The mention of the Spirit, the pentecostal gift, as decisive of the question whether God abides in believers, suggests that a safeguard should be set up against false spirits who would lead them astray. These are not all of them disembodied, and invisible like Satan. Some of them walk the earth as living religious teachers. These must be tested to prove that they are in sympathy with God and are trustworthy expounders of His truth. Other evil spirits are unseen assuming "specious forms of ambition, power, honor, knowledge, as distinguished from earthly and sensual enjoyments. All such spirits are partial revelations of the one spirit of evil which become (so to speak) embodied in men." (Westcott.)
d. iv. 1-v. 12. The Sources of Sonship: Possession of the Spirit as shown by Confession of the Incarnation.
- The Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Error (iv. 1-6)
- Love is the Mark of the Children of Him who is Love (iv. 7-21).
- Faith Is the Source of Love, the Victory over the World, and the Possession of Life (v. 1-12).
1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world
1. "Prove the spirits." One element of our probation consists in the exercise of our powers of discernment, in discriminating between the influences which are brought to bear upon us. The devil wears many different masks. He conquers by deceit. It is our duty to cultivate the ability to detect the actor behind the mask. This ability is one element of Christian perfection, according to Heb. v. 14, "But solid food is for the perfect, even those who by reason of use (habit) have their (internal) senses åexercised to discern good and evil." (R. V. margin.)
The mental inertia which refuses to form this habit of spiritual insight is next in culpability to total indifference in the presence of moral good and moral evil, holiness and sin, soliciting our choice and determining our character. There is no evading responsibility at this point. The fact that "discerning of spirits" is one of the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit excuses no one from the constant exercise of his intellectual discrimination between good and evil.
"Many false prophets." Or preachers of religious errors. The false prophets in the Old Testament come to us modern readers branded as false, but in their day they were not thus branded, but came to the people as true and inspired. It is so in our times. Many discredit the true prophets and cleave to the false. Paul encountered rival apostles who publicly questioned the genuineness of his apostleship and turned his converts away from the truth and from Christ its incarnation. In no age has this class of teachers been extinct. They are to-day fulfilling Christ's prediction showing "great signs and wonders" (Matt. xxiv. 24), especially in the line of so-called miraculous healing of the sick and making the dead to appear in material form. Bishop Westcott suggests that John had in mind "the great outbreak of the Gentile pseudo-Christianity which is vaguely spoken of as Gnosticism, the endeavor to separate the 'ideas' of the faith from the facts of the historic redemption." This miscalled "philosophy of religion," which is a series of imaginative speculations respecting the origin of the universe, and the independent and eternal principles of existence, holiness existing in spirit and sin inherent in matter and never touching spirit, is the real key to this Epistle.
2. "Jesus Christ is come in the flesh." Here both the A. V. and R. V. have failed to give the exact Greek, "confesseth Jesus Christ, come in the flesh." Christ is the object confessed, and not some fact relating to Him. The confession required is a person and not, an abstract doctrine. "The gospel centres in a person and not in any truth, even the greatest, about the Person." It is not the confession of the incarnation, but of the Saviour incarnate, the pledge and pattern of man completely redeemed, soul and body bearing the image of the glorified God-man. The believer who thus savingly apprehends and publicly confesses the historic Christ, not as a phantom man, as the Gnostics taught, but a real man, the incarnation of the uncreated Logos who in the beginning was with God and was God, is of God, born from above. "Faith if it is real must declare itself." This text does not teach that an orthodox creed is saving, unless it has produced a truly penitent heart trusting in the divine and human Christ confessed, and relying on Him alone for salvation. Throughout the Epistle the emphasis laid upon "in the flesh," as denoting Christ's real humanity, is manifestly directed against those docetic Gnostics who denied that He was a real man. This they did to avoid the objection to the inherence of sin in all matter; because this would make Jesus Christ sinful, for He had a real body. To meet this objection these philosophers resorted to the denial of His real body.
3. "Confesseth not Jesus!" Overwhelming evidence, including the R. V., requires the omission of the words "Christ is come in the flesh," as an obvious interpolation to complete the antithesis. However orthodox one's theological creed may be, he does not really and savingly confess Christ till he enthrones Him in his heart as both Saviour and Lord, his reason bowing to His authority as an infallible teacher, and his will submitting to Him as his supreme sovereign, the God-man. The marginal reading, "annulleth Jesus," supported by some ancient authorities, is regarded by most modern experts to be a mistake arising from some traditional saying of John. The same may be said of another reading, "the Spirit which separates Jesus," i. e., sunders Him into two persons, one divine and the other human. It has little or no support in the Greek manuscripts, and rests chiefly, if not solely, on the Vulgate version, the Roman Catholic standard. "The denial of the Incarnation is in fact the denial of that which is characteristic of the Christian faith, the true union of God and man." (Bishop Westcott.) Since it was love that prompted the Divine Logos to become flesh, the denial of this fact, as Augustine suggests, is a sign of the absence of love in him who denies.
