Sound Doctrine about Jesus - Part 1
Test the Spirits
1 John 4v1-3
9th June 2023
1 John 4v1-3
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they
are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that
Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,
but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit
of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.
For some time in this letter, John's been writing about the essential Christian attribute of agape love. Every Christian has God-given agape love for others, and particularly for His brothers and sisters in Christ. Now John turns to another essential Christian attribute: the attribute of sound doctrine. It's fundamentally important that we love each other, and it's also fundamentally important that we understand and believe the basic truths of the Christian message.
One of Satan's favourite and most successful lies is that all religions are basically the same, and they all lead to God in the end. John says different. Some spirits are from God and some are not. Some teaching is true and some is false. Some prophecy is from God and some is not.
We need to be careful because there's a lot of false teaching about. Some of it's obviously anti-Christian, like atheism, which teaches that there is no God. Some religions worship other gods, but every other god is a false god, and every false God is surely a demon. Some religions are anti-Christian but less obviously so, such as Islam, which teaches that Jesus is not God, and Judaism, which denies that Jesus is the Messiah. Some are very subtly anti-Christian, such as Unitarianism, which calls itself Christian but denies that Jesus is God. Jehovah's Witness have their own version of the Bible, subtly different from ours, and preach from it that Jesus is not divine.
Most religious teachers, most preachers, pastors and church leaders, claim to have some divine revelation, which they believe motivates and qualifies them to speak. That's certainly true of me. I believe the Bible is the infallible, inerrant written word of God. I believe every word of the Bible is divine revelation. I've studied it, and it excites me so much that I want to share what the Bible teaches with as many people as possible. Of course I do. But there are plenty of religious leaders who see things very differently from the way I see them. Does it matter?
Does it matter if you're a Christian or a Unitarian, or a Jehovah's Witness, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a follower of Voodoo or Shinto or whatever? If all religions are basically the same then, no, it doesn't. But if some religions teach that Jesus is not God and we teach that Jesus is God, then that's a rather important difference, isn't it? All religions are not the same. We are worshipping different gods.
And the Bible clearly teaches that Jesus is the only way to God.
Acts 4v12
Salvation is found in no-one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to
mankind by which we must be saved.
So truth matters, doesn't it?
As well as false teaching, churches can experience false prophecy. This may not be as unhelpful as the systematic propagation of heresy, but it can be very damaging, and we should watch out for it. If a church or an individual believes that God has spoken, giving significant direction or moral teaching, and God didn't say that, then that church or person can go a long way off course. History is littered with stories of false prophets leading churches astray.
We must not ignore any prophecy from God, but we must not simply accept any prophecy that's brought to us. John instructs us to test the spirits. So what is the test?
1 John 4v2-3
This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges
that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,
but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the
spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in
the world.
Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. He has come in the flesh. He is the incarnate Son of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity. He was with God the Father before the beginning of the universe. If you don't believe that Jesus is the Messiah, you don't have the Spirit of God. If you don't believe that Jesus is God, you don't have the Spirit of God. That is what John is saying.
There are various heresies about Jesus. Some teach that Jesus was just a man with an extraordinary experience of God. Some teach that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity came upon the man Jesus after his birth, perhaps when He was baptised. Some teach that the Second Person of the Trinity left Jesus the man before His crucifixion, and so on. But these are, indeed, heresies. They are unacceptable in Christian churches because they're untrue, because they dishonour our Lord, and because they undermine the Gospel. As I said when we studied 1 John 2:22, Jesus couldn't share our humanity without becoming a man, and he couldn't pay for our sins if He wasn't God.
The truth is that Jesus is wholly God and wholly man, two natures in one Person, complete and indivisible, divine from before the creation of the world, born of a virgin, and human from conception.
Matthew 1v22-23
All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet:
"The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will
call him Immanuel" - which means "God with us".
Hear what John says: "Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God."
We need to be a bit careful here. The word translated as "acknowledges" in the NIV here can simply mean "agrees". The AV, NASB and ESV have "confesses". It can also mean "an emphatic declaration of truth" and that's the sense here. Evil spirits know that Jesus is the Son of God, and they're prepared to say so. Matthew 8:28-29 tells us about a group of demons who 'screamed, "What do you want with us, you Son of God?"' Mark 1:23-24 tells the story of a man with an evil spirit who entered a synagogue and screamed, "What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Are you here to destroy us? I know who you are — you are God's holy messenger!" So John uses the word "acknowledges" to mean more than an admission or a recognition of the truth. John's saying that every spirit that willingly, gladly emphasises that Jesus is the Messiah, the second Person of the Holy Trinity come in human flesh, is from God, and every spirit that doesn't, isn't from God.
This means that we can test a preacher or a prophet by considering how much his words emphasise the Person of Jesus. Any teacher or prophet who doesn't emphasise that Jesus is the Messiah, and that Jesus is God come in the flesh, does not have the spirit of God. So we can see which speakers have the spirit of God, and which don't. But that's not the last thing we need to say here.
A lot of teaching and a lot of prophecy given by Christian people is part true and part false, part from God and part from elsewhere, possibly from other spirits but often from our own flesh, or perhaps we're just repeating inaccurate teaching that we've received from others. And some Christian teaching which is not actually false is less helpful than other Christian teaching. The best Christian teaching is teaching which emphasises Jesus, the Messiah, God come in the flesh.
Beware teachers and prophets who talk about money, or ministry, or themselves, or church, or mission, more than they talk about Jesus. Beware teachers who talk about ideas that are not in the Bible. Welcome teachers who follow Paul's example. He said:
1 Corinthians 2v1-2
When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior
wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.
For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and
him crucified.
I urge you: listen to teachers and prophets who talk about Jesus, first and foremost. And test teaching and prophecy with this question: does it glorify Jesus?
There are other ways to test preaching and prophecy. The best is to study the Bible ourselves to see if what we've heard is true or not. Another way to test prophecy, according to 1 Corinthians 14v29, is for other people with the gift of prophesy to weigh what's been said. And, although it's not in the text, I would add one more test: does the teacher's or prophet's life line up with his words? Does he demonstrate gentleness, holiness and sacrificial love?
Test the spirits.