HOW DO YOU DISCERN the presence of false teachers in the church? How do you distinguish false teachers from true teachers? From the very earliest days of the Christian church, there have always been false teachers. Whenever you find the genuine article, beware of Satan’s counterfeits. In today’s world, to listen to some people, you would get the idea that there is no such thing as a false teacher in the church. It seems today that almost anything can pass for Christian truth. Heresy is considered by many to be a dirty word. After all, who wants to be known as a heresy hunter? Who wants to be considered so narrow and bigoted as to say that his view of the truth is the only view of the truth? In fact, in some circles if you affirm evangelical Christianity, you are labeled a religious terrorist.
The Departure of False Teachers Confirms Their Unsaved Status (vv. 18, 19)
John contrasts false teachers and true teachers in verses 18–21. The presence of false teachers is a sign of the end times (v. 18), and their defection is proof of their true nature (v. 19). In verse 18 John introduces another test of genuine Christian living: the test of right believing. It is very important that we believe rightly. If ever we live in a day when we are inundated with false doctrine, especially false doctrine about the person of Christ, it is today. John says his readers have heard that an antichrist (singular) is coming in the future. That is a reference to a final world ruler who will arise in the end times according to the book of Revelation. He will be Satan incarnate, and he will arise with such power and charisma that the world will follow him. Revelation says that the Antichrist will arise in the days of the return of Christ to the earth. No one knows when that will happen. It could be tomorrow, a hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now. We are not on the planning committee for the return of Christ; we are on the reception committee.
John says that many antichrists (plural) appeared in his own day. These are false prophets who pretend to be Christian but actually are not. They are precursors of the final antichrist who will appear in the end times. Their presence leads John to conclude that “it is the last hour.” You might be wondering at this point, “If John thought the last hour was in his own day, and here we are more than 1,900 years down the road and Jesus has not yet returned to earth, that is one long hour!” I’ve been through what seemed like some interminably long hours in my life—in school, church, the hospital, and a host of other long hours. Of course, we have to understand that God does not operate on Eastern Standard Time, Central Time, or Mountain Time; rather, he operates on his time. Second Peter 3:8 says that a day with the Lord is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day. So when the Scripture writers talk about “the last hour,” they are not speaking about duration of time, which is the way you and I calculate time. What John means is not time as it is reckoned sequentially, time as it tick-tocks off the clock second by second, but rather an epoch of time. Since the first coming of Jesus, we are literally in the days moving toward the end times when Jesus will return to the earth. By this understanding, since the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, in symbolic eschatological terms we have been in the last days or the last hour. Luther adds the interesting point that here John uses the phrase “the last hour” not because of the shortness of time but because of the nature of the teaching. The doctrine of the person and work of Christ is God’s final word to us (Hebrews 1:1, 2). Thus this teaching is the last in the sense of ultimate, and another kind should not be expected.1
John’s focus is not on the future figure called the Antichrist. Rather he says there are people like that figure who are already infiltrating the churches, and that is why John uses the word “antichrists” (plural). Many antichrists have appeared, which is why we know this is the last hour. Notice the prefix anti on the word “antichrists.” This prefix can mean “against” or “instead of.” There is a sense in which both are true in this context. False teachers in the church are like the final antichrist in the book of Revelation. He is literally “against Christ,” and hence they are “false christs.” However, these false teachers come talking about Jesus claiming to be his true teachers. Thus these false teachers are also substitute christs.
If you were Satan, how would you go about diluting and destroying the church of the Lord Jesus Christ? You might say, “I would bring foreign pagan armies in and try to kill all the Christians.” But that has never worked. If I were Satan, I would sow the seeds of false teachers within the church. I would not enter the church and say that Jesus is a liar and Jesus is not divine. I would come in like an angel of light, and with crafty cunning I would lead the sheep astray little by little through false teaching. That is what Satan does. He has his counterfeits in the churches and outside the churches. What does a counterfeit imply? A counterfeit implies the existence of the real thing. Why do people not counterfeit $3 bills? There is no such thing as a $3 bill. People don’t counterfeit that which is not real. Satan counterfeits what is true. So he has his counterfeit preachers in churches. There are churches today with a false prophet, a counterfeiter, standing behind the pulpit teaching people. Jesus told us we should not be surprised about that. He said there will always be false prophets. Jesus said that when he went away (after his resurrection), many false prophets would arise to lead many astray (Matthew 24:11). They would claim to be the Messiah, and they would deceive many.