"Is not of God." There are apparently two classes, those who deny the Incarnation and (iii. 10) those who do not practice righteousness, but they exhibit two negative signs of one class. He who denies the Incarnation, having thrust from himself the strongest motive to holy living, will fail to practice that genuine, evangelical righteousness which Christ exemplifies and requires.
"Spirit of antichrist." There being no middle class between the just and the unjust, the friends of Christ and his foes, it must follow that all who are not His friends are actuated by the spirit antagonistic to Christ, the spirit of antichrist. See ii. 18, note.
"Whereof ye have heard." As a part of the Gospel message (Matt. xxiv. 5, 24) and of apostolic prediction. (Acts xx. 30; 1 Tim, iv. 1.) These general warnings respecting false Christs and heretical teachers are by John vividly condensed in a typical adversary, called by Paul "that man of sin." (2 Thess. ii. 3.) This antagonism represents not merely unbelievers, but also wilful and conscious perverters of the gospel. Those who have extreme abhorrence of popery render the preposition "anti" instead of. Thus they find in antichrist a forewarning of one who will profess to stand in Christ's place clothed with His authority to forgive sin and to rule the church as "the vicegerent of God." It is certain that John was divinely inspired to describe the seed out of which the papacy has budded, blossomed and borne its baneful fruit. This is implied in the words "even now already is it in the world." In seed form the fulfilment of the prophecy had come before Christians were looking for it.
4. "Ye are of God." "Ye," as contrasted with the world and with professed believers who were not endowed with spiritual discernment because they had not received and retained "the anointing of the Holy One" (ii. 20, 24, 27). There are in John's writings three phrases to express the relation of believers to God: to be begotten of God, to be of God, and to be a child of God. They occur scores of times, implying a new life in the earth.
"Have overcome them." The false prophets who would seduce you from your loyalty to Christ are permanently conquered by John's hearers, as the perfect tense implies. See ii. 14, v. 4; Rev. ii. 7, 11, 17, 26; iii. 5, 12, 21; xii. 11, to all of which John xvi. 32, is the key. "The ground and assurance of the victory of Christians lie in the Power by which they are inspired." (Westcott.) This power is applied by the mutual indwelling of God and the believer (iii. 24, iv. 16; John xv. 4).
"Greater is He that is in you." The Holy Spirit whose indwelling is maintained by an uninterrupted, unwavering trust in the living glorified Christ.
"Than he that is in the world." The devil, whose children the wicked are (iii. 10; Matt. xiii. 38, xxiii. 15; Acts xiii. 10). In their case there is also a mutual indwelling, for the world lieth in the wicked one (v. 19), and the unbelieving and impenitent are "in the world" as a baneful and dominating power.
5 They are of the world: therefore speak they [as] of the world, and the world heareth them
5. "They are of the world." The false prophets, the organs of the devil, are not merely of the earth, as all men are, but they are of the world — a phrase expressing the characteristics of all who are separated from God (ii. 16; John viii. 23, xv. 19, xvii. 14, 16, xviii. 36).
"They speak of the world." The character of their speech and the character of their hearers are determined by their own character." (Westcott.) This is according to the adage, "'like priest like people." An unspiritual pulpit will make unspiritual pews.
6. "We are of God." Having spoken of Christian hearers in verse 4, John now speaks of Christian teachers whose anointed vision discerns the true message which they bring to men from the lips of God. This is received in its true character by him who has the experimental knowledge of God and by all who sincerely desire such knowledge. "The world listens to those who express its own thoughts; the Christian listens to those who teach him more of God. The readiness to hear springs from a living, growing knowledge, which welcomes and appropriates the truth." The phrase, "He who is not of God," does not exclude true moral responsibility. He has determined his own character by the perverse attitude of his own will, by which he has shut out "the Spirit of truth," who reveals the truth and enables the seeking soul to see it. In the absence of the Spirit of truth, the evil spirit, the father of lies, fills the empty and darkened soul with various forms of religious error. Hence the culpability of unbelief.
"By this we know." "This power of recognition belongs to all believers. It is not limited to teachers by an emphatic pronoun as before." That the apostles have the "Spirit of truth" is proved by the fact that they who have been born of the Spirit hear and obey them, while the false prophets show that they have the spirit of error because the world hears them with sympathy and satisfaction.
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