You have heard it often. I mean the statement “Touch not the Lord’s anointed,” which stands ready and steady to silence the biblical call for necessary discernment. Many followers will rebuff calls to examine the teaching or lifestyle of their modern ‘apostles,’ ‘prophets,’ or pastors by warning one not to touch the anointed. Such an examination, they say, would be opposition to God and a secure judgment for oneself. But who are the Lord’s anointed in the Bible? Could we have miss-anointed our leaders by misapplying the title ‘anointed one’?
The ‘Anointed’ in the Old Testament
‘Anointed’ in the OT translates the Hebrew noun māšîaḥ (39x) from which the title Messiah comes. The noun occurs four times in Leviticus (4:3, 5, 16; 6:15) to refer to Israel’s high priest and highest in Samuel to refer only to Israel’s kings, especially Saul (1 Sam 12:3, 5; 24:7, 11; 26:9, 11, 16, 23; 2 Sam 1:14, 16, 21), and David (2 Sam 19:22; 22:51; 23:1). In Isaiah 45:1, king Cyrus is the Lord’s anointed who helps restore Israel to her land. Only once is the verb ‘to anoint’ applied to a prophet (Elisha, cf. 1 Kgs 19:16).
From this data, we note that the title ‘anointed one’ in the OT referred to Israel’s high priests, kings, and a prophet. We also see that not every leader in Israel was the ‘anointed of the Lord;’ indeed, the title never applied to leaders of local congregations. The scope of the prophet-priest-king messiah was national. Crucially, this national scope pointed to the cosmic extent of the ultimate Messiah who, as a prophet-priest-king, would rule the nations as the Son of David (cf. Ps 2:2).
But there is at least one other rare sense in which ‘anointed’ has a different referent than Israel’s high priest, prophet, or king. Psalm 105:15, from where the famed statement “touch not my anointed” comes, does not have individuals in view, whether kings, priests, or prophets. In that text, the anointed ones are Israel as God’s people, not their leaders (cf. vv. 6, 12-14).
Thus, the title ‘anointed’ in the OT either referred to the people of God as a whole without segregation or to national Israel’s kings, priests, and prophet(s). These are the two ways the OT uses the noun ‘anointed.’
The ‘Anointed’ in the New Testament
The Greek Old Testament (LXX) translated the Hebrew title ‘messiah’ as ‘Christ,’ the label that New Testament authors will apply exclusively to Jesus. In the New Testament, only Jesus, the son of David and the ultimate Prophet (Acts 3:22), Priest (Heb 2:17; 3:1), and King (Matt 2:2; 1 Cor 15:25) is the Christ (Jn 20:31; Acts 18:5, 28). Only Jesus is the expected Messiah and the Savior of his people, the one to whom Psalm 2 pointed as one who would redeem the whole world (Acts 4:25-28).
That is, no one else is the Christ, the anointed one, the messiah—not any pastor, ‘prophet,’ or ‘apostle.’ Only Jesus is ‘the anointed’ in that sense, for such a title exists for the Savior alone. Your spiritual leader is not your Savior, no matter how great they are. He is not the Christ, the Prophet-Priest-King and mediator to God. To call him ‘anointed’ in that sense is to miss-anoint him and to diss-anoint Jesus practically and devotionally. It is to exalt the ‘man of God’ to the seat only Jesus deserves and demands.
But there is another sense in which the New Testament uses ‘anointed.’ Just as the OT (at least once) calls the whole congregation of Israel God’s ‘anointed’ without distinctions of rank or leadership, so does the NT. The NT uses the verb ‘to anoint’ to apply to all believers. In 2 Corinthians 1:21, Paul insists that God has “established us [apostles] with you [believers] in Christ [the Messiah, the Anointed One], and has anointed us.” The second ‘us,’ the object of the verb ‘to anoint,’ refers to all believers, as the subsequent relative clause demands (for all believers have the seal of ownership and the Spirit as the guarantee of future inheritance, cf. Eph 1:14).
Also, in the NT, the noun ‘anointing’ occurs only thrice. In 1 Jn 2:20, 27, the Apostle John reminds all his readers without distinction that they have received the anointing. John parallels the act of receiving anointing with the state of knowing all things so that, in this passage, ‘anointing’ refers to doctrine or a set of teachings handed down from God through the apostles. John insists that the anointing received means that no one (outside the body of believers) should teach his readers, for the anointing itself teaches them. ‘Anointing’ in that passage does not refer to a mystical or magical power that renders some people in the local congregation more potent than others. It concerns the unity of faith and the teaching we receive from the apostles.
You May Touch the (Miss) Anointed
From 2 Corinthians 1:21 and 1 John 2:20-27, we conclude that there is no ‘special anointing’ for modern congregational leaders, pastors, or ‘apostles.’ Every Christian is equally and similarly anointed—we all have the same set of teachings that bind us together as one community established in Christ. The unity of doctrine is the anointing that protects believers from false doctrine and teachings that do not align with apostolic instruction.
Because there are no ‘super-anointed’ individuals, and because anointing means teaching, anyone who teaches anything outside Scripture, regardless of their self-acclaimed titles, can be—and must be ‘touched.’ That only Jesus is the Christ means no one else is our Messiah or Savior; thus, no one is above scrutiny. Leaders must avoid their messiah complex and be doctrinally and ethically accountable to the congregation.
That ‘anointing’ is doctrinal and not mystical means that every believer is called to discernment, to examine what they hear to see if these things are biblical or not. Of course, discernment does not mean disrespect; the former is biblical, while the latter is not. We should respect all, especially those who lead us. But we must never exalt such leaders to a Messiah status. Crucially, we must reject teachings and teachers who deviate from “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). To ‘touch not’ false teachers is to misunderstand what the Bible means by ‘anointed.’ To not discern is to abandon our duty to belong to Christ’s body of “one Faith” and “one baptism” (Eph 4:5).