Proclaimer Blog
1 John (talk 1, part 2)
Who are the antichrists?
So, the anti-Christ. What a startling title it is! I wonder what your understanding of the anti-Christ is. I suppose I had in my mind the man of lawlessness in 2 Thessalonians – that monstrous figure who will stand at the end of time. Is that what John is talking about? Well, not exactly. I want to say that we hear about these only in John’s epistles and so if we don’t know 1 John we’ll be ignorant of who the anti-Christs are and what sort of danger they bring to the churches. They were present in the first century; therefore presumably they are present in the 21st century as well. So 1 John is a particularly important warning about these miserable men.
I am only going to dart into various verses in these first two lectures. Let’s turn to chapter 2. “Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going shows that none of them belonged to us.” (2:18) The references to the antichrist in 1 and 2 John are as follows: 2:18; 2:22 “Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is antichrist”. 4:3 talks about the false prophets, who are presumably the same. “…every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist”. And then 2 John 7-8, “Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist. Watch out…” So those are the references in 1 and 2 John. These are the troublemakers who are causing so much confusion and disturbing the peace of the Christians.
Actually they are not just mentioned here, although they are given a name here. We shall find that we meet them in every part of 1 John. They are on every page and in every paragraph. They are almost in every line; echoes of them are to be found everywhere, even though we may not realise it. For example, when we start in chapter 1 and verses 6, 8, and 10 to read those familiar claims, “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” He’s talking there about the antichrist and their influence on the churches. Verse 8: “If we claim to be without sin…” Again, he’s talking there about the antichrists who not only try to deceive others but are deceived themselves. Verse 10: “If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar…” That’s not the ordinary Christians – that’s the antichrists, the trouble-makers. We shall meet them again in chapter 2. There’s a little Greek phrase which simply goes: ‘he who says’. Verse 4, 6, and 9. Verse 4: “The man who says, ‘I know him,’…” That’s a tremendous claim isn’t it? ‘I have a real knowledge, I’ve been enlightened, and the impression is, beyond you ordinary Christians.’ Verse 6: “The man who says he lives in him…”; verse 9: “The man who says he’s in the light but hates his brother…” All those references are to the antichrist and the influence they have on the little churches – if indeed they are having this influence, as we shall come to see later.
Five hallmarks of the antichrists Well, it’s time to get a handle on them and I think the best place to start is in 2:18-19. I’m going to give you five hallmarks of these men.
1. They are already present in the first century, as early as that. See 2:18. Paul’s man of lawlessness, 2 Thessalonians 2:4, is one man, a monster, at the end of Christian history. These people are already present in the first century. They are at work with their propaganda in these little Christian communities in John’s lifetime. They are already present. That ought to chill us. It means they will always be in the churches.
2. There are many of them. Verse 18: “…the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come.” And 4:1 “…many false prophets…” Not one trouble-maker, though one can be enough in a church as some of you know, not like Diotrephes in 3 John, who obviously was a pain in the neck, and there are people like that, aren’t there. But here there are many pains in the neck, many Diotrephes or whatever they are, so they are already present, point one, and there are many of them, point two.
3. This is very important: they had been professing Christian believers, 2:19a. Remember Paul’s warning? “Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth” (Acts 20:30) They came not from the outside, like wolves descending on the flock, but deceitfully, from within and therefore unsuspected.
4. They had, however, left these little orthodox gospel assemblies, 2:19. The person who helped me most on this is Colin Kruse and if I’m going to recommend one commentator to you it would be him. I think it’s very thorough and really very good indeed; that was the one that really woke me up and my debt to Colin Kruse is enormous. He showed me many things about the way in which these people, for example, had left their communities and what that actually involved. So they had left these little early Christian communities but they didn’t leave them alone; they wanted to draw away the disciples after them.
5. Finally, and obviously most important of all in 2:22-23: they did not acknowledge Jesus as the God-man. “Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist – he denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.” These tremendous words seem to me to be foundational to our understanding of 1 John.
We shall see later on that he describes this particular denial in a number of different ways. It’s not just in one way and that has caused a certain amount of dispute among the commentators as to what he really meant. 4:2 for example: “…every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God”. Then in 4:15 just simply: “If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him…” So we mustn’t take one to the exclusion of the other. Later I will put them all together and to get some idea of what these men were saying. I will leave that until later, but I do want to reassure you with 2:20 which is remarkable: “But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth.” So John is saying there that every born-again Christian has an experience of the Spirit, a spiritual provision, the necessary equipment to be kept safe from this kind of antichrist. So we’re not talking now about the brilliant young pastor; we’re talking about Mrs Baggins in your congregation who may have had no theological training but she’s a dear Christian woman and has been so for many years. She too has the anointing and is just as able as a pastor to understand that the antichrist is not teaching the true faith. That’s very important. Since in recent literature in Christian evangelical circles we hear a good deal of nonsense about anointings, it may be worth turning to 1 John and asking what he has to say. And here he says that every Christian has an anointing – the most important anointing you could imagine because it keeps him or her safe from error.