b. ii. 12-28. What Walking in the Light excludes: the Things and Persons to be avoided.
Three-fold Statement of Reasons for Writing (ii. 12-14)
Things to be avoided: the World and Its Ways (ii. 15-17).
Persons to be avoided: Antichrists (B. 18-26). [Transitional.] The Place of Safety: Christ (ii. 27, 28).
18. "It is the last hour." This expression denotes a crisis and not the end of the world. Christianity is the last dispensation in human history. It will be a period of suffering and conflict ending in victory over all the foes of Christ. Of these the most subtle and the most difficult to conquer is that evil power which antagonizes Christ by proposing to take His name and to continue His work while denying Him. This hypocrisy on the part of men professing faith in Christ is personified under the name of antichrist, a word meaning far more than an adversary of Christ. Says Bishop Westcott, "The essential character of antichrist lies in the denial of the true humanity of Messiah, as in verse 22, in iv. 3, and 2 John 7." To refute the Gnostic denial of the reality of Christ's body is the purpose of this Epistle. If He is not the God-man, very God and very man, there is an impassable gulf between God and the world. It is not bridged by the incarnate Son, if He is not a real man. If His body was a phantom, His incarnation, atoning death and resurrection are unreal. God is still unknown and unknowable, and all men are, and ever must be, agnostics groaning under the burden of unforgiven sins.
