Beloved, don’t believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit who confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit who doesn’t confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God, and this is the spirit of the Antichrist, of whom you have heard that it comes. Now it is in the world already. You are of God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. They are of the world. Therefore they speak of the world, and the world hears them. We are of God. He who knows God listens to us. He who is not of God doesn’t listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.
Beloved, let’s love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves has been born of God, and knows God. He who doesn’t love doesn’t know God, for God is love. By this God’s love was revealed in us, that God has sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, if God loved us in this way, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God remains in us, and his love has been perfected in us.
By this we know that we remain in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains in him, and he in God. We know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. In this love has been made perfect among us, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as he is, even so we are in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has punishment. He who fears is not made perfect in love. We love him, because he first loved us. If a man says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who doesn’t love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? This commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should also love his brother.
John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 He returns to his former doctrine, which he had…
He returns to his former doctrine, which he had touched upon in the second chapter; for many (as it is usual in new things) abused the name of Christ for the purpose of serving their own errors. Some made a half profession of Christ; and when they obtained a place among his friends, they had more opportunity to injure his cause. Satan took occasion to disturb the Church, especially through Christ himself; for he is the stone of offense, against whom all necessarily stumble who keep not on the right way, as shewn to us by God.
But what the Apostle says consists of three parts. He first shews an evil dangerous to the faithful; and therefore he exhorts them to beware. He prescribes how they were to beware, that is, by making a distinction between the spirits; and this is the second part. In the third place, he points out a particular error, the most dangerous to them, he therefore forbids them to hear those who denied that the Son of God appeared in the flesh. We shall now consider each in order.
Read full note →
But though in the passage this reason is added, that many false prophets had gone forth into the world, yet it is convenient to begin with it. The announcement contains a useful admonition; for if Satan had then already seduced many, who under the name of Christ scattered their impostures, similar instances at this day ought not to terrify us. For it is the case perpetually with the Gospel, that Satan attempts to pollute and corrupt its purity by variety of errors. This our age has brought forth some horrible and monstrous sects; and for this reason many stand amazed; and not knowing where to turn, they cast aside every care for religion; for they find no more summary way for extricating themselves from the danger of errors. They thus, indeed, act most foolishly; for by shunning the light of truth, they cast themselves into the darkness of errors. Let, therefore, this fact remain fixed in our minds, that from the time the Gospel began to be preached, false prophets immediately appeared; and the fact will fortify us against such offenses.
The antiquity of errors keeps many, as it were, fast bound, so that they dare not emerge from them. But John points out here all intestine evil which was then in the Church. Now, if there were impostors mixed then with the Apostles and other faithful teachers, what wonder is it, that the doctrine of the Gospel has been long ago suppressed, and that many corruptions have prevailed in the world? There is, then, no reason why antiquity should hinder us to exercise our liberty in distinguishing between truth and falsehood.
1 Believe not every spirit When the Church is disturbed by discords and contentions, many, as it has been said, being frightened, depart from the Gospel. But the Spirit prescribes to us a far different remedy, that is, that the faithful should not receive any doctrine thoughtlessly and without discrimination. We ought, then, to take heed lest, being offended at the variety of opinions, we should discard teachers, and, together with them, the word of God. But this precaution is sufficient, that all are not to be heard indiscriminately.
The word spirit I take metonymically, as signifying him who boasts that he is endowed with the gift of the Spirit to perform his office as a prophet. For as it was not permitted to any one to speak in his own name, nor was credit given to speakers but as far as they were the organs of the Holy Spirit, in order that prophets might have more authority, God honored them with this name, as though he had separated them from mankind in general. Those, then, were called spirits, who, giving only a language to the oracles of the Holy Spirit, in a manner represented him. They brought nothing of their own, nor came they forth in their own name, but the design of this honorable title was, that God’s word should not lose the respect due to it through the humble condition of the minister. For God would have his word to be always received from the mouth of man no otherwise than if he himself had appeared from heaven.
Here Satan interposed, and having sent false teachers to adulterate God’s word, he gave them also this name, that they might more easily deceive. Thus false prophets have always been wont superciliously and boldly to claim for themselves whatever honor God had bestowed on his own servants. But the Apostle designedly made use of this name, lest they who falsely pretend God’s name should deceive us by their masks, as we see at this day; for many are so dazzled by the mere name of a Church, that they prefer, to their eternal ruin, to cleave to the Pope, than to deny him the least part of his authority.
We ought, therefore, to notice this concession: for the Apostle might have said that every sort of men ought not to be believed; but as false teachers claimed the Spirit, so he left them to do so, having at the same time reminded them that their claim was frivolous and nugatory, except they really exhibited what they professed, and that those were foolish who, being astonished at the very sound of so honorable a name, dared not to make any inquiry on the subject.
Try the spirits As all were not true prophets, the Apostle here declares that they ought to have been examined and tried. And he addresses not only the whole Church, but also every one of the faithful.
But it may be asked, whence have we this discernment? They who answer, that the word of God is the rule by which everything that men bring forward ought to be tried, say something, but not the whole. I grant that doctrines ought to be tested by God’s word; but except the Spirit of wisdom be present, to have God’s word in our hands will avail little or nothing, for its meaning will not appear to us; as, for instance, gold is tried by fire or touchstone, but it can only be done by those who understand the art; for neither the touchstone nor the fire can be of any use to the unskillful. That we may then be fit judges, we must necessarily be endowed with and directed by the Spirit of discernment. But as the Apostle would have commanded this in vain, were there no power of judging supplied, we may with certainty conclude, that the godly shall never be left destitute of the Spirit of wisdom as to what is necessary, provided they ask for him of the Lord. But the Spirit will only thus guide us to a right discrimination, when we render all our thoughts subject to God’s word; for it is, as it has been said, like the touchstone, yea, it ought to be deemed most necessary to us; for that alone is true doctrine which is drawn from it.
But here a difficult question arises: If every one has the right and the liberty to judge, nothing can be settled as certain, but on the contrary the whole of religion will be uncertain. To this I answer, that there is a twofold trial of doctrine, private and public. The private trial is that by which every one settles his own faith, when he wholly acquiesces in that doctrine which he knows has come from God; for consciences will never find a safe and tranquil port otherwise than in God. Public trial refers to the common consent and polity of the Church; for as there is danger lest fanatics should rise up, who may presumptuously boast that they are endued with the Spirit of God, it is a necessary remedy, that the faithful meet together and seek a way by which they may agree in a holy and godly manner. But as the old proverb is too true, “So many heads, so many opinions,” it is doubtless a singular work of God, when he subdues our perverseness and makes us to think the same thing, and to agree in a holy unity of faith.
But what Papists under this pretense hold, that whatever has been decreed in councils is to be deemed as certain oracles, because the Church has once proved them to be from God, is extremely frivolous. For though it be the ordinary way of seeking consent, to gather a godly and holy council, when controversies may be determined according to God’s word; yet God has never bound himself to the decrees of any council. Nor does it necessarily follow, that as soon as a hundred bishops or more meet together in any place, they have duly called on God and inquired at his mouth what is true; nay, nothing is more clear that they have often departed from the pure word of God. Then in this case also the trial which the Apostle prescribes ought to take place, so that the spirits may be proved.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 This is spoken by the figure Metonymy, and it…
This is spoken by the figure Metonymy, and it is as if he had said, Believe not everyone that saith that he hath a gift of the holy Ghost to do the office of a Prophet.
Taking occasion by the name of the Spirit, lest love and charity should be separated from the worship of God, which chiefly dependeth of his true knowledge, he returneth to that which he spake in the second Chapter touching the taking heed of Antichrists. And he will have us here to take heed of two things, the one is, that seeing there be many false prophets, we do not lightly give credit to every man: the other is, that because many men teach false things, we should not therefore believe any. We must then observe a mean, that we may be able to discern the Spirit of God, which are altogether to be followed from impure spirits which are to be eschewed.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv1–21 1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the…
1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
Ver. 1. But try the spirits] As lapidaries do their stones, as goldsmiths do their metals. A Bristol stone may look as well as an Indian diamond; and many things glitter besides gold. Try therefore before you trust that which is doctrinally delivered unto you; being neither overly credulous, -the fool believeth everything; nor rashly censorious, as those were that said of our Saviour, "This man blasphemeth." {See Trapp on "1Th 5:21"}
Read full note →
Because many false prophets] Both the old Church, Deu 13:1, and the new, Act 20:30, were ever pestered with them.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 Believe not every spirit; i.e. not every one pretending…
Believe not every spirit; i.e. not every one pretending to inspiration, or a revelation; spirit, whether good or bad, being put for the person acted thereby.
But try the spirits; there being a judgment of discretion or discerning, common to Christians, de jure, and which they ought to endeavour for and to use upon such occasions, Act 17:11; Phi 1:9,10; 1Th 5:21; and the attainment and exercise whereof is, in reference to the great essentials of religion, more facile and sure: as when heretofore among the Jews, any should attempt the drawing them off from the true God, as Deu 13:1,2; and so when with Christians it should be endeavoured to tempt them away from Christ, as the
Read full note →
false prophets
or teachers did, now gone out into the world.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21 Our apostle having in the last verse of the…
Our apostle having in the last verse of the foregoing chapter mentioned the abiding of the spirit of God in the souls of believers, lest the Christians to whom he wrote should be deceived by such as might pretend to be acted by the Spirit, when indeed they were not; he comes in this chapter to caution and counsel all Christians to take heed of being seduced by such as should pretend to be inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, saying, Believe not every spirit; that is, every teacher who pretends to be inspired, and every doctrine that lays claim to the authority of divine revelation: But try the spirits: that is, examine their doctrines by the rule of the word of God, and try from whom they come, whether from the Spirit of God, or Satan: for many false prophets, or impostors and deceivers, are gone abroad in the world.
Learn hence, 1. That men from the beginning of Christianity have, and still do, falsely pretend to divine inspiration.
Read full note →
2. That Christians ought not to believe every one that thus pretends to be divinely inspired: for every one that has but enough of confidence, and little enough of conscience, may pretend to come from God.
Learn, 3. That neither are we to reject all that pretend to come from God; for when the apostle bids us not to believe every spirit, he supposes that we are to believe some; and when he bids us try the spirits whether they be of God, he supposes some to be of God, and that such as are so, ought to be believed by us.
Learn, 4. That there is some way to discern mere pretenders to inspiration from those who are truly and divinely inspired; it were in vain to make the trial, if there were no way to discern the truth.
Learn, 5. That it is the duty of all Christians to examine the doctrines propounded to them by the word of God; they having a judgment of discretion, though not a judgment of decision; a power to judge for themselves, not to impose upon others: nor does this allowed liberty of every one judging for himself take away the necessity and use of our spiritual guides and teachers, or exempt us from a due submission and obedience thereunto, but in concurrence with them, we are to try the spirits, whether they be of God.
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv1, 4, 7, 14, 17 The apostle, having said that God's dwelling in and…
The apostle, having said that God's dwelling in and with us may be known by the Spirit that he hath given us, intimates that that Spirit may be discerned and distinguished from other spirits that appear in the world; and so here,
I. He calls the disciples, to whom he writes, to caution and scrutiny about the spirits and spiritual professors that had now risen. 1. To caution: "Beloved, believe not every spirit; regard not, trust not, follow not, every pretender to the Spirit of God, or every professor of vision, or inspiration, or revelation from God." Truth is the foundation of simulation and counterfeits; there had been real communications from the divine Spirit, and therefore others pretended thereto. God will take the way of his own wisdom and goodness, though it may be liable to abuse; he has sent inspired teachers to the world, and given us a supernatural revelation, though others may be so evil and so impudent as to pretend the same; every pretender to the divine Spirit, or to inspiration, and extraordinary illumination thereby, is not to be believed. Time was when the spiritual man (the man of the Spirit, who made a great noise about, and boast of, the Spirit) was mad, Hos 9:7. 2. To scrutiny, to examination of the claims that are laid to the Spirit: But try the spirits, whether they be of God, Jo1 4:1. God has given of his Spirit in these latter ages of the world, but not to all who profess to come furnished therewith; to the disciples is allowed a judgment of discretion, in reference to the spirits that would be believed and trusted in the affairs of religion. A reason is given for this trial: Because many false prophets have gone out into the world, Jo1 4:1. There being much about the time of our Saviour's appearance in the world a general expectation among the Jews of a Redeemer to Israel, and the humiliation, spiritual reformation, and sufferings of the Saviour being taken as a prejudice against him, others were induced to set up as prophets and messiahs to Israel, according to the Saviour's prediction, Mat 24:23, Mat 24:24. It should not seem strange to us that false teachers set themselves up in the church: it was so in the apostles' times; fatal is the spirit of delusion, sad that men should vaunt themselves for prophets and inspired preachers that are by no means so!
Read full note →
II. He gives a test whereby the disciples may try these pretending spirits. These spirits set up for prophets, doctors, or dictators in religion, and so they were to be tried by their doctrine; and the test whereby in that day, or in that part of the world where the apostle now resided (for in various seasons, and in various churches, tests were different), must be this: Hereby know you the Spirit of God, Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (or that confesseth Jesus Christ that came in the flesh), is of God, Jo1 4:2. Jesus Christ is to be confessed as the Son of God, the eternal life and Word, that was with the Father from the beginning; as the Son of God that came into, and came in, our human mortal nature, and therein suffered and died at Jerusalem. He who confesses and preaches this, by a mind supernaturally instructed and enlightened therein, does it by the Spirit of God, or God is the author of that illumination. On the contrary, "Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (or Jesus Christ that came in the flesh) is not of God, Jo1 4:3. God has given so much testimony to Jesus Christ, who was lately here in the world, and in the flesh (or in a fleshly body like ours), though now in heaven, that you may be assured that any impulse or pretended inspiration that contradicts this is far from being from heaven and of God." The sum of revealed religion is comprehended in the doctrine concerning Christ, his person and office. We see then the aggravation of a systematic opposition to him and it. And this is that spirit of antichrist whereof you have heard that it should come, and even now already is it in the world, Jo1 4:3. It was foreknown by God that antichrists would arise, and antichristian spirits oppose his Spirit and his truth; it was foreknown also that one eminent antichrist would arise, and make a long and fatal war against the Christ of God, and his institution, and honour, and kingdom in the world. This great antichrist would have his way prepared, and his rise facilitated, by other less antichrists, and the spirit of error working and disposing men's minds for him: the antichristian spirit began betimes, even in the apostles' days. Dreadful and unsearchable is the judgment of God, that persons should be given over to an antichristian spirit, and to such darkness and delusion as to set themselves against the Son of God and all the testimony that the Father hath given to the Son! But we have been forewarned that such opposition would arise; we should therefore cease to be offended, and the more we see the word of Christ fulfilled the more confirmed we should be in the truth of it.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv1–20 Beloved, believe not every spirit,.... The apostle having mentioned…
Beloved, believe not every spirit,.... The apostle having mentioned the word "spirit" in the latter part of the preceding chapter, takes an occasion from thence to return to what he had been suggesting in the "second" chapter, concerning the many antichrists that then were, and whom he points out, and here cautions against. By "every spirit" he means, either every doctrine that is pretended to come from the Spirit of God, or every teacher, who professes to be qualified and sent by him, and to have his light, knowledge, and doctrine from him. Every true minister of the Gospel has the Spirit, and the gifts of the Spirit, more or less, to qualify him for his work; he is separated, and called to it by him, and receives his spiritual light find knowledge from him; it is he that teaches him sound doctrine, and leads him into all truth, as it is in Jesus, and brings every necessary truth to his remembrance; and who succeeds his ministrations to the good of souls: but there are some who call themselves the ministers of the Gospel, who, though they may have some natural abilities, and a share of human learning, and a notional knowledge of things, yet have never received either grace or gifts from the Spirit; nor have they been ever called by him; nor are their ministrations according to that divine word which is inspired by him, nor attended with his demonstration and power; wherefore, though some professing to have the Spirit of Christ are to be believed, yet not everyone; and though the Spirit is not to be quenched in any, nor prophesying to be despised, yet care should be taken what is heard and received: some persons are so obstinate and incredulous as not to believe anything that is declared, be the evidence what it will; as the Jews would not believe Christ and his apostles, though what they said agreed with Moses and the prophets, and was confirmed by miracles; and others are too credulous; at once receive every teacher, and embrace every upstart doctrine: this they should not do,
but try the spirits whether they are of God; not by human reason, especially as carnal and unsanctified; for though the doctrines of the Gospel are not contrary to true reason, they are above it, and not to be judged of by it, and are disapproved of and rejected by carnal reason; but by the word of God, which is the standard of all doctrine; and whatever agrees with that is to be received, and what does not should be rejected. And so to do is very commendable, as appears from the instance of the Beraeans, who on this account are said to be more noble than those of Thessalonica, Act 17:11; and from the commendation of the church at Ephesus, Rev 2:2. And this is what every believer, every private Christian should do; to them it belongs to read and search the Scriptures, and prove all things, and judge for themselves of the truth of doctrine; and to such a probation or trial of the spirits, spiritual light, knowledge, judgment, sense, experience, and divine guidance are necessary, which should be asked of God, and an increase thereof; and all such diligent searchers, and humble inquirers, are capable of making judgment of persons and doctrines, whether they are from the Spirit of God or not, for the Spirit of God never speaks contrary to his word: and the reason why such a trial should be made is,
Read full note →
because many false prophets are gone out into the world: such who pretended either to a revelation of future things, and to foretell things to come; or rather to a gift of prophesying, or preaching in Christ's name, to be "prophets" and spiritual men, and ministers of the word, but were "false" ones; who either predicted what did not come to pass, or rather preached false doctrine, by corrupting the word, and handling it deceitfully, and so imposed upon and ruined the souls of others, as well as deceived their own: and there were not only one, or two, or a few of these, but "many", as our Lord had foretold, Mat 24:11; and which makes the reason the stronger for not believing every spirit, but trying them; and the rather, since they were not sent of God, hot called out by his churches, but were "gone out" of themselves; of their own heads, and without any mission from God or man: and "into the world" too; they were in every part of it, and especially where there were any churches of Christ; into which they first crept in privily, and at unawares, but afterwards became public preachers of the word, and then separating from them, set up openly in the world for themselves.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 Believe not every spirit - Whereby any teacher is…
Believe not every spirit - Whereby any teacher is actuated. But try the spirits - By the rule which follows. We are to try all spirits by the written word: "To the law and to the testimony!" If any man speak not according to these, the spirit which actuates him is not of God.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 We must not believe every teacher who professes to…
CHAPTER IV.
We must not believe every teacher who professes to have a
Read full note →
Divine commission to preach, but try such, whether they be of
God; and the more so because many false prophets are gone out
into the world, 1.
Those who deny that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh have the
spirit of antichrist, 2, 3.
The followers of God have been enabled to discern and overcome
them, 4-6.
The necessity of love to God and one another shown, from God's
love to us, 7-11.
Though no man hath seen God, yet every genuine Christian knows
him by the spirit which God has given him, 12, 13.
The apostles testified that God sent his Son to be the Saviour
of the world; and God dwelt in those who confessed this truth,
14, 15.
God is love, 16.
The nature and properties of perfect love, 17, 18.
We love him because he first loved us, 19.
The wickedness of pretending to love God while we hate one
another, 20, 21.
NOTES ON CHAP. IV.
Verse 1. Beloved, believe not every spirit] Do not be forward to believe every teacher to be a man sent of God. As in those early times every teacher professed to be inspired by the Spirit of God, because all the prophets had come thus accredited, the term spirit was used to express the man who pretended to be and teach under the Spirit's influence. See 1Co 12:1-12; 1Ti 4:1.
Try the Spirits] δοκιμαζετε τα πνευματα. Put these teachers to the proof. Try them by that testimony which is known to have come from the Spirit of God, the word of revelation already given.
Many false prophets] Teachers not inspired by the Spirit of God, are gone out into the world-among the Jewish people particularly, and among them who are carnal and have not the Spirit.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 18, 20 1Jn 4:1. Because the Gnostics and other heretics, in…
1Jn 4:1. Because the Gnostics and other heretics, in the first age, to gain the greater credit to their erroneous doctrines, assumed to themselves the character and authority of inspired teachers, John put his disciples in mind, (1Jn 2:27,) that they had an unction from the Holy Spirit, by which they were enabled to judge with certainty, both of teachers and of their doctrine. He therefore, in this chapter, commands them not to believe rashly every teacher who pretended to be inspired, but to try the inspiration by which any preacher professed to speak, whether it was from God or from evil spirits; that after trial they might know whom it was their duty to attend to, and whom they ought to disregard and reject. And to secure them, as far as possible, from being deceived, he especially desires them to consider whether the teacher, who came to them, pretending to inspiration, held the great and fundamental doctrines of the gospel, which all the teachers, really inspired of God, regularly and uniformly maintained. His words may be paraphrased as follows: Believe not every spirit — By which any teacher is, or professes to be, actuated: or, believe not every teacher who pretends to be inspired by the Spirit of God; but try the spirits — Namely, whether they are of God — By the rule which God hath given. We are to try all spirits by the written word: To the law and to the testimony! If any man speak not according to these, the spirit which actuates him is not of God. Because many false prophets — Or false teachers; are gone forth into the world — With an intention to draw disciples after them.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv1–21 Beloved, believe not every spirit - Do not confide…
Beloved, believe not every spirit - Do not confide implicitly in everyone who professes to be under the influences of the Holy Spirit. Compare Mat 24:4-5. The true and the false teachers of religion alike claimed to be under the influence of the Spirit of God, and it was of importance that all such pretensions should be examined. It was not to be admitted because anyone claimed to have been sent from God that therefore he was sent. Every such claim should be subjected to the proper proof before it was conceded. All pretensions to divine inspiration, or to being authorised teachers of religion, were to be examined by the proper tests, because there were many false and delusive teachers who set up such claims in the world.
But try the spirits whether they are of God - There were those in the early Christian church who had the gift of “discerning spirits,” (see the notes at 1Co 12:10), but it is not certain that the apostle refers here to any such supernatural power. It is more probable, as he addresses this command to Christians in general, that he refers to the ability of doing this by a comparison of the doctrines which they professed to hold with what was revealed, and by the fruits of their doctrines in their lives. If they taught what God had taught in his word, and if their lives corresponded with his requirements, and if their doctrines agreed with what had been inculcated by those who were admitted to be true apostles, 1Jo 4:6, they were to receive them as what they professed to be. If not, they were to reject them, and hold them to be impostors. It may be remarked, that it is just as proper and as important now to examine the claims of all who profess to be teachers of religion, as it was then. In a matter so momentous as religion, and where there is so much at stake, it is important that all pretensions of this kind should be subjected to a rigid examination. No one should be received as a religious teacher without the clearest evidence that he has come in accordance with the will of God, nor unless he inculcates the very truth which God has revealed. See the Isa 8:20 note, and Act 17:11 note.
Read full note →
Because many false prophets are gone out into the world - The word prophet is often used in the New Testament to denote religious instructors or preachers. See the notes at Rom 12:6. Compare the notes at 2Pe 2:1. Such false teachers evidently abounded in the times here referred to. See the notes at 1Jo 2:18. The meaning is, that many had gone out into the world pretending to be true teachers of religion, but who inculcated most dangerous doctrines; and it was their duty to be on their guard against them, for they had the very spirit of antichrist, 1Jo 4:3.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 17, 18, 20 Try the spirits; i.e. every doctrine that you hear:…
Try the spirits; i.e. every doctrine that you hear: for now are many false teachers, false doctors, and false prophets. (Witham) --- Try, &c. viz. by examining whether their teaching be agreeable to the rule of the Catholic faith and the doctrine of the Church. For, as he says, (ver. 6) "He that knoweth God, heareth us: (the pastors of the Church) ...by this we know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error." (Challoner) --- The Church only, not every private man, hath to prove and discern spirits.
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
John Nelson Darby 1862 · Public Domain On v1 1 John Chapter 4
1 John Chapter 4
Now, to make use of this last proof, caution was required, for many false prophets would assume, and even in the time of the apostle had already assumed, the semblance of having received communications from the Spirit of God, and insinuated themselves among the Christians. It was necessary therefore to put them on their guard, by giving them the sure mark of the real Spirit of God. The first of these was the confession of Jesus come in the flesh. It is not merely to confess that He is come, but to confess Him thus come. The second was that He who really knew God hearkened to the apostles. In this way the writings of the apostles become a touchstone for those who pretend to teach the assembly. All the word is so, doubtless; but I confine myself here to that which is said in this place. The teaching of the apostles is formally a touchstone for all other teaching-I mean that which they themselves taught immediately. If any one tells me that others must explain or develop it to have the truth and certainty of faith, I reply, “You are not of God, for he who is of God hearkens to them; and you would have me not to hearken to them; and whatever may be your pretext, you prevent my doing so.” The denial of Jesus come in the flesh is the spirit of Antichrist. Not to hear the apostles is the provisional and preparatory form of the evil. True Christians had overcome the spirit of error by the Spirit of God who dwelt in them.
Read full note →
The three tests of true Christianity are now distinctly laid down, and the apostle pursues his exhortations, developing the fullness and intimacy of our relationships with a God of love, maintaining that participation of nature in which love is of God, and he who loves is born of God-partakes therefore of His nature, and knows Him (for it is by faith that he received it) as partaking of His nature. He who loves not does not know God. We must possess the nature that loves in order to know what love is. He then who does not love does not know God, for God is love. Such a person has not one sentiment in connection with the nature of God; how then can he know Him? No more than an animal can know what a man’s mind or understanding is when he has not got it.
Give especial heed, reader, to this immense prerogative, which flows from the whole doctrine of the epistle. The eternal life which was with the Father has been manifested and has been imparted to us: thus we are partakers of the divine nature. The affections of that nature acting in us rest, by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the enjoyment of communion with God who is its source; we dwell in Him and He in us. The first thing is the statement of the truth in us. The actings of this nature prove that He dwells -that, if we thus love, God Himself dwells in us. He who works this love is there. But He is infinite and the heart rests in Him; we know at the same time that we dwell in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. But this passage, so rich in blessing, demands that we should follow it with order.
He begins with the fact that love is of God. It is His nature: He is its source. Therefore he who loves is born of God, is a partaker of His nature. Also he knows God, for he knows what love is, and God is its fullness. This is the doctrine which makes everything depend on our participation in the divine nature.
Now this might be transformed on the one hand into mysticism,- by leading us to fix our attention on our love for God, and love in us, that being God’s nature, as if it was said, love is God, not God is love, and be seeking to fathom the divine nature in ourselves; or to doubt on the other, because we do not find the effects of the divine nature in us as we would. In effect, he who does not love (for the thing, as ever in John, is expressed in an abstract way) does not know God, for God is love. The possession of the nature is necessary to the understanding of what that nature is, and for the knowledge of Him who is its perfection.
But, if I seek to know it and have or give the proof of it, it is not to the existence of the nature in us that the Spirit of God directs the thoughts of the believers as their object. God, he has said, is love; and this love has been manifested towards us in that He has given His only Son, that we might live through Him. The proof is not the life in us, but that God has given His Son in order that we might live, and further to make propitiation for our sins. God be praised! we know this love, not by the poor results of its action in ourselves, but in its perfection in God, and that even in a manifestation of it towards us, which is wholly outside ourselves. It is a fact outside ourselves which is the manifestation of this perfect love. We enjoy it by participating in the divine nature; we know it by the infinite gift of God’s Son. The exercise and proof of it are there.
The full scope of this principle and all the force of its truth are stated and demonstrated in that which follows. It is striking to see how the Holy Spirit, in an epistle which is essentially occupied with the life of Christ and its fruits in us, gives the proof and full character of love in that which is wholly without ourselves. Nor can anything be more perfect than the way in which the love of God is here set forth, from the time it is occupied with our sinful state till we stand before the judgment-seat. God has thought of all: love towards us as sinners, 1Jn 4:9-10; in us as saints, 1Jn 3:12; with us as perfect in our condition in view of the day of judgment, 1Jn 3:17. In the first verses, the love of God is manifested in the gift of Christ; first, to give us life-we were dead; secondly, to make propitiation-we were guilty. Our whole case is taken up. In the second of these verses the great principle of grace, what love is, where and how known, is clearly stated in words of infinite importance as to the very nature of Christianity. Herein is love, not that we have loved God (that was the principle of the law), but in that He has loved us, and has given His Son to make propitiation for our sins. Here, then, it is that we have learnt that which love is. It was perfect in Him when we had no love for Him; perfect in Him in that He exercised it towards us when we were in our sins, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for them. The apostle then affirms, no doubt, that he who loves not knows not God. The pretension to possess this love is judged by this means; but in order to know love we must not seek for it in ourselves, but seek it manifested in God when we had none. He gives the life which loves, and He has made propitiation for our sins
And now with regard to the enjoyment and the privileges of this love:-if God has so loved us (this is the ground that He takes) we ought to love one another.
No one has ever seen God: if we love one another, God dwells in us. His presence, Himself dwelling in us, rises in the excellency of His nature above all the barriers of circumstances, and attaches us to those who are His. It is God in the power of His nature which is the source of thought and feeling and diffuses itself among them in whom it is. One can understand this. How is it that I love strangers from another land, persons of different habits, whom I have never known, more intimately than members of my own family after the flesh? How is it that I have thoughts in common, objects infinitely loved in common, affections powerfully engaged, a stronger bond with persons whom I have never seen, than with the otherwise dear companions of my childhood? It is because there is in them and in me a source of thoughts and affections which is not human. God is in it. God dwells in us. What happiness! What a bond! Does He not communicate Himself to the soul? Does He not render it conscious of His presence in love ? Assured]y, yes. And if He is thus in us, the blessed source of our thoughts, can there be fear, or distance, or uncertainty, with regard to what He is? None at all. His love is perfect in us. We know Him as love in our souls: the second great point in this remarkable passage, the enjoyment of divine love in our souls.
The apostle has not yet said,”We know that we dwell in him.” He will say it now. But, if the love of the brethren is in us, God dwells in us. When it is in exercise, we are conscious of the presence of God, as perfect love in us. It fills the heart, and thus is exercised in us. Now this consciousness is the effect of the presence of His Spirit, as the source and power of life and nature, in us. He has given us, not here “his Spirit”-the proof that He dwells in us, but “of his Spirit;” we participate by His presence in us in divine affection through the Spirit, and thus we not only know that He dwells in us, but the presence of the Spirit, acting in a nature which is that of God in us, makes us conscious that we dwell in Him. For He is the infiniteness and perfection of that which is now in us.
The heart rests in this, and enjoys Him, and is hidden from all that is outside Him, in the consciousness of the perfect love in which (thus dwelling in Him) one finds oneself. The Spirit makes us dwell in God, and gives us thus the consciousness that He dwells in us. Thus we, in the savour and consciousness of the love that was in it, can testify of that in which it was manifested beyond all Jewish limits, that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. We shall see further another character of it.
If we compare verse 12 of our chapter 4 (1Jn 4:12) with Joh 1:18 of the Gospel by John, we shall better apprehend the scope of the apostle’s teaching here. The same difficulty, or if you will, the same truth is presented in both cases. No one has ever seen God. How is this met?
