A community learns to shut the door on deception.
When a culture doesn’t know what to believe, it sometimes believes in everything. All ideas, opinions, and creeds are held to be equally valid, equally true—and equally meaningless. As they sift through a sea of superficial beliefs, people are hard-pressed to distinguish fact from fiction.
Second John encourages Christians to test ideas and spiritual claims against the essential test of Christology: What do they say about Jesus? At the time of John’s writing, the early Christian community was overrun with deceivers who were attempting to infiltrate the church with their teaching that Jesus was nothing more than a spirit. Claiming that anything physical was evil, they declared that Christ could not have inhabited a real body. Unless Jesus came in the flesh, however, He could not have died for our sins. Because Christians were welcoming these false teachers into their homes, John warned his well-intentioned readers to shut the door on this deception.
The brevity of 2 John causes many Bible readers to overlook this book, yet its message is crucial. In the pluralistic culture of the modern world, John’s warnings remain extremely relevant. Along with 1 and 3 John, tradition attributes this book to the apostle John. It was probably written toward the end of the first century A.D.