Thought For The Week

THOUGHTS FROM JOHN’S LETTERS

TEST THE SPIRITS - 1

In 2:18 – 23 John said that people who deny ‘that Jesus is the Christ’ and who deny ‘the Father and the Son’ are ‘antichrist’. In 4:1 - 6 John interrupts what he has been saying about loving one another to restate and add to what he said about such false believers. He turns from stressing the critical importance of love to stress the critical importance of God’s truth. John’s goal for his readers is not love at any cost, but love that is both defined by God’s truth and grounded in God’s truth. It is never love at the expense of truth. The love that God expects of us is love that has its source in his truth.

We need to ask: what is John writing about in these six verses? What are these ‘spirits’ that he warns us not to believe? Neither evil spirits nor the evil one are normally visible. But we can discern the presence and impact of the evil one because we know what his nature is – he deceives, he accuses, he destroys. We can recognize that he is present and at work whenever there is any interference with God’s truth – any alteration, corruption or reduction of the Word of God, that leads us away from the true God to idols of some kind, whether physical idols or idolatrous ideas about God.

The first test: Are they from God or not from God? – 4:1. John says ‘do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.’ Let us note John’s word ‘many’. John is not concerned about a mere handful of false teachers, but about ‘many’. And the evidence of the rest of the New Testament supports his choice of word. Every New Testament book, except Philemon, makes reference to the presence of false teaching, warning us to be careful, to be discerning, to oppose and to expose false teachers and false teaching. Only God’s truth that can set people free (John 8:32). Any reduction or corruption of God’s truth is both powerless and destructive, so John warns us against the ‘many false prophets’ who are in the world.

A ‘prophet’ was, and is, a person who claimed to speak the words of God. Their claim to bring messages from God makes it very easy for them to deceive people. Just as Christians today tend to accept as true whatever their pastors (or some internet preacher) says, so it was in biblical times. People who believe in God are easy targets for anyone who claims to have a message from God or to speak the word of God. The ability of some false prophets to perform great miracles makes it even more difficult to discern their origin. And their ability to gain many followers also makes it difficult, but Jesus warns us that the majority, far from affirming God’s truth by their great numbers, are actually wrong (Matthew 7:13, 14).

God tells us what to look for when testing the spirits - when trying to identify the source of the message and the power behind the messengers:

Even if a prophet’s predictive words come to pass, those words and that prophet are not from God if the prophet preaches a different ‘god’ from the true God. In the Old Testament this meant luring people away from the true God to idols or into the occult – Deuteronomy 13:1 - 5. In the New Testament it means some kind of interference with the truth about Jesus Christ – another ‘Jesus’ other than the Jesus defined and proclaimed by the apostles, and another ‘gospel’ other than the apostolic gospel – Galatians 1:6 – 9; 2Corinthians 11:4.

The fact that a person performs miracles is not to be seen as an automatic proof of their integrity or the integrity of their message. Just because miracles happen does not mean that God is the power behind the miracles or the miracle-worker – Matthew 7:15 – 23; 24:24. So far are these ‘prophets’ from God that Jesus said to them ‘I never knew you. Away from me you evildoers!’

Just because someone claims to have a message from God does not mean that their message actually is from God. False prophets and false teachers abounded in both the Old and New Testaments. Although they spoke in God’s name, what they said was nothing more than their own ideas. They incurred God’s condemnation – Jeremiah 23:25 – 40; 2Timothy 4:2 – 4.

False messengers and their messages are often coercive in some way, creating some kind of bondage that is the very opposite of the gospel of Jesus Christ – Galatians 5:1 – 4; Colossians 2:16, 18, 20 - 23.

Both God in the Old Testament, and Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament, were very harsh in their condemnation and rejection of such people and their deceptive messages.

But it is quite common today for Christians to be hesitant to identify others as ‘false teachers’ or to expose their teaching as false. It is feared that to do so is to disobey Christ’s ‘Do not judge, or you too will be judged’ in Matthew 7:1. It is also felt that to criticize a person because of what they teach is to be unloving. But here, in the middle of extended teaching about love, John interrupts his teaching about love to warn us against these people, exposing them as unbelievers who are ‘from the world’ (4:5), and whose spirit is the spirit of the antichrist (4:3) and the spirit of falsehood (4:6).

May we all have the courage to obey John’s instruction: ‘Test the spirits to see whether they are from God.’

© Rosemary Bardsley 2022

For an extended study on false teaching go here .