In Joh 1:18 the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. He who is [17] in the most perfect intimacy, in the most absolute proximity and enjoyment of the Father’s love, the one eternal, sufficient object that knew the love of the Father as His only Son, has revealed Him unto men as He has Himself known Him. What is the answer in our epistle to this same difficulty? “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.” By the communication of the divine nature, and by the dwelling of God in us, we inwardly enjoy Him as He has been manifested and declared by :His only Son. His love is perfect in us, known to the heart, as it has been declared in Jesus. The God who has been declared by Him dwells in us. What a thought! that this answer to the fact that no one has ever seen God is equally, that the only Son has declared Him, and that He dwells in us. What light this throws upon the words, “which thing is true in him and in you!” [18] For it is in that Christ has become our life that we can thus enjoy God and His presence in us by the power of the Holy Ghost. And from this we have seen that the testimony of 1Jn 4:14 flows.
We see, also, the distinction between God dwelling in us and we in God, even in that which Christ says of Himself. He abode always in the Father, and the Father in Him; but He says, “The Father who dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.” Through His word the disciples ought to have believed in them both; but in that which they had seen-in His works -they had rather seen the proof that the Father dwelt in Him. They who had seen Him had seen the Father. But when the Comforter was come, at that day they should know that Jesus was in His Father-divinely one with the Father.
He does not say that we are in God, nor in the Father, [19] but that we dwell in Him, and we know it, because He has given us of His Spirit. We have already noticed that He says (chap. 3:24) “hereby we know that he God abideth in us, because he has given us his Spirit.” Here he adds, We know that we dwell in God, because it is-not the manifestation, as a proof, but-communion with God Himself. We know that we dwell in Him, always as a precious truth-an unchangeable fact; sensibly, when His love is active in the heart. Consequently it is to this activity that the apostle immediately turns by adding “and we have seen and do testify, that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.” This was the proof for every one, of that love which the apostle enjoyed-as all believers do-in his own heart. It is important to notice how the passage thus first presents the fact of God’s dwelling in us, then the effect (as He is infinite), our dwelling in Him, and then the realisation of the first truth in conscious reality of life.
We may remark here that, while God’s dwelling in us is a doctrinal fact and true of every real Christian, our dwelling in Him, though involved in it, is connected with our state. Thus 1Jn 3:24, “He that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him.” 1Jn 4:16, “He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him.’’
Love one to another is indeed taken as the proof that God is there, and His love is perfected in us-this to contrast the manner of His presence with that of Christ. (Joh 1:18) But, what we thus know is dwelling in Him and He in us. In each case this knowledge is by the Spirit. 1Jn 4:15 is the universal fact: 1Jn 4:16 brings it fully up to its source. We have known and believed the love that God hath to us. His nature is there declared in itself (for we joy in God); God is love, and he who dwells in love dwells in God and God in him. There is none anywhere else: if we partake of His nature, we partake of it, and he who abides in it abides in God who is the fullness of it. But then remark that while what He is is insisted on, His personal being is carefully insisted on. He dwells in us.
And here comes in a principle of deep importance. It might perhaps be said that this dwelling of God in us and our dwelling in Him depended on a large measure of spirituality, the apostle having in fact spoken of the highest possible joy. But although the degree in which we intelligently realise it is in effect a matter of spirituality, yet the thing in itself is the portion of every Christian. It is our position, because Christ is our life, and because the Holy Ghost is given us. “Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God.” How great the grace of the gospel! How admirable our position because it is in Jesus that we possess it! It is important to hold fast this, that it is the portion of every Christian, the joy of the humble, the strongest reproach to the conscience of the careless.
The apostle explains this high position by the possession of the divine nature-the essential condition of Christianity. A Christian is one who is a partaker of the divine nature, and in whom the Spirit dwells. But the knowledge of our position does not flow from the consideration of this truth, though it depends on its being true, but of that of God’s own love, as we have already seen. And the apostle goes on to say “We have known and believed the love that God has to us.” This is the source of our knowledge and enjoyment of these privileges, so sweet and so marvelously exalted, but so simple and so real to the heart when they are known.
We have known love, the love that God has for us, and we have believed it. Precious knowledge! by possessing it we know God; for it is thus that He has manifested Himself. Therefore can we say, “God is love.” There is none beside. Himself is love. He is love in all its fullness. He is not holiness, He is holy; but He is love. He is not righteousness; He is righteous.[20]
By dwelling then in love I dwell in Him, which I could not do unless He dwelt in me, and this He does. Here he puts it first, that we dwell in Him, because it is God Himself who is before our eyes, as the love in which we dwell. Therefore, when thinking of this love, I say that I dwell in Him, because I have in my heart the consciousness of it by the Spirit. At the same time this love is an active energetic principle in us; it is God Himself who is there. This is the joy of our position-the position of every Christian.
Verses 14 and 16 present the twofold effect of the manifestation of this love.
First, the testimony that the Father has sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Quite outside the promises made to the Jews (as everywhere in John), this work is the fruit of that which God Himself is. Accordingly whosoever confesses Jesus to be that Son enjoys all the fullness of its blessed consequences.
Secondly, the Christian has believed for himself in this love, and he enjoys it according to its fullness. There is only this modification of the expression of the glorious fact of our portion-that the confession of Jesus as the Son of God is primarily here the proof that God dwells in us, although the other part of the truth equally says that he who confesses Him dwells also in God.
When speaking of our portion in communion, as believing in this love, it is said, that he who dwells in love dwells in God; for in effect that is where the heart is. Here also the other part of the truth is equally true; God dwells in him likewise
I have spoken of the consciousness of this dwelling in God, for it is thus only that it is known. But it is important to remember that the apostle teaches it as a truth that applies to every believer. These might have excused themselves for not appropriating these statements as too high for them; but this fact judges the excuse. This communion is neglected. But God dwells in every one who confesses that Jesus is Son of God, and he in God. What an encouragement for a timid believer! What a rebuke for a careless one!
The apostle returns to our relative position, viewing God as outside ourselves, as Him before whom we are to appear and with whom we have always to do. This is the third great proof and character of love in which it is complete, testifying, as I have already said, that God has thought on all as to us from our sinful state to the day of judgment.
Herein is love perfect with us (in order that we may have boldness for the day of judgment), namely, that as He is, such are we in this world. In truth, what could give us a more complete assurance for that day than to be as Jesus Himself-like the judge? He who will judge in righteousness is our righteousness. We are in Him the righteousness according to which He will judge. We are in respect of judgment as He is. Truly this can give us perfect peace. But observe, that it is not only in the day of judgment that this is so (it gives us boldness for it), but we are it in this world. Not as He was, but in this world we are as He is, and have our known place already, as needed, and according to the nature and counsels of God, for that day. It is ours as being livingly identified with Him.
Now in love there is no fear; there is confidence. If I am sure that a person loves me, I do not fear him. If I am only desiring to be the object of his affection, I may fear that I am not so, and may even fear himself. Nevertheless this fear would always tend to destroy my love for him and my desire to be loved by him. There is incompatibility between the two affections-there is no fear in love. Perfect love then banishes fear; for fear torments us, and torment is not the enjoyment of love. He therefore who fears does not know perfect love. And now what does he mean by “perfect love”? It is that which God is, and which He has fully displayed in Christ, and given us to know and to enjoy by His presence in us, so that we dwell in Him. The positive proof of its complete perfectness is that we are such as Christ is. It is manifested towards us, perfected in us, and made perfect with us. But that which we enjoy is God, who is love, and we enjoy Him by His being in us, so that love and confidence are in our hearts, and we have rest. That which I know of God is that He is love, and love to me, and nothing else but love to me, because it is Himself who is so. Therefore there is no fear. [21] If we inquire practically into the history, so to speak, of these affections; if we seek to separate that which in the enjoyment is united, because the divine nature in us, which is love, enjoys love in its perfection in God (His love shed abroad in the heart by His presence therefore); if we wish to specify the relationship in which our hearts find themselves with God in regard to this, here it is: “we love him because he, first loved us.” It is grace and it must be grace because it is God who is to be glorified.
Here, it will be worth our while to notice the order of this remarkable passage. 1Jn 4:7-10: We possess the nature of God; consequently we love, we are born of Him, and we know Him. But the manifestation of love towards us in Christ Jesus is the proof of that love; it is thus that we know it. 1Jn 4:11-16: We enjoy it by dwelling in it. It is present life in the love of God by the presence of His Spirit in us; the enjoyment of that love by communion, in that God dwells in us, and we thus dwell in Him. 1Jn 4:17 His love is perfected with us; the perfection of that love, viewed in the place that it has given us in view of judgment-we are, in this world, such as Christ is. 1Jn 4:18-19: it is thus fully perfected with us. Love to sinners, communion, perfection before God, give us the moral and characteristic elements of that love-what it is in our relationship with God.
In the first passage, where the apostle speaks of the manifestation of this love, he does not go beyond the fact that one who loves is born of God. The nature of God (which is love) being in us, he who loves know~ Him, for he is born of Him-has His nature and realises what it is.
It is that which God has been with regard to the sinner which demonstrates His nature of love. afterwards, that which we learnt as sinners we enjoy as saints. The perfect love of God is shed abroad in the heart, and we dwell in Him. As already with Jesus in this world, and as He is, fear has no place in one to whom the love of God is a dwelling-place and rest.
Verse 20: the reality of our love to God, fruit of His love to us, is now tested. If we say that we love God and do not love the brethren, we are liars; for if the divine nature, so near us (in the brethren near us), and Christ’s value for them, does not awaken our spiritual affections, how then can He who is afar off do so? This also is His commandment, that he who loves God love his brother also. Obedience is found here also. (Compare Joh 14:31)
Love for the brethren proves the reality of our love for God. And this love must be universal, must be in exercise towards all Christians, for whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God; and he who loves a person will love one who is born of Him. And if the being born of Him is the motive, we shall love all that are born of Him.
Footnotes for 1 John Chapter 4
17: Note, it is not “was.” It is never said in scripture, as often, He left the Father’s bosom; but “the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father.” As so knowing God, He revealed Him on earth.
18: This gives us too, in their highest character and subject, the difference between the gospel and Epistle.
19: The only expression in the word that has some resemblance to it is “the church of the Thessalonians, which is in God the Father.” This is addressed to a numerous corporation in quite another sense.
20: Righteousness and holiness suppose reference to other things; thus, evil to be known, rejection of evil, and judgment. Love, though exercised towards others, is what He is in Him self. The other essential name that God bears is “light.” We are said to be “light in the Lord “as partakers of the divine nature; not love, which is, though the divine nature, sovereign in grace. We cannot therefore be said to be love. (See Eph 4:32)
21: It is striking to see that he does not say, We ought to love Him because He first loved us; but we love Him. We cannot know and enjoy love to us without loving. The sense of love to us is always love. It is not known and valued without its being there. My sense of love in another is love to him. We ought to love the brethren, because it is not their love to us which is the spring of it, though it may nourish it in this way. But we love God because He first loved us
John Nelson Darby — Synopsis of the Books of the Bible: the New Testament (c. 1857–1862) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 6. Warning and Exhortation with Reference to the False…
6. Warning and Exhortation with Reference to the False Teachers
1Jn_4:1-6
Read full note →
1Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of1 God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. 2Hereby know ye2 the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come3 in the flesh is of God: 3And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus4 Christ is come in the flesh is not of1 God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.5 4Ye are of1 God, little children, and have 5overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. They are of1 the world: therefore speak they of1 the world, and the world heareth them. 6We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of1 God heareth not us.6 Hereby7 know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
The difference of the spirits renders the trial necessary, 1Jn_4:1.
1Jn_4:1. Beloved:—The Apostle begins with ἀγαπητοί as 1Jn_3:21 [cf. 1Jn_4:7. 1Jn_3:2.—M], in the joyful consciousness of the common blessings of the Divine adoption, and earnestly solicitous of inciting and exhorting those to the exhibition of brotherly love who are loved of God.
Believe not every spirit.—Here, as in 1Jn_2:18-28, the Apostle adverts to the false teachers. Those who are to believe on the name of the Son of God (1Jn_3:23) in the power of the Holy Ghost (1Jn_3:24) given to them and bearing witness to their spirit that they are the children of God (cf. Rom_8:16), must not believe every spirit. The reference is to a plurality, a multitude of spirits (πάντι πνεύματι), not to a Dual but to a Plural. Hence, we must understand the expression of the spirits of men to whom the spirit bears witness. Every human spirit has its peculiarity, its special gifts and views, its mode of expression, which the animating, moving Spirit does not change or render uniform. Many a spirit might secure our approbation, sympathy and attention, which is not influenced by the Spirit of God. Hence the warning, to which, because of its great importance, there is forthwith annexed the exhortation:—“But try the spirits whether they are of God.” [Huther: The idea πνεῦμα is closely connected with ψευδοπροφῆται. The true prophets spoke, as we read 1Pe_1:21, ὑπὸ πνεύματος ἁγίου φερόμενοι; the source of the revelations whose utterers (πρόφημι) they are, is the πνεῦμα ἅγιον or the πεῦμα τοῦ θεοῦ, whereby is described, not an affection of their mind, but the Divine Power, different from their own individuality, which animates and influences them (δύναμις ὑψίστου, the synonyme of πνεῦμα ἅγιον, Luk_1:35.). This πνεῦμα speaks by the prophet, entering into his πνεῦμα and communicating to him the truth to be revealed; and thus the πνεῦμα of the prophet becomes a πνεῦμα ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ. But since every prophet has his own πνεῦμα, there is, although the πνεῦμα ἅγιον is One, a plurality of prophetical spirits. The same relation takes place in an opposite direction, in the case of the pseudo-prophets. They also are under the influence of one spiritual being, to wit, under that of the πνεῦμα, that ἐκ τοῦ δεοῦ οὐκ ἕστι, the πνεῦμα τῆς πλάνης; this spirit also is one, but since it penetrates with its lie the πνεῦματα of the pseudo-prophets and makes them like itself, we may say of the πνεῦμα of each individual prophet that is not of God, that it is not a πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, but a πνεῦμα τῆς πλάνης.”—The rationalistic interpretation of Socinus (“sensus hominis aliquo modo inspiratus”) and Episcopius (“doctrina”), and the figurative construction of the word πνεύμα=λαλοῦντες ἐν πνεύματι of Lücke, de Wette and Calvin (“pro eo qui spiritus dono se præditum esse jactat ad obeundum prophetiæ munus”), are equally irrelevant.—M.].
But try the spirits whether they are of God.—John evidently speaks of a plurality of spirits (τὰ πνεύματα). Instead of a receiving surrender to and of agreeing with them, of the assensus (πιστεύειν) John requires a δοκιμάζειν, a cautious criticism before the κατέχειν (1Th_5:21), and he requires it of all like Paul, Rom_12:2; Php_1:20; Eph_5:10; 1Co_10:15; 1Co_11:13, although some may have a special gift in discerning the spirits (1Co_12:10 : διακρίσεις πνευμάτων Calvin: “alloquitur—singulos fideles,” as opposed to Lorinus: “Non omnium est probare; unum oportet in ecclesia summum judicem quæstionum de fide moribusque; id est sine dubio Pontifex Maximus.” [This may be conclusive reasoning to Romanists, but will be utterly repudiated by Protestants, as an arbitrary dictum repugnant to Holy Writ.—M.]. The falsity of this exposition is evident both from the object of this text which every man ought to know; εἰ ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστίν, whether they are of, originate in or proceed from God: the confession of Jesus Christ come in the flesh (1Jn_4:2), and from the danger, urging such a test, to which every one is exposed and which necessitates the decision [the Apostle proceeds to specify the reason why this trial is necessary.—M.].
Because many false prophets are gone out into the world.—These ψευδοπροφῆται answer to the ἀντιχρίστοις (1Jn_2:18). Cf. Mat_7:15; Mat_24:11; Mat_24:24 (where also ψευδόχριστοι are specified), 2Pe_2:1 (where ψευδοδιδάσκαλοι are paralleled with the ψευδοπροφῆται of the Old Testament). The idea of predicting something future is not any more the prominent point here than it constitutes in general the leading characteristic of the prophet; he derives his name from πρόφημι, because he has, as it were, behind him the Spirit that inspires him, whose thoughts he speaks out and makes known. The true prophet must be clearly distinguished from the hidden πνεῦμα influencing him, the true prophet is ὑπὸ πνευμάτος ἁγίου φερόμενος (2Pe_1:21); this πνεῦμα δύναμις ὑψίστου (Luk_1:35). The point at which He unites with the prophet, is the prophet’s πνεῦμα, which as an organ to be influenced, must be clearly distinguished from the πνεῦμα ἅγιον who operates through it; for the πνεῦμα ἅγιον is the Source and Principle of the revelation, enters into the prophet’s πνεῦμα, moves and imparts to the prophet, animates and prompts him, and thus the prophet’s πνεῦμα becomes a πνεῦμα ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ, yet so that thereby the characteristics of the prophet’s spirit are neither obliterated nor annulled, neither as to his temperament, nor as to his mode of utterance, nor as to qualification for specific relations of the spiritual or material worlds. Hence there are as many πνεύματα as there are προφῆται, notwithstanding the unity of the efficient principle which influences them. But alongside this πνεῦμα ἅγιον, πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, there is a πνεῦμα τοῦ ἀντιχρίστου (1Jn_4:3), τῆς πλάνης (1Jn_4:6), that makes the ψευδοπροφήτας and whose spirit must not be believed. The πνεῦμα and πνεύματα designate not absolutely ψευδοπροφῆται (Calvin, Lücke, de Wette and others), nor the sensus hominis aliquo modo inspiratus (Socinus), nor doctrina (Episcopius), nor the superhuman principle animating man (Greek Comment., Augustine, Luther, Spener, Bengel (spiritui, quo doctor aliquis agitur), Neander, Düsterdieck and others). Cf. Huther [whose note I have translated above, under “Believe not every spirit.”—M.].—With ἐξεληλύθασιν εἰς τὸν κόσμον Düsterdieck appropriately compares γεγόνασιν 1Jn_2:18. After ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ we ought to supply a reference to the sending forth, the missionary activity which in the case of the false prophets is an aping of the Apostles and the prophets; they come from, proceed, go out from him that makes them prophets. Cf. Joh_8:42; Joh_13:3; Joh_16:27, etc. cf. Joh_17:18; Mat_13:49. It is therefore neither=in publicum prodire, as Mat_13:3; Mat_26:55; Mar_1:35; Mar_8:11; Act_7:7 (Grotius, Calov, Lücke, al.), nor=ex apostolis et eorum ecclesia, as in 1Jn_2:19 (S. Schmidt), nor=ex sedibus suis 2Jn_1:7. (Bengel).—On εἰς τὸν κόσμον cf. Joh_6:14; Joh_10:36. They come into the world, which Christ was sent to redeem, which belongs to Him, in order to destroy it with their αἱρέσεις ἀπωλείας. (2Pe_2:1).
The standard of the trial. 1Jn_4:2-3.
1Jn_4:2. In this know ye the Spirit of God.—Ἐν τούτῳ here evidently points to the following sentence and γινώσκετε is not Indicative, but like πιστεύετε, δοκιμάζετε 1Jn_4:1, the Imperative [on the other hand Alford, on account of the very frequent ἐν τούτῳ γινώσκομεν, would let analogy prevail and take it as Indicative; but Huther, de Wette, Lücke and most commentators take it as Imperative.—M.].—That τὸ πνεῦμα τοῦ θεοῦ denotes the Holy Spirit is evident both from the expression itself and from the antithesis τὸ τοῦ ἀντιχρίστου 1Jn_4:3; the reference therefore is not to a loquens de spiritualibus ex inspiratione divina (Lyra). But the sequel shows that we have to think of the Divine Spirit working in the spirit of the prophets, to wit:
Every spirit which confesseth Jesus Christ come in the flesh, is of God.—Ὁμολογεῖν is the oral confession of a doctrinal truth (cf. 2Jn_1:10.), like 1Jn_2:23 (Düsterdieck, Huther and al.); confession with a walk agreeing with a Christian is not indicated here (Greek comm., Augustine, Bede), even though only a confession with the mouth emanating from the faith of the heart under the influence of the indwelling Spirit of God can be meant here, as in Rom_10:9-10; cf. 1Jn_5:11 sq.; 1Jn_2:22 sq.—The object of the confession: Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα. The form is that of a substantival objective-sentence; hence the participial form should be retained, and the rendering avoided which would make it an Infinitive thus: that Jesus Christ is or has come in the flesh; it is not a predicative sentence, but ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα is added attributively; that which is known is added in the Accusative. The names are taken in their literal sense at 1Jn_2:22; here they stand, as in 1Jn_1:3, in juxtaposition and must not be separated according to 1Jn_2:22, as if they imported: Jesus the Christ who is come in the flesh; so Luther renders wrongly in his Scholia, and Huther inclines in that direction. In like manner ἐν σαρκὶ must be held fast and not be made equivalent to εἰς σάρκα, as maintained by Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Piscator, Sander and al.; ἐν σαρκὶ denotes the mode of existence, in which He appeared and came; nor is there any ground here to assume here a pregnancy common among the Greeks who conjoin ἐν with verbs of motion in order to describe the result, the rest (cf. Winer, p. 449), to wit, that He had come into the flesh in order to remain and work in the flesh; so S. Schmidt and others.—Jesus Christ came in the flesh from the time of His birth after He σὰρξ ἐγένετο and ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν (Joh_1:14) cf. 1Jn_1:1, sqq.—The conversatio in carne, inter homines, in vera natura humana, nor the incarnatio, which is pre-supposed as the transition, is meant here; nor is here a limiting reference to innumera mala and ipsa cruenta mors, as maintained by Socinus, who erroneously refers to Heb_2:14; Heb_5:7, and Grotius who adverts to a Hebraism.—Ἔρχεσθαι indeed is often used to designate the appearance of teachers, but then it either occurs with a qualifying ἐπὶ τῷ ὀνόματι, Mat_24:5, or ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι, Joh_5:43, or εἰς μαρτυρίαν, Joh_1:7, or with an indication of the subject as ἐμπαῖκται, 2Pe_3:3, or an addition like καὶ ταύτην τὴν διδαχὴν οὐ φέρει, 2Jn_1:10, or as in Mat_11:18, of John, μήτε ἐσθίων μήτε πίνων or as in Mat_17:11 of Elias καὶ ἀποκαταστήσει πάντα, so that the context invariably marks either the appearance of the teacher, or distinctly states that he is not exclusively referred to as a teacher, namely in his vocation of teacher. Here also the reference seems not to be exclusively to the office of a teacher or a prophet, which is by no means indicated by ἐν σαρκὶ. But it is important to notice here the tense; for while we have in this place the part. perfecti ἐληλυθότα, 1Jn_5:6 gives the part. aor. ὁ ἐλθὼν and 2Jn_1:7 the part. præs. ἐρχόμενον; the Present denotes the fact which is not a single act, in a moment, like birth, but has a longer duration which may be seen and represents this in a timeless form; the Aorist denotes an act as purely historical, the Perfect an act which, though historically completed, has present continuance (Winer, Part III. § 40). Thus this confession contains the fundamental truth of the Gospel; Χριστὸς and ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα indicate the dignity and existence of the Son of God and emphatically assert His humanity as a reality and a historical fact for all time. Bengel excellently remarks: “In carne, est ergo Ipse aliquid præter carnem; hæreses veritatem carnis Jesu Christi negantes præsupponunt et eo ipso confirmant deitatem ejus, quippe cum qua non poterant conciliare carnem, tanquam ea dignam.”
1Jn_4:3. And every spirit which confesses not Jesus, is not of God.—Τὸν Ἰησοῦν comprehends what was said in 1Jn_4:2, viz.; Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα, it is just the historical Christ and none other.—Ὃ μὴ ὁμολογεῖ=if he does not confess, while ὃ οὐχ ὁμολογεῖ would be=who does not confess. From this it is evident that John contemplates not so much distinct persons, as only distinct doctrines. Winer, part III. § 55. [Huther observes that μὴ denotes the contradiction of the true confession, while οὐ would express only a simple denial.—M.].
And this is the (spirit) of antichrist, of which ye have heard that it cometh, and now it is in the world already.—Τοῦτο refers to πνεῦμα, not to ὁμολογεῖν, and τὸ τοῦ ἀντιχρίστου is the (πνεῦμα) of antichrist; for τὸ pre-supposes a substantive or constitutes a substantival idea; were it, as Valla, Episcopius, Huther and al. render, proprium antichristi, matter of antichrist, τοῦτο would not refer to πνεῦμα but to ὁμολογεῖν; this would be rather an artificial construction and τὸ before τοῦ ἀντίχριστου would be superfluous. The passages adduced, viz. Mat_21:21; 1Co_10:24; 2Pe_2:22; Jam_4:14, are somewhat different, for they import one and all a substantival idea, τὸ τῆς συκῆς, τὸ ἑαυτοῦ, τὸ τῆς παροιμίας, τὸ τῆς αὔριον [that of the fig tree, that of himself, that of the proverb, the event of the morrow—M.], while here the Genitive alone would have been sufficient.—Ἀκηκόατε refers not to the written word 1Jn_2:18 where we have already ἠκούσατε, but to the previous oral instruction they had received. The last clause καὶ νῦν ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ ἐστὶν ἤδη, which emphatically asserts that the spirit of antichrist is already now, at the present time, working in the antichrists, is not governed by ἀκηκόατε but coördinated with καὶ τοῦτό ἐστίν τὸ τοῦ ἀντιχρίστου. Cf. 1Jn_2:18.
Comfortable strengthening and assurance against the false prophets. 1Jn_4:4-6.
1Jn_4:4. Ye are of God, little children.—The Apostle moved, and affectionately confident (τεκνία) that they all stand in the fundamental truth and are the children of God (1Jn_3:1-2; 1Jn_3:13-14), urgently represents to them (ὑμεῖς emphatically placed first as in 1Jn_2:24; 1Jn_2:27), what is given to them: ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστέ, agreeing with the leading thought 1Jn_2:29 and the context: the trial to be made is εἰ ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστίν (1Jn_4:1) and he that confesseth Jesus is ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστίν (1Jn_4:3) and he that confesseth not Jesus ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ οὐκ ἔστιν.
And have overcome them.—Αὐτοὺς are the ψεῦδοπροφήτας (1Jn_4:1), in whom the πνεῦμα τοῦ ἀντιχρίστου is operative and connected with their πνεῦμα. Hence not: antichristum et mundum (Erasmus); the Vulgate renders falsely eum, which Lyra interprets: mundum, devincendo concupiscentiam, and other Roman Catholics: antichristum or spiritum antichristi in antichristis.—The Perfect νενικήσατε as at 1Jn_2:13-14, where τὸν πονηρόν is the person overcome. The victory referred to there is inward in their hearts, here it is a victory not only in their hearts but also outward, visible in the life, in the sphere of their church-life, the Church; in the former place the victory is over Satan himself, here over his false prophets. But it is a victory actually achieved, and moreover a victory of continuous duration notwithstanding a succession of conflicts; through these very struggles and conflicts runs the victory already achieved and decisive, ye have overcome! ye have it! by your fidelity they with their seductive arts and temptations have been confounded (Ebrard). Cf. Joh_16:33. Νενικήκατε is the Perfect not propter futuritionis certitudinem (Episcopius),=potestis superare (Rosenmüller). Calvin renders not very accurately: “In media pugna jam extra periculum sunt, quia futuri sunt superiores.” The ground of their victory and overcoming lies indeed in them, yet nevertheless above them.
Because He (that is) in you is greater than he (that is) in the world.—Ὁ ἐν ὑμῖν is He of (out of) whom they are, who abideth in them (1Jn_3:24; 1Jn_4:1-2), that is ὁ θεὸς (Greek Comm., Calvin, Bengel, de Wette, Sander, Düsterdieck, Huther); this is also clear from the antithesis; it is understood of Christ by Augustine, Grotius, etc.—Ὁ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ=ὁ διάβολος, whose children (τέκνα) the antichrists are, 1Jn_3:10 a—God is not only greater than our heart (1Jn_3:20), but also greater than Satan, than all things (Joh_10:29; 2Co_2:14); all things belong to Him (1Co_15:57; 1Co_3:23).—[Huther: “Instead of the more specific ἐν αὐτοῖς the Apostle uses ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ to intimate that the former, though having been for some time in the Church, belong to the κόσμος, which is expressly declared in the words following. Socinus: “Quamvis Johannes, non de eo, qui sit in falsis prophetis, sed de eo, qui sit in mundo, verba faciat, tamen necesse est, ut mundi appellatione falsos istos Prophetas comprehendat, vel polius plane intelligat, quod satis aperte declarant sequentia verba.”—M.].
1Jn_4:5. The antithesis as to essence, work and success:
They are of the world.—Ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου, quatenus Satanas est ejus princeps (Calvin), hence not ἐξ ἡμῶν (1Jn_2:19). Cf. Joh_8:23; Joh_8:44. The reference is not only to worldly lusts and carnal desires but to the ground and source of their life determining the exhibition of their life (διὰ τοῦτο).
Therefore they speak of the world and the world heareth them.—The substance of what they speak and their success with the world are conditioned by their being of [out of, from—as to origin—M.] the world. This λαλεῖν ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου also is deep-reaching: ex mundi vita ac sensu sermones suos promere (Bengel). Huther capitally distinguishes λαλεῖν ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου from ἐκ τῆς γῆς λαλεῖν (Joh_3:31) by the remark that ἡ γῆ is not an ethical notion like ὁ κόσμος. Although the separate points made by Oecumenius (κατὰ τὰς σαρκικὰς ἐπιθυμίας), the Scholiasts (ἐκ τῆς πονηρᾶς αὐτῶν γνώμης), Luther (ea quæ mundus intelligit ac probat), Grotius (mundi affectibus congruentia) and others, are correct, yet they shed light only on particular points and not on the whole. The approval and agreement of the world constitute a proof against them on the principle τῷ γὰρ ὁμοίῳ τὸ ὅμοιον προστρέχει. Cf. Joh_8:37; Joh_8:43; Joh_8:47; Joh_18:37. [The false prophets left the Church and went out into the world to which they stood in inward affinity, and proclaimed to it a wisdom that originated in it; therefore the world heard them, i.e. approved and assented to their word; τῷ γὰρ ὁμοίῷ κ. τ. λ. (Oecumenius); whereas the believers were hated and persecuted by the world, Huther.—M.].—Αὐτῶν ἀκούει denotes hearing attentively with inward delight, while ἀκούειν τινα signifies hearing in general without determining the sympathy of the hearer.
Inference and conclusion. 1Jn_4:6.
1Jn_4:6. We are of God.—A quickly added contrast of the false prospects without δὲ. After what precedes there are here implied the two thoughts which are not expressed: διὰ τοῦτο ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ λαλοῦμεν καὶ ὑμεῖς ἡμῶν ἀκούετε, although the latter is indicated by ὁ γινώσκων τὸν θεὸν ἀκούει ἡμῶν. Hence the Apostle understands by ἡμεῖς himself with the Apostles and the teachers in the Church (and not himself and the Church ὑμεῖς), as opposed to αὐτοὶ (1Jn_4:5) and the ψευδοπροφῆται (1Jn_4:1). This is the view of most commentators in opposition to Calvin, Spener, Lücke and al.
