 

This is the irony Jude and Peter expose. The false teacher thinks he is the most liberated person in the room. In reality, he is the least free. He cannot say no to his appetites. He cannot interrupt his own patterns. He has surrendered the higher faculties of conscience and reason to the lower drives of the body.

Brazen Without Fear

What makes these false teachers so dangerous—and so disturbing—is the absence of fear. Bauckham is striking on this point. The false teachers, he says, “in their brazenly immoral behavior… take no notice of the danger they run.” They scoff at the powers of evil. They mock the warnings. They are confident of “their immunity from judgment.” They think because judgment is not swift that it will never come—or worse, that God has no issue with their predatory behavior.

Bauckham draws the picture vividly: they are “like animals, unaware that they are likely to be hunted and slaughtered.” A deer grazes in the open field, oblivious to the rifle scope. A fish strikes the lure, oblivious to the hook. The false teacher commits sin in the church, oblivious to the holiness of the God he claims to serve. He thinks he is invisible. He thinks he is untouchable. He thinks the rules that bind ordinary believers do not bind him.

He is wrong. And his wrongness is the very thing that will destroy him.

I write this on the sixth day of “global prayer and fasting” for a notorious predator, and someone who possibly should be declared a false prophet by a council of charismatic leaders— Mike Bickle. It is shocking that a group of believers has gathered around a serial abuser and likely fake prophet, because they believe his con: He alone can save Israel through his prayers. You don’t become a false prophet without having a keen ability to convince people of your con. 

The Vicious Circle

How does a man get to this place? Bauckham’s analysis is sober and worth pausing over. The corruption, he suggests, often happens gradually. A teacher dependent on his followers for his living slowly discovers that rigorous truth is unpopular. Watered-down grace fills more seats. Permissive theology raises more support.

So he relaxes. Just a little. Then a little more. His own appetites grow as he sanctions theirs. His followers’ appetites grow as he feeds them. Soon, teacher and disciple are locked in what Bauckham calls a “vicious circle of mutually dependent self-interest.” The pulpit panders to the pew, and the pew funds the pulpit, and the gospel becomes whatever keeps the system feeds.

Baukham compares them to Balaam—the prophet who tried to sell his services for money. Balaam’s greed so warped his judgment that he genuinely believed he could oppose God’s will and succeed. “This was ‘madness,’” Bauckham writes, comparable to “the false teachers' belief that they can sin with impunity.” 

The Donkey Knew Better

There is dark humor in the Balaam story, and neither Bauckham nor Jude misses it. When Balaam went off the rails, it was the donkey who saw the angel of the Lord. It was the donkey who tried to stop him. It was the donkey who finally spoke up and told Balaam what an ass he was being.

The comparison, Bauckham notes wryly, is “in the animal’s favor.” Jude refers to the false prophet, following animal instincts. And in the story, it’s the donkey who acts more human than Balaam! Balaam’s sin was greed, and greed is instinctual: “the very things they do understand by instinct—as irrational animals do—will destroy them. Woe to them! … they have rushed for profit into Balaam’s error” (v. 10).

That is the warning of Jude and 2 Peter for the church today. When a minister can no longer hear the voice of conscience that even a beast of burden hears, he has not ascended to higher freedom—he has descended below the animals. His sin is not sophisticated. It is not enlightened. It is instinctual, brazen, and self-destructive.

And the God he scoffs at is not impressed.

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Bauckham, Richard J. 2 Peter–Jude. Edited by David A. Hubbard and Ralph P. Martin, Word Biblical Themes. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 1990.