How can we tell the difference between a false teacher and a true Christian teacher? John says there are three marks. First, a false teacher departs from the fellowship of the church. Look at verse 19: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” This is an important verse in 1 John. Something of a rift had occurred in the churches to whom John wrote. It is interesting that in Greek the phrase “from us”2 appears first in the sentence and may be John’s way of pointing out that those who are loyal to John and the other apostles’ teaching were prior to the false teachers in the church. Yarbrough paraphrases it this way: “We were here first and doing fine; they were the ones who diverged and departed.”3 The reason they departed from the fellowship is stated by John: “they were not of us.” The problem for us is that John does not state why they left. Given the context of the entire letter, it would seem clear that doctrinal issues concerning the person and work of Christ, along with ethical issues that flow from these doctrines, were part of the problem. Proto-gnosticism may have been the culprit here (see the earlier sermon on 1 John 1:1–4).4
Have you noticed that virtually every cult today was founded by someone who came out of the church? They became disgruntled with a church or denomination. They left the church to form what they called “the true church.” There have always been those throughout church history who claimed that everybody else before them got it wrong, but then suddenly God spoke the truth to them personally. I remember shortly after Sherri and I married in 1978, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple were in the news. Jim Jones started out in an evangelical church but somehow crossed over to the dark side. He persuaded some 800 people to move with him to Guyana to establish what he called a church. In the end 800 people plus their children died, committing suicide under his leadership. He was a false prophet. For a while he was a part of the church, but he departed from the faith, and as John says, he went out from the church. His exit and subsequent false teaching made it clear he was never genuinely a part of the church in the first place.
Joseph Smith said he was visited by an angel from Heaven named Moroni, who dropped down golden tablets of new scripture called the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith had been a member of a local church but decided that the church was corrupt. He thought God wanted to begin a new church and had, of course, chosen him to begin it. Joseph Smith went out and founded a cult called Mormonism. Mormonism teaches false doctrine about the person of Jesus Christ. Most Mormons are morally responsible, good people. That is not in dispute. Right living is one thing. Right doctrine is altogether something else. You cannot combine right living with false doctrine and call yourself an orthodox Christian or an orthodox church.
These examples all illustrate 1 John 2:19: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” The departure of false teachers serves an important purpose: to make clear to the true church that false teachers are not part of the true church. B. H. Carroll was a young man in the Civil War fighting for the Confederacy when he was wounded. He survived but then had an early marriage that failed. Carroll was a self-proclaimed atheist. When he was converted, God called him to preach. One of his greatest sermons is entitled “My Infidelity and What Became of It.”5 Carroll went on to Waco, Texas and founded the Religion Department at Baylor University and ultimately in 1908 was the founder and first president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. He had a saying: “When you see a star fall you know it’s not a star.” Stars don’t fall; stars shine. We call them shooting stars, but astronomically that is incorrect. When you see a star fall, what you are seeing is not actually a star. When you see a person who is a member of a church turn his back on Jesus and orthodox doctrine and depart into false doctrine, in the vast majority of cases you can be guaranteed that person was not a true Christian in the first place. Profession does not necessarily mean possession. Speaking of Jesus’ parable in Matthew 13:2–30 and 1 John 2:19, James Boice is right on target: “The implication of Christ’s parable and John’s statement is that some Christians are so much like non-Christians and some non-Christians are so much like Christians that it is impossible to tell the difference between them in this life.”6 The first mark of false teachers is they depart from the fellowship of the church. The old saying is still true: “Faith that fizzles before the finish was faulty from the first.”
The Holy Spirit Confirms Your Knowledge of the Truth (vv. 20, 21)
The second mark of false teachers is that they deny the faith. In verse 20 John places the pronoun “you” in emphatic position at the beginning of the clause. This creates a strong contrast between the false teachers and John’s readers. False teachers deny the basic truths of Christianity as taught by Jesus and as revealed in the Bible, but true believers have an anointing from “the Holy One.” This designation could refer to Jesus or to the Holy Spirit. Since Jesus is the one who promised the Holy Spirit to the disciples in John’s Gospel, there is a sense in which both referents apply here. This is the first indirect reference to the Holy Spirit in the letter. John will refer to the Holy Spirit directly six times in the letter. Some of what John teaches here he has already taught in his Gospel. That word “anointing” is a Johannine metaphor from the Old Testament when kings (1 Samuel 9:16; 1 Kings 19:15, 16), priests (Exodus 29:7; Numbers 35:25), and prophets (1 Kings 19:16; Isaiah 61:1) were anointed for their ministries by the pouring of olive oil on their head,7 thus setting them apart for special service. The Greek noun chrisma, translated “anointing,” occurs only three times in the New Testament (1 John 2:20, 27a, 27b). The verbal form is used several times. This act as described by John signified Christians being endued with the Holy Spirit in order to succeed in their calling. Just before he went to the cross, Jesus promised the disciples that the Comforter would come and indwell them (John 14:16, 17). This anointing is the gift of the Holy Spirit who indwells all believers.8 You don’t have to seek an anointing; you already have it! You don’t have to get some second portion of the Holy Spirit or second blessing from the Holy Spirit. If you are a Christian you have all the Holy Spirit that you are ever going to have in terms of his indwelling your life (1 Corinthians 12:13).