He that knoweth God, heareth us; he who is not of God doth not hear us.—The antithesis ὁ γινώσκων τὸν θεὸν and ὃς οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ requires, as is well known, that we should understand in the former clause ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ εἶναι and supply in the second γινώσκειν τὸν θεὸν as the consequence. Hence ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ εἶναι must not be taken here differently from 1Jn_4:1-4 and according to the contrast in 1Jn_4:5. It is consequently not a general drawing and impulse towards God (as held by Lücke and Neander), but the state of grace of God’s children, and their understanding of and conduct towards the word of God as preached to them. But nothing is said here concerning the manner how they did come into this state, nor is here any reference to predetermination (Hilgenfeld) or predestination (Calvin); we know also from 1Jn_2:2; 1Jn_4:14; cf. Joh_3:16; Joh_1:10 sqq. 29, that all are desired and may enter into the sonship. [Alford: Here we must remember carefully what the context is and what its purpose. The Apostle is giving a text to distinguish, not the children of God from those who are not children of God, but the spirit of truth from the spirit of error, as is clear from the words following. And this he does by saying that in the case of the teachers of the truth, they are heard and received by those who apprehend God, but refused by those who are not of God. It is evident then that these two terms here, ὁ γινώσκων τὸν θεόν, and ὃς οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ represent two patent matters of fact, two classes open and patent to all: one of them identical with the κόσμος above: the other consisting of those of whom it is said above, ἐγνώκατε τὸν πατέρα…. ἐγνώκατε τὸν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, 1Jn_2:13-14. How these two classes are what they are, it is not the purpose of this passage to set forth, nor need we here inquire; we have elsewhere tests to distinguish them, 1Jn_3:9-10. …; we have a striking parallel, in fact the key to these words, in the saying of our Lord to Pilate, Joh_18:37.—M.].
From this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error (deception).—Ἐκ τούτου refers to hearing, but since the matter in hand relates to the trial of the spirits that teach, the reference is to hearing the false prophets and to hearing the Apostles and the ministers of the Divine word [i.e. to the reception given to both classes.—M.]. Hence we must not think here of the criterion specified in 1Jn_4:2-3, as maintained by the Roman Catholic Comm., Calvin, Hunnius, Calov and Neander.
In γινώσκομεν John includes the Apostles and the Church. On τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, cf. Joh_14:17; Joh_15:26; Joh_16:13; from which passages it is evident that the Genitive indicates that which the Spirit gives, testifies, whereto He helpeth and whither He guideth and leadeth; He is that Spirit that proceedeth from God and teacheth the truth to men. In like manner, τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς πλάνης is the spirit proceeding from the devil, deceiving and seducing men (1Jn_1:8; 1Jn_2:26; 2Jn_1:8; 1Ti_4:1; 1Th_2:3; 2Th_2:11.) The latter is certainly in him whom the world hears, the former in Him to whom the children of God give ear.
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. Δοκιμάζειν is used here as by St. Paul, (see notes on 1Jn_4:1, in Exegetical and Critical) and as the Lord Himself bids His Church do, Mat_7:15-16. The Roman Catholic proposition: “Ecclesia in suis prælatis est judex controversiarum” is not true; they limit to the ecclesia reprœsentans and to the [visible] head of that, what the Lord of the Church and his Apostles say to all believers. However it is important to remember that the Apostle restricts this right and duty of trial simply to the question whether the teachers are of God, and that he does not mean questions affecting the learning, wisdom or eloquence of teachers, or questions of secondary importance and on controversial points; he only refers to that which is necessary to the salvation of our souls. On this head every Christian ought and may, if necessary, apply the test.
2. The believing Confession of One Jesus Christ uniting in Himself the Godhead and the Manhood, even the confession of the historical Christ is necessary to salvation and essentially Christian. John, of course, understands ὁμολογεῖν as engaging the powers of the whole Christian and not only the oral confession without the heart; for he adverts to the πνεύματα, specifies the antithesis μὴ ὁμολογεῖν and proceeds throughout in a contemplative manner. If this were not so, the true disciples of Jesus would have the same confession as the demons as their distinguishing mark (Luk_4:41; Mat_8:29); hence the contents of the confession are not decisive per se. Cf. Harless, Ethik § 39** p. 174.—But Estius has no warranty for limiting St. John’s direction to the apostolical age and for considering the confession of the Lord’s Supper as the criterion now; on the former confession depends also the latter, for the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper reflects of course the Christology, since the fellowship with Christ is accomplished in the most pregnant manner in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Nothing is truly Christian without the living Christ.
3. According to the Johannean mode of expression the contrast brought out here is to be conceived as an error wholly gnostic, spiritualizing and misinterpreting the historic and directed more against the corporealness, i.e. the manhood of Christ than against his Godhead, an error rather Docetical than Ebionite. For σάρξ does not denote merely the human body apart from the human ψυχή, the human νοῦς, the human will or self-consciousness, which could not be done by the preposition ἐν, but it signifies the human nature, the manhood; and this is conceived in the precise manner in which He appeared in the world. Cf. Hofmann, Schriftbeweis ii. 1. p. 76, sq.
4. John does not predicate of man independence, self-glory and perfect freedom in the sphere of his spiritual life; either the Spirit of God or the spirit of Satan determines the spirit of man and conditions his views, inclinations, knowledge, words and deeds. Behind the πνεῦμα of man stands the directing, determining, operating and fulfilling πνεῦμα, which through the former and united with it, works on the world and on men.
5. But any disposition of the human spirit for the Spirit of God or the spirit of Satan is no more taken for granted here than that the Spirit of God and the spirit of Satan are or might be supposed to be in a state of coördination. Rather, we should say, does this victory, of which the Apostle discourses in such lofty strains (1Jn_4:4, cf. 1Jn_2:13-14; 1Jn_4:4-5), assert the superiority of the Divine Spirit to Satan and denote both the monarchy of God and the enmity of Satan, at the same time intimating however, that, though men may suffer themselves to be controlled either by God or Satan, all men ought to be and might become God’s.
6. The Apostle contemplates the reality and the possession of the Divine sonship (εἶναι ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ=γεγεννῆσθαι ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ), which is evident from his specification of the marks whereby the existence of this relation may be determined; the reference, therefore, is not to the origin, the beginning of one’s being of God, to the manner how it is attained. The same remark applies to Joh_18:36-37 and also to Joh_8:43-47, as is manifest from Joh_4:30 : πολλοὶ ἐπίστευσαν εἰς αὐτὸν and Joh_4:31 : ἐὰν μείνητε ἐν τῷ λόγῳ τῷ ἐμῷ. The sonship or state of grace of faith in John 8 is however quite young and only begun, while the case before Pilate and in the passage under notice respects the believing people in His Kingdom and under His Rule. According to the Johannean conception we have to view the sonship or state of grace of believers as complete from the beginning although ever progressing towards perfection and consummation and to the inheritance itself. A young babe or a suckling is surely a perfect man, a rational creature, though only as to the germ, and not yet a man, not yet fully developed in all the powers and gifts wherewith it is endowed.
[7. As supplemental to the exegetical notes on 1Jn_4:3, and No. 3, above, it may be profitable to put together some of the interpretations of this difficult passage.
1. The Socinian.—Socinus: “Jesum Christum, i.e. Jesum qui dicitur Christus, non modo mortalem hominem fuisse, sed etiam innumeris malis et denique ipsi cruentæ morti obnoxium.” Grotius: “Non cum regia pompa et exercitibus, sed in statu humili, abjecto, multisque malis ac postremum cruci obnoxio.” But it has been shown that ἐν σαρκί cannot be construed in this sense.
2. Those assertive and not only implicative of our Lord’s Incarnation. The commentators, most of them orthodox, who give this interpretation, either confound ἐν σαρκί with εἰς σάρκα (Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Piscator, Sander and al.), or waver between ἐν and εἰς, e.g. Hunnius: “Tunc venire in carne dicitur Jesus Christus quando λόγος ex sua velut arcana sede prodiens assumta visibili carne se in terris manifestat. Here we must also name the exposition of Augustine, who introduces in the train of the Incarnation the death and redeeming love of Christ, and makes the confession denial depend on “caritatem habere” (Alford); saying: “Deus erat et in carne venit: Deus enim mori non poterat, caro mori poterat: ideo ergo venit in carne ut moreretur pro nobis. Quemadmodum autem mortuus est pro nobis? Majorem hac caritatem nemo habet, quam ut animam suam ponat pro amicis suis. Caritas ergo ilum adduxit ad crucem. Quisquis ergo non habet caritatem, negat Christum in carne venisse.”—To put the question in his own words: “Arius and Eunomius, and Macedonius and Nestorius own that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, are not they therefore of God?” and then replies that those hierarchs did not in fact confess Christ to have come in the flesh, because whatever they might do by words, they in their works denied Him (Tit_1:16). “They have not charity,” he say “because they have not unity, and therefore all their other gifts are of no avail.” (1Co_13:1-3).—But the Apostle says here nothing of charity, or unity, or of the love of Christ, but he simply asserts the true Manhood of our Lord, and this brings us
3. To the true interpretation which takes ἐν in its proper meaning and applies the passage to the case of the Docetæ who maintained that our Lord had only an apparent and not a real body. See also the extracts from Irenæus and Origen above in Appar. Crit. note 4.—M.].
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
The command: Try! 1. The occasion (1Jn_4:1 : many false prophets); 2. The importance (1Jn_4:1 : whether they are of God); 3. The difficulty (1Jn_4:1 : the spirits); 4. The right (1Jn_4:4 : ye are of God); 5. The standard (1Jn_4:1; 1Jn_4:3 : the confession and the contradiction, cf. 1Jn_4:6.).—Be not afraid of the majority of votes, but fear the majesty of the truth of (out of) God; take care that thou do not violate it; the former cannot and must not have any influence in matters of eternal truth and of eternal life. Not from the masses comes the truth, but from One, with whom you ought to vote and to whom you ought to assent; but though it comes only from One it is nevertheless designed for all and should be brought to and diffused among the masses by means of preaching, testimony and confession.—You ought to regard as a Christian and a brother whoever clings to Christ in faith, no matter how heretical the sect to which he may belong.—Communities and Christians grow more and more imperfect, the former into sects and the latter illiberal in proportion as they strive to give undue prominence to any one point of the truth except that of a believing and vital confession of Christ. You may not even push into the background the sphere of creation with its appointments before redemption and its glory, for Christ is also the Creator of the world.—The question is the pursuit of victory in order to secure and preserve unimpaired eternal peace for eternity.—The fundamental truth is simple and ever plain to the simplicity of the heart. That with which you are familiar you understand and love; what you cling to, cleaves to you; that in which you live, lives in you; that, for and of which you speak, speaks out of you.—Either a prophet of God or a false prophet, either of God or of the world, moved either by the Spirit of God or by the spirit of antichrist, by the Spirit of truth or the spirit of error; a middle way and a third course are not provided.—Neither you nor any of your acquaintance may be able clearly to perceive your point of gravity, but it is there, and One, now a Saviour, but hereafter the Judge, knows where and what it is and will make it manifest in preliminary judgments here, but in the final judgment there.
Starke:—Trust, believe, whom? It concerns not riches and possessions, but your soul and salvation. It is amazing that most men are concerned about false wares, whereby they incur certain and eternal loss. The prudent will make inquiries and not join in with an inconsiderate credit.—Lying spirit, that sayest that the Christian religion is founded on credulity! Gross lies! it requires faith, but rejects credulity.—We ought to believe sincere, experienced and honest teachers, yet so that we look only and solely to God and rest in Him as the author of the wisdom which they proclaim. Teachers should willingly subject their teaching to the trial of others, even to the trial of their own hearers, and consequently not only not deter them from it but also to urge them to it, and direct them away from themselves to God and His Spirit; otherwise they will not make honest Christians but render themselves suspicious.—The government alone has not the power of appointing teachers at its option regardless of the views and wishes of the whole Church (or congregation), whose wishes should be duly consulted, for God has clothed it also with the power and ability to try the spirits. [Such a caution, however relevant on the Continent of Europe, is of course unnecessary in the U. S.—M.].—Whatever obscures and lessens in word or deed the person, office, doctrine and glory of Christ, is heretical.—Be of good courage! though the world and the devil rage, thou hast a strong support, for God, who is with, by and in thee, is greater than all.—Whenever we are victorious, we ought to ascribe the glory of our victory not to ourselves but to God; otherwise if we take the least credit to ourselves, we rouse a new enemy, spiritual pride, most dangerous in this that it enables Satan easily to overcome us.—Like seeks like; the world loves its own but hates those who have gone out from the world.
Heubner:—The Christian spirit of trial is intimately connected with faith. Faith is not credulity.—This trying is a duty which belongs to every age and especially in our age when so many teach against the Scripture and still set up the pretension that they have the Spirit, and consider themselves full of spirit and others spiritless. It is the duty of all Christians; consequently, also the duty of the laity.—The conditions of this trial are simplicity of heart, a firm faith, and prayer to the Lord for clearness of perception (to open our eyes). The deceived have indeed excuses to offer; but there would not be so many of the deceived, if they had a pure mind and would try. Try the more frequently and carefully, the more the spirit of deceivers flatters thee and thy vanity, and the greater the number of these spirits grow.—Everything which lays irreverent hands on the Person of Christ, from any side, is decidedly unchristian.—Should John have given us a false criterion? Maintaining this is already the sign of a bad cause. Whatever is anti-christian shows its true character by its contradicting the Apostles.—The superiority of the Spirit of Christ to the error-spirit of the world gives to the Christian the preponderance; he need not fear any assaults of unbelief. John foretells certain victory. All the shouts of victory on the part of unbelievers are nothing but false alarm. All antichristianity panders to the spirit of the world; it flatters, if not the loose morality, yet the vanity and conceit of the world which finds it burdensome and confounding to believe in the Crucified One.—The false apostles prove the dignity of the true Apostles.
Besser:—Any pupil in a catechism-class, in order to be on his guard against the false prophets, may determine whether the teaching of a prophet has the grape-taste of Christ’s vine or the sloe-taste of the thorn of the flesh and reason.—It is not because of the parts of the truth they hold in common with the Church, but because of the error wherewith they contradict the confession of the Church, because of the broken branch on the tree of truth, because of the cancer in the body of truth, that the sects are congregated as separate communities.
Krummacher:—The frontier of Christianity. 1. In which way is it decided? Are the cumbersome trinity, God, virtue and immortality, or birth within the pale of Christendom, individual interpretation, the opinion of the majority of one’s contemporaries—to determine Christianness? 2. The final infallible decision, over against the skeptics, those who are at variance with the confession, those who only seek for the word of God in the Scriptures but do not receive the Scriptures as the word of God, is given by the fundamental fact of the supernatural revelation in Christ, the necessity of regeneration, the personal preëxistence of Christ or of the Godhead.
Fronmüller:—Of the trial of the Spirits. 1. Why it is necessary? Many false spirits have gone out into the world, the spirit of antichrist is already now in the world—in the Church, in the school, in the family, in private life, in the great and in the small. 2. Which is its end and aim? Whether they are of God or not. 3. Which is its rule? The confession.
[Burkitt: 1Jn_4:1.—Believe not every spirit, etc. That is, every teacher who pretends to be inspired, and every doctrine that lays claim to the authority of Divine revelation: “but try the spirits,” that is, examine their doctrine by the rule of the word of God, and try from whom they come, whether from the Spirit of God or from Satan.—M.].
[Bp. Hall: 1Jn_4:2.—Every one who confesseth Jesus Christ to have been God from all eternity, and in the fulness of time to have taken our nature upon Him, and to be come in the flesh, to accomplish the perfect work of man’s redemption, is of God and speaks from God. And so by the contraries 1Jn_4:3.—M.].
[Barrow:—He was not only (as the Gnostics and some other heretics have conceited) in shape and outward appearance (as a spectre, deluding men’s sight and fancy), but in most real truth, a very perfect man; having a real body, figured and circumscribed like ours, compacted of flesh and blood, visible and tangible; which was nourished and did grow, which needed and received sustenance, which was tender and sensible, frail and passible, which was bruised with stripes, torn with scourges, pricked with thorns, pierced with nails, transfixed with a spear; which was mortal and underwent death by expiring its breath, and being disjoined from the soul that enlivened it. He had also a soul, endued with the same faculties as ours; with an understanding, capable of learning and improvement (for He was a man, ignorant of some things which He might know: and He grew in wisdom and in stature), with a will, subject and submissive to the Divine Will (see Mar_13:32; Luk_2:52; Mat_26:39; Luk_22:42; Joh_5:30; Mat_21:18; Joh_4:6-7), with several appetites, of meat, of drink, of sleep and rest (for we read that He was hungry, that He thirsted, that He was weary); yea with various passions and affections (φυσικὰ καὶ ἀδιάβλητα πάθη, I mean, that is, natural and irreprehensible passions), and these of the most troublesome and afflictive sort, such as zeal, pity and sorrow; the which were sometimes declared by very pathetical significations and are expressed in high terms; as upon occasion of His friend Lazarus’s death it is said, He groaned in Spirit and was troubled; He then and upon other occasions, out of pity and sorrow, did weep; and ye know what excesses of sorrow, what anxieties and agonies, what tribulations, disturbances and amazements, the Evangelists, using those very terms, describe Him to have undergone at His passion; so that, as the Apostle to the Hebrews speaketh, “We have not an highpriest that could not compassionate (or sympathize with) our infirmities, but who was in all points tempted (or exercised and proved) as we are, yet without sin.”—M.].
[Neander:—Here is no other test of true faith, no other law for Christian union, than steadfast adherence to that one fundamental fact of the appearing of the Divine-human Redeemer. In all which proceeds from this belief, the influences of the Divine Spirit should be acknowledged. Hence it follows, that provided faith in this one fundamental fact be the soul of the Christian life, no minor difference of creed should be allowed to disturb Christian unity; that mistakes and alloys of Christian truth, which trench not on this one fundamental fact, should not hinder us from recognizing the Divine Stamp in him whose faith and profession have their root therein,—that the bonds of Christian fellowship should not thereby be sundered or loosened. Steadfast adherence to this one foundation is the mark of being from God, of the Spirit derived from God.—
Truth and error have each their peculiar history of development. As in the continued development of Christian truth, the Holy Spirit is ever revealing Himself in the inward consciousness of believers, that Anointing spoken of by St. John; so does error, proceeding side by side with this revelation, mingle therewith its own disturbing and adulterating influence,—rending single truths from their connection with the whole system of truth and giving them the stamp of error. These are the two currents, proceeding from the ever operative Spirit of Christ and from the spirit of the world; the latter mingling with the revelations of the former its own disturbing element and imitating them with a deceptive outward seeming.—M.].
[Sermons and Sermon-themes.
1Jn_4:1. Augustine,Believe not every Spirit. Libr. of Fathers, 20. 954.Tillotson,Abp. Of the trial of the Spirits. Sermons 2, 29.Waterland,Daniel, The springs and motives of false pretences to the Holy Spirit; with the rules and marks of trying and detecting them. Sermons. Works 9, 336.Edwards,Jonathan, The distinguishing marks of a work of the Spirit of God, applied to that uncommon operation that has lately appeared in New England. 120. 1742. Works. 2, 254.Zollikoffer, C. J.Fanaticism in general. Fanaticism with regard to religious conceptions in particular. Sermons on prevalent errors and vices I. 95. 111.Smith, JohnPye, On the means of obtaining satisfaction with regard to the truth of religious sentiments. A Sermon, London, 1822.1Jn_4:2. Augustine,Every Spirit that confesseth not, etc. Libr. of the Fathers 20, 960. De probatione Spiritum. Cr. Sac.Thes.Nov.2. 999.1Jn_4:2-3. Wilberforce, R. I.,The sacramental system. Serm. on the New Birth, 222.Vaughan, I. C.,John’s test of truth. Sermons (1851), 121.1Jn_4:4. Saurin, I.,The superior evidence and influence of Christianity. Sermons; 2, 323. In French, 7, 129. Extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost.1Jn_4:4-5. Tillotson, Abp.,The advantages of truth in opposition to error. 2 Sermons. Serm. xi. 389.—M.].Footnotes:
[1]1Jn_4:1. [ἐκ, German: “out of.”—M.]
[2]1Jn_4:2. γινώσκετε A. B. C. G. al. Cod. Sin. has in the text γινώσκομεν, but corrected γινώσκετε.
[3]1Jn_4:2. ἐληλυθότα A. C. Sinait.—B. reads ἐληλυθέναι; Vulgate: venisse conforming to the usage of Latin. [German: “Every spirit which confesseth Jesus Christ come in the flesh.”—M.]
[4]
1Jn_4:3. Instead of the reading of A. B. τὸν Ιησοῦν, G. K. and Sin. have Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα, but G. has also the Article and Sin. reads κύριον instead of Χριστὸν. Both readings, the shorter τὸν Ἰησοῦν, and the longer agreeing with 1Jn_4:2, are well authenticated, and either may pass for the original reading, it being equally probable that the longer reading was abbreviated into the shorter, and that the shorter was changed into the longer; the testimony for both renders the decision very difficult; but the shorter form seems to be the lectio difficilior.—By the side of the reading ὃ μὴ ὁμολογεὶ τὸν Ἰησοῦν, the Church Fathers have the variation ὃ λύει τὸν Ἰησοῦν, among the Latins Tertullian (negantes—et solventes, adv. Marc. 5, 16), Augustine qui solvit Jesum et negat in carne venisse) also the two conjoined. It is repeatedly asserted, that the heretics suppressed λύειν (Socrates h. l. 7, 32; Fulbert and Hincmar: Eraserunt, in Tischendorf 1859 editio major). Bengel well observes: humanam potius artem, quam apostolicam redolet (λύει) sapientiam. It is a dogmatical terminus technicus to denote the Nestorianism which dissolves the union of the Godhead and the humanity in Jesus, Christ.
[Socrates, H. E. VII. 1John 32: γέγραπτο ἐν τοῖς παλαιοῖς ἀντιγράφοις ὅτι πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ λύει τὸν Ἰησοῦν, ἀπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ οὐκ ἔστιν. Irenæus (III, 8, p. 511 ed. Stieren): Igitur omnes extra dispositionem sunt, qui sub obtentu agnitionis alterum quidem Jesum intelligunt, alterum autem Christum, et alterum Unigenitum, et alterum Salvatorem … Sententia enim eorum homicidalis, Deos quidem plures confingens et Patres multos simulans. Comminuens autem et per multa dividens Filium Dei; quos et Dominus nobis cavere prædixit, et discipulus ejus Joannes in prædicta epistola fugere eos præcepit dicens: “Multi seductores exierunt in hunc mundum, qui non confitentur Jesum Christum in carne venisse. Hic est seductor et Antichristus. Videte eos, ne perdatis quod operati estis.” Et rursus in Epistola ait: “Multi pseudo-prophetæ exierunt de sæculo. In hoc cognoscite Spiritum Dei. Omnis spiritus qui confttetur Jesum Christum in carne venisse, ex Deo est. Et omnis Spiritus qui solvit Jesum, non est ex Deo, sed de antichristo est.” Hæc autem similia sunt illi quod in Evangelio dictum est, quoniam “Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.”—Origen on Mat_25:14 (Vol. I 4:359–361 ed. Lommat.): Secundum hanc divinitatis suæ naturam non peregrinatur, sed peregrinatur secundum dispensationem corporis quod suscepit.—Haec autem dicentes non solvimus suscepti corporis hominem, cum sit scriptum apud Joannem “Omnis spiritus qui solvit Jesum non est ex Deo:” sed unicuique substantiæ proprietatem servamus. Si enim omnis homo fidelis “qui conjungitur Domino unus spiritus est:” quanto magis homo ille quem secundum dispensationem. carnis Christus suscepit non est solvendus ab eo, nec alter est dicendus ab eo? Et vide quomodo ait: “Sicut homo peregre futurus” quoniam non erat homo, sed sicut homo et quasi homo peregrinabitur, qui erat ubique secundum divinitatis naturam.” While thus Irenæus and Origen clearly had the reading ὃ λύει before them, Polycarp, on the other hand, seems to quote, though loosely, the received text (Ep. ad. Philipp. cap. 7): Πάς γὰρ ὃς ἂν μὴ ὁμολογῇ Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθέναι, ἀντίχριρτός ἐστι. καὶ ὃς ἂν μὴ ὁμολογῇ τὸ μαρτύριον τοῦ σταυροῦ ἐκ τοῦ διαβόλου ἐστί. καὶ ὃς ἂν μεθοδεύῃ τὰ λόγια τοῦ κυρίου πρὸς τὰς ἰδίας ἐπιθυμίας καὶ λέγῃ μήτε ἀνάστασιν μήτε κρίσιν εἶναι, οὗτος πρωτότοκός ἐστι τοῦ Σατανᾶ. [Alford].—Huther: Very singular is the opinion of Semler that ὃλύει originated oculorum vitio; the reading may probably be accounted for from the polemics against Gnosticism (Grotius, Lücke, de Wette, Huther), and this supposition is borne out by the scholion in Matthæi p. 1John 225: προώδευσαν γὰρ αὐτοῦ (τοῦ ἀντιχ ριστοῦ) αἱ αἱρέσεις, ὧν χαρακτεριστικὸν τὸ διὰ ψευδοπροφητῶν καὶ πνευμάτων λύειν τον Ἰησοῦν ἐν τῷ μὴ ὁμολογεῖν αὐτὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθέαι.—M.].
[German: “And every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God.”—M.]
[5]1Jn_4:3. [German: “And this is the [spirit] of antichrist, of which ye have heard that it cometh, and now it is in the world already.” So Alford.—M.].
[6]1Jn_4:6. ὃς οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ, οὐκ ἀκούει ἡμῶν is wanting in A. G. (perhaps by mistake?)
[7]
1Jn_4:6. ἐκτούτου B. G. K. Sinait; important on account of 1Jn_3:24; ἐκ τοῦ πνεύματος.
[German: “From this.”—M.]
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv2–21 know . . . the Spirit of God--whether he…
Hereby--"Herein."
know . . . the Spirit of God--whether he be, or not, in those teachers professing to be moved by Him.
Read full note →
Every spirit--that is, Every teacher claiming inspiration by the HOLY SPIRIT.
confesseth--The truth is taken for granted as established. Man is required to confess it, that is, in his teaching to profess it openly.
Jesus Christ is come in the flesh--a twofold truth confessed, that Jesus is the Christ, and that He is come (the Greek perfect tense implies not a mere past historical fact, as the aorist would, but also the present continuance of the fact and its blessed effects) in the flesh ("clothed with flesh": not with a mere seeming humanity, as the Docetæ afterwards taught: He therefore was, previously, something far above flesh). His flesh implies His death for us, for only by assuming flesh could He die (for as God He could not), Heb 2:9-10, Heb 2:14, Heb 2:16; and His death implies His LOVE for us (Joh 15:13). To deny the reality of His flesh is to deny His love, and so cast away the root which produces all true love on the believer's part (Jo1 4:9-11, Jo1 4:19). Rome, by the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, denies Christ's proper humanity.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv1–21 THE TRYING OF THE ANTICHRISTIC SPIRITS, 1Jn_4:1-21.
THE TRYING OF THE ANTICHRISTIC SPIRITS, 1Jn_4:1-21.
1. The three condemnatory tests—non-confession of a human Jesus, worldliness; the not hearing us, the apostolic witnesses, 1Jn_4:1-6.
Read full note →
1. Believe not every spirit—In this, the apostolic day of supernatural manifestations there are false inspirations, as well as true. There are demoniac instigations as well as true revelations. The term Spirit of God, in the second verse, shows that by spirits are antithetically meant, not merely human intellects or personalities, nor a temper or disposition of human minds. The errors of the errorists are referred back to supernatural sources; though the word spirits spontaneously, in 1Jn_4:2-3, becomes a designation of the man himself inspired by the spirit. So the demoniac of Gadara becomes identified with the demon possessing him. See notes on Mar_5:1-20; 2Th_2:9.
False prophets— Each possessed by, and identified with, his own spirit, and teaching his own particular error.
Gone out—From their chief commissioner, Satan. The intensity of John’s feelings in regard to these antichristic emissaries appears from his reference to the same deceivers in his second epistle, 1Jn_4:7. There they have entered into the world, and each one is antichrist, and earnest warnings are given for a profound avoidance of them.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv1–21 1–6. The Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of…
1–6. The Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Error
1–6. This section is an amplification of the sentence with which the preceding chapter ends. We certainly have the Holy Spirit as an abiding gift from God, for otherwise we could not believe and confess the truth of the Incarnation. As usual, S. John thinks and teaches in antitheses. The test which proves that we have the Spirit of God proves that the antichrists have not this gift but its very opposite. In chap. 2 the antichrists were introduced as evidence of the transitoriness of the world (1Jn_2:18): here they are introduced as the crucial negative instance which proves that every true believer has the Spirit of God.
Read full note →
Beloved] See on 1Jn_3:2.
believe not every spirit] This exhortation does not give us the main subject of the section, any more than ‘Marvel not, brethren, if the world hate you’ (1Jn_3:12) gave us the main subject of the last section (1Jn_3:12-24). In both cases the exhortation is introductory and momentary. Having spoken of the Spirit by which we know that God abides in us, the Apostle goes on to speak of other spiritual influences which indubitably exist, and of which every one has experience, but which are not necessarily of God because they are spiritual. “He does not discredit the fact that spiritual influences were widely diffused; he does not monopolize such influences for the Christian Church. How could he discredit this fact? How can we? Are there not myriads of influences about us continually, which do not act upon our senses but upon our spirits, which do not proceed from things which may be seen and handled, but from the spirits of men?” (Maurice). But besides ordinary spiritual influences, S. John probably has in his mind those extraordinary and supernatural powers which at various periods of the Church’s history persons have claimed to possess. Such claims exhibit themselves in professed revelations, prophecies, miracles, and the like. About all such things there are two possibilities which must put us on our guard: (1) they may be unreal; either the delusions of fanatical enthusiasts, or the lies of deliberate impostors: (2) even if real, they need not be of God. Miraculous powers are no absolute guarantee of the possession of truth.
try the spirits] Or, as R. V., prove the spirits. There are two words in N. T. meaning ‘to try, test, prove’; the one which we have here (δοκιμάζειν), and the one which is used where the Jews try or tempt Christ (Mar_8:11; Mar_10:2, &c.), and of the temptations of Satan (Mat_4:1; Mat_4:3, &c.). The former occurs about 20, the latter about 40 times in N. T. Neither are common in S. John’s writings: he nowhere else uses the word which we have here, and the other only 4 times (Joh_6:6; Rev_2:2; Rev_2:10; Rev_3:10). The A. V. is very capricious in its renderings of the former; ‘allow’ (Rom_14:22), ‘approve’ (Rom_2:18), ‘discern’ (Luk_12:56), ‘examine’ (1Co_11:28), ‘like’ (Rom_1:28), ‘prove’ (Luk_14:19), ‘try’ (1Co_3:13); while the latter is rendered ‘examine’ (2Co_13:5), ‘prove’ (Joh_6:6), ‘tempt’ (Mat_22:18), ‘try’ (Rev_2:2). The Revisers have somewhat reduced this variety. In the one case ‘allow’ has been changed to ‘approve’; ‘examine’ and ‘try’ to ‘prove’: in the other case ‘examine’ has been changed to ‘try’. The difference between the two words (which are found together 2Co_13:5 and Psa_26:2) is on the whole this, that the one here used commonly implies a good, if not a friendly object; to prove or test in the hope that what is tried will stand the test: whereas the other often implies a sinister object; to try in the hope that what is tried will be found wanting. The metaphor here is from testing metals. Comp. ‘Prove all things; hold fast that which is good’ (1Th_5:21).
whether they are of God] Whether their origin (ἐκ) is from God: comp. 1Jn_3:2; 1Jn_3:12.
