The Spirit of Antichrist
"Hereby known ye the Spirit of God:
Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and
every spirit that confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not
of God: and this is that spirit of
antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is
in the world.... " I John 4:2,3
The gospel statement is clear, "Jesus Christ is come in the
flesh." Antichrist is also
straightforward, "Jesus Christ is not come in the flesh." Both cannot be true, and one of them must
be; hence, man cannot escape making a decision. The Holy Spirit makes it even more emphatic: "Hereby know we the spirit of truth,
and the spirit of error." (verse 6).
The spirit of error contradicts the spirit of truth. God has said that He cannot deny Himself,
that He cannot lie, that He lives forever, that He created the world, and that
salvation is in Jesus Christ alone.
Only the devil and those who carry water for him will say otherwise. In
fact the sin against the Holy Spirit is the ultimate contradiction, to propose
that the works of the Holy Spirit are the works of the devil.
Even Peter, a good man, was rebuked by Christ when he contradicted
Christ's clear statement that He must die and be raised from the dead. Peter probably thought that he was very
generous hearted and full of love, "Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall
not be unto thee." But Jesus did
not mince words: "Get thee behind
me, Satan....'' Peter should have known better than to deny the law of
contradiction. Christ's words are true;
their true contradictory is false and of the devil.
"What is truth?" Pilate asked. The pagan world tolerated
a multiplicity of contra-dictory religious ideas, because the prevailing pagan
religious attitude was that there was no certainty in religious
propositions. As long as a man bought
into the prevailing attitude of religious toleration, he could believe as he
chose.
The insistence of the early church to the exclusive claims of
Jesus Christ was what brought on the persecution. If they had said that Jesus was just one way of looking at the
truth, or even that Jesus Christ was the best way of coming to God, they would
have had little problem being assimilated into the Roman religious scene. The pagan attitude was similar to the
attitude of the late Dorothy Parker:
"I do not care what they do, as long as they do not do it in the
street and scare the horses."
Against the lie that there is no certain religious truth, the
exclusive claims of Jesus Christ must be maintained against all comers, for
Satan knows where the citadel is. Jesus
Christ did really come in the flesh.
This basic truth of Christianity means that several other things are
true:
1. The Old Testament
presents a system of revelation that culminates in Jesus Christ. "Christ" is not a word that simply
sits alone in the desert. It means
"Messiah." To confess that
Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is to affirm the messianic hopes of the Old
Testament that the promises terminate in Jesus.
2. Humanity is a proper
receptacle for the truth of God. If
Jesus is the Messiah, the culmination of the Old Testament promises, then what
He said about Himself must be true.
"I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me." "He that has seen me has seen the
Father." "He that is not with
me is against me." "Because I live, ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my
Father, and ye in me, and I in you."
Jesus Christ is not a stick figure that in some way resembles God,
but God manifest in the flesh. There
can be real ideas of God communicated to men.
The devil has tried to contradict this since the Garden of Eden, when he
said to Eve, "You shall not die."
But Eve is dead.
3. If Jesus Christ is come
in the flesh, then the Bible is a coherent historical record that God has given
of His Son. Eternal life is in
believing this record (1John 5), for Jesus was "sent" to save
sinners.
4. If Jesus Christ is come
in the flesh, then God has a loving plan for the world (John 3:16-19), which is
the proper object of God's love and grace and mercy. If God sent His Son as the Christ to save us, then God has not
abandoned us.
5. If Jesus Christ is come
in the flesh, then we do not live in a stupid, senseless, irrational
world. Our lives make sense. Jesus is the Word of God, not the Feeling of
God or the Emotion of God. To reduce
our response to Jesus Christ to feeