1John---Watch Out for False Teaching

[HKHaugan]

False teaching is the dangerous satanic interference in every generation. The positive stand of John in his letters is the antidote in every generation. Believers need not only right doctrine for their minds but encouragement for their hearts. This is exactly John’s purpose in writing for the Body of Christ at large.

The subtle infusion of heretical teaching was the devil’s ploy to sidetrack the early Body of Christ. One prevailing example was called Gnosticism. Part of its teaching was that anything spiritual is good and all matter is evil---hence, the strong introductory presentation of the eternal Son of God, Jesus, really having come in the flesh. John has three purposes in writing his epistles. First, it is to affirm and assure believer’s salvation. Second, it is to expose false teachers and their immorality. Third, it is to lift up the reality of the Body of Christ being a spiritual fellowship.

1:1-10 Here is the primary truth, the spiritual reality, of faith. It resounds with the prologue of John’s Gospel, In the beginning was the Word…John opens with a stirring personal witness describing both the spiritual and physical presence of the Son of God. For John they are completely one yet identifiable as two natures, human and spiritual. Both are in Jesus Christ. He is the perfect human containing the perfect Spirit.

There are four words to watch for that impact these letters, beginning, life, light and love. They all appear in John’s Gospel as well.

First, beginning. That which was from the beginning…Like Genesis and the Gospel the beginning is important to note. In Genesis we have in the beginning signifying that before there was a beginning God already was. Here from the beginning carries through the spiritual intention of God, that He who was from before the beginning is present in the beginning and from that point on we have the plan of God all wrapped up in Jesus. He is the revelation of the presence and purpose of God from before Creation. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. Everything finds it meaning in Jesus since He was the agent of Creation.

Second, life. …which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched---this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. What the apostles saw, looked at, touched with their hands, was the physical body of Jesus revealing a different kind of life, a spiritual life that was real. This life was not the biological one but the eternal life of God (vs.2). When we were born again this is the life we were given. Being born again is to be born from eternity into eternity---now. Dying to self you rise to new life in Jesus and this is to be born into eternity. This life is from before Creation in the mind of an already existent eternal God. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.

The importance of this new life is that it is eternal and brings us into fellowship with the Father and the Son and also that those who accept Jesus have this new life in fellowship with everyone else who is born again. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. Again what we see here is eternity and Creation in the shadow of the Cross. Eternal life (the vertical) is grounded in fellowship (the horizontal). Now others may have the view of an above and a view of fellowship here, i.e. other religions, idol worship, an invisible source with a visible expression but John speaks to that in the last words of vs.3-4, And our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

Third, light. Vs.5 This is the message we have heard from him and declare unto you: God is light; in Him is no darkness at all. The light of God is what the heart perceives. It is perceived in faith. It is perceived in making faithful decisions.

Light is the presence of God in Jesus Christ. Jn.8:12 Jesus said, I am the light of the world. Jesus’ teachings are filled with His light. Just the presence of Jesus brings clarity to the mind, lifting of the heart and a security in belief.

When we see Jesus in the Scripture it is His light that clarifies the words. He brings the Spirit to the surface and it is the Spirit that touches our hearts and we say we have seen the light.

One word to describe our personal experience of the light is insight. It is what we see within, in our minds and in our hearts. Where there is confusion he brings order. Where there is insecurity he brings stability. When there is no clear direction he calls us to act faithfully. Reliance on His will allows Him to bring His light and we respond by simply saying, ‘Oh, now I see.’ Actually this is what the Cross is all about. When Jesus was faced with nothing but darkness and death, He lifts His eyes to Heaven and says before the Cross, ‘Not my will but your will be done.’ On the Cross he says, ‘Into your hands I commit my Spirit.’ Then the light burst forth in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the insight of God becoming outsight. What God is within (inwardly), Jesus is without (outwardly).

John says it clearly in the Gospel prologue, In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. Further in Jn.3:19-21, this is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth come into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God. So darkness is sin; its evil motivation and its consequent behavior prompted by the prince of darkness. Sin is the devil’s spirit that entered Adam when he disobeyed God. Sin replaced the Holy Spirit in the hearts of men and, as John says it in 3:8, The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. He did this by coming into the flesh for us to see. He is the light that exposes the darkness and what lies in it.

Jesus, being the light, exposed three things, the devil, sin and evil.

The devil, satan, acted in the dark and was mentioned only in Scripture. He was hidden until Jesus came and revealed him as the enemy.

Sin is the spirit of satan and is the spiritual infection that plays on fear, ignorance of God and self-will. It is the spirit of ‘me first.’

Evil is the collective result of shared sin. When Adam and Eve shared their disobedience evil overtook them. The evil mounted against Jesus occurred when the collective action of Roman authorities and the combined leadership of the Jewish nation sinfully condemned Jesus in a rigged trial to an unjust death reserved for foreign rebels and blasphemers.

Exposing sin and its manipulator, the sinless Jesus went to the Cross bearing everyone’s sin, bearing it personally for each of us personally. Sin killed Jesus on the Cross but His Spirit, which produced His perfect righteousness and sinlessness, could not be touched and physically raised Him from the dead. Therein lies each of our hopes. He was victorious over sin, evil and satan. The same Spirit will raise us from the dead as well which began when we asked the Lord into our hearts. So spiritual light breaks through for us when we yield to Jesus as Savior and Lord and we allow His will to be seen by others through us.

Vs.5-10 Understanding that light and life come from the beginning in God, predating Creation, there is no darkness in God. So if we claim to have fellowship with God and yet walk in sin, evil, yielding to the tempter’s call, we do not live by the truth. And here is another word we need to grasp, truth. If we heed Jesus’ own words that He is truth, then truth is alive because it is a part of the nature of Jesus. Also Jesus says that the Word is truth. So the living Word, Jesus, is expressed in the living words of God, Holy Scripture.

Vs.7 follows and very clearly promises three things. First, we can walk in the light because He guarantees we can. Second, if we walk in the light, as Jesus is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. Third, if we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus purifies us from all sin.

Vs.8-10 Here is a cautionary section that challenges our honesty with ourselves. False teaching would have us believe that either there is no such thing as sin or that we can control it by ourselves. This was part of emerging gnostic teaching that was beginning to infect the body (again gnostics believe that all spirituality is good and that all material being is evil). As this letter develops we will see John throwing in other warnings to the Body.

What we want to see here is that the ease with which our sinfulness wants to say we are not sinners, or that we can control ourselves all by ourselves, is self-deceit. And we know it. Prov.20:9 speaks pointedly, Who can say, ”I have kept my heart pure; I am clean and without sin”? as does Eccl.7:20, There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins. Add to these Paul’s quotes from Rom.3 and it is quite apparent we all have a spiritual problem for which there is only one solution and that is our repentance before God and Jesus’ promise of forgiveness when we repent. When we repent this opens the door to let the Holy Spirit into our hearts to be the guide and the power.

To look at the issue of self-deceit John helps us to see the problem when he points out that If we claim…we can see three things taking place.

First, the claiming is defensive. Self-deceit is always defensive. The heart knows itself and is always seeking to defend itself from internal and external pressure.

Second, defensiveness shows up something deeper and that is fear. If we have to defend our internal workings it means we fear exposure.

Third, you can’t escape yourself. We live in separate bodies and the workings of the heart are as mysterious to others as they are to ourselves. We are who we are and we are what we believe. Defensiveness, fear and pride all walk hand in hand. They seek to control the heart to maintain control at all costs. It is these dynamics everyone shares from birth. And it is a lonely walk. Shakespeare was biblically accurate when he wrote “Oh what a tangled web we weave when in order to deceive…” There is no end to how far we drift into that abyss of conscious aloneness through self-deceit. Everything outside of Christ is a futile attempt to be in control of the heart. Self-deceit is the foundation built on sand, the fountain of sin’s goal, the promise of eternal aloneness.

So John gives us five ways to identify self-deceit. They are introduced by the words if we claim and claims. The first three have to do with our relationship with God and the other two direct our relationships with others (again the idea of the vertical and horizontal beams of the Cross).

First, 1:6, If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.

Fellowship, darkness, truth; three words punctuating serious principles. Fellowship can be claimed like saying you know someone well you have only met once. The person who says about a well-known person, ‘I know him. He is a personal friend of mine’, is a questionable claim. Jesus gets right to it when He says, If you really knew me you would know my Father as well. If you love me, you will obey what I command. But even more directly, Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of Heaven but only he who does the will of my Father who is in Heaven. It is obvious then that doing the will of the Father is Jesus’ will for us. That can only come through knowing Jesus on a personal level. When we have obeyed Jesus’ words then we have fellowship with Him. That is His guarantee. Fellowship with God and with one another is based on obedience to His will as He has given it in His Word.

But obedience is not done alone, nor can it be. That is why Jesus says, And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever---The Spirit of truth. So Jesus gives us a Counselor to be with us so that we don’t have to go it alone. This is not solitary stoic grit-your-teeth submission but someone in our hearts who keeps the truth in front of us, convicting, encouraging, rebuking, loving, inspiring and nudging. It is the Spirit leading us to Jesus through His Word and presence.

Second, 1;8, If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. We have dealt with self-deceit already but the enormity of it lies at the base of our hearts. To deny sin in the heart, to deny that we are without it is to deny the truth, the living reality of the nature of God. Jesus said He is the truth and He sends the Spirit of truth to counsel us. To claim to be without sin is to deny the principle, the concept and the reality of our internal heart problem. It is no different than an addict denying he is one or having a sickness and saying you’re not sick. Self-deceit is addictive and addiction drives out logic and spiritual awareness.

Third, 1:10, If we claim we have not sinned, we make Him out to be a liar and His Word has no place in our lives. What is even more insidious is that the denial of sin itself is a denial we have sinned. This blasphemes God and clashes with the living truth. The Word then becomes a pick-and-choose supermarket and finally it ceases to have any authority in our lives whatsoever. This is the devil’s strategy, to doubt the truth not only as a living reality but to get us to distance ourselves from its call to godly obedience. As the devil acts we become more and more the center of life and God becomes a distant echo in a canyon of morose self-indulgence.

Here there is an intervening passage, 2:1-2, that anticipates our human problem. It is a saving passage guaranteeing that we are covered by Jesus’ grace, His love, His sacrifice and His forgiveness. My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense---Jesus Christ the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. We will cover this passage in more detail in the next session.

Fourth, 2:6, Whoever claims to live in Him must walk as Jesus did. How did Jesus walk? The question is an important one especially when we are called to walk, to live and to emulate Him in every aspect. The question is further amplified by the WWJD idea of “What Would Jesus Do?’ in any given situation in which we find ourselves. Vs.6 helps to clarify this for us. The issue is not what would Jesus do but what did He do? If we can answer this then we know what our walk has to be like.

Seven things stand out in Jesus’ walk in this world. First, He was totally obedient to His Father’s will. Second, He was obedient faithfully. Third, He always walked faithfully with the Cross in mind. Fourth, He was always spontaneous. Fifth, He knew who He was. Sixth, He always acted according to the Word. Seventh, He knew His enemy and His enemy’s strategy as well.

Fifth, 2:9, Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Here hate and darkness are synonymous. Hate biblically is far more than an emotion although it may have emotion attached to it. Both the righteous and the unrighteous can hate. The righteous passionately disown evil while the unrighteous disown the good with equal passion. “Hate is a rejection in will and deed” that can be both evil and good. But the distinction is in where hate is centered. If it is centered in God then we know what God hates and if it is centered in the devil then we know what he hates. God hates idolatry, self-deceit, playing religious games, breaking His commandments. The devil hates God. Sin is the spiritual sickness that causes the confusion of hate. Paul says, For that which I do I know not; for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. So the sinful heart is prone to hate. Jesus identifies the manifestation of anti-God hate, …For, from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.

Three consequences of these forms of hate.

First, it is a denial of the self as created by God thus a self-destructive tendency.

Second, it is a denial of God as the source of good resulting in self-deification.

Third, it is an unconscious, sometimes conscious, affirmation of the devil who by nature is a rebel against God and goodness.

The question then for each of us is who do we allow control of our lives? There is no middle ground between God and the devil. To serve God is to love and to serve self is to serve the devil.

So to hate one’s brother is to be disobedient to God toward others, which is the opposite of love---being obedient to God toward others. Obedience to God is measured by the one authority He has given us and that is His Word.