A verse such as this cuts at the root of such pretensions as the Infallibility of the Pope. What room is left for Christians to ‘prove the spirits’, if all they have to do is to ask the opinion of an official? The Apostle’s charge, ‘prove ye the spirits’, may be addressed to Christians singly or to the Church collectively: it cannot be addressed to an individual. Comp. Rom_12:2; Eph_5:10; 1Co_10:15; 1Co_11:13. The verse also shews us in what spirit to judge of such things as the reported miracles at Lourdes and the so-called ‘manifestations’ of Spiritualism. When they have been proved to be real, they must still further be proved to see ‘whether they are of God’. We are not to judge of doctrine by miracles, but of miracles by doctrine. A miracle enforcing what contradicts the teaching of Christ and His Apostles is not ‘of God’ and is no authority for Christians. Comp. Gal_1:8; Deu_13:1-3.
because many false prophets] The caution is against no imaginary or merely possible danger; it already exists. Warnings respecting the coming of such had been given by Christ, S. Paul, S. Peter, and S. Jude; and now S. John tells his readers that these prophecies have been fulfilled. These ‘false prophets’ include the antichrists of 1Jn_2:18, and what is here said of them seems to indicate that like Mahomet, Swedenborg, the Irvingites, and others, they put forth their new doctrine as a revelation.
are gone out into the world] This probably has no reference to their ‘going out from us’ (1Jn_2:19). Possibly it means no more than that they have appeared in public; but it perhaps includes the notion of their having a mission from the power that sent them: comp. Joh_3:17; Joh_6:14; Joh_10:36; Joh_11:27; Joh_12:47; Joh_12:49, and especially Joh_16:28. We need not confine these ‘many false prophets’ to the antichrists who had left the Christian communion. There would be others who, like Apollonius of Tyana, had never been Christians at all: and others even more dangerous who still professed to be members of the Church. The difficulties in the Church of Corinth caused by the unrestrained ‘speaking with tongues’ point to dangers of this kind.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 (6) NOT ALL SPIRITS ARE THE RESULT OF THE…
IV.
(6) NOT ALL SPIRITS ARE THE RESULT OF THE SONSHIP: NECESSITY OF EXAMINING THEM (1Jn_4:1-6).
Read full note →
(a) The difference among spirits (1Jn_4:1).
(b) The measure (1Jn_4:2-3).
(c) The encouragement (1Jn_4:4).
(d) The condemnation (1Jn_4:5).
(e) Inference and conclusion (1Jn_4:6).
The mention of faith in 1Jn_3:23 had reminded St. John of the danger of intellectual, as well as of moral error. The mention of God’s Spirit at the conclusion of the last paragraph gave him a form in which to clothe the discussion of truth and falsehood in its human manifestations. By “spirits” he means those tendencies towards good and evil (here especially with regard to thought and opinion) which may be considered as coming from the supreme power of God, on the one hand, and from the inferior power of the devil, on the other. Into the question what these influences are, whether, like the Holy Spirit, they are personal or not, he does not enter. Where one quality, or opinion, shows itself in different individuals, he identifies it and calls it a spirit. Religious fervour might take a form quite antagonistic to the real will and law of God. For Christians there was but one standard by which to measure all claims on their religious allegiance: confession that the man Christ Jesus was the Word. All that demurred to that plain fact, and the loyalty implied by it, belonged to the spirit of antichrist. His hearers, however, if he understood them rightly, need not fear. By virtue of their adherence to the truth, God was in them. In Him they had conquered the spirits of the world, and had but to claim their victory. The false teachers might be known, and must be condemned by the savour of the world that was in their method and their message, and by their popularity with what was opposed to God. The Apostles and those who taught with them could confidently before God put forward the grand claim that theirs was the spirit that came from Him, because they had held undeviatingly to the truth as manifested in Jesus.
(6 a.) (1) Beloved.—Whenever St. John uses this word, he has a strong and earnest exhortation in hand. (Comp. 1Jn_3:2-21; 1Jn_4:7.)
Try the spirits.—Comp. 1Co_10:15; 1Co_11:13; 1Co_12:10; Eph_5:10; 1Th_5:21. It is most important to notice that this examination of truth and error is inculcated on all alike, not merely on an ordained and materially separate class.
Prophets, in the New Testament, preach rather than predict. (Comp. 1Co_14:1-4; 1Co_14:24; Eph_4:11.)
Are gone out into the world, either “from us,” or else “have appeared in order to give their message.” (Comp. Joh_6:14; Joh_16:28; Joh_18:37.)
(6 b.) Comp. 1Co_12:3. The real humanity of the Saviour is the truth here specially emphasised.
(2) Jesus Christ is taken to imply all His history. (Comp. 1Jn_3:23, and 1Jn_4:6.)
Come is used of Christ in St. John’s language for His mission and manifestation. (Comp. Joh_5:43; Joh_6:14; Joh_7:28-29; Joh_8:42; Joh_16:28; Joh_18:37.)
(3) Every spirit that confesseth not.—There is a curious old reading mentioned by Socrates, the historian, viz., “every spirit that destroyeth” (or, dissolveth) “Jesus Christ.” It is, however, evidently a gloss, written against the Gnostics, which crept into the text. It is clear that this verse presupposes an evangelistic presentation of Christ before refusal to confess His historical person could be made. (Comp. 1Jn_2:18.)
(6 c.) This consolation is in the same manner as that in 1Jn_2:12, and is introduced by the same endearing phrase. He is sure they have held to the truth, and have the Sonship. (Comp. 1Jn_3:1-2; 1Jn_3:13-14.) God is in them, and therefore the victory is already theirs. Although they may still have to struggle, they have only to claim Christ’s strength, and they have won. In making their choice between light and darkness, love and hate, good and evil, God and the devil, they became of the victorious party.
(4) Them—i.e., the antichrists, the false prophets, the spirits that are not of God. (Comp. 1Jn_2:13-14.)
He that is in the world—i.e., “the prince of this world,” the devil.
(6 d.) As usual, a contrast. The reason of their success is at once their distinguishing mark and their condemnation. (Comp. Joh_8:37; Joh_8:43; Joh_8:47; Joh_18:37.)
(5) Hearing them.—This implies listening with attention and pleasure.
(6 e.) (6) We are of God.—The first side of the antithesis repeated, after St. John’s manner, with a difference, we being substituted for ye, and meaning “the Apostles and those who taught with them.” St. John feels the grave duty, in condemnation of Cerinthus and other opponents, to assert the genuine truth and divine authority of the apostolic gospel. There could be no spiritual pride in this; it was a conscientious obligation. God spoke in them, and their loyalty for bade alike disclaimer and accommodation. (Comp. Joh_18:37.) When heretics said, “Christ ought to have said this or that,” the Apostles had only to reply, “But He did not say it.”
Hereby know we.—The criterion here is much the same as in 1Jn_4:2-3, but regarded from a different point of view: attention to false innovators, or faithful adherence to the Jesus Christ of history.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv1–21 1Jn_5:12. (2) The source of son-ship. Possession of the…
1Jn_5:12. (2) The source of son-ship. Possession of the Spirit.
Vers. 1-6. Confession of the Incarnation is the assurance that the Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of truth, is working in us, and not the spirit of error. The passage seems clearly to teach that there are two rival influences contending for power over the spirits of men. We must test men"s spirits to see whether they are organs of the Spirit of truth or of the spirit of error.
Read full note →
Beloved (as in 1Jn_2:28 and 3:18, the apostle again breaks out with a personal appeal into an earnest exhortation suggested by the statement just made), prove the spirits dokimazete tamata. "The spirits" are principles and tendencies in religion: these need to be tested, for earnestness and fervour are no guarantee of truth. And to test these principles is the duty of the individual Christian as well as of the Church in its official capacity. Just as every Athenian was subjected to an examination dokimasia as to his origin and character before he could hold office, so the spirit of every religious teacher must be examined before his teaching can be accepted. This is no useless precaution; because, as Christ has come forth ejxelhluqe from God (Joh_16:28; comp., (Joh_8:42 Joh 13:3 Joh 16:27) ninny false prophets have come forth ejzelhuqasi from the spirit of error. But perhaps "have gone forth into the world" means no more than " have displayed themselves" in publicum prodierunt. There is probably no reference to the false teachers having "gone forth from us". (1Jn_2:19) Besides Cerinthus and other Gnostics, there were the Nicolaitanes, astrologers, professors of magic, and dealers in charms, some of which seem to have had their origin in Ephesus, for they were known as "Ephesian letters." Apollonius of Tyana was eagerly welcomed at Ephesus, and it is not impossible that his visit took place during St. John"s lifetime.
Vers. 1-3.
Tests of true or false prophets.
Connecting link: The apostle had just declared that, in a life of obedience to and of like spirit with God, we had a twofold seal firstly, that we are of the truth; and secondly, that God abideth in us. But it was not to be supposed that all this would remain unimpugned from without, however clear it might be to the spirit within. At the same time, we are not to be easily moved from our ground. But should any attempt to seduce us from the faith, we are to apply to such a very searching test. Hence our topicTeachers of novelties to be severely tested. For many an age there have been and will be two classes of men one, desirous of uttering any new fancy that seizes them, or of disputing any accepted faith which they themselves are not disposed to embrace; and another, equally ready to listen to any novelty in doctrine which may at any time be propounded to them. Even in the age when the Apostle John wrote this letter, "many false prophets" had "gone out into the world." And it is a great blessing for us that the aged apostle took occasion from that fact
(1) to administer a caution against a too ready acceptance of any new prophet, and
(2) to supply a test, at once exclusive and inclusive, which might serve the Churches for all time.
I THE RIGHT OF "TRYING THE SPIRITS" BELONGS TO EVERY CHRISTIAN, AND IS INALIENABLE. A Christian is under no obligation to let any new prophet gain his acceptance without severely testing him.
1. The Lord Jesus Christ himself had never called for a blind acceptance ofhis claims. He courted inquiry. He repelled objectors by statements of infinite dignity and power. He appealed to their reason, their candour, and their sense of right. One assertion indeed he made and maintained that he was the Son of God and the King of men. This was the sole charge which led him to the cross. For the first part of the assertion he was condemned by the Sanhedrin, as if he were against Moses; for the second by the Roman power, as if he were the rival of Caesar. But no fewer than six different lines did he suggest on which the proof of his claims might be tried.
1. His character. (Joh_8:46)
2. His works. (Joh_14:10, Joh_14:11)
3. Prophecy. (Luk_24:27)
4. Testimony. (Joh_8:17, Joh_8:18)
5. His resurrection. (Joh_2:19)
6. The promise of the Holy Ghost. (Act_1:4)
2. In receiving the Lord Jesus, believers, whether Jew or Gentile, hadfound their very strongest prepossessions in an opposite direction overborne by the accumulated force of the evidence that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. (Joh_20:30, Joh_20:31)
1. The reception of Christ as a living and reigning Saviour had beenfollowed by a new and. regenerated social life.
2. Consequently, it could never be right to consent to imperil all this at thebidding of any new prophet that might arise, until they had submitted that prophet to a scrutiny as severe and as searching as their own Lord and Master had invited when he called for the adhesion of their hearts. The reason was satisfied when the Christ was accepted; and if any further claims arise the reason must still assert its right to examine them, and to be equally satisfied on them before accepting them. So in every age. New critics must be criticized.
II THERE IS ONE UNIFORM TEST TO WHICH THE " SPIRITS " ARE TO BE BROUGHT. Note here:
1. The point to be tested they are of God.
2. The one point which will be the test of that Do they or do they notconfess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh? i.e., Do they in all their teachings maintain the honour of our Lord. Jesus, as the incarnate Son of God, the Saviour of the world, the Christ, the Lord and King of men? Yes or no! It is a plain issue. And it is manifestly reasonable to compel men to try the whole question at issue, as to the truth or otherwise of any new prophet on a point so distinct and so sharply defined. For:
(1) It is the point. For if the Lord Jesus is all that he claimed to be, Christianity stands. If he be not, it falls with a crash.
(2) The claims of Christ are so vast that they stand absolutely alone.
(3) Some point of invalidity in them must be shown before those claims can be displaced.
(4) This never has been, never will be, never can be done.
(5) Hence any "spirit" that would relegate Christ to an inferior place, is to be rejected forthwith.
III APPLYING THIS TEST, WE HAVE THE EXTENT AND THE LIMIT OF THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD.
1. If he confesses the glory of Christ as the incarnate Son, he is "of God."He may not "follow with us;" he may be uncertain and inaccurate on minor points, He may come in no line of succession, and have felt the imposition of no priestly hand; still, if he avows "the Christ," he is "of God.
2. If he disavows the Christ, he is "not of God," however plausible hispretensions or captivating his words. Without the Christ, no Christian truth stands. "In him all things consist" (see Greek); Col_1:11.
There may indeed be there are demurs against drawing the division so sharply as yes or no true or false; and against the applicability of a like test to every age. E.g., it is objected:
1. It may surely be contended that, through prepossession on the part ofthe sacred writers, embellishments may have gathered round the history of a true Jesus, without insinuating that either it or he was absolutely false. We reply: The theory of prepossession will not hold; for the supreme testimony of all the New Testament is to the resurrection of Christ: as for the Jew, it was most violently contrary to all his prepossessions that the one whom his own nation hanged on a tree should have riser from the
2. dead; and as for the Gentile, it was equally contrary to his prepossessions to believe in a resurrection at all! It is objected:
3. We admire Christ extremely; we honour him as the Prince of teachers. Infact, no praise of him can be excessive, if he be but put on the merely human platform. We reply: That intermediate position cannot consistently be held. So strongly was this felt at the outset, that the watchword of the pagan camp was, "Jesus Christ is anathema;" that of the Christian camp, "Jesus Christ is Lord." There is no halting-place between the two. It is asked:
1. Is there, then, to be no progress in the course of the ages? is all otherscience to advance and Christian knowledge remain stationary, so that in the nineteenth century the same test of truth applies as at the first? We reply: Yes; there is to be progress in the truth, but not from it. Jesus Christ is what he is. lie is what he claims to i.e., A thousand millions of ages cannot alter that fact. Jesus Christ is "the same yesterday, and today, and for ever." Hence at any point of time, however distant, whoever withholds from him his due, cannot be "of God.
Note:
1. The "trying the spirits," as prophets and teachers, is not by any means tobe confounded with all attempt to decide or to sit in judgment upon their spiritual position individually, as in the sight of God. To their own Master they stand or fall. We judge their teachings, not them.
2. At the same time, any one who comes to teach with a view of displacingJesus from the throne of our hearts, must be prepared to undergo a scrutinizing ordeal. We can criticize as well as he, and we will.
1. In repelling attacks on the Christian faith, our wisdom lies in
1. setting minor matters in due relation to the rest, and then
2. remaining calmly in our stronghold, compelling an onset there, if any be ventured on at all.
3. Our attitude, perpetually, must be this: "We know we have a Saviour, who has saved us, who is saving others by us, and who is perpetually proving what he is by causing the lame to walk, the blind to see, and the dead to live; and you must displace these facts before you attempt to disturb our faith.
Vers. 1-6.
The power of trying the spirits.
In the preceding homily we laid stress on the duty here indicated of "trying the spirits," and also on the test with which we are furnished for applying to them through all time. We moreover there referred almost exclusively to them as yeudoprofhtai rather than as pneumata. But a close study of all the clauses in these six verses will disclose to us teachings of great vividness and power concerning the false prophets themselves the point from whence they started, the mission on which they are sent, the region to which they are bound, and the spirit with which they are inspired. In fact, the apostle views their embassy and action as a part of the great mystery of "antichrist," which had been foretold, which had actually made its appearance, and which would have to be fought against and overcome. It is the right and the duty of Christians to "try the spirits" (as we have seen). But they are not left to go to this warfare at their own charges, or without being adequately empowered. To them the right belongs, to them the duty attaches, because to them the power is given. Let us see how, in the paragraph before us, this is shown. TopicThe power of trying the spirits a Divine bestowment.
I THOUGH SPIRITS ARE VISIBLE AS SUCH, THEY MAY EMBODY THEMSELVES IN THE FORM OF PROPHETS. Indeed, it is only as "prophets" bring messages of truth or of falsehood messages which belong to the spiritual realm that we have any special concern with them; i.e., as we regard them and their message as above and beyond the sphere of the phenomenal, and as representing the noumenal. (cf 1Ki_22:20-24; 2Pe_1:21 2Pe_2:1; 1Ti_4:1) Note: It is by clearly apprehending the teachings of the Word of God concerning the spiritual world that we shall host be guarded against the prying and unholy pretensions of a spurious spiritualism (see homily on Deuteronomy 18).
II THE INRUSH OF FALSE PROPHETS FROM TIME TO TIME IS THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANTICHRIST. "This is that spirit of antichrist" (verse 3); see homily on 1Jn_2:18. "This is that whole power and principle of the antichrist" ("Speaker"s Commentary," in loc., where see also a valuable historical note on verse 1).
III THESE FALSE PROPHETS ARE COME FROM AFAR ON A MISSION TO THIS WORLD. The apostle says of them, they "are gone out into the world a mission of evil from their dark home" (Westcott). This world is regarded as the sphere in which they are to propagate their negations. This is but one of the many forms in which Scripture sets forth the mysterious conflict between good and evil, of which this world is at once the theatre and the witness. The struggle is between
(1) the serpent and Eve;
(2) Christ and the tempter;
(3) Christ and the world;
(4) the tempter and the individual;
(5) error and truth;
(6) the Church and the world;
(7) the Church and the evil one;
(8) the antichristian embassy and the body of believers.
IV THIS ANTICHRISTIAN MISSION TO EARTH IS INSPIRED BY A SPIRIT OF ERROR. And the apostle shows us here, as before, (see homily on 1Jn_2:18, ut supra) that it is the business of this embassy to deny the truth. The first lie was, "Ye shall not surely die." The supreme lie of antichrist now is, "Jesus is not the Son of God." Wherever that lie flourishes, no saving truth can live. The forms in which it is now put are legion!
V THESE ERROR-INSPIRED SPIRITS OWE THEIR INSPIRATION TO A PERSONAL LEADER. Verse 4, oJ ejn tw kosmw. The apostle sets forth here the personality of the evil one, as the one animating leader of the false prophets, just as vividly as our Lord set forth the personality of the devil as the father of lies. Difficult as the doctrine undoubtedly is, it is far less so than any theory of moral evil which represents it as having its seat in no one, and nowhere. (cf 2Co_4:4; Eph_2:2; Joh_8:44) The fact is, neither the beginnings nor the endings of sin are shown us in the word. We only know what lies within the revealed termini.
VI GREAT AS IS THE POWER OF EVIL WHICH IS IN THE WORLD, THERE IS A GREATER POWER IN BELIEVERS. Meizwn ejstin oJ ejn uJmin. Satan is mighty, but there is a Mightier. The strong one has been vanquished by a Stronger (Mat_12:28, 29 4:11; John Col_2:15; Joh_12:31) The evil one proved no match for Jesus Christ the Righteous when he sought to prevail against him in the desert. By the cross Satan was dethroned and Christ enthroned. And not all the band of hell-taught emissaries with which the world and the Church may be plagued for a while will ever overthrow the Spirit, the army, and the saving work of Christ. "God will bruise Satan under our feet shortly.
VII THIS GREATER POWER IS "OF GOD." The Divine Spirit may take possession of the human spirit. He does. The life of God in the soul of man is the great secret of personal religion. As bearing on our present theme, there are four ways in which God"s Spirit may influence man"s.
1. By what has been called "prevenient grace;" where the Spirit of God goes beforehand, and predisposes him to hear God"s Word. Our Lord spake of this, in words which have never yet been sufficiently laid hold of by the Church. (Joh_8:47)
2. By regenerating grace. When a man is born of God, that wicked onetoucheth him not.
3. By the unction from above. (1Jn_2:20; see homily on 1Jn_2:20, 1Jn_2:27) This imparts spiritual discernment.
4. By the ardour and courage of a holy combativeness. (Eph_6:10-17)
VIII WHERESOEVER THIS DIVINE POWER IS GIVEN, THE POWER OF ANTICHRIST IS GONE. Nenikhkate aujtouv. "Them." All of them. "Ye have overcome them." You have already gained the victory! Your Lord"s triumph is yours. On those who have in them the Spirit of God, antichrist can have no hold. So Paul. (1Co_12:3) All depends on men being filled with the Spirit. If a man has not the Spirit of God, he will not say, "Jesus is Lord." If a man has the Spirit of God, he will not say, "Jesus is anathema." Against antichrist he will have an effectual guard. How will this be? Thus, by the teaching and power of the Spirit, he will be enabled
(1) to perceive,
(2) to receive, and
(3) to hold fast the truth.
He will be enabled
(1) to detect,
(2) to expose,
(3) to combat, and
(4) to overcome the error.
Note:
1. It is an unspeakable mercy to have the Spirit dwelling within us; byvirtue of his unction, light, and might we shall have an inward and effective guard against the heresies of this and of every age. The possession of spiritual religion will be, as the late Rev. J.A. James expressed it, the surest preservative against the snares of infidelity and the seductions of a false philosophy.
2. It is by means of the conflict that the believer is himself confirmed in thetruth. We do not envy the man who shrinks from open conflict against error on the behalf of Christian truth. Such timidity argues either little faith in the power of the truth, or else small trust in the power of his Saviour. Let him in Christ"s strength go forth to war, and when he is more than conqueror through him who loved him, he will have learnt a lesson of priceless worth in the power of Christ and the impotence of antichrist!
HOMILIES BY R. FINLAYSON Vers. 1-6.
The spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
I NEED FOR TESTING. "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world." Again, at the thought of danger, his heart warms toward his readers as his beloved. It is necessary to bear in mind the circumstances in which they were placed. They had the help of true prophets. The apostolic age had not come to an end. John was still living; and there were others who had inspired utterance. They had that for which some minds still crave infallible guidance on the spot. But they were not placed beyond danger, as minds never are in this world. Many false prophets had gone out into the world, and were in their neighbourhood, as they are in all neighbourhoods where Christ"s truth is published and finding acceptance. The false prophets are Satan"s counterpoise to the true prophets, and, as the true prophets were really under Divine inspiration, the false prophets claimed to be under Divine inspiration too. For that lie best succeeds which is made to bear the closest resemblance to the truth that is active. Christianity was at that time wonderfully active in many places. How was it to be counteracted? We can understand that forming the subject of evil counsel. One way was to incorporate Judaism with Christianity. Another way was to incorporate Gentile philosophy with Christianity, to which the name of Gnosticism is given. The general drift of Gnosticism is to substitute, for the plain facts of the gospel, philosophic myths. Cerinthus, who was a contemporary of John in proconsular Asia, is described by Neander as "the intermediate link between the Judaizing and the Gnostic sects." "As a Judaizer, Cerinthus held, with the Ebionites, that Jesus was only the son of Joseph and Mary, born in the natural way. As a Gnostic, he maintained that the Christ first descended, in the form of a dove, on the carpenter"s son at his baptism; that he revealed to him the unknown Father, and worked miracles through him; and that at length he took his flight, and left him, so that Jesus alone suffered and rose, while the Christ remained impassible." There is reason for believing that this was the particular danger, or something not unlike it, which beset the circle or circles to which John writes in this Epistle. There therefore arose a necessity for discriminating between the true prophets and the false prophets, that the one class might be followed and the others shunned. How was this necessity to be met? Only by the action of the Christians themselves. The duty of discrimination is here laid upon them. For this they were not specially inspired; but they had the ordinary assistance of the Holy Spirit. Observe the language in which the duty is described. "Believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world." They were not enjoined to sit in judgment upon the prophets as individuals, but in respect of their prophetic teachings, which they claimed to have received from God. There were spirits of God to whom afterward is attributed the confessing of Christ; and there were spirits not of God to whom afterward is attributed the refusal to confess Christ, the organs of the latter being the false prophets. How are we to understand this plurality of spirits? Are we to think of the spirits of the prophets as objectified? or are we to think of spirits as connected with separate movements, finding their organs in prophets true or false? The latter view is not excluded by the language; but we know very little of the sphere in question. The practical thing is that there are true teachers and false teachers, between whom a discrimination has to be made. The Christian ministry should be in the service of truth; but it would be vain to think that the teaching from every Christian pulpit is true. There are times when many go forth from our theological halls with rationalistic tendencies. What are Christian people to do? They are not to believe every spirit. Whoever the Christian teacher is, the influence resting upon him and giving character to his utterances must be tested, to see whether it is of God. There are teachers rising up from time to time of commanding ability. They are, or seem to be, burdened with a message for their age. Their influence extends beyond the readers of their books or listeners to their orations. It is soon to be found in novels, in magazines, in newspapers, in conversation. What are Christian people to do. They are to discriminate, they are not to believe every spirit; they are to satisfy themselves that the influence present in the teaching is of God before they yield themselves to it. If they are not satisfied, then they must do what they can to make themselves impervious to, or vigorously to counteract, the influence. For very much depends on what teaching we receive through all channels, it being either for our spiritual advancement or for our spiritual deterioration.
II THE TEST TO BE APPLIED. "Hereby know ye the Spirit of God.
1. Positive. "Every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God." Teaching is to be judged in relation to Christ. It is due to Christ that there should be an open declaration in his favour. The object of confession is (strictly) Jesus Christ come in the flesh. It is to be borne in mind that Jesus is the historical name. It is admitted on all sides that "one Jesus" lived about nineteen hundred years ago, and that his influence has extended far and wide. What account is to be given of this Personage? The right teaching is that which confesses him to be the Christ. This is in agreement with 1Jn_2:22. Cerinthus taught that the Christ had a temporary abode in Jesus; the Christian teacher declares Jesus to be the Christ. But the Christ refers us to Divinity, eternal Sonship, with which we associate ideas of immateriality, invisibility, impassibility, exemption from death. This was virtually the understanding of Cerinthus, and his way of accounting for the ordinary manifestations of humanity in Jesus was that he was only apparently the Christ. This was the usual solution of the difficulty by the Gnostics. The right teaching is that Jesus is Christ come in the flesh. That is to say, the true solution is the Incarnation. Christ is Divine, and as such we can think of him as essentially immaterial, invisible, impassible, undying; and. yet he is human, and as such there could be connected with him materiality, visibility, suffering, death. The Incarnation is well worthy of being made the great object of confession. For it proclaims the wonderful and indissoluble union between God and man with a view to human redemption, which sometimes tends to repel by its strangeness. It proclaims a new and unexpected outlet for Divine love, transcending all finite power of thought, to be estimated adequately only by him in whose heart the love burned. In this view we obtain facts which are rich in meaning. We first stand in presence of his birth, when the mysterious union commenced. We are amazed as we contemplate him growing up to manhood. We behold him setting himself to his work, and proving himself
2. in a threefold encounter with the tempter. We are overwhelmed with awe to think of him, in death, passing under the eclipse of the Father"s countenance. We are profoundly interested to behold him rising from the dead, and to think of him as passing into the heavens in our glorified nature. That is the right kind of teaching which deals with these facts, puts them forward for the grasp of faith, uses them for the clearing of thought and the stirring up of love.
3. Negative. "And every spirit which confesseth not Jesus is not of God: and this is the spirit of the antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it cometh; and now it is in the world already." The true confession has been defined; this is its contradiction. There is implied a certain knowledge of Christianity. The news has gone forth that God has become incarnate for human salvation. It is news which is fitted to arrest, and leaves no excuse for want of inquiry into the question of fact. Every teacher especially should have his mind made up with regard to it. The apostle lays it down as the test of a true confession. By this Cerinthus and other Gnostic teachers were to be condemned. They found a way of avoiding the Incarnation, and thus took away the impression of the great love of God manifested toward men. The same thing is done by the Unitarians now. They withhold acknowledgment from Jesus. Many of their teachers plead for warmth of feeling toward Christ. "Without the passions which move incessantly, like glittering and intense fire, around the Person of Christ, religious teaching will not make men"s hearts so to burn within them as to bring them in crowds to hear and to obey, and to be impelled to become teachers in turn" (Stepford Brooke). They do not, however, leave room for the calling forth of such love, inasmuch as they represent Christ as a mere man, only transcending other men in excellence of character. They do not accept the Incarnation; it is not credible to them; it takes away from the simplicity of the faith. Their declaration must go forward to judgment; a Higher than man will one day pronounce upon its worth. It is an important consideration for our guidance that Unitarianism stands clearly condemned by the apostolic test. It confesses not Jesus, admits not the higher view of his Person and work. There are teachers of great eminence "who occupy rather a negative and undefined position in relation to Christ and Christianity. They have written upon almost every subject of human thought upon government and the Church, upon history and biography, upon morals and destiny. They have gone round the world to find heroes and representative men, and have said many true and striking things about them; but, strange to say, they have never clearly informed the world as to what they think of Christ. They are unaccountably reticent upon a subject that is the most important of all. They allow a painful silence to brood over a Name that is above every name. What can be the meaning of this? Is it because they have no faith in Christ, but do not think it prudent or necessary to profess their unbelief? Can they have faith without professing it? The fact remains that they have thought it their business to act as guides to the world, and have thought it necessary to publish many volumes of their opinions, and. yet have never directly told the world what they think of Christ. That fact remains; and alongside of it the truth remains, "Every spirit which confesseth not Jesus is not of God (F. Ferguson). Of the Corinthian Gnosticism, which set aside the Incarnation, John says that it was the presence of antichrist. So early had the announced opposition to Christ commenced; it still exists under other specious forms. The most radical opposition is that which is directed against the central fact of the Incarnation, which would reduce Christ to the position of a mere human teacher.
III SUCCESS IN APPLYING THE TEST.
1. The fact of victory. "Ye are of God, my little children, and have overcome them." This is another occasion on which the apostle is so affectionate as to call them his little children. He thinks of something which was greatly to their honour..They had overcome the false prophets. We are not told the wiles which were used by these prophets. They pretended to be under Divine inspiration. Very probably they pretended to work miracles. We do not know that they held out the inducement of false pleasures. Whatever the wiles were, in vain were they tried on those to whom John is now writing. They held tenaciously to the fact of the Incarnation, and to its blessed import. Nay, we can understand that they succeeded in separating from their communion all who were not in sympathy with the Incarnation, who for the fact put some fanciful idea. "They went out from us," it is said of these prophets in chapter 2:19, which, taken in connection with what is said here, gives us an impression of their moral defeat. There needed to be no recourse to the disciplinary power of excommunication; they went out when they could no longer endure the power of the truth.