The problem for some of us is the Holy Spirit does not have all of us. He wants to fill us completely so that we might regularly bear fruit spiritually (Galatians 5:22, 23). This anointing is from “the Holy One.” “The Holy One” could also refer to God the Father since according to Jesus in John 14:16, 26 it is the Father who will send the Holy Spirit at the request of Jesus the Son. More likely it refers directly to Jesus as the one who is the direct agent of sending the Holy Spirit to believers. There is an interesting play on words here in the Greek text. John speaks of “Christ” (v. 22), “antichrist” (vv. 18, 22), and “anointing” (v. 20). These words are cognates; they share the same root. “Christ” in Greek means “the anointed one.” True Christians have an “anointing” in contrast to the false teachers who are “antichrist,” that is, “against the true anointed one.”
The result of this anointing is that all Christians have knowledge of the truth. You already have an anointing as a Christian, and thus John says, “you all have knowledge” (v. 20b). Some translations say, “you know all things.” Once when I preached on this passage in 1 John, a teenager came up to me and said, “When John said ‘you know all things,’ I thought to myself ‘not math!’” No one knows everything about Christian truth or anything else for that matter. Actually there is a variant reading at this point in the Greek New Testament. The two possible readings could be translated as “you all know” or “you know all things.” Most commentators opt for the former, but the latter is also possible because of what John says in verse 27: “his anointing teaches you about everything.”9 What John means is, you know the truth because the Holy Spirit, who is truth, indwells you. In other words, you know the truth because you have been taught the truth. Christians need not feel deprived because the Gnostic false teachers appealed to “special knowledge.” To know Christ is to know him who possesses “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). Christians know God, Christians know Jesus, Christians know the Word, Christians know the truth. We know how to distinguish truth from error and false teachers from true. This anointing teaches us everything that is necessary for spiritual life.
It is interesting that in 1 John we are said to “know” seven things:
| 1. | “We know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments” (2:3). |
| 2. | “We know that when he appears we shall be like him” (3:2). |
| 3. | “We know we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers” (3:14). |
| 4. | “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him”(3:19). |
| 5. | “We know he abides in us” (3:24). |
| 6. | And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him” (5:15). |
| 7. |
“We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him” (5:18).10 |
There are three major ways to know if something is true. The first way is reason. You can use reason to understand and know things. For example, you can know and understand mathematically that 2+2 = 4. Reason is a gift of God. There is a second way you can know something is true: experience. The scientific method of experimentation is one way we learn truth from experience. For example, if I take 100 bars of Ivory soap and I put one at a time in a kitchen sink full of water and 100 times out of 100 times each bar of soap floats, then what might I conclude from that experiment? Ivory soap floats! How did I arrive at that conclusion? I came to such a conclusion from my experience via experimentation. There is a third way to know truth: divine revelation. If there is a God who knows all truth, and if that God chooses to come into history and tell us some of his truth, then we can know that something is true because God has revealed it as true. God has revealed himself through Jesus Christ and through his written Word, the Bible. But of course lots of religions claim to have a revelation from God that differs from the Bible. How do we know which one is the genuine article and which is the counterfeit? Test the product. This truth John speaks about can be known now, not later, and it can be known by believing it!11
John continues in verse 21 to remind us that we do know the truth. He tells us he is not writing because we don’t know the truth and so he wants to impart the truth to us. Rather, he is writing because we do know the truth. In fact in the previous verse as well as here he uses the perfect tense of the verb “know” to emphasize our reception and ongoing possession of this knowledge. John provides a second reason for why he is writing when he affirms, “no lie is of the truth.” This statement implies two things. First, nothing untrue (a lie) comes from true Christian doctrine or teaching. Second, since God is the author of Christian truth and since God is truth and cannot lie, no lie comes from God. Both the content of the truth and the character of the God of truth appear to be in view here. Jesus said concerning God’s word, “Your word is truth” (John 17:17). Notice he did not say, “your word is true.” It certainly is, but Jesus says, “Your word is truth.” God’s truth is what makes everything else true.12
When John mentions a “lie” in verse 21, it leads him into a discussion of just what makes a person who is a false teacher a “liar” (v. 22). All lies are lies, but then again, there are lies and there are lies! In verse 22, in Greek, the definite article before the noun “liar” singles out the distinct characteristic of this class of liars: they are liars par excellence! These are not just liars, they are big fat liars! Their lie strikes at the very heart of the gospel in that it denies Jesus is the Christ, the “anointed one” of God, the second member of the Trinity, God in human flesh, whose purpose is to provide salvation through his death on the cross. Think through those people, movements, and religions that deny this truth. They are legion. John is an equal opportunity offender: he calls them all “liars.”