2. The ground of victory. "Because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world." The Divine Person is left undefined. We naturally think of Christ in the Spirit. For the victory lies in discrimination; and John"s conception of their qualification is their having an anointing from the Holy One. As qualified in the same way, Christ had to fight. He was brought into conflict with him that is in the world. All attempts were made to delude him, to lead him to abandon the Father"s cause; but he conquered. "Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out." As the hour approaches, he announces his victory for the encouragement of his followers: "Be of good cheer; I have conquered the world." John"s friends conquered too, because greater was he that was in them than he that was in the false prophets, and in the world to which properly these belonged, though they had once been connected with the communion of Christians. Christ is in us by his Spirit, to unmask all designs on us, to expose all fallacies, to disclose all the beauties of truth. He that is in the world has great power of delusion; but we can think of it as vanquished, and we can think of the victory as sure for us in the power of his Spirit which is within us as our equipment. Therefore let us be of good cheer.
3 . The manner of victory.
(1) Discrimination in respect of the false prophets. "They are of the world: therefore speak they as of the world, and the world heareth them." How are false prophets to be known? They are the birth of a worldly state of society, they give utterance to worldly sentiment, they gain worldly applause. As for the Incarnation, it is remote from their thoughts; it is too high for their low origin; it is too self-abasing, too self-restraining. Let a field be sought where looser sentiment may be uttered, or where there may be a grim handling of abuses and unrealities and failings, and, if there is only sufficient vis in the teacher, certain men will loudly applaud.
(2) Discrimination in respect of the true prophets. "We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he who is not of God heareth us not." How are true prophets to be known? They may be said to be the birth of a quickened Church; they are here represented as the birth of God. They teach about God, and they set forth the Incarnation as the grandest manifestation of what God is as the fact of facts and the truth of truths. He that is in the school of God, and seeks to advance in the knowledge of God, is attracted to them; while he who is not yet born of God is repelled from them. "I have set thee," says God to Jeremiah, "for a tower and a fortress among my people, that thou mayest know and try their way." Marking of the discrimination. "By this we know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error." We are to understand the principle laid down. By it we discriminate between the spirit of truth resting on the true teachers, and the spirit of wandering resting on the false teachers. There is implied the test of the Incarnation. According as teachers are attracted to it do they come into the light of God; according as they are repelled from it do they wander themselves, and lead away others, into the darkness. R.F.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits…
1Jn_4:1-3
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God
Read full note →
The test of truth--confessing Christ
In the Word of God we are warned against sitting in judgment on others.
Especially are we enjoined not to cultivate a censorious and uncharitable spirit. But in the text Christians seem to be enjoined to exercise their powers of judgment and discrimination in another way. They are called upon to try the spirits whether they are of God. To try a spirit is not to try an individual; it is not to try even a community of men; rather is it to put to the test of enlightened reason some principle they follow as true, some institution they uphold as right.
I. The scientific false prophet; or antiChrist in the schools, especially in connection with the study and interpretation of nature. There are three points in the scientific world that appear to be prominent. These points are--first, that our highest business here is to study nature--that nature at least in relation to this present life is supreme; second, that natural or physical law is absolutely uniform or unbending, and has been so since the creation of the universe; third, that the human race is to be elevated, regenerated, or truly developed from the basis of nature, and in accordance merely with natural laws. Now, if it really were so, we can have no hesitation in saying that the position and claims of the Christian religion are quite incompatible with it. If the dream of such thinkers were destined to be realised, Christianity must slowly fade from the earth, with other superstitions. It is only too evident what the spirit and hope of such systems is. Take the first position--that nature or the visible material scene around us is the supreme influence and power in relation to our life upon the earth. That involves the denial of a Divine revelation. Take the second position--that for incalculable ages Nature has been undeviating in her course. That law maintains its slow, grand march through millions of years, without deviation, acceleration, or interruption. That may be thought a grand idea; but as it is advanced in certain systems, it is not a true one; for it is a shutting out of the miraculous altogether. Take the third position--that man is saved by obedience to natural law, and that the human race will be elevated and ennobled only as men study the laws of nature, and conform themselves to them. That is a doctrine put forth by some. It looks with a sinister and disparaging eye on Christianity and the Church. It does not hesitate sometimes to say that all religions have been a misfortune to the world. When the plague comes this spirit declares that prayer is useless, and that the only thing that can save us is to perfect our sanitary arrangements. This is a spirit of antichrist, for it is the denial of a moral government in the Scriptural sense of the word.
II. The secular false prophet; or antichrist in the kingdoms of the world. In as far as the kingdoms of the world are necessary to maintain order, to suppress violence, and repel invasion, they are the ordinance of God, but in so far as they perpetuate injustice and wrong, of course they cannot be of God; they are babels and antichrists, standing in the way of His kingdom who has the absolute right to rule. Now it is the duty of everyone to whom the light of the gospel comes to become a subject of the kingdom of Christ. That light will show him what is wrong in existing systems. It will show him that some of them are fundamentally wrong, but it will not teach him to remedy that wrong by violence and revolution. The eternal moral principle that truth and justice cannot be permanently advanced by mere physical force, enters into the foundation of Christs kingdom. And if anyone asks, How then are we to hold our own in the world? the only answer that can be given is, that it is our duty to do as Christ did. Because God lives all those who have faith in Him will live also.
III. The literary false prophet; or antichrist in the world of letters. This is a time of great thinkers, great writers, great bookmakers. We do not speak of individuals. We have no right to judge them; but their works we may judge, and the spirit of their works we may try whether it is of God or no. Now we know that some of the greatest works in the world are books written in defence of Christianity; but it is also true that some writers of considerable power have taken up positive ground against Christianity and have sufficiently shown that they do not believe that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. They do not believe in Him as the eternal Son of God, and the only Saviour of men. Some of them have written books expressly to deny this. But this is not so much what the text suggests. There are other writers of great power and influence in both hemispheres of the world who occupy rather a negative and undefined position in relation to Christ and Christianity. They have written upon almost every subject of human thought--upon government and the Church, upon history and biography, upon morals and destiny. They have gone round the world to find heroes and representative men, and have said many true and striking things about them; but, strange to say, they have never clearly informed the world as to what they think of Christ. They are unaccountably reticent upon a subject that is the most important of all.
IV. The religious false prophet; or antichrist in the ecclesiastical world. The antichrist of an atheistical, political system; of a poor, blind, hero worship--the worship of mere intellectual ability and unfathomable cunning; and the antichrist of a barren Protestantism which has a name to live while it is dead--such forms as these are little better than the Papacy.
V. The social false prophet; or antichrist in the work of everyday life. That is the most deadly form of antichrist which professes great respect for Christianity, but lives in continual opposition to its principles; and we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that a great amount of the Christian profession of this country seems little more than a mere profession. This is called a Christian country, but look at the woes that are festering in the midst of us; think of the rank worldliness and heartlessness that is baptized into the name of Christ. Is this not the reason why prayer seems unanswered, and troubles are thickening upon the land? (F. Ferguson, D. D.)
Our righteousness exercised in trying the spirits; the test, confessing that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh
I. It properly belongs to the Spirit to confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. He had much to do with the flesh in which Jesus Christ came. He prepared for Him a body in the Virgins womb, so as to secure that He came into the world pure and sinless. And all throughout His sojourn on earth the Spirit ministered to Him as Jesus Christ come in the flesh; He could not minister to Him otherwise. It is the flesh, or humanity, of Jesus Christ that brings Him within the range of the Spirits gracious care. It was His human experience that the Spirit animated and sustained; and it is with His human experience also that the Spirit deals when He takes of what is Christs and shows it unto us. His object is to make us one with Jesus Christ as come in the flesh. That practically is His confession to us and in us. Let us see what it implies.
1. He identifies us with Jesus Christ in His humiliation. In our Divine regeneration He brings us to be subject to the authority and commandments of God--willingly subject--our nature being renewed into the likeness of His.
2. The Spirit identifies us with Jesus Christ, not only in His humiliation, but in its conditions and liabilities. His coming in the flesh is His consenting to be crucified for us; the Spirit in us confessing Him as come in the flesh makes us willing to be crucified with Him. In my flesh I shall see God was the hope of the patriarch Job. It is made sure by Jesus Christ come in the flesh, and by the Spirit confessing in us that He is come.
II. This accordingly is the secret of our present victory over anti-Christian spirits and men: Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them (verse 4).
1. The victory is a real victory got over the false prophets or teachers, who are not of God, whom the spirit of antichrist inspires. And it is a victory over them personally; not over their doctrines and principles merely, but over themselves--ye have overcome them. It is the actual coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh, and His actual accomplishment, in the flesh, of all that in the flesh He came for, that they resent and resist. It is that which Satan, the original spirit of antichrist, would fain have set himself to hinder; moving Herod to slay Jesus in His childhood, and Judas to betray Him in his manhood; tempting Jesus to make shipwreck of His integrity. And it is your actual personal participation with Him, as Jesus Christ come in the flesh; your being really one with Him in that wondrous humiliation, in its spirit and its fruit; that, so far as you are concerned, they seek to frustrate. In realising that, you get the better of them; confessing thus Jesus Christ come in the flesh, you have overcome them.
2. Your having overcome them is connected with your being of God (verse 4); which again is intimately connected with your confessing that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh (verse 2). Your being of God is the intermediate link between your confessing thus Jesus Christ is come in the flesh (verse 2), and your having overcome them who reject that truth (verse 4). The essential characteristic of the spirit of antichrist is that it is not of God. It does not look at the Saviour and the salvation as on the side of God; rather it takes an opposite view, and subjects God to man. It subordinates everything to human interests and human claims; looks at everything from a human and mundane point of view; measures everything by a human standard; submits everything to human opinion--in a word, conceives and judges of God after the manner of man. This, indeed, may be said to be the distinctive feature of all false religions, as well as of all corruptions of the true religion. They exalt man. They dislike such representations as bring in the element of Gods holy name and righteous authority, and lay much stress upon that element as one of primary consideration in the plan of saving mercy. Hence they naturally shrink from owning explicitly Jesus Christ as come in the flesh to make atonement by satisfying Divine justice. But ye are of God, little children, in this matter; in the view that you take, and the conception that you form of Jesus Christ come in the flesh; of the end of His coming, and the manner in which that end is attained. You look at that great fact, first and chiefly in its relation to God, and as on the side of God. It is from God and for God that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. So He always taught; and so you firmly believe. You sit at the feet of Jesus Christ come in the flesh. You stand beside His Cross. You do not now stumble at the mystery of its bloody expiation; or quarrel with the great propitiation sacrifice through unbelief of its necessity. Nay, being of God, on His side and in His interest in the whole of this great transaction, you can meekly, in faith, commit to Him and leave in His hands even the most terrible of those ultimate and eternal consequences, involving the aggravated guilt and final ruin of many, that you cannot but see to be inseparably mixed up with the confession that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. (R. S. Candlish, D. D.)
Testing false teachers
I. The general counsel--Beloved, believe not every spirit, etc. Those who are called spirits in the first part of it are denominated prophets in the last. They are the ministers of the Word, whether they write or preach it. They are supposed to be under the dominion of other spirits. These may be good, or they may be evil. Such being the position of the teachers of the Church, we must at once perceive the propriety of the counsel which is given respecting them. Believe not every spirit. You are not to suppose because a man is a minister he must be sound in his views, or faithful in his office, or exemplary in his life. All professing ministers must be tested by members of the Church. Nor let us fail particularly to notice what is to be tried in the matter of all ministers of the Word. It is whether they are of God. How solemn the duty! Has God sent them? Do they bear their credentials from Him? Do they speak His truth? Do they maintain His cause? Do they promote His glory? A reason is assigned for this duty, Because many false prophets are gone out into the world. It was so even in the days of the apostles. All their influence, and zeal, and fidelity could not prevent it. The opponents of the truth were many--many in numbers, many in their forms of error, and many in the spirit and practices of enmity which they discovered. It is, therefore, no strange thing that happens if the same be found in all subsequent ages. Nor let us overlook the powerful motive by which the members of the Church are urged to fidelity in the duty here required of them. Compassion for false teachers should operate on them. Their guilt is great and we should earnestly seek to deliver them from it. What is the crime of the man who sets up a false light on the dangerous shore? Such is that of the false teacher. But it is not he only that is concerned. Our Lord has said, If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. In like manner they who mislead the members of the Church draw them with themselves to destruction. Above all, if we encourage false teachers we are held accountable with them and shall be partakers in their condemnation.
II. Having given this general counsel the apostle proceeds to give a particular illustration of both the error that might be introduced and of the duty of opposing it in the subsequent verses--hereby know ye the spirit of God, etc. There are signs by which the minister who is under the teaching and influence of the Spirit of God may be known. What are they? They are both positive and negative. Every spirit that confesseth, etc.
1. To confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is to own the Divinity of His mission.
2. To confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is to own the Divinity of His person.
3. To confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is to own the grace of both His mission and His person (2Co_8:9).
4. Finally, to confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is to own Him to be an all-sufficient Saviour. (J. Morgan, D. D.)
The springs and motives of false pretences to the Holy Spirit; with the rules and marks of trying and detecting them
These words very plainly pointed at the false pretenders to the Spirit, appearing in those early days.
I. From what springs or motives the false pretences to the spirit generally proceed. Vainglory, or a thirst after fame, is often the most prevailing motive. But to go a little deeper; self-love, of some kind or other, is the general root of all. Who does not wish to be one of the favourites of heaven, and to be extraordinarily illuminated, or conducted by Gods Holy Spirit? When the pleasing delusion is once indulged thus far, the man begins presently to fancy himself a kind of saint upon earth, or perhaps an apostle. It is not to be doubted but that persons of this unhappy complexion must have some appearances whereby to deceive their own hearts.
II. By what rules or marks any pretences of that kind may be tried, and detected to be false and vain.
1. Boasting and ostentation are a flat contradiction to the very supposal of the ordinary graces boasted of; because humility and modesty are the very chief graces upon which all the rest hang.
2. Another sure, mark of a false spirit is disobedience to rule and order, contempt of lawful authority, and especially any intruding into what does not belong to them.
3. Another sure mark of a false spirit is the laying down deceitful rules or tokens whereby to judge, whether or when a man has the spirit of God. There have been many who have laid great stress upon I know not what sensible emotions, or violent impulses, coming upon them at times.
III. How much it concerns us to be upon our guard in such cases. Religion, like all other weighty concernments, is best carried on in the calm, regular, and sedate way; and there fore great care should be taken to keep up the old and well-tried methods, rather than to change them for new devices, which will never answer. (D. Waterland, D. D.)
Rules for trial of the spirits
I. What rules they had in the apostles days to try the spirits, and to distinguish the false prophets or teachers from the true.
1. The miraculous gifts which were then bestowed upon the true prophets or teachers.
2. Their obedience and subjection to the apostles of our Blessed Saviour, as the great directors of their ministry.
3. The agreement of their doctrine with the doctrines taught by Christ and His apostles.
II. What rules there are in our days, to know and distinguish them so as that the honest and well-meaning Christians may not be imposed upon by false prophets or teachers.
1. If men pretend to come to us with an extraordinary message from God, or boast of an extraordinary inspiration, such as the apostles had, we may justly require of them to give the same, or the like extraordinary proof of it.
2. If they pretend to no more than a common and ordinary assistance of Gods Holy Spirit, such as any good man may lay claim to, then are they subject to Christ and His apostles, and obey those orders and injunctions they have left us in the New Testament.
3. If anyone, though never so regularly called to the office of the ministry, should preach a doctrine contrary to the doctrine of the gospel, such a teacher is not to be heard--his spirit cannot be from God.
Conclusion:
1. From what has been said we may learn to make a true judgment of those who take upon them the office of preachers.
2. We should take care that the wild notions and practices of these men do not create a prejudice in us, and possess us with a less esteem for religion in general, or any particular doctrines of Christianity; for there is nothing so good but may be mistaken or abused, and an ill use made of it.
3. That God assists good men, both in the knowledge and practice of their duty, by the secret operation of His Holy Spirit, is a plain and certain doctrine of Christianity; but that the motions of the Holy Spirit are to be distinguished from the natural workings of our own minds, or the suggestions of the evil spirit by anything to be felt in these motions themselves, does not appear from Holy Scripture. The only way we have to distinguish them is to bring them to the standard of truth, and those rules of right and wrong, of good and evil, which are fixed and certain. (Chas. Peters, M. A.)
The duty of testing the spirits
I. The faith of the Christian rests upon inward conviction, not on outward authority.
1. Scripture proof of this.
(1) We are commanded to test the doctrines delivered to us. (1Th_5:21; 1Co_2:10; 1Co_2:14-15; 1Co_10:15).
(2) The foundation of our faith is declared to be such (Joh_6:45; Joh_14:26; Joh_16:13; Eph_2:18; Eph_4:21; 1Th_4:9; Heb_8:10-11; 1Jn_2:27; also Rom_14:5; Col_2:2; 1Th_1:5).
2. The occasions on which the apostles spoke with authority of their own had to do with minor matters. The gospel they had to deliver was entrusted to them from above, (1Co_9:16; Gal_1:8-9). Over that they had no power, (Eph_3:2-3; Col_1:25; 1Ti_1:11).
II. Yet outward authority has its own function in the Church of God. It deals, not with the truths of Christianity itself, but with rules and ordinances, which touch, not the essence of the Churchs life, but its details.
III. The true limits of outward authority. Every society must have its rules. Our conscience must be satisfied that there is nothing wrong in principle in these rules.
IV. By what test are we to try the spirits?
V. There are many errors abroad. St. John warns the Christians of his day against error. The warning is equally necessary now. It needs not to specify instances. They fall under four heads:
(1) traditional corruptions of the faith, whether in a Roman or a Protestant direction;
(2) new revelations, such as Swedenborgianism, Irvingism, or Mormonism;
(3) neglect of portions of revealed truth, such as has often led to the formation of sects; and
(4) denial of all revelation, as in the various forms of infidelity. (J. J. Lias, M. A.)
The true and false spirits
In this world there appears to be no truth without its counterfeit, no religion without hypocrites, no gold without tinsel, nor good wheat of God unmixed with tares. Christ is mimicked by Antichrist. Indeed, the more active is religious thought and life in any period, so much the more numerous and plausible are likely to be the forms of religious delusion and imposture. St. John has set forth in his last paragraph (1Jn_3:19-24) the grounds of a Christian mans assurance; he has traced it to its spring in the gift of the Spirit, who first kindled the life of God within ourselves. But, alas! even on this point deception is possible, and a warning is necessary. Beloved, he interjects, dont be believing every spirit, but test the spirits, to see whether they are of God. It is a common but perilous mistake occurring even in books of Christian evidence, to treat the supernatural as synonymous with the Divine. One is amazed at the facility with which many religious minded people fall into the meshes of spiritualism. Let them be persuaded that they are witnessing manifestations from another world, and they bow to them at once as Divine revelation, without considering their intrinsic character, their moral worth, their agreement with Scripture and established truth. Let it be proved to me that certain phenomena are spiritual, and I say, Very possibly; but there are many spirits abroad in the world--some of them from the pit! The Apostle Paul had had to deal with a similar opposition at Corinth, with spiritual and prophetical manifestations that contravened his teaching. And he speaks in 1Co_12:10 of the discerning of spirits, the power to distinguish genuine from spurious inspiration, as a supernatural grace bestowed upon certain members of the Church. On the same point he wrote to the Thessalonians earlier (verses 19, 20). Our Lord Himself foretold in His last discourses the rise of false Christs and false prophets to deceive the Church. The false prophet figures side by side with the wild beast in his visions in the Apocalypse, representing a corrupt form of religion abetting a cruel and persecuting worldly power. Elymas, the Jewish sorcerer of Paphos, was a specimen of this kind of trader in the supernatural (Act_13:6). In the later Old Testament times such upstarts were numerous, men who professed to speak by revelation in Jehovahs name, and who brought a more popular message than the true prophets, and for gain flattered the rulers and the multitude to their destruction. This last feature appears in St. Johns false prophets: They are of the world--animated by its spirit and tastes; therefore they speak of the world (they utter what it prompts; they give back to the world its own ideas, and tickle its ear with its vain fancies), and the world heareth them. Along with their worldly spirit, it is false doctrine rather than miracles or lying predictions that supplies the chief mark of the class of men denounced by our apostle. Accordingly, he puts them through a theological examination: he uses for their touchstone the Incarnate Deity of Jesus. In this way the apostle comes round again to the subject of 1Jn_2:18-29, and the great conflict there announced between Christ and Antichrist. It is evident, from the whole Epistle, that the burning question of controversy just then was the nature of Jesus Christ--the reality of His bodily form, and the consistency of His seeming fleshly life with His higher Divine origin and being.
1. St. Johns crucial test of Christian belief lies, then, in the true confession of Christ Himself. In this, says the apostle, you may know the Spirit of God. One may repeat a creed glibly enough, and yet be very far from confessing Jesus Christ. We can only apprehend Him, and lay hold of the person of Christ with a realising mental grasp, by the aid of the Spirit of God: No man can say Jesus is Lord, declared the other theological apostle, except in the Holy Ghost (1Co_12:3; Mat_16:17). But mark the precise form given to this proof question by St. John: Every spirit that confesseth Jesus Christ come in flesh. The content of this confession is variously construed by interpreters. Some read it, confesseth Jesus Christ as come in flesh--that is, as the incarnate Messiah. I do not think that either grammatical usage or the doctrinal situation points to this construction. Others, confesseth Jesus Christ to be come in flesh; but this makes Jesus Christ the specific name of Godhead, equivalent by itself to the Son of God (else it is no antithesis to come in flesh); and this is not at all obvious, nor John-like. We must read the expression as one continuous object: Confesseth Jesus Christ come in flesh. To confess Jesus Christ is to confess the human Jesus, known in the gospel history, as the declared Messiah of God; and to confess Him come, in flesh, is to confess the Godhead in the humanity, to acknowledge Him as indubitable man, but more than man--to confess, in short, the Word made flesh. For, of course, when you speak of one as come (arrived) in flesh, it is assumed that he has issued from some other, spiritual region, and that his flesh is the garb of a higher nature; otherwise the words are pointless (Joh_16:28). St. Pauls watchword of confession in 1Co_12:3, belonged to the stage of conflict with original Jewish unbelief. As the Messiahship of the Nazarene was preached, the spirit of evil cried out--and Paul had frequently been thus interrupted in the Jewish synagogue--Jesus is anathema, accursed of God! He was justly crucified; He is the abhorred, and not the elect of Israel! But it is a more developed and subtle kind of error, bred within the Church, that is here unmasked. Christ is no longer, in St. Johns Ephesian circle, the disputed title of the crucified Jesus; it is His accepted designation; and the words Jesus Christ have coalesced by this time into the familiar name of the Redeemer. The rising Gnosticism of Johns day separated the words in a new fashion, by metaphysical analysis, not by historical distinction. The new prophets recoiled not from a crucified Messiah, but from a humanised God. Now St. Johns formula is precisely opposed to this popular heresy of Asia Minor, which tradition imputes to Cerinthus, the apostles personal antagonist. To confess Jesus Christ come in flesh is to declare the oneness of His Divine-human person as an abiding certainty, not from His baptism, but from His birth and onwards. (Note the force of the Greek perfect eleluthota, arrived, come for good and all.) The bearing of the expression is indicated by the marginal reading of the Revised Version in verse 3, which is probably a very ancient gloss upon the text: Every spirit which dissolveth Jesus is not of God. In this latter negative clause (verse 3a) it is to be observed the apostle writes Jesus with the Greek definite article, as much as to say this Jesus--the Jesus thus defined--Jesus as the Church knows Him, as the apostles preached Him. He it is whom the spirit of error rejects, and whose Person it would dissolve and destroy.
2. This brings us to St. Johns second test of true doctrine in the Church, the general consent of Christian believers. The teaching he denounced was repudiated by the Church; it found acceptance only in the outside world. The seductions of the false prophets are overcome by Johns little children, because they are born of God; there is in them a Spirit greater than the spirit that lives in the world. Plausible as the new teaching was, and powerful through its accord with the current of prevailing thought, St. Johns readers, as a body, had rejected it. They felt it could not be true. They had struggled with the network of error flung about them, and broken through the snare. They had received an anointing (the chrism which makes Christians) from the Holy One, in virtue of which they know the truth, and detect, as by an inner, instinctive sense, the lie which is its counterfeit (1Jn_2:20). Admittedly this test, taken by itself, is not easy to apply. The orthodoxy that prevails in any one Church, or at any given moment, is not necessarily the orthodoxy of the Spirit of God. You must take a sufficiently large area to get the consensus of Christian faith, and you must take the central and primary truths, not questions such as those of the three orders in Church government, or the refinements of the Quinquarticular controversy. The danger lies with us, not in the difficulty that attends a formal adoption of this confession of Christ, but in the ease with which men accept it in words but deny it in heart and life.
3. St. John in verse 6 clinches the two previous tests of the true or false spirits at work in the Church by a third--that of agreement with the apostolic testimony. You are of God, he declared in verse 4; but now adds, speaking for himself and his brother witnesses who had seen and handled the Word made flesh (1Jn_1:1-3), We are of God: and men are shown to be of God or not of God by the sole fact of their hearing or refusing us. This was an enormous assumption to make, a piece of boundless arrogance, if it was not simple truth. But the claim has now the endorsement of eighteen centuries behind it. He that knows God (ho ginoskon, verse 5) is, strictly, he who is getting-to-know--the learner of God, the true disciple, the seeker after Divine truth. Is it not to the teaching of the New Testament that such men, all the world over, are infallibly drawn when it comes within their knowledge? They follow it, they listen to the Gospel and the Epistles, as the eye follows the dawning light and the intent ear the breaking of sweet music and the famished appetite the scent of wholesome food. The soul that seeks God, from whatever distance, knows when it hears the words of this Book that its quest is not in vain; it is getting what it wants! (G. G. Findlay, B. A.)
A caution against fanaticism
There is in the human mind a strong propensity: to believe in supernatural communications; and where fancy is ardent, and the power of reflection little cultivated, this propensity renders men either so credulous as to believe in the arrogant pretensions of others, or so vain as to set up their own. Here then we must inquire into the state of our own convictions. Have we the least reason to suppose that God will act upon our minds or those of others either in revealing new truths, or in explaining old, or in making us acquainted with future events, by any influence out of the ordinary course of His providence? We know but one way of accrediting a messenger from God; and that is by the power of working miracles. But amongst the pretenders to a Divine commission, not one has been found since the first age of Christianity who has established his claim upon this ground. It is finished. All the truths are promulgated which it concerns us to know; and all the miracles have been performed which were necessary to convince us that they are truths from God. To look after this for new revelations, new prophets, new miracles, is to despise the gospel of Christ, and to turn His grace into wantonness. But though we ought upon this ground to lend a deaf ear to anyone who in these times assumes a preternatural knowledge of the designs of God, this of itself will not guard us against the indulgence of a fanatical spirit. There are many who, though they believe in the sufficiency of Scripture, and in consequence reject such claims as we have just been exposing, yet entertain a notion not much less absurd, that the true sense of Scripture is revealed to them by the Spirit of God; whilst all those who do not admit their interpretation are actuated by the spirit of delusion. This is, in effect, to arrogate the gift of inspiration. By what evidence then is this claim supported? They tell you that they possess a certain consciousness of being born again; of having been guided to the truth by the immediate influence of the Holy Ghost. The same consciousness has been alleged, and with the same reason, for the most absurd and the most dangerous notions, political and religious, that ever were broached by the wildest or the weakest heads. But is not another mans consciousness as good as yours? And may not he who holds doctrines directly the reverse of yours persuade himself that he too has the guidance of a Divine spirit? Who then is to judge between you? It should never be forgotten on this subject that the Almighty, in acting upon our minds, acts by stated laws adapted to the nature and circumstances of moral agents. He submits the revelation of His will to the test of our inquiries, and in all essential points it is so plain, that he who runs may read. The natural province of religious feeling lies not in points of faith, but in the exercises of devotion. Here, however, we must still try the spirit in which these feelings are indulged. For here too there is ample scope for delusion. We would not encourage the cold and heartless religion which never rises with delight to the contemplation and worship of that Being who has given us affections, that they may centre in Himself. But to produce this salutary effect our piety must be under the control of rational and sober views; though animated, not extravagant; though earnest, not familiar. Above all, we must not confound those temporary feelings, which are the offspring of accidental circumstances, with that devout habit of the mind which, though less ardent, is more salutary because it acts by a steady and permanent influence. As to what regards our own practice, let us be equally careful to avoid loud pretensions on the one hand, and never to shrink from the open but modest avowal of what we deem important truth on the other. Let us examine our opinions by the standard of the gospel, and try their practical efficacy by their habitual influence upon our temper and conduct. Let us never rest in emotions, however strong, however pious, till they are cherished into good habits. But let us also beware, lest in avoiding the extreme of fanaticism, we run into that of apathy and indifference. (J. Lindsay, D. D.)
Try the spirits
So St. Paul (1Th_5:21). Cf. among the distribution of gifts of the Spirit, those of criticism and discernment (1Co_12:10). The spirit of St. John and St. Paul, however deeply reverential and childlike, is not one of credulous fanaticism, or abject unreasoning submission to authority (1Co_12:10; 1Co_14:29; 1Ti_4:1). It must have been a crisis time in the spiritual world (Rev_9:1-3). We must remember that at Ephesus, and in Asia Minor generally, St. John found not only a heresy of the intellect in Cerinthus and the Gnostics, and a heresy of the senses in the Nicolaitanes, but also a heresy of magic and mysticism. The streets of Ephesus were full of theoleptics and convulsionaries; magical practices and invocations were pursued by the educated with a passionate interest to which modern spiritualism presents but a feeble parallel. St. Paul triumphed for a season (Act_19:17-20). But Persian Magi, with their enchantments and philtres, Egyptian hierophants, Chaldean astrologers, came to Ephesus year after year. Cabalistic letters, called Ephesian letters, were in reputation for their power of healing or divination. Apollonius of Tyana found an enthusiastic reception in Ephesus. It may be added that St. Johns Epistles contain no point of the apostles exercising gifts of healing. (Abp. Wm. Alexander.)
Hereby know ye the Spirit of God--
Characteristic nature of the influences of the Holy Spirit with reference to personal religion
I. The characteristic nature of the influences of the Holy Spirit.
1. Their perfect accordance with the written Word.
2. Self-abasement under a sense of sin.
3. A faithful reliance on the covenanted mercy of God in Christ.
4. A spirit of prayer.
5. It uniformly excites in the soul a principle of love.
6. There is one other point characteristic of the influence of the Holy Spirit within the soul, to which we must advert the influential principle of holiness.
II. The nature of this implanted holiness. It is no abstract reverie about the perfectibility of mans nature--a dream originating in a half-informed imagination. The holiness of the believer has a definite character, and a model no less authoritative than it is luminously distinct. (E. Yoking, M. A.)
Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God--
Christ made a phantom
Did ever human folly go so far as this, asserting the unreality of Christs bodily presence, and making Him but a phantom? Even so is the testimony of history. The apostle had felt the heaving of that breast, the beating of that heart, and he arrayed himself firmly and intelligibly against the philosophy of his times, that really, in effect, made Jesus Christ a phantom--an existence without bodily proportions and substantiality. To exalt the purity of Christ, to make Him the illustrious soul they desired to recognise Him, they were forced to deny the reality of His bodily presence, and maintain that it was but show, without substance. That He actually died upon the Cross they could not allow, and some argued that when the Cross was taken by Simon the Cyrenean, a change was made, and the Cyrenean was actually crucified, while, in his shape and appearance, Jesus passed away. How absurd the conclusions to which theories drive men! Against these ideas the apostle protested. He that professeth not that Christ was really a man, a proper substantiality, is not of God--is not instructed by the Divine Spirit--hath not the truth. There are many who do not weigh well this matter. They deem it of little consequence whether they have an ideal or an historical personage as the embodiment of excellence. They say the idea is sufficient, and rest satisfied with that. They talk of Christianity being as old as creation; that it is but the growth of the idea of the race; but they overlook the essential difference between the effect of a mere idea and an actual person, and that if by any subtlety of metaphysics, or play of poetic fancy, or theological vagary, we make Jesus not to have laboured and suffered, died and rose, as the Gospels represent Him, the real, regenerating power of His example is gone; it is but as fine poetry, or fine music, and the whole of Christs resistance of evil is less than the actors performance. I pity those who thus dismiss Christ as a phantom that has spoken. Dream or reality, fable or historical fact, it is all the same to them. Not so with Johns estimate of what man would need. He that confesseth not that the Christ of whom my Gospel treats, who is there portrayed as I saw Him; he who denies that that excellence came in the flesh, is not of God. He denies Gods greatest benefaction. He accepts not the grandest thing ever done for humanity. He does not believe that the highest ideal of character has been realised. What we want is such a sight of Jesus as will exert a transforming power. It was this kind of seeing Jesus that wrought the vast change which took place in the first centuries of the Christian Church. It gave new elements to thought. It made life more to be desired. It poured into the channel of human activity new forces of civilisation and progress, and every department of social life felt the power of the grandest of all lives. Phantom though He may be to many, Jesus has filled the world with His presence. It cannot be denied. It is a moral, spiritual power. It has its judgment seat in our midst, and men of the world, of the bar and the senate, instead of attempting to set aside His authority when it crosses their path, try their power to bring His consecrated name to the support of their position. Christ is no phantom. He is before us in social usages, laws, institutions--in the best blessings of our homes, the best aids to social improvement, the happiest tendencies of the wondrous activities of the world. (Henry Bacon.)
The object of faith
Three dangers, arising from as many different quarters, seem at this moment to assail the faith of the Church.
1. The first of these springs from the aversion which is very widely felt towards anything approaching to an exact and definite theological system. I speak of that large mass of half-educated minds, the aggregate or average of whose sentiments forms very largely what is commonly called public opinion; I speak of those, too, who aspire to be leaders of that public opinion. Such persons profess the utmost respect for what they believe to be Christianity, but repudiate whatever religion comes before them in a definite and tangible shape. Now, if these minor sceptics would carry out their own views with anything like consistency, they would at least wrong nobody but themselves. Content with denying the possibility of arriving at the truth, they would leave others to enjoy undisturbed their real or fancied possession of it; remembering that if it be impossible to prove that any religious system is true, it must be equally impossible to prove that any religious system is false. They would think it enough to regard creeds and orthodoxy with contemptuous pity, without expressing opinions on a subject upon which they are proud to be ignorant, or raising a clamour against those whose adoption of a fixed standard of belief rebukes their own indifference.
2. The next peril comes from men of a totally different stamp, a nobler sort than the others, persons of strong religious convictions, and professing a rigid orthodoxy of a certain kind. They accept the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, and other doctrines which, whether true or false, are not fundamental. But their creed is out of all keeping and perspective, for they lay but little stress upon the weightier matters of revealed religion; while the objects of present or recent controversy assume an exaggerated importance in their eyes. The end of it is that they become Protestants, or Churchmen, or Arminians, or Supralapsarians, or anything rather than Christians. And if, as is often the case, they have been led to dwell almost exclusively upon what may be called the subjective doctrines of the gospel--those which regard the work of redemption as it reveals itself in the inner man--the danger comes to them in a more subtle shape. For the internal and spiritual character of those doctrines seduces men readily into the belief that the profession of them is a guarantee for spirituality.
3. The third proceeds from persons who profess a perfectly correct belief, while they are not at all spiritual, nor always particularly practical. The true object of the confession is not so properly the Incarnation, as the Saviour regarded as Incarnate. Yet creeds and dogmas have their proper function, so far forth as they give our faith a definite object to fasten on. A Christ who is not come in the flesh would be no Christ at all. (W. B. Jones, M. A.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On vv2, 17 Chapter 3
Chapter 3
THE POLEMICAL ELEMENT IN THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST. JOHN
Read full note →
1Jn_4:2-3
A DISCUSSION (however far from technical completeness) of the polemical element in St. Johns Epistle, probably seems likely to be destitute of interest or of instruction, except to ecclesiastical or philosophical antiquarians. Those who believe the Epistle to be a divine book must, however, take a different view of the matter. St. John was not merely dealing with forms of human error which were local and fortuitous. In refuting them he was enunciating principles of universal import, of almost illimitable application. Let us pass by those obscure sects, those subtle curiosities of error, which the diligence of minute research has excavated from the masses of erudition under which they have been buried; which theologians, like other antiquarians, have sometimes labelled with names at once uncouth and imaginative. Let us fix our attention upon such broad and well-defined features of heresy as credible witnesses have indelibly fixed upon the contemporaneous heretical thought of Asia Minor; and we shall see not only a great precision in St. Johns words, but a radiant image of truth, which is equally adapted to enlighten us in the peculiar dangers of our age.
Controversy is the condition under which all truth must be held, which is not in necessary subject matter-which is not either mathematical or physical. In the case of the second, controversy is active, until the fact of the physical law is established beyond the possibility of rational discussion; until self-consistent thought can only think upon the postulate of its admission. Now in these departments all the argument is on one side. We are not in a state of suspended speculation, leaning neither to affirmation nor denial, which is doubt. We are not in the position of inclining either to one side or the other, by an almost impalpable overplus of evidence, which is suspicion; or by those additions to this slender stock which convert suspicion into opinion. We are not merely yielding a strong adhesion to one side, while we must yet admit, to ourselves at least, that our knowledge is not perfect, nor absolutely manifest-which is the mental and moral position of belief. In necessary subject matter, we know and see with that perfect intellectual vision for which controversy is impossible.
The region of belief must therefore, in our present condition, be a region from which controversy cannot be excluded.
Religious controversialists may be divided into three classes, for each of which we may find an emblem in the animal creation. The first are the nuisances, at times the numerous nuisances, of Churches. These controversialists delight in showing that the convictions of persons whom they happen to dislike, can, more or less plausibly, be pressed to unpopular conclusions. They are incessant fault finders. Some of them, if they had an opportunity, might delight in finding the sun guilty in his daily worship of the many-coloured ritualism of the western clouds. Controversialists of this class, if minute, are venomous, and capable of inflicting a degree of pain quite out of proportion to their strength. Their emblem may be found somewhere in the range of "every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." The second class of controversialists is of a much higher nature. Their emblem is the hawk, with his bright eye, with the forward throw of his pinions, his rushing flight along the woodland skirt, his unerring stroke. Such hawks of the Churches, whose delight is in pouncing upon fallacies, fulfil an important function. They rid us of tribes of mischievous winged errors. The third class of controversialists is that which embraces St. John supremely-such minds also as Augustines in his loftiest and most inspired moments, such as those which have endowed the Church with the Nicene Creed. Of such the eagle is the emblem. Over the grosser atmosphere of earthly anger or imperfect motives, over the clouds of error, poised in the light of the True Sun, with the eagles upward wing and the eagles sunward eye, St. John looks upon the truth. He is indeed the eagle of the four Evangelists, the eagle of God. If the eagle could speak with our language, his style would have something of the purity of the sky and of the brightness of the light. He would warn his nestlings against losing their way in the banks of clouds that lie below him so far. At times he might show that there was a danger or an error whose position he might indicate by the sweep of his wing, or by descending for a moment to strike.
There are then polemics in the Epistle and in the Gospel of St. John. But we refuse to hunt down some obscure heresy in every sentence. It will be enough to indicate the master heresy of Asia Minor, to which St. John undoubtedly refers, with its intellectual and moral perils. In so doing we shall find the very truth which our own generation especially needs.
The prophetic words addressed by St. Paul to the Church of Ephesus thirty years before the date of this Epistle had found only too complete a fulfilment. "From among their own selves," at Ephesus in particular, through the Churches of Asia Minor in general, men had arisen "speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them." The prediction began to justify itself when Timothy was Bishop of Ephesus only five or six years later. A few significant words in the First Epistle to Timothy let us see the heretical influences that were at work. St. Paul speaks with the solemnity of a closing charge when he warns Timothy against what were once "profane babblings," and "antitheses of the Gnosis which is falsely so called." In an earlier portion of the same Epistle the young bishop is exhorted to charge certain men not to teach a "different doctrine," neither to give "heed to myths and genealogies," out of whose endless mazes no intellect entangled in them can ever find its way. Those commentators put us on a false scent who would have us look after Judaising error, Jewish "stemmata." The reference is not to Judaistic ritualism, but to semi-Pagan philosophical speculation. The "genealogies" are systems of Divine potencies which the Gnostics (and probably some Jewish Rabbis of Gnosticising tendency) called "aeons," and so the earliest Christian writers understood the word.
Now without entering into the details of Gnosticism, this may be said of its general method and purpose. It aspired at once to accept and to transform the Christian creed; to elevate its faith into a philosophy, a knowledge-and then to make this knowledge cashier and supersede faith, love, holiness, redemption itself.
This system was strangely eclectic, and amalgamated certain elements not only of Greek and Egyptian, but of Persian and Indian, Pantheistic thought. It was infected throughout with dualism and doketism. Dualism held that all good and evil in the universe proceeded from two first principles, good and evil. Matter was the power of evil whose home is in the region of darkness. Minds which started from this fundamental view could only accept the Incarnation provisionally and with reserve, and must at once proceed to explain it away. "The Word was made flesh"; but the Word of God, the True Light, could not be personally united to an actual material system called a human body, plunged in the world of matter, darkened and contaminated by its immersion. The human flesh in which Jesus appeared to be seen was fictitious. Redemption was a drama with a shadow for its hero. The phantom of a Redeemer was nailed to the phantom of a cross. Philosophical dualism logically became theological doketism. Doketism logically evaporated dogmas, sacraments, duties, redemption.
It may be objected that this doketism has been a mere temporary and local aberration of the human intellect; a metaphysical curiosity, with no real roots in human nature. If so, its refutation is an obsolete piece of an obsolete controversy; and the Epistle in some of its most vital portions is a dead letter.
Now of course literal doketism is past and gone, dead and buried. The progress of the human mind, the slow and resistless influence of the logic of common sense, the wholesome influence of the sciences of observation in correcting visionary metaphysics, have swept away aeons, emanations, dualism, and the rest. But a subtler, and to modern minds infinitely more attractive, doketism is round us, and accepted, as far as words go, with a passionate enthusiasm.
What is this doketism?
Let us refer to the history and to the language of a mind of singular subtlety and power.
In George Eliots early career she was induced to prepare for the press a translation of Strausss mythical explanation of the life of Jesus. It is no disrespect to so great a memory to say, that at that period of her career, at least, Miss Evans must have been unequal to grapple with such a work, if she desired to do so from a Christian point of view. She had not apparently studied the history or the structure of the Gospels. What she knew of their meaning she had imbibed from an antiquated and unscientific school of theologians. The faith of a sciolist engaged in a struggle for its life with the fatal strength of a critical giant instructed in the negative lore of all ages, and sharpened by hatred of the Christian religion; met with the result which was to be expected. Her faith expired, not without some painful throes. She fell a victim to the fallacy of youthful conceit-I cannot answer this or that objection, therefore it is unanswerable. She wrote at first that she was "Strauss-sick." It made her ill to dissect the beautiful story of the crucifixion. She took to herself a consolation singular in the circumstances. The sight of an ivory crucifix, and of a pathetic picture of the Passion, made her capable of enduring the first shock of the loss which her heart had sustained. That is, she found comfort in looking at tangible reminders of a scene which had ceased to be a historical reality, of a Sufferer who had faded from a living Redeemer into the spectre of a visionary past. After a time, however, she feels able to propose to herself and others "a new starting point. We can never have a satisfactory basis for the history of the man Jesus, but that negation does not affect the Idea of the Christ, either in its historical influence, or its great symbolic meanings." Yes! a Christ who has no history, of whom we do not possess one undoubted word, of whom we know, and can know, nothing; who has no flesh of fact, no blood of life; an idea, not a man; this is the Christ of modern doketism. The method of this widely diffused school is to separate the sentiments of admiration which the history inspires from the history itself; to sever the ideas of the faith from the facts of the faith, and then to present the ideas thus surviving the dissolvents of criticism as at once the refutation of the facts and the substitute for them.
This may be pretty writing, though false and illogical writing is rarely even that; but a little consideration will show that this new starting point is not even a plausible substitute for the old belief.
(1) We question simple believers in the first instance. We ask them what is the great religious power in Christianity for themselves, and for others like-minded? What makes people pure, good, self-denying, nurses of the sick, missionaries to the heathen? They will tell us that the power lies, not in any doketic idea of a Christ-life which was never lived, but in "the conviction that that idea was really and perfectly incarnated in an actual career," of which we have a record literally and absolutely true in all essential particulars. When we turn to the past of the Church, we find that as it is with these persons, so it has ever been with the saints. For instance, we hear St. Paul speaking of his whole life. He tells us that "whether we went out of ourselves it was unto God, or whether we be sober, it is for you"; that is to say, such a life has two aspects, one Godward, one manward. Its Godward aspect is a noble insanity, its manward aspect a noble sanity; the first with its beautiful enthusiasm, the second with its saving common sense. What is the source of this? "For the love of Christ constraineth us," - forces the whole stream of life to flow between these two banks without the deviations of selfishness-"because we thus judge that He died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but to Him who for their sakes died and rose again." It was the real unselfish life of a real unselfish Man which made such a life as that of St. Paul a possibility. Or we may think of the first beginning of St. Johns love for our Lord. When he turned to the past, he remembered one bright day about ten in the morning, when the real Jesus turned to him and to another with a real look, and said with a human voice, "What seek ye?" and then-"Come, and ye shall see." It was the real living love that won the only kind of love which could enable the old man to write as he did in this Epistle so many years afterwards-"we love because He first loved us."
(2) We address ourselves next to those who look at Christ simply as an ideal. We venture to put to them a definite question. You believe that there is no solid basis for the history of the man Jesus; that his life as a historical reality is lost in a dazzling mist of legend and adoration. Has the idea of a Christ, divorced from all accompaniment of authentic fact, unfixed in a definite historical form, uncontinued in an abiding existence, been operative or inoperative for yourselves? Has it been a practical power and motive, or an occasional and evanescent sentiment? There can be no doubt about the answer. It is not a make belief, but a belief, which gives purity and power. It is not an ideal of Jesus, but the blood of Jesus, which cleanseth us from all sin.
There are other lessons of abiding practical importance to be drawn from the polemical elements in St. Johns Epistle. These, however, we can only briefly indicate, because we wish to leave an undivided impression of that which seems to be St. Johns chief object controversially. There were Gnostics in Asia Minor for whom the mere knowledge of certain supposed spiritual truths was all in all, as there are those amongst ourselves who care for little but what are called clear views. For such St. John writes-"and hereby we do know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments." There were heretics in and about Ephesus who conceived that the special favour of God, or the illumination which they obtained by junction with the sect to which they had "gone out" from the Church, neutralised the poison of sin, and made innocuous for them that which might have been deadly for others. They suffered, as they thought, no more contamination by it, than "gold by lying upon the dunghill" (to use a favourite metaphor of their own). St. John utters a principle which cleaves through every fallacy in every age which says or insinuates that sin subjective can in any case cease to be sin objective. "Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law, for sin is the transgression of the law. All unrighteousness is sin." Possibly within the Church itself, certainly among the sectarians without it, there was a disposition to lessen the glory of the Incarnation, by looking upon the Atonement as narrow and partial in its aim. St. Johns unhesitating statement is that "He is the propitiation for the whole world." Thus does the eagle of the Church ever fix his gaze above the clouds of error, upon the Sun of universal truth.
Above all, over and through his negation of temporary and local errors about the person of Christ, St. John leads the Church in all ages to the true Christ. Cerinthus, in a form which seems to us eccentric and revolting, proclaimed a Jesus not born of a virgin, temporarily endowed with the sovereign power of the Christ, deprived of Him before His passion and resurrection, while the Christ remained spiritual and impassible. He taught a commonplace Jesus. At the beginning of his Epistle and Gospel John "wings his soul, and leads his readers onward and upward." He is like a man who stands upon the shore and looks upon town and coast and bay. Then another takes the man off with him far to sea. All that he surveyed before is now lost to him; and as he gazes ever oceanward, he does not stay his eye upon any intervening object, but lets it range over the infinite azure. So the Apostle leads us above all creation, and transports us to the ages before it; makes us raise our eyes, not suffering us to find any end in the stretch above, since end is none. That "in the beginning," "from the beginning," of the Epistle and Gospel, includes nothing short of the eternal God. The doketics of many shades proclaimed an ideological, a misty Christ. "Every spirit which confesseth Jesus Christ as in flesh having come is of God, and every spirit which confesseth not Jesus, is not of God." "Many deceivers have gone out into the world, they who confess not Jesus Christ coming in flesh." Such a Christ of mist as these words warn us against is again shaped by more powerful intellects and touched with tenderer lights. But the shadowy Christ of George Eliot and of Mill is equally arraigned by the hand of St. John. Each believer may well think within himself-I must die, and that, it may be, very soon; I must be alone with God, and my own soul; with that which I am and have been; with my memories, and with my sins. In that hour the weird desolate language of the Psalmist will find its realisation: "Lover and friend hast thou put from me, and mine acquaintance are-darkness." Then we want, and then we may find, a real Saviour. Then we shall know that if we have only a doketic Christ, we shall indeed be alone -for "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you."
NOTE THE two following extracts in addition to what has been already said in this discourse will supply the reader with that which it is most necessary for him to know upon the heresies of Asia Minor.
1. Two principal heresies upon the nature of Christ then prevailed, each diametrically opposite to the other, as well as to the Catholic faith. One was the heresy of the Doketae, which destroyed the verity of the Human Nature in Christ; the other was the heresy of the Ebionites, who denied the Divine Nature, and the eternal Generation, and inclined to press the observation of the ceremonial law. Ancient writers allow these as heresies of the first century; all admit that they were powerful in the age of Ignatius. Hence Theodoret ("Prooem.") divided the books of these heresies into two categories. In the first he included those who put forward the idea of a second Creator, and asserted that the Lord had appeared illusively. In the second he placed those who maintained that the Lord was merely a man. Of the first Jerome observed (Adv. Lucifer., 23) that while the Apostles yet remained upon the earth, while the blood of Christ was almost smoking upon the sod of Judea, some asserted that the body of the Lord was a phantom. Of the second the same writer remarked that St. John, at the invitation of the bishops of Asia Minor, wrote his Gospel against Cerinthus and other heretics -and especially against the dogma of the Ebionites then rising into existence, who asserted that Christ did not exist before Mary. Epiphanius notes that these heresies were mainly of Asia Minor (φημι δεα). Haeres., 56 (Pearson, "Vindic. Ignat.," 2, 100, 1, p. 351).
2. "Two of these sects or schools are very ancient, and seem to have been referred to by St. John. The first is that of the Naassenians or Ophites. The antiquity of this sect is guaranteed to us by the author of the Philosophumena, who represents them as the real founders of Gnosticism. Later, he says, they were called Gnostics, pretending that they only knew the depths. (To this allusion is made in Rev_2:24, which would identify these sectaries with the Balaamites and Nicolaitans.) The second of these great heresies of Asia Minor is the doketic. The publication of the Philosophumena has furnished us with more precise information about their tenets. We need not say much about the Divine emanation-the fall of souls into matter, their corporeal captivity, their final rehabilitation (these are merely the ordinary Gnostic ideas). But we may follow what they assert about the Saviour and His manifestationin the world. They admit in Him the only Son of the Father (οο μονογενης παις ανωψεν αιωνιος), who descended to the region of shadows and the Virgins womb, where He clothed Himself in a gross, human material body. But this was a vestment of no integrally personal and permanent character; it was, indeed, a sort of masquerade, an artifice or fiction imagined to deceive the prince of this world. The Saviour at His baptism received a second birth, and clad himself with a subtler texture of body, formed in the bosom of the waters-if that can be termed a body which was but a fantastic texture woven or framed upon the model of His earthly body. During the hours of the Passion, the flesh formed in Marys womb, and it alone, was nailed to the tree. The great Archon or Demiurgus, whose work that flesh was, was played upon and deceived, in pouring His wrath only upon the work of His hands. For the soul, or spiritual substance, which had been wounded in the flesh of the Saviour, extricated itself from this as from an unmeet and hateful vesture; and itself contributing to nailing it to the cross, triumphed by that very flesh over principalities and powers. It did not, however, remain naked, but clad in the subtler form which it had assumed in its baptismal second birth (Philosoph., 8:10). What is remarkable in this theory is, first, the admission of the reality of the terrestrial body, formed in the Virgins womb, and then nailed to the cross. The negation is only of the real and permanent union of this body with the heavenly spirit which inhabits it. We shall further note the importance which it attaches to the Saviours baptism, and the part played by water, as if an intermediate element between flesh and spirit. This may bear upon 1Jn_5:8."
[This passage is from a "Dissertation-les Trois Temoins Celestes," in a collection of religious and literary papers by French scholars (Tom. 2., Sept., 1868, pp. 388- 392). The author, since deceased, was the Abbe Le Hir, M. Renans instructor in Hebrew at Saint Sulpice, and pronounced by his pupil one of the first of European Hebraists and scientific theologians.]
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 1–6. Believe not every spirit. The last chapter has…
1–6. Believe not every spirit. The last chapter has closed concerning the Spirit, but some are moved by other spirits than that of Christ. Try the spirits. Test the spirit that moves teachers and see whether it be of God. Verse 2 tells how to test. Because many false prophets. There were many false teachers in that age as well as in ours, and some claimed to be inspired.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv1, 7, 15 IN the first three verses the apostle guards his…
LOVE FINDS THE TRUTH; FEAR TAKES UP WITH ERROR
CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Read full note →
IN the first three verses the apostle guards his readers against being misled by false pretensions to the possession of the Spirit (see chap. 1Jn_2:24).
1Jn_4:1. Beloved.—Indicating the affectionate relations in which St. John and his disciples stood. Believe not.—Do not be carried away by loud professions. In all ages of the Church persons have arisen who claimed to possess supernatural powers, or to have received special revelations. St. John does not say that they all are insincere and time-serving; but he reminds us that they may be, and that their claims must always be submitted to careful examination and testing. They may be the delusions of fanatical enthusiasts; they may be the lies of fanatical impostors. Spirit.—That is, persons who pretend to have a spirit. Illustrate by Act_8:9; Act_16:16; Act_21:9. Try the spirits.—R.V. prove. He bids them exercise the χάρισμα of διακρίσεις πνευματων (1Co_12:4 : see also 1Co_10:15; 1Co_11:13; 1Co_12:10; Eph_5:10; 1Th_5:21). False prophets.—Teachers, not foretellers. Men who pretend to have received a special revelation, which is out of harmony with that received through Christ and His apostles. Under the old dispensation prophets were to be tested by “the law and the testimony. If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no truth in them” (Isa_8:20). Under the new dispensation all claimants to Divine inspiration must submit to be tested by the inspired words of Christ and His apostles. Whatever proposes to supersede the revelation given us, and whatever is out of harmony with that revelation, must be wrong and untrustworthy. Gone out.—Generally, are spread abroad. It is not meant that they had all once been Christian disciples. Some may have been, perhaps some of the most mischievous ones.
1Jn_4:2. Know ye.—Prefer indicative “ye know.” Spirit of God.—That is, a spirit which has been given by God. A man may assume to have the Spirit; a man may have the Spirit: you will know which it is if you estimate aright what the spirit moves the man to say and do. St. John suggests one test as specially applicable to the delusions of his own age. Come in the flesh.—The strongest way of asserting the veritable humanity of Christ. It is important to notice that the heretics of the later apostolic age did not deny the Divinity, but the humanity, of Christ. See the Cerinthian and Docetic doctrines. That spirit of antichrist.—There is no word answering to spirit in the original, but it is necessary to the sense of the passage. Observe that the antichrist is not a person, but a sentiment, influence, point and tone of teaching. The essence of apostolic teaching is loyalty to Christ; the essence of the teaching of deceiving or self-deceived prophets was independence of Christ, or antagonism to Him. If any man wants to improve upon Christ, or teach otherwise than He did, we cannot be wrong in calling him antichrist. And so there are “many antichrists.” Should come.—It cometh.
1Jn_4:4. Little children.—As before, conceiving disciples as in the immature, training stage, and therefore specially exposed to evil influences. He that is in you.—The Holy Spirit. In the world.—The spirit of self, or the devil.
1Jn_4:6. Knoweth God.—Compare Joh_17:3. The knowing is that which comes by personal experience, not by merely mental effort. Let a man stand in right relations with God, that man will have right discernment of God’s servants, and be ever ready to receive their messages. Spirit of truth.—Not only the true spirit, but the spirit whose range is truth. Spirit of error.—Not only the false spirit, but the spirit whose range is error.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—1Jn_4:1-6
Come in the Flesh—the True man.—Trench says, “Jesus took the name Son of Man, as He who alone realised the idea of man.” Philo calls the Logos, ὁ ἀληθινὸς ἄνθρωπος. It is often shown that the purpose Christ had in view in coming to our world was to reveal the Father; to correct the mistakes into which men had fallen respecting the Divine Being; to convince us that He is no impassive Being, no mere embodiment of abstract justice or impersonation of law, but the Divine Father of spirits. Our Lord Jesus came into this world with one supreme aim—to save us by making the Father-God lovely to us, and lovable by us. But we should give heed to another great meaning and purpose of our Lord’s life on the earth. It was designed to be a revelation of humanity to men—of man to himself. The rays of light shine out from Christ both upwards, and all around. Upwards they pierce to some extent the darkness in which Deity is hidden from mortal eyes. All around they shine into our hearts, and dispel the mistakes that hide our true selves from our own view. Christ is Emmanuel, God and man; God with us, in our own flesh and blood. We cannot be said adequately to know Jesus Christ until we have seen the God that is in Him, and also the man that is in Him. He is come in the flesh. He is the second Adam. He represents ideal humanity, man as God thought him when He gave him breath and being. Over the old Grecian temple they put the words, “Know thyself.” An easy command to give, a most difficult command to obey. And that for one sufficient reason—the true standard of humanity is lost, and we have no one with whom we may safely compare ourselves. To know a picture, or a statue, or a building, we must judge it by the standard; and there are world-standards. But when we would know ourselves, where is our standard? If it ever was here amongst men, it is lost now, and has been lost for ages. That the ideal of humanity is lost is shown in the conceptions alike of old and of modern poets. They declare, in their word-pictures, the universal conviction that there was once a Golden Age. But they all mourn over it as a past and lost time. They do but tell us the Bible story of Eden—its innocency, its grace, its possibilities, and then its sin, its shame, and its desolation. Men have been seeking vainly for the true standard through all the ages since Eden was lost. God purposed, when He saw that the fitting time had come, to show men a man once again, a perfect, ideal, standard man. The fulness of time came, and He sent forth His Son “made of a woman, made under the law,” veritable partaker of our flesh and blood. There is the only perfect flower of manhood that has ever unfolded out of the root of humanity. How soon, and how easily, men can lose fitting and worthy conceptions of God! Give to any nation comparatively clear light on the nature and character and relations of God, and in a generation or two we shall find that the light is faded, and the image is blurred. Men began to worship the sun as if it were the brightness of God; then they thought of the nobler beasts of the earth as images of Him; presently they made symbols of reptiles and creeping things; and at last sunk to making idols which expressed, in their forms and features, the vilest human passions. But men have proved quite as ready to lose the truth about themselves. Indeed, if men will not keep the truth about God, they shall not keep the truth about anything else—at least about anything moral. How men sunk from the standard of humanity St. Paul has described in Romans 1. Then God sent forth His Son, the ideal man, the standard man. Other men, lost in their corruptions, shall see amongst them the true man, Christ Jesus. Looking upon Him men know themselves, and are humbled to find how low they have sunk from what they ought to be. Since Jesus came to the world there have been no great men, no standard men. All fall below His excellence. But that life Jesus lived was truly human. There are some things in which we may become true men like Christ.
I. It is possible for man to enjoy consciously near and happy fellowship with God, as Jesus did.—Into the Divine presence He seemed to be always easily going. He breathed in the Divine atmosphere. Carrying the thought of God always with Him, every place became a holy place, all work became holy work, all days holy days. His humanity was no hindrance to Him; it made no mists or cloud-shadows between Him and God. And it is light and hope for us thus to see, in Christ, that the thing which shuts us out from God is not our being men, but our being sinners. Christ was a man, but not a sinner, and so the holy place of communion was to Him as a home. And as we look on Christ, come in the flesh, we see the work of life set before us. We must be wholly freed from sin, and then God Himself shall become the dear love, and near friend, and cherished home of our soul.
II. It is possible for man to reach the abiding conquest of sin—of sin both without him and within.—Up to the time of Christ, that possibility was never known, it could never be realised. Man toiled on under the slavery of sin. There had never been seen such a thing as a man free from sin, a man proved through all the temptations of a human life to be mightier than evil. Men had never seen one human tree without some traces of the decaying worm; never seen the building of one human life without some bulgings and disfigurings of failure; never seen one human face without the care-look of a wounded conscience. So men might, with some show of reason, have said, “Sin is a part of humanity; we cannot be rid of it.” But in saying that man would have consummated his ruin; he would have, as it were, reached out his hand to the tree of life, and stamped immortality upon his sin. God would not let him do that. God would guard the tree of life with a flaming sword. God would send His Son into the world as a man without sin, to break the hopeless sameness of the past—as a man, surrounded with evil, attacked by temptations, and yet able to say, “Who convicteth Me of sin?” No stain upon the life, no pollution on the soul, one with men, separate from sinners,—there is hope for us in that. Sin is not man. Sin is not any necessary part of man. Sin may be put away from man. It is a fact now—a man has stood and walked and worked, in a world full of sin, with unsoiled garments, and unspotted soul, always clothed in pure white garments. Man has proved to be mightier than sin. It can no longer raise its head and boast, as if it were an unconquered and unconquerable foe. It is a beaten foe. Christ has beaten it. The shame and weakness of defeat lie on sin now. And our manhood, with God’s help, may renew the victory.