Speaking of the devil who is behind these antichrists and their false doctrine, F. W. Farrar nailed it: “He is apt at quoting Scripture for his purpose, as he did thrice over the Lord of glory. He pares up the Bible into little snippings of verbal theology—‘old odd ends stolen forth of Holy Writ’—and on the strength of these misinterpreted fragments makes men believe that God is not a loving Father, but a terrific Moloch. Through the wicket gate of a perverted text he lets in a flood of errors, in which he then glories as inspired and infallible truth, and anathematizes as ‘heretics’ the saints who reject his tyranny and his lies.”13
Denial of the Son Is Denial of the Father as Well (vv. 22, 23)
A denial that Jesus is the Messiah is also a denial of God the Father! Many people say that we all worship the same God, we just disagree about Jesus. John speedily puts that error to rest. To deny the Son is ipso facto to deny the Father. No matter what your religion, if you deny the deity of Christ, don’t tell me you worship the true God because John says you don’t. You can’t choose God and reject Jesus. Since God has revealed himself through his Son, Jesus, it is obvious that if you deny the Son, you are denying the Father as well.
John says that anybody who denies that Jesus is the Messiah, that is, that Jesus is God in human flesh, is “the antichrist.” It doesn’t matter whether he wears a religious robe or who he or she is or how much of the Bible he or she may believe or agree with or how he or she treats humanity. At that point of doctrinal truth they are of the spirit and mind-set of antichrist. You cannot believe in God and not believe in Jesus. The Scriptures do not give you that option. Jesus is God in human flesh, the second member of the Trinity. Scripture says that Jesus is the only way to the Father. There is only one God, and everybody who denies that Jesus is the Son of God, according to Scripture, is making it clear that they are not rightly related to God. They cannot be. I know this is not a popular view, but it is true. There is only one way to God, and that way is through Jesus Christ. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
John’s logic continues in verse 23: “No one who denies the Son has the Father.” To deny the Son leads to a denial of the Father, which leads to the fact that the one who denies the Son does not have the Father either. To have the Father means to have a spiritual relationship with the Father. You see, this is more than just disagreeing over doctrinal statements. Relationships are involved. You cannot believe wrongly about Jesus and God and yet be in a right relationship with them. To know God and to have God are essentially ways of talking about relationship. If you don’t know God, then you don’t have God, and you are thus not in a genuine relationship with him. The only way we can have a spiritual relationship with God is through Jesus Christ. That is why John is so forceful when he says in essence, “To deny the Son is to deny the Father and to fail to be in a relationship with both.” Nothing exhibits the antichristian spirit any more than when men identify their own fallible notions with the truths of God and all opposition to themselves as hostility to God.14 John ends the verse by stating the opposite truth: to openly acknowledge Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, is to be in a right relationship with God the Father.
Abiding in the Father and the Son Is Eternal Life (vv. 24, 25)
In verses 24, 25 John now draws it all together with a challenge and a promise. The placement of “you” in the emphatic position in the clause in Greek strongly contrasts true believers with the false teachers of the previous verses. Some translations bring this out by translating this, “As for you . . .”15 We are commanded to let the truth of the gospel that we have “heard from the beginning abide” in us. The phrase “from the beginning” refers to when John’s readers first heard the gospel and believed. To let the truth of the gospel “abide” in you means two things: 1) to accept the truth, and 2) to interact with it and let it control your thinking and actions. In the next statement John reverses the order: what they had “heard from the beginning” precedes the word “abides.” This is a stylistic difference that creates a chiasm, a parallel structure of inverse order. This kind of thing occurs frequently in both the Old and New Testaments and serves as a forceful rhetorical tool as well as a memory device. If we accept and adhere to the truth of the gospel, the result is we will continue in fellowship with Jesus and with God the Father.
Verse 25 closes the passage with a promise: those who know the Son and the Father in a saving way, those who obey his gospel and its precepts, have the “promise” of “eternal life.” This promise is given by Jesus, who is the antecedent of “he.” Being rightly related spiritually to Jesus and God is, in its essence, eternal life. Since the Biblical concept of eternal life includes both a quantity of time as well as a quality of time, Christians are people who have eternal life now in the sense that God’s life is in them, but who will have eternal life in Heaven in the sense that this life will never end. Eternal life is a gift from God through Christ that every true believer shares.