III. It is possible for men to reach the cherished spirit, and the abiding expression, of self-sacrifice.—If we know ourselves, we know this, that outward enemies are easily mastered, but the inward foe of self only with extreme difficulty. But the most marked feature in the life of Christ is His self-sacrifice. He was among us as one that serveth. But on what principle is all this possible to us, to humanity? The success of Christ was not due to any latent force which is in humanity itself, and which Christ alone succeeded in developing. Humanity has no independent energies. As a created thing it is a necessarily dependent thing. It has trailed on the ground, and soiled its flowers, because it tried to grow alone. In the forests of Madagascar may be seen a beautiful climbing-plant, twining itself about the larger trunks and branches, and singing out its strength in bright green leaves, and laughing out its gladness in large, abundant, and exquisite white flowers. It is so strong and so beautiful because it clasps the strong, twines about the strong, and drinks up ever new life from the strong. And so humanity is strong in God, holding a living dependence on Him, and a happy reliance on Him. The triumph which Christ gained was the result of a most near union between the Divine and the human, the man and God. The secret of His life is this—in Him the Spirit of God dwelt above measure. He was, in some wonderful way, God and man. At first that dashes down all our hopes. Then He is altogether other than we are. But if Christ won so perfect a life by having the Spirit above measure, we may win towards it by having the Spirit in measure. We can receive the Holy Ghost, and become temples of the Holy Ghost; in some degree at least, like Christ—men having God with them.
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
1Jn_4:1. The Trial of Spiritual Claims by Spiritual Men.—“Prove the spirits.” We have to take full account of the fact that error—false or imperfect presentation of truth—has a similar mission in the sphere of religious thought to that of affliction in the sphere of religious relations. There always has been in the Church testing, tempting, disciplining error, just as there always has been in the Christian experience testing, tempting, disciplining affliction. Had there been no error, the truth would neither have been preserved effective, nor would it have been elaborated, defined, or adapted. So many of the settings of Christian truth, in which the Church now rejoices, are the direct products of times of conflict. Look along the level lines, and error seems to be an unmitigated evil. But look down on it from above, see it with some fitting idea of the Divine over-ruling, and it is but one of the dark angels that are about the Father’s business; it is but as the emery that polishes the sword of truth. If we keep in thought a comparison between “errors” and “afflictions,” we may learn how to deal effectually and wisely with errors. Afflictions are overwhelming woes until their inmost mystery is opened, as it only can be opened, by the spiritually-minded man. And that is equally true of error. That it is error is always detected by the spiritually-minded man, because he can test every setting of truth by two infallible tests:
1. By the sense of its harmony with God, which in Him is most keen.
2. By the tendency of it to work towards righteousness; and of this the spiritual man has a quickened and cultured discernment. The error never lies in any particular form of words by which a side or aspect of truth is expressed. Error lies in the motive that shapes the setting, and in the moral or immoral influence which the setting may exert.
1Jn_4:2-3. The Doctrine of Christ’s Humanity a Test Doctrine.—We live in times when the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity is usually made the test doctrine, and when much anxiety is felt lest the doctrine of Christ’s humanity should gain an exaggerated place, and an extravagant, and therefore mischievous, setting. In the early Church, the Divinity of Jesus seems to have been fully recognised. The Arian conflicts belong to a much later age. The union of the Divine and human in Christ is of necessity a mystery that can never gain precise statement in any limited, imperfect, and variable human language. But then that can with equal truth be said of the union of soul and body in man. Men will have a right to demand proof of the Divinity of Christ, when they have found it reasonable to demand proof of the existence of the soul. And it will be found that the arguments on which rest our belief in the one are of the same kind as those on which rest our belief in the other. In the early Church the test of orthodoxy was belief in the veritableness of Christ’s humanity, His real body of flesh and blood. The error of that day was a subtle distinction between a Divine Being and a human body which that Divine Being temporarily used. This made the “Man Christ Jesus” an unreal, unnatural Being—not such a man as we are; and if not, He could be no proper representative of us, to be sacrificed for us. But the error took even a more subtle form. Men taught that what seemed a human body, and could indeed be seen and touched, was in fact no body at all, but only such an appearance of a body as angels had taken for their earth-ministries in Old Testament times. Neither of these can possibly be consistent with the Christian revelation, which declares that Jesus is come in the flesh, and so is a bond-fide man, with body, soul, and spirit like every other man; and so able to be the race representative and Saviour.
1Jn_4:3. Spirit of Antichrist.—Man after man, rich in gifts, endowed often with far larger and nobler faculties than the people that oppose him, with indomitable perseverance, a martyr to his error, sets himself up against the truth that is sphered in Jesus Christ; and the great Divine message simply goes on its way, and all the battlement and noise is like so many bats flying against a light, or the wild sea-birds that come sweeping up in the tempest and the night, against the hospitable Pharos that is upon the rock, and smite themselves dead against it.—A. Maclaren, D.D.
1Jn_4:4. The True Secret of the Mastery of Error.—“Because greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.” Canon Liddon says: “St. John constantly teaches that the Christian’s work in this state of probation is to ‘conquer the world.’ It is, in other words, to fight successfully against that view of life which ignores God, against that complex system of attractive moral evil and specious intellectual falsehood which is organised and marshalled by the great enemy of God, and which permeates and inspires non-Christianised society.” To be “of God” implies that God is in us; dwelling in us as the spiritual presence and power of the Holy Ghost. So our Lord promised and assured His disciples (Joh_14:16-17; Joh_14:23). If we may suggest a distinction between our apprehensions of the presences with us of the Son and of the Spirit, we may say—the living Christ is God with us in order that He may be for us; the Holy Ghost is God with us in order that He may be in us, ever at the springs of thought, and feeling, and motive, and action. Then we can fill St. John’s assertion in this text with a double meaning, and so assure our hearts that we have all-sufficing strength unto ever-renewed victory over all forms of moral evil.
I. God with us as the living Christ is greater than all the evil forces that may seek to injure us.—In some such sense as the human Christ was with His apostles, defending, preserving, guiding them—with them in the sphere of their circumstances, shaping, controlling, overruling them, so as to secure for His disciples triumph over all evil—the living Christ is with His people now, with His Church now, “walking amid the candlesticks,” working the safety of His people and His Church, by His control of all their circumstances. He is for them as a living Helper and Friend; for them in the exertion of Divine power.
II. God with us as the Holy Ghost is greater than all the subtle influences that can act upon us.—What the Holy Ghost was in the early Church as defence against error, taking the most subtle forms against the malign influence of subtle men, spirits, antichrist, that the Holy Spirit is in every age to the believer—the absolutely secure defence against intellectual and moral evil, as Divine wisdom and strength abiding in us.
1Jn_4:6. All inspired by God will be in Essential Harmony.—“He that knoweth God heareth us.” The more careful and strict, the more critical, examination of Holy Scripture has brought to view, in a very impressive way, the fact that wherever there is a Divine inspiration there is essential harmony with all other Divine inspiration. Of this we are now so well assured, that we are even prepared to say this—if there is any inspiration of God outside the Scriptures, then that inspiration will certainly be found in essential harmony with all that is in them. But the statements properly occasion surprise and stimulate thought. The Scriptures represent different ages, different types of mind, different social and intellectual conditions; and in the Scriptures is found an ever-refreshing variety in the settings and shapings of truth; and yet take any vital, primary, fundamental verity concerning God, or man, or the relations between God and man, and it is not possible to find anything out of the general harmony. The inspired word of God never contradicts itself. St. John says that what is true of the inspired word is also true of the inspired man. Assume that God is in the teacher, inspiring his words; then it is certain that whenever God is in the hearer, inspiring him for hearing, he will receive the message which the inspired teacher delivers. Safety against the false teacher, the uninspired teacher, is found in the hearer being inspired for hearing. Such an one is in no moral danger. He cannot live and thrive on the uninspired teaching. He finds himself out of harmony with it. But his inspiration brings him into full harmony with everything that is also inspired. It is of course to be understood that the term “inspiration” is here used, not of a precise and limited definition of inspiration, such as may be characteristic of a particular school of thought, but of that general experience of Divine inspiration, which the believer knows as the moving, impelling, directing, restraining influence of the Holy Ghost that dwelleth in him. Inspiration is the proper word for the inward work of God the Holy Ghost.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
William B. Godbey 1900 · Public Domain On vv1, 7, 11 1. “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but prove the…
ARGUMENT 9
REJECTION OF THE FALSE PROPHETS
Read full note →
1. “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, because many false prophets have come out into the world.” We are to try and prove the spirits, excarnate and incarnate, and especially the latter, i.e., the spirits which are in the living bodies. My spirit is writing these pages in the using of my bodily instrumentality. You hear a man preach; his spirit speaks through his body. The false prophets in this chapter are identical with the Antichrists in Chapter 2. Hence you are to try them by the Word of God, and if so you will utterly discard them.
2. “In this know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, is of God.”
3. “Every spirit that confesseth not Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of Antichrist, whom you have heard, that he cometh and now is already in the world.” John, in his second epistle says, “Confesseth that Jesus Christ is coming in the flesh.” Then he exhorts us not to receive them into our houses nor to bid them God speed. “For he that biddeth them God speed is partaker of their evil deeds.” These scriptures plainly reveal the attitude and character of these Antichrists, or false prophets, against whom John gives us this solemn warning. Their peculiar differentia is that they do not bring with them the great doctrine of the Christhood.
(a) The omnipotent spiritual Christ has always been in the world (entering immediately after the fall), in the Old Testament known as Jehovah, the Excarnate Christ, and in the Gospel dispensation as the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, the successor of the risen Christ, to prepare the world for His return.
(b) The God-man Christ came on the earth, expiated the guilt of the world on the cross and ascended up to heaven, receiving the perfect
and satisfactory approval of the Father, who enthroned Him Mediatorial King at His right hand, to reign till the Father makes His enemies His footstool. Then He will descend on the throne of His glory, cast out Satan, and reign over this world forever. Daniel 7. As God out of Christ can show no mercy to His fallen subjects, the entire plan of salvation in all ages is involved in the Christhood which the Holy Ghost is sent to reveal and its benefits to impart. The Holy Ghost came on the day of Pentecost as the successor of the risen Christ, to remain in charge till his return, having the sole right to rule the Church. Satan, having suffered defeat in the Father’s dispensation, and in that of the Son, is now fighting in his last ditch, stirring earth and hell against the Holy Ghost, the Representative of the Christhood. Hence you see that the men who do not preach the work of Christ and the Holy Ghost are Antichrists, i.e., opponents of Christ or supplanters of Christ, and false prophets, i.e., do not “preach with the Holy Ghost come down from heaven.” The Gospel preacher preaches that Christ has come and redeemed the world by His blood, and that He will come and reign over it, casting out Satan. He also preaches the glorious work of the Holy Ghost in regenerating the sinner, sanctifying the believer, and transfiguring the saints. All others are to be discarded, having failed to satisfy the tests of the Christhood.
4. John congratulates the children of God because they have conquered these false prophets and Antichrists.
5. These are the carnal preachers, so popular with the world. Their name is legion today. Look out and try them by the Word of God. Do they preach the great truths of the Christhood, with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven?
6. How significantly is this prophecy verified this day. If a man preaches the truth with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, only the sainted few will hear. Let him come forth with carnal eloquence, pomp and power, the world will bear him. Popular churches will be thrown open, and all agape to swallow down Satan’s bait. God help us all to obey this command, “Try the spirits, if they be of God,” as the world is full of false prophets leading millions into hell.
William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Sermon Bible 1900 · Public Domain On v1 1Jn 4:1
1Jn 4:1
This text shows (1) that the highest pretensions may be hypocritical, and therefore mere profession amounts to nothing; (2) that all pretensions should be submitted to trial, and therefore to shrink from trial is to confess incompetence and immorality; (3) that God Himself is the true standard by which to try all men. One man is not to be compared with another; each man is to be judged before God. The fulfilment of this exhortation would be followed by three results: (1) Spiritual adventurers would meet with proper condemnation. All lackadaisical sympathy would be destroyed, etc. (2) The highest piety would be realised, the piety which lives upon God, and seeks truth at all costs, etc. (3) The multiplication of needless and vexatious sects would be arrested. Little nests of quacks and mutual flatterers would be broken up. Men who live in God despise the concealment of obscure theories and the ostentation of pretentious technicalities. The fulfilment of this exhortation would not, on the other hand, secure monotonous and insipid uniformity of thought, expression, and social development. God’s ministry in nature is various, yet nature is one. The illustration applies to the highest life.
Read full note →
Parker, City Temple, vol. i., p. 60.
1Jn 4:1
I. There are questions relating to spiritual influence in which we all, each for himself, ought to have the very deepest interest. For the most persistent sceptic that ever lived cannot deny the fact of spiritual influence. All the influences which proceed from mind to mind are spiritual influences. By certain spiritual or, if you like, mental influences, our conduct is determined, and our characters formed. The Spirit of life, and order, and growth to perfection; which works in the world of matter and also in the mind and soul of man, in the Bible is said to be the Spirit of God; and, on the other hand, all that is evil, and degrading, and dividing is said to be the working of a spirit of disobedience. So that the saving and destroying forces of the world are in perpetual activity.
II. Let me give you one test by which you may try the spirits whether they are of God. We are told in the Bible that the Spirit of God is the Spirit of adoption. And this is the uniting and converting power of the world. (1) It is the converting Spirit, not the spirit of fear and intimidation, not the spirit of the devil and his angels, not the unprincipled spirit of management and of making things easy all round, so that under all circumstances self may be triumphant, but the Spirit which rises up now and then with its saving regeneration in the heart of the cold and bad, the seducer and the faithless, saying, "I am a child of God; shame on me that I have stooped so low and forgotten who I am and what is my birthright," the Spirit which stirs in a man, and floods him over with penitence, and from his crossness and cruelty, his deep commonness and sinfulness, makes him get up and shake himself free. (2) And the same Spirit is the Spirit of unity. The Spirit which tells us we are sons of God tells also that we are brethren, and its word of command is, "Let brotherly love continue."
W. Page Roberts, Law and God, p. 89.
References: 1Jn 4:1.—W. L. Alexander, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 309; J. Kennedy, Ibid., p. 206; A. M. Brown, Ibid., vol. ix., p. 152; J. G. Rogers, Ibid., vol. xxvii., p. 391. 1Jn 4:1, 1Jn 4:2.—Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. ii., p. 331. 1Jn 4:2.—H. Scott Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxiii., p. 49. 1Jn 4:3-7.—Church of England Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 195. 1Jn 4:6.—E. White, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xviii., p. 328; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. v., p. 297.
1Jn 4:7
The Source of Love.
I. Essentially and eternally, all love is of God, and all God is love. To reveal this to man, that stream of paradise was parted, and became into three heads. There was the electing love of God the Father, which gave His Son to the world, and the world to His Son; and there was the love of Jesus to the death, by which He gave Himself, the innocent Sufferer for a guilty race; and there was the love of the patient Spirit in sevenfold offices, and all to comfort those who were unhappy because they were wicked, and wicked because they were unhappy.
II. What do we mean when we say, "Love is of God"? (1) We mean, it is of the nature of God. All love is first in God. (2) Love is of God because it is His gift. Whoever wants real love must ask for it as a creation. It does not spring up here in the lower ground, but it comes down from heaven. If you find it hard to love anybody, you must remember that love is a fruit; and before there can be fruit there must be seed. (3) Love is of God because it is an emanation always flowing. This is the reason why those who live nearest to God grow the most loving. They catch the droppings; they get imbued with that with which they are in contact.
III. The shortest road to almost every good thing is through love. You will have to meet, and to do battle with, many strong things; and not very long hence you will have to meet death, that mighty conqueror death. There is only one thing strong enough to be antagonistic to death—you must take it out of God’s armoury—"Love is strong as death."
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 5th series, p. 267.
1Jn 4:7
Love of Relations and Friends.
There have been men before now who have supposed Christian love was so diffusive as not to admit of concentration upon individuals, so that we ought to love all men equally. And many there are who, without bringing forward any theory, yet consider practically that the love of many is something superior to the love of one or two, and neglect the charities of private life while busy in the schemes of expansive benevolence or of effecting a general union and conciliation among Christians. Now I shall here maintain, in opposition to such notions of Christian love, with our Saviour’s pattern before me, that the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us.
I. It has been the plan of Divine providence to ground what is good and true in religion and morals on the basis of our good natural feelings. What we are towards our earthly friends in the instincts and wishes of our infancy, such we are to become at length towards God and man in the extended field of our duties as accountable beings. To honour our parents is the first step towards honouring God, to love our brethren according to the flesh the first step towards considering all men our brethren. The love of our private friends is the only preparatory exercise for the love of all men. By trying to love our relations and friends, by submitting to their wishes, though contrary to our own, by bearing with their infirmities, by overcoming their occasional waywardness by kindness, by dwelling on their excellences and trying to copy them—thus it is that we form in our hearts that root of charity which, though small at first, may, like the mustard seed, at last even overshadow the earth.
II. Further, that love of friends and relations which nature prescribes is also of use to the Christian in giving form and direction to his love of mankind at large, and making it intelligent and discriminating. By laying a good foundation of social amiableness, we insensibly learn to observe a due harmony and order in our charity; we learn that all men are not on a level, that the interests of truth and holiness must be religiously observed, and that the Church has claims on us before the world. Those who have not accustomed themselves to love their neighbours whom they have seen will have nothing to lose or gain, nothing to grieve at or rejoice in, in their larger plans of benevolence. Private virtue is the only sure foundation of public virtue; and no national good is to be expected (though it may now and then accrue) from men who have not the fear of God before their eyes.
J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. ii., p. 51.
References: 1Jn 4:7.—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. vi., p. 26; J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity, Part I., p. 223. 1Jn 4:7, 1Jn 4:8.—M. Butler, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxii., p. 72.
1Jn 4:7-10
Love is of God; God is Love.
I. "Love is of God." This does not mean merely that love comes from God and has its source in God, that He is the Author or Creator of it. All created things are of God, for by Him all things were made, and on Him they all depend. But love is not a created thing; it is a Divine property, a Divine affection; and it is of its essence to be communicative and begetting, to communicate itself and, as it were, beget its own likeness. "Love is of God." It is not merely of God as every good gift is of God. It is of God as being His own property, His own affection, His own love. (1) None but one born of God can thus love with the love which in this sense is of God; therefore one who so loves must needs be one who is born of God. (2) Being born of God implies knowing God. It is a knowledge of God altogether peculiar, belonging exclusively to the relation constituted by, and realised in, your being born of God. It is the very knowledge of God which His Son has—His only-begotten Son, whom He sent into the world to manifest His love.
II. Every one that loveth knoweth God; he that loveth not knoweth not God: these are the antagonistic statements. The fact of a man not loving plainly proves that he knows not God; and his not knowing God explains and accounts for the fact of his not loving. How, indeed, can he know God—know Him as being love? To know God thus, as being love, implies some measure of congeniality, sympathy, and fellowship. There must be community of heart and nature between Him and me. I must be "born of God." (1) We are to love as He loves His only-begotten Son. Our thus loving Him is one primary criterion and touchstone of our being born of God. (2) Then we are to love, as God loves it and because God loves it, the world which He sent His Son to save. We are to love thus one another, with what intensity of longing, like God’s own longing and yearning, for one another’s salvation, that all may turn and live.
R. S. Candlish, Lectures on First John, Part III., p. 104.
References: 1Jn 4:7-10.—Homilist, 3rd series, vol. viii., p. 219. 1Jn 4:7-11.—N. Beach, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxii., p. 178. 1Jn 4:7-16.—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. i., p. 444.
1Jn 4:8
I. In perfect love there are three elements, which may best be seen by examining the three states of life in which they are respectively most prominent: the filial; the fraternal; the parental. (1) The first form of love in the history of each of us is that of a child to his parent, and, as a rule, it is the weakest form; but it contains and exhibits in an exceptional degree the first and essential element in all true love: reverential trustfulness. (2) But with the passing away of childhood a new need dawns upon the spirit of man: the wish to be one in whom others can rest, as he finds rest in them; the need for reciprocity of affection, such as is found in a brother, a friend, a wife. It is this reciprocity that is, in the common opinion, the chief characteristic of love; and as in all natural reciprocity, so too here, the more distinct are the elements, the closer is the union; and in ordinary cases and for ordinary men, therefore, the love of friend is closer than the love of brother, and the love of woman than the love of friend. (3) And yet there is a height above the reciprocity of wedded love. "Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends," which I have called parental love, or the parental element in love, because, again speaking of the average of cases and the average of men, it is in parents that such love is oftenest and earliest seen. Such, then, are the three elements which go to make up love, reverence, desire, sacrifice, inextricably intertwined into a new something which is none of them, and yet all of them together—the whiteness of the prism, the trinity in unity of love.
II. Consequently, if God is love, that love must exist and be exhibited as possessing in fulness this trinity of elements; and if to dwell in love is to dwell in God, that love in which we dwell must have its full development, and we must pass in our spiritual history from trust through desire to sacrifice, just as in our natural history we pass from filial through wedded to parental love. "Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, O God." Then, but not till then, will love enter upon its highest stage, and put on the crown of sacrifice; for sacrifice is the language of love, its only adequate expression, the last effort of the spirit whom no union with the object of its love can satisfy short of the self-annihilation that shall make that object all in all. This is a goal very far from us, the love of saints, the love of the men whom God in His turn reverences; but it has been realised by one and another lonely soul along the ages, living afar upon the mountains in the air we cannot breathe, to remind us that after all sacrifice is an element in love, and an element that will be present in proportion as love is stronger—that if God is love, there must be eternal sacrifice in Him, and that we cannot dwell in love without partaking of that sacrifice.
J. R. Illingworth, Sermons, p. 130.
The Revelation of God’s Love the Distinctive Characteristic of the Gospel.
What has Christianity done to make good its claim to the proud title of the Gospel—the one good message of glad tidings to mankind?
I. It were easy to enumerate many eminent social blessings, many conspicuous instances of individual happiness, which can be traced distinctly to the Christian dispensation as their only authentic source; but if I were asked to name what is its greatest gift of all, I should say unhesitatingly that it is the unveiling of the face of our Father who is in heaven—the revelation, all the more pregnant and influencing from the way in which it was made, that "God is love."
II. God, having spoken in time past partially and variously by the prophets, in the last days, when the time was full, spoke unto the world by His Son. The darkness passed away; the true light shone: the day broke, and the shadows fled away. One who had lived under that darkness and felt it, described in vivid and emphatic language the change that came over the spirit of his mind when, as one of the Israel of God, he found himself blessed with light in his dwelling. Christ, says Clement of Rome, was taught His message of glad tidings by the Father, and the Apostles were taught theirs by Christ. The Gospel was not only an atonement: it was a revelation. Not only was God in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, but God also was in Christ making Himself known unto the world. The Son, by whom He spoke to men in the last days, was the "brightness of His glory and the express image of His person."
III. The doctrine of the love of God when imbibed, not speculatively or conventionally, but really and practically, not as the badge of a party, but as a conviction of the soul, is little liable to perversion. Antinomianism in a religious mind seems to me to be an impossible moral phenomenon. For whom are we more likely to obey—one whom we love, and whom we know to love us, or one whom we simply fear? Who renders the more willing service—a son or a slave? Surely, under a law of liberty, all obedience freely paid becomes by that very freedom more hearty, more trustworthy, more true.
Bishop Fraser, University Sermons, p. 288.
References: 1Jn 4:8.—Spurgeon, Evening by Evening, p. 157; E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation, vol. ii., p. 327; J. J. S. Perowne, Church of England Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 109; Homilist, 1st series, vol. v., p. 333; F. Wagstaff, Christian World Pulpit, vol. viii., p. 398; J. Baldwin Brown, Ibid., vol. xvii., p. 328; F. W. Farrar, Ibid., vol. xxix., p. 385; E. Hatch, Ibid., vol. xxxi., p. 385; G. W. McCree, Ibid., vol. xxxvi., p. 182. 1Jn 4:8-12.—H. W. Beecher, Ibid., vol. xxiv., p. 106.
1Jn 4:8, 1Jn 4:16
I. God is love. The text takes us up, as it were, above the veil; we are caught up through the door of this vision to the sanctuary of God’s throne. We are suffered to know something, not of His working only, but of His being. We are led to the fountain of all good and joy. And that fountain is this, says St. John: "God is love." Is there not something to grasp, to embrace, in these words, "God is love," when within the glory of the Godhead we see the revealed love of God for God, the infinite, embosomed tenderness of the Eternal Son to the Eternal Father? Yes, there is something here which meets the human soul in its longings more lovingly, more warmly, than the God of mere philosophy, the God of mere Deism, the God of man’s own inventing. In revealing the truth of the Trinity, God does much more than show to us an abstract doctrine: He unveils to us Himself.
II. God is love. Such is the fountain, worthy of its stream. This love of the being of God came forth unasked, unmerited, in the love of His actings. He, this God, loved the world, so loved it that He gave His only-begotten Son for the sinner’s life. "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another." Here is indeed the point of contact between the sublime truth of the Holy Trinity and the humblest, smallest, most trying claims which one poor, suffering human being may lay upon another, if this other is a Christian, a child and servant of this God. Here descends this great ladder of light from the throne above all heavens to the stones of the desert road. If God is this God, if this God hath thus loved us, then we cannot own His tenderness to us, we cannot see this glorious depth of lovableness in Himself, and yet remain cool, calculating, and selfish in our thoughts and wills towards our suffering brethren.
H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All, p. 151.
References: 1Jn 4:10.—C. Kingsley, Westminster Sermons, p. 15; Christian World Pulpit, vol. v., p. 268; R. Tuck, Ibid., vol. xiii., p. 69. 1Jn 4:10, 1Jn 4:11.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix., No. 1707.
1Jn 4:11
Sacrifice and Service.
I. The sacrifice of love. It is of this that St. John speaks when he says, "In this was manifested the love of God toward us." True, the visible world teems with illustrations of God’s love, but this surpasses them all; true, our houses are filled with proofs of God’s love, but this transcends them all. For "herein is love, not that we loved God." No: we had apostatised from Him; we had cast off His allegiance; we were in arms against Him; yet in this was manifested the love of God, that He gave His Son for us. Love, then, was the great mission of our Redeemer, to restore, reclaim, sanctify, save. And that love is the theme of the song which St. John heard in heaven, and which he calls a new song, the language of redeemed men. It was never heard there till the soul of Abel, the first martyr for God, leaving its murdered body on the field below, came up and sang it alone, and every harp was hushed to hear. And we, too, can share this song of love now. It will not sound like presumption from our lips. We are come to the innumerable company of angels; we, though still on earth, stand within the circle of salvation, and join in the everlasting song. They understand its meaning better; they utter it out of a fuller heart, and with a deepened gratitude. Not so many are the drops of dew at night that distil on every plant, not so many the blades of grass that quiver on ten thousand fields, not so many the particles of golden light that flood the world, as God’s thoughts of love toward us in the gift of His Son. And Christ has given us the grandest example of sacrifice, for "He loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood."
II. Out of sacrifice flows service. For such service as this we live in days of wonderful opportunities. Opportunities come to all. Like the stones, they lie at our feet; and he shall gather most who stoops the lowest, like Him who came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to "give His life a ransom for many." Our responsibilities will be measured by our capacity to do good. Many indeed and splendid are the opportunities of service in our day. Never was the Church so powerful in numbers, in wealth, in influence, in organisation. There is a work for every man and woman, and a place for every little child. What we want is more quiet consecration in all our work, more of the spirit of love in all our religion.
J. Fleming, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 723.
References: 1Jn 4:11.—Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. i., p. 145. 1Jn 4:13.—Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 36. 1Jn 4:14.—Ibid., p. 127; G. S. Barrett, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxi., p. 305; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 259.
1Jn 4:16
I. God is love. "He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." So we read in an earlier verse. It is worth noticing who it was through whom the Holy Spirit spoke these words. St. John is the writer in the New Testament to whom the Church gave the title by pre-eminence of the divine, the theologian, the Apostle in whose mind dwelt more than in others his Master’s deeper sayings as to Divine things, who set forth the doctrinal aspect of the Christian revelation more than others. He understood and explained more clearly than others the true Divine nature of Christ. Theology is the knowledge—if such a term is possible or lawful in such a relation—the scientific knowledge—that is, the methodised and exact knowledge—of the things of God. It seems, it is often treated as, a matter purely for the intellect, for study, thought, and reading. The words of the greatest of theologians, of him to interpret whose words is the highest task of the greatest of uninspired theologians, give us a new view of the limits within which this is true: "He that loveth not knoweth not God." Surely that sentence is a key to a great deal. It makes us understand why St. John was the divine. The loving nature was the most receptive. The disciple whom Jesus loved was the one who loved Jesus; and, therefore, he understood his Master best.
II. "God is love; he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." See the words once more as setting forth the Divine ideal of human life—he that dwelleth in love, as in a home, as the atmosphere in which he can breathe and live, without which he would die. They describe in their full sense a few rare souls: the St. John of the apostolic age, the Francis of Assisi of the Middle Ages; but they describe also an ideal of life, a hope, a principle, not beyond the aspirations and efforts of all of us. Perhaps the "life of love" sounds to us too lofty and presumptuous a title. It seems to imply a fervour of feeling which we shrink from claiming for ourselves even in hope and aim. It is this instinct, not, surely, an improper one, which makes us prefer rather when we are speaking of our own ideal, and even of beautiful human lives that we have known, the phrase which I used just now: the unselfish life. It is a negative phrase, but as a moral guide it helps us even more than the positive one, for it suggests to us what it is that is the great drawback, the great rival, in the way of the life of love. Love is God’s gift to us, to all of us; it springs spontaneously in every human heart; it is as natural to a child as to breathe. And God gives us objects for love, and He changes and widens them, leads us on from circle to circle, helping us at every stage at once to look further and to feel more deeply.
III. We are God’s children; and He has given us of His Spirit, so that it comes naturally to us in a sense to love—to love even as He loves, unselfishly, instinctively. It is not a new affection to be painfully won for ourselves, if such a thing were possible. Yet it must be cherished. The world kills it; it preaches selfishness to us in every form and through every channel, laughs at enthusiasm, bids us distrust, despair, think first of ourselves; and still more surely our own selfish nature would kill it. It is something, some help, to remember now and then what God has told us: how beautiful, how Divine, that simple affection of loving is, the best thing in life, the most like God, that which puts us at once in sympathy with Him, makes it possible for us to understand Him, makes a link between us and Him which no ignorance or mistake can wholly break. Every kind, thoughtful, affectionate act, every unselfish thought for others, is dear to God. "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." God make us all dwell in Him!
E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons, p. 132.
1Jn 4:16
The Soul Dwelling in God.
These words embody one of the manifold aspects of the Christian ideal. They suggest the inwardness and exaltation of the Christian life.
I. The love dwelling in which is one with dwelling in God is not any love; it is not all that passes by the name of love; it is that love only which has been poured forth in Christ for the salvation of the world. There rises overhead and around the Christian soul the vision, the thought and memory, of the love of God in Christ. It is a real home for the spirit, a real dwelling-place for thought. It is joy, strength, and new life to let the feelings of the heart flock to it.
II. The love in which in this way the soul finds a home is much more than an object of thought: it is life, power, law as well; it is the life that stirs at the heart of Providence, the power that causes all things to work together for good, the unseen law behind events which Christian faith searches for, and in which at last, in sunshine and cloud, it rests.
III. It is not enough to know that a soul, by meditation and trust, can dwell in love; how should its dwelling in love be at the same time a dwelling in God? The love is really God manifest; the love which is a wall of fire around us is nothing other than God. He that dwells in love dwells in that which is the life of God; he has come into a world whose sunlight is Divine, where Divine paths open before the feet, where Divine love breathes in the air and fills the hollows of life as a sea.
IV. The life we are called to imitate was the fulfilment of this very ideal. Christ dwelt in God. His earthly, human life was, so to speak, a life immersed in the life of God. It is to no unrealised ideal, therefore, that we are pointed when we are called to dwell in God.
V. The elements in Christ’s life which reveal this dwelling of the soul in God are present, however dimly, in all Christian life. They are—(1) insight and (2) power.
VI. The soul who is dwelling in love is, up to the measure of his indwelling, already in possession of the future. The blessedness which awaits us in the future is but the unfolding of the present life of the soul.
A. Macleod, Days of Heaven upon Earth, p. 240.
The Love of God in the Atonement.
I. The mission of Christ to redeem and save mankind is not indeed here for the first time connected with the love of the Triune God. It is uniformly in Scripture traced up to that principle as its supreme ultimate source. The Saviour’s Passion is always declared to be a demonstration of the Father’s charity to man, and the apprehension of it by faith is everywhere bound up with the shedding abroad of that love by the Holy Ghost in the heart. But the peculiarity of our text, the last revelation on the subject, is that these three are brought together in the most impressive and affecting manner. The Persons of the Holy Trinity shed their distinct mediatorial glory on the work of our salvation.
II. "We love Him because He first loved us." By constantly keeping alive in our hearts the memorials of Christ’s dying charity, celebrating there an eternal sacrament, we must nourish our love to the God of all grace. There is no duty more binding, none that we so much forget. Here is the secret of all spiritual strength. "The love of Christ constraineth us," suppressing every alien affection and growing by its own internal constraining influence. The true Christian lives, and moves, and has his being in love, the love awakened by redemption.
III. God’s love is the agent of our holiness, and makes us perfect in love. It is, in the administration of the Spirit, the energy that carries us onward to perfection; and all the glory is His. Thus the indwelling presence of the Spirit proves its power; the God of atoning charity perfects the operation of His love within us. It accomplishes all His will; it strengthens obedience unto perfection; it expels every sinful affection, rendering entire the consecration of the heart; and it raises the new nature to a full conformity to Christ and preparation for heaven.
W. B. Pope, Sermons and Charges, p. 193.
References: 1Jn 4:16.—G. Gilfillan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 4; W. M. Statham, Ibid., vol. xi., p. 248; H. Goodwin, Church of England Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 329; S. Leathes, Ibid., vol. ii., p. 80; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v., No. 253. 1Jn 4:16-18.—C. Kingsley, Town and Country Sermons, p. 341. 1Jn 4:17.—J. M. Neale, Sermons to Children, p. 148; Homilist, 2nd series, vol. iv., p. 358.
1Jn 4:17
The Fear of Death.
I. Is not the bondage to the fear of death the one heavy burden of life? I do not mean that the fear of our own individual death is a constantly present fear. It may but seldom occur consciously to the mind. But though the prospect and the thought be banished, the bondage abides still. The hunger of a soul is felt, though the attention be distracted from its existence. A life occupied only upon the things which perish feels resting heavily upon it a burden; and that burden is the bondage to the fear of death. The weariness of a worldly life is in part bodily and mental fatigue, but it is more than this: it is the protest of a spirit which was meant for other things. To have forgotten death, to have put it out of sight, out of our reckoning, is itself the completest death. The enemy is not to be conquered by closing the eyes upon him. He is a conqueror, who is only to be cast out by another conqueror.
II. St. John in our text declares that fear has a conqueror’s power; it can inflict torment. It is a power which requires another stronger power to exorcise it. This power of grace is "perfect love." In this Epistle St. John does not speak vaguely and sentimentally about love. He connects it directly with God’s goodness to us, and with our duties as children of the Father. And as love grows, fear, the fear that has torment—the fear, that is, of finding Him a God of hate in the next world whom we have found, by blessed experience, to be a God of love in this—becomes no longer tenable. It is forced out of the soul by the spreading roots of affection and trust, for while it abides it is the lingering shadow of unfaithfulness. Love is not the grace which has made obedience superfluous; it is a feeling which, like Aaron’s serpent, has swallowed up all the rest, which has taken up into itself, absorbed, duty and obedience, as unconscious and spontaneous offerings of the will.
A. Ainger, Sermons in the Temple Church, p. 101.
1Jn 4:18
I. We can scarcely conceive how anything could live in such a world as this that had not the element of fear. For surely every part of life, not alone of the human family, but down to the lowest animated particles, has to struggle for its existence. One of the strangest things in the organisation of this world is the prevalence of a universal destructiveness. We are taught, and we believe, that God is a God of benevolence. We are taught, and we believe, that the world was ordained for the production of happiness. And yet, when the Apostle says that "the whole creation groans and travails in pain until now," every one who is conversant with history says, "Amen." Every one who looks out into life and takes cognisance of the things that are going on—the silent sufferings, the secret mischiefs, the wastes, and the wails that spread throughout the whole human family—every such one must feel that that which has been is, and will be.
II. Fear was the lowest and earliest condition in the human development. As men rise in knowledge and virtue, they lose the need of fear. It still remains; it may exist in some external relations as long as we live upon the globe; but, in regard to our affections and moral sentiments, that fear which is indispensable in the development of a higher life grows less and less. Men take the first steps in their development because they fear; but afterwards their development is carried on by other influences. Civilisation progresses from a state of fear toward a state of tranquillity. It works through a realm of the lower appetites and passions, filled with pain, up toward a condition in which peace, and tranquillity, and quiet predominate, and are the characteristic elements. As society develops and as men grow stronger and larger, terrors cease, and the impact of overwhelming fear becomes less and less frequent. But fear is not gone. It has taken on a latent form. That is, it has associated itself with other faculties. It acts now as an auxiliary to all the different feelings. In the beginning it acts by itself, but by-and-by it acts with the higher qualities of the mind; and then come all the solicitudes and vigilances of love, for fear working with love produces vigilance and solicitude. Fear and love acting in conjunction create apprehensiveness. Blended together, they go to make a state of mind not without its charm, and oftentimes quite indispensable to the purposes of life.
III. And when at last men have, by culture and training, passed out of the lower and voluntary states into the higher and involuntary ones; when habits have been formed, and have clustered themselves into groups, covering the whole circle of the mind, so that character is the result; when pain has done its work, and men are set upon that which is right because they love right, and not because they are afraid of penalty; when fear has wrought out its negative fruits, and inspired such growth that men come to the positive side, and love brightness because the sense of brightness is gratified, and love truth because there is that in them which is attracted by truth, and seek goodness with their whole social and moral being, because they are so lifted up that they hunger and thirst for it, then fear has no longer any function. Now they have risen to such a state of purity, and of beneficence, and of likeness to God that they live in a higher sphere and on a nobler plane, and work by the positive attractions of good, and not by the fear of the mischiefs of evil. But this is a long course. It is the final result. It is not the beginning, but the ending, of our training in life.
H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. v., p. 212.
I. Consider the truth, "There is no fear in love." There is no fear (1) of God’s majesty. God’s grandeur gives not birth to dread within the Christian’s soul. There is enough majesty to overawe a universe, but not too much for the weakest saint to joy in. He knows his God, and love has cast out fear. Nor is he afraid (2) of Divine power. Though he knows that God’s right hand hath omnipotence, yet does he not dread its power. Nay, it is just because God has unlimited power that he triumphs in Him. The very might of God, instead of being a thought to crush with terror, becomes one of the themes of his daily song. (3) There will be no dread, either, in approaching Him in prayer. The soul that is filled with love cannot come to God trembling like a slave. It comes with reverential, but delightful, awe; it comes with its spirit bowed, and oftentimes with its face veiled with shame, yet with holy confidence.
II. Let us seek to know a little more of this by experience. The sad thing is that there are so many who seem content with a low, dull level of mediocrity in love for Christ. How few there are who seem to climb the mount of love until they attain a sublime, position. Let us daily ask the Lord to cause love to Him to become an all-absorbing passion, until this text shall be true in our own experience.
A. G. Brown, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 1088.
Fear and Love.
I. Scripture assigns to fear a considerable place in the apparatus, so to speak, of religious motives and forces. Fear of punishment, either as imminent or distant, is not a false or bad principle of action in its own place and for its own time. It is appropriate for the earlier stage of spiritual training. It is commonly called "servile"; but until a soul can realise its sonship the servant’s position is the one which it must occupy, and it has, at any rate, the assurance of bread enough for present needs. Bishop Andrewes, alluding to fear, observes that it is "as the base-court to the temple"; and adds that a man must do his duty "for fear of punishment, if he cannot get himself to do it for love of righteousness." So long as we are still under probation, there must be the possibility of ultimate failure even on the part of the grey-haired saint, as Bunyan in his dream saw that there was a way to hell from the gate of heaven as well as from the City of Destruction, as before now men have fallen from God at their very last hour, as once, according to a most impressive story, an ail-but martyr became through unforgivingness an apostate. And that possibility involves a fear which dwells not on the mere pain of future punishment, but on that which is the essential and central misery of hell: the forfeiture of the life-giving love of God.
II. A religion which professes to dispense with this kind of fear, on the ground that Christianity has discarded it as a permanent motive and that rational piety involves an assurance which makes it needless, may be very attractive and become widely popular, but it is not the religion of Scripture and the Church. One may suspect that its estimate of sin is gravely defective. Let our fear of grieving and quenching the Spirit, of wounding the heart of Jesus Christ, of losing our place in the house of our Father, be steadfast and perpetual in companionship with love.
W. Bright, Morality in Doctrine, p. 209.
1Jn 4:18
I. The Apostle here contemplates a universal dominion of fear wherever there is not the presence of active love. Of course he is speaking about the emotions which men cherish with regard to God. It is not fear and love generally that he is talking about, but it is the relation in which we stand to our Father in heaven; and of that he says universally, Those that do not love Him fear Him. Is that true? It is not difficult, I think, to establish it. (1) This universal dominion of fear rests on a universal consciousness of sin. (2) This truth is not made in the least degree doubtful by the fact that the ordinary condition of men is not one of active dread of God. There is nothing more striking than the power we have of forcing ourselves to forget, because we know that it is dangerous to remember.
II. Note the fearlessness of love, how perfect love casts out fear. Love is no weak thing, no mere sentiment. It does not ally itself most naturally with feeble natures, or with the feeble parts of a man’s nature. It is the bravest of all human emotions. It makes heroes as its natural work. The spirit of love is always the spirit of power, if it be the spirit likewise of a sound mind. The love of God entering into a man’s heart destroys fear. All the attributes of God come to be on our side. He that loves has the whole Godhead for him. The love of God casts out the fear of God; the love of God casts out all other fear. Every affection makes him who cherishes it in some degree braver than he would have been without it. It is not self-reliance which makes the hero. It is having the heart filled with passionate enthusiasm, born of love for some person or for some thing. Love is gentle, but it is omnipotent, victor over all. It is the true hero, and martyr if need be, in the human heart. Note these lessons: (1) they that love ought not to fear; (2) they that fear ought to love.
A. Maclaren, Sermons in Manchester, vol. i., p. 200.
References: 1Jn 4:18.—G. Bainton, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 355; G. J. Proctor, Ibid., vol. xiv., p. 195; H. W. Beecher, Ibid., vol. xviii., p. 332; Ibid., vol. xxxi., p. 84.
1Jn 4:19
Originating Love.
The love of all who love God is a consequence of God’s love to them.
I. By an act of creative power. All love in the heart is a creation; and whom God loves, in them He creates love to Him. It might be enough to see that, but we may trace the creation. First, by moral cause and effect. There is always an inclination to love those who we believe love us. If you believe God loves you, it is a sure effect that you will try to love Him; it is a part of the ordinary constitution of our nature. It is so wonderful a thing that the great God should indeed love a poor miserable sinner that whenever it is really brought home to the heart and conscience it awakens heavenly affections.
II. And now mark, it must be believed and felt. Many have a general sense of the love of God, but they cannot believe that He personally loves them; and yet till this is done nothing is done. You will not love God until you are quite sure that God specially and individually loves you.
III. But then this feeling cannot be produced by any natural process, by any reasoning whatever. Therefore the way by which God’s love produces our love is altogether spiritual. Where God loves the Holy Ghost comes and shows us that love of God.
IV. Hence we arrive at the fourth reason of mutual love in a believer’s heart. It is a necessity: the love of God has shone there, and it must reflect itself. And the reflection of God’s love to the soul is that soul’s love—first to God, then to the Church, and then to every creature.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 8th series, p. 188.
References: 1Jn 4:19.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v., No. 229; vol. xvii., No. 1008; vol. xxii., No. 1299; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 163; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxv., p. 114; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. v., p. 5. 1Jn 4:21.—Church of England Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 414. 1Jn 5:1.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvii., No. 979.
The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On vv10, 16, 17, 18, 19 1 John
1 John
CHRIST’S MISSION THE REVELATION OF GOD’S LOVE
Read full note →
1Jn 4:10.
This is the second of a pair of twin verses which deal with substantially the same subject under two slightly different aspects. The thought common to both is that Christ’s mission is the great revelation of God’s love. But in the preceding verse the point on which stress is laid is the manifestation of that love, and in our text the point mainly brought out is its essential nature. In the former we read, ‘In this was manifested the love of God,’ and in the present verse we read, ‘Herein is love.’ In the former verse John fixes on three things as setting forth the greatness of that manifestation--viz., that the Christ is the only begotten Son, that the manifestation is for the world, and that its end is the bestowment of everlasting love. In my text the points which are fixed on are that that Love in its nature is self-kindled--’not that we loved God, but that He loved us’--and that it lays hold of, and casts out of the way that which, unremoved, would be a barrier between God and us--viz., our sin: ‘He hath sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.’
Now it is interesting to notice that these twin verses, like a double star which reflects the light of a central sun, draw their brightness from the great word of the Master, ‘God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ Do you not hear the echo of His voice in the three expressions in the verse before the text--’only begotten’ ‘world’ ‘live’? Here is one more of the innumerable links which bind together in indissoluble union the Gospel and the Epistle. So, then, the great thought suggested by the words before us is just this, that in the Incarnation and Sacrifice of Jesus Christ we have the great revelation of the love of God.
I. Now there are three questions that suggest themselves to me, and the first is this, What, then, does Christ’s mission say about God’s love?
I do not need to dwell on the previous question whether, apart from that mission, there is any solid revelation of the fact that there is love in Heaven, or whether we are left, apart from it, to gropings and probabilities. I need not refer you to the ambiguous oracles of nature or to the equally ambiguous oracles of life. I need not, I suppose, do more than just remind you that even the men whose faith grasps the thought of the love of God most intensely, know what it is to be brought to a stand before some of the dreadful problems which the facts of humanity and the facts of nature press upon us, nor need I remind you how, as we see around us to-day, in the drift of our English literature and that of other nations, when men turn their backs upon the Cross, they look upon a landscape all swathed in mists, and on which darkness is steadily settling. The reason why the men of this generation, some of them very superficially, and for the sake of being ‘in the swim’ and some of them despairingly and with bleeding hearts, are turning themselves to a reasoned pessimism, is because they will not see what shines out from the Cross, that God is love.
Nor need I do more than remind you, in a word, of the fact that, go where we will through this world, and consult all the conceptions that men have made to themselves of gods many and lords many, whilst we find the deification of power, and of vice, and of fragmentary goodnesses, of hopes and fears, of longings, of regrets, we find nowhere a god of whom the characteristic is love. And amidst that Pantheon of deities, some of them savage, some of them lustful, some of them embodiments of all vices, some of them indifferent and neutral, some of them radiant and fair, none reveals this secret, that the centre of the universe is a heart. So we have to turn away from hopes, from probability dashed with many a doubt, and find something that has more solid substance in it, if it is to be enough to bear up the man that grasps it and to yield before no tempests. For all that Bishop Butler says, probabilities are not the guide of life, in its deepest and noblest aspects. They may be the guide of practice, but for the anchorage of the soul we want no shifting sand-bank, but that to which we may make fast and be sure that, whatever shifts, it remains immovable. You can no more clothe the soul in ‘perhapses’ than a man can make garments out of a spider’s web. Religion consists of the things of which we are sure, and not of the things which are probable. ‘Peradventure’ is not the word on which a man can rest the weight of a crushed, or an agonising, or a sinking soul; he must have ‘Verily! verily!’ and then he is at rest.
How do we know what a man is? By seeing what a man does. How do we know what God is? By knowing what God does. So John does not argue with logic, either frosty or fiery, but he simply opens his mouth, and in calm, pellucid utterances sets forth the truths and leaves them to work. He says to us, ‘I do not relegate you to your intuitions; I do not argue with you; I simply say, Look at Him; look, and see that God is love.’
What, then, does the mission of Christ say to us about the love of God? It says, first, that it is a love independent of, and earlier than, ours. We love, as a rule, because we recognise in the object to which our heart goes out something that draws it, something that is loveable. But He whose name is ‘I am that I am’ has all the reasons of His actions within Himself, and just as He
‘Sits on no precarious throne,
Nor borrows leave to be,’
nor is dependent on any creature for existence, so He is His own motive, He is His own reason. Within that sacred circle of the Infinite Nature lie all the energies which bring that Infinite Nature into action; and like some clear fountain, more sparkling than crystal, there wells up for ever, from the depths of the Divine Nature, the love which is Himself. He loves, not because we love Him, but because He is God. The very sun itself, as some astronomers believe, owes its radiant brightness and ever-communicated warmth to the impact on, and reception into, it of myriads of meteors and of matter drawn from the surrounding system. So when the fuel fails, that fire will go out, and the sun will shrivel into a black ball. But this central Sun of the universe has all His light within Himself, and the rays that pour out from Him owe their being and their motion to nothing but the force of that central fire, from which they rush with healing on their wings.
If, then, God’s love is not evoked by anything in His creatures, then it is universal, and we do not need anxiously to question ourselves whether we deserve that it shall fall upon us, and no conscious unworthiness need ever make us falter in the least in the firmness with which we grasp that great central thought. The sun, inferior emblem as it is of that Light of all that is, pours down its beams indiscriminately on dunghill and on jewel, though it be true that in the one its rays breed corruption and in the other draw out beauty. That great love wraps us all, is older than our sins, and is not deflected by them. So that is the first thing that Christ’s mission tells us about God’s love.
The second is--it speaks to us of a love which gives its best. John says, ‘God sent His Son,’ and that word reposes, like the rest of the passage, on many words of Christ’s--such as, for instance, when He speaks of Himself as ‘sanctified and sent into the world,’ and many another saying. But remember how, in the foundation passage to which I have already referred, and of which we have some reflection in the words before us, there is a tenderer expression--not merely ‘sent,’ but ‘gave.’ Paul strengthens the word when he says, ‘gave up for us all.’ It is not for us to speculate about these deep things, but I would remind you of what I dare say I have had occasion often to point out, that Paul seems to intend to suggest to us a mysterious parallel, when he further says, ‘He that spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him up to death for us all.’ For that emphatic word ‘spared’ is a distinct allusion to, and quotation of, the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac: ‘Seeing thou hast not withheld from Me thine only son.’ And so, mysterious as it is, we may venture to say that He not only sent, but He gave, and not only gave, but gave up. His love, like ours, delights to lavish its most precious gifts on its objects.
Now there arises from this consideration a thought which I only mention, and it is this. Christian teaching about Christ’s work has often, both by its friends and its foes, been so presented as to lead to the conception that it was the work of Christ which made God love men. The enemies of evangelical truth are never tired of talking in that sense; and some of its unwise friends have given reason for the caricature. But the true Christian teaching is, ‘God so loved ... that He gave.’ The love is the cause of the mission, and not the mission that which evokes the love. So let us be sure that, not because Christ died does God love us sinful creatures, but that, because God loves us, Christ died for us.
The third thing which the mission of Christ teaches us about the love of God is that it is a love which takes note of and overcomes man’s sin. I have said, as plainly as I can, that I reject the travesty of Christianity which implies that it was Christ’s mission which originated God’s love to men. But a love that does not in the slightest degree care whether its object is good or bad--what sort of a love do you call that? What do you name it when a father shows it to his children? Moral indifference; culpable and weak and fatal. And is it anything nobler, if you transfer it to God, and say that it is all the same to Him whether a man is living the life of a hog, and forgetting all that is high and noble, or whether he is pressing with all his strength towards light and truth and goodness? Surely, surely they who, in the name of their reverence for the supreme love of God, cover over the fact of His righteousness, are mutilating and killing the very attribute that they are trying to exalt. A love that cares nothing for the moral character of its object is not love, but hate; it is not kindness, but cruelty. Take away the background because it is so black, and you lower the brilliancy of whiteness of that which stands in front of it. There is such a property in God as is fittingly described by that tremendous word ‘wrath.’ God cannot, being what He is, treat sin as if it were no sin; and therefore we read, ‘He sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins.’ The black dam, which we build up between ourselves and the river of the water of life, is to be swept away; and it is the death of Jesus Christ which makes it possible for the highest gift of God’s love to pour over the ruined and partially removed barrier and to flood a man’s soul. Brethren, no God that is worthy the name can give Himself to a sinful soul. No sinful soul that has not the habit, the guilt, the penalty of its sins swept away, is capable of receiving the life, which is the highest gift of the love. So our twin texts divide what I may call the process of redemption between them; and whilst the one says, ‘He sent His Son that we should have life through Him,’ the other tells us of how the sins which bar the entrance of that life into our hearts, as our own consciences tell us they do, can be removed. There must first be the propitiation for our sins, and then that mighty love reaches its purpose and attains its end, and can give us the life of God to be the life of our souls. So much for my first and principle question.
II. Now I have to ask, secondly, how comes it that Christ’s mission says anything about God’s love?
That question is a very plain one, and I should like to press the answer to it very emphatically. Take any other of the great names of the world’s history of poet, thinker, philosopher, moralist, practical benefactor; is it possible to apply such a thought as this to them--except with a hundred explanations and limitations--that they, however radiant, however wise, however beneficent, however fruitful their influence, make men sure that God loves them? The thing is ridiculous, unless you are using language in a very fantastic and artificial fashion.
Christ’s mission reveals God’s love, because Christ is the Son of God. If it is true, as Jesus said, that ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,’ then I can say, ‘In Thy tenderness, in Thy patience, in Thy attracting of the publican and the harlot, in Thy sympathy with all the erring and the sorrowful, and, most of all, in Thy agony and passion, in Thy cross and death, I see the glory of God which is the love of God.’ Brother, if you break that link, which binds the man Christ Jesus with the ever-living and the ever-loving God, I know not how you can draw from the record of His life and death a confidence, which nothing can shake, in the love of the Father.
Then there is another point. Christ’s mission speaks to us about God’s love, if--and I was going to say only if--we regard it as His mission to be the propitiation for our sins. Strike out the death as the sacrifice for the world’s sin, and what you have left is a maimed something, which may be, and I thankfully recognise often is, very strengthening, very helpful, very calming, very ennobling, even to men who do not sympathise with the view of that work which I am now setting forth, but which is all that to them, very largely, because of the unconscious influence of the truths which they have cast away. It seems to me that those who, in the name of the highest paternal love of God, reject the thought of Christ’s sacrificial death, are kicking away the ladder by which they have climbed, and are better than their creeds, and happily illogical. It is the Cross that reveals the love, and it is the Cross as the means of propitiation that pours the light of that blessed conviction into men’s hearts.
III. My last question is this: what does Christ’s mission say about God’s love to me?
We know what it ought to say. It ought to carry, as on the crest of a great wave, the conviction of that divine love into our hearts, to be fruitful there. It ought to sweep out, as on the crest of a great wave, our sins and evils. It ought to do this; does it? On some of us I fear it produces no effect at all. Some of you, dear friends, look at that light with lack-lustre eyes, or, rather, with blind eyes, that are dark as midnight in the blaze of noonday. The voice comes from the Cross, sweet as that of harpers harping with their harps, and mighty as the voice of many waters, and you hear nothing. Some of us it slightly moves now and then, and there an end.
Brethren, you have to turn the world-wide generality into a personal possession. You have to say, ‘He loved me, and gave Himself for me.’ It is of no use to believe in a universal Saviour; do you trust in your particular Saviour? It is of no use to have the most orthodox and clear conceptions of the relation between the Cross of Christ and the revelation to men of the love of God; have you made that revelation the means of bringing into your own personal life the conviction that Jesus Christ is your Saviour, the propitiation for your sins, the Giver to you of life eternal? It is faith that does that. Note that, in the great foundation passage to which I have made frequent reference, there are two conditions put in between the beginning and the end. Some of us are disposed to say, ‘God so loved the world that every man might have eternal life.’ That is not what Christ said, ‘God so loved the world that’--and here follows the first condition--’He gave His Son that’--and here follows the second--’he that believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ God has done what it is needful for Him to do. His part of the conditions has been fulfilled. Fulfil yours--’He that believeth on Him.’ And if you can say, not He is the propitiation for our sin, but for my sin, then you will live and move and have your being in a heaven of love, and will love Him back again with an echo and reflection of His own, and nothing shall be able to separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain On v1 Fellowship with God in Love
Fellowship with God in Love
1. Try the spirits] RV 'Prove the spirits.' The verb is used of testing metals.
Read full note →
2, 3. See on 2Jn_1:7.
3. Confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh] RV 'confesseth not Jesus.'
4. He that is in the world] the Devil: cp. 1Jn_3:10; Joh_8:44; Joh_12:31.
5. They] the false prophets.
6. We] the Christian teachers.
8. God is love] the third fundamental maxim (see Intro.). Love is not merely an attribute of God, it is His very Being. Hence to be without love is to be without God: cp. 1Jn_4:16.
9. See Joh_3:16.
11. We ought also] RV 'we also ought.'
12. Hath seen God] RV 'hath beheld God.' His love] i.e. our love to Him. If we love one another we have proof both of His presence with us and of our love to Him.
17. Herein is our love made perfect] RV 'herein is love made perfect with us,' i.e. in the double communion spoken of in the preceding v. As he is, so are we] We, as we are in this world, are like Christ, who shares our human nature. The sense of likeness to Him gives us confidence.
18. No fear in love] not the rightful awe which pertains to reverence, but servile or guilty fear.
19. We love him] RV 'we love.' Possibly the verb should be rendered 'let us love.'
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On vv3, 9, 10, 12, 14, 18 world kosmos = world-system. 1Jn 5:4; 1Jn 5:5; 1Jn…
world kosmos = world-system. 1Jn 5:4; 1Jn 5:5; 1Jn 5:19; Joh 7:7. (See Scofield "Rev 13:8").
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv1, 4, 7, 11, 16 The Attitude of Christians toward False Teachers and toward…
The Attitude of Christians toward False Teachers and toward One Another.
The false prophets:
Read full note →
v. 1. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
v. 2. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God;
v. 3. and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is that spirit of Anti-Christ, whereof ye have heard that it should come, and even now already is it in the world.
Having emphasized the righteousness of life and the need of brotherly love, the apostle now takes up the matter of anti-Christian seduction once more: Beloved, not every spirit believe, but examine the spirits whether they are of God, for many false prophets are gone out into the world. The words "prophets" and "spirits" are here used as synonyms, both of them signifying preachers. Prophets are preachers. Good prophets are preachers through whom the Spirit of God, the Holy Ghost, teaches and preaches, whether it be by direct inspiration, as in the Old Testament, or whether it be by the teaching of the pure Gospel, as in the case of all true ministers today. In that sense they are spirits. But the Christians are here warned to use all care, to be on the lookout in ceaseless vigilance; for unfortunately not every man that claims to be a true prophet is able to present such credentials as the Word of God demands in such a case. These men, who presume upon the rights and duties of true Christian ministers, go out into the world, they display a remarkable missionary activity, they make the most strenuous attempts to gain adherents for their false tenets. Therefore Christians, as they value their soul’s salvation, must examine, test, such spirits and their doctrines, whether they are of God. The mere pretense, the name, the glamour must not hold their attention. It surely does not pay even to listen to the spirits of darkness. Note: The very fact that false prophets come to the houses without invitation and try to insinuate themselves into the good graces of some member of the household, brands these men as outlaws in the Christian Church. They should be turned away without a hearing.
The apostle shows wherein the test of the spirits, of the preachers, consists: In this you recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is that of Anti-Christ, of whom you have heard that he is coming, and he is even now in the world. The Christians must look for evidences of the Spirit of God, for a proof that He is present in the work of the men that profess to be guided by His wisdom. One of the fundamental facts of Christianity is the doctrine that Jesus Christ came into the world, became flesh. That is the touchstone which enables the believers to distinguish between true and false teachers. For in this doctrine is included the confession that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, who, according to the promise given by God, became man, and by His vicarious suffering and death, and by His victorious resurrection and ascension merited our righteousness and salvation. He that accepts and confesses these truths unequivocally, with all that they imply, may be considered a preacher from God. But every professed teacher in the Church or outside of the Church that denies the incarnation of the eternal Son of God; that denies that Jesus Christ is our only righteousness and salvation; every one that teaches that we, in order to be saved, should not trust in Christ and in His merits alone, but also in our own works: such a man is not of God. Such a one can be put down at once as having the spirit of Anti-Christ in him, for even in those early days of the Church this spirit, which has now reached its culmination in popery and all the related sects, was rearing its head. Truly, the anti-Christian spirit whose working was noticeable even at the end of the first century has made rapid strides forward, and all true Christians cannot be cautioned too strongly against his insidious power.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 15, 17, 19 General Information:
General Information:
John gives a warning against false teachers who teach against Christ's having had a human body and teachers who talk the way those who love the world talk.
Read full note →
Beloved, do not believe
"You people whom I love, do not believe" or "Dear friends, do not believe." See how you translated this in 1 John 2:7.
do not believe every spirit
Here, the word "spirit" refers to a spiritual power or being that gives a person a message or prophecy. AT: "do not trust every prophet who claims to have a message from a spirit" (See: Metonymy)
test the spirits
Here, the word "spirits" refers to a spiritual power or being that gives a person a message or prophecy. AT: "think carefully about what the prophet says" (See: Metonymy)
has come in the flesh
Here "flesh" represents the human body. AT: "has come as a human being" or "has come in a physical body" (See: Synecdoche)
This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming, and now is already in the world
"These are prophets opposed to Christ, whom you have heard are coming, and now are already in the world"
translationWords
beloved
believe
spirit
test
false prophet
Holy Spirit
flesh
antichrist
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15, 17, 18, 19 4:1-6 Those who belong to God (4:4) can distinguish…
4:1-6 Those who belong to God (4:4) can distinguish spiritual truth from error, because the Spirit’s presence (3:23-24) teaches them (see 2:20, 27; John 14:15-26; 16:5-15). Yet John provides concrete tests for the believers to apply so that there will be no confusion. These tests are a starting point for true teachers, not an exhaustive set; they were designed to address the false teachings that were being promoted in the churches of John’s readers.
4:1 everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit (literally every spirit): The teachers who left John’s churches claimed to be prophets, but the true prophet is an instrument for the Holy Spirit’s messages (Acts 4:25; 1 Tim 4:1; Rev 19:10). Every speaker should be tested against what the Holy Spirit has said through the apostles (1 Jn 4:2-3, 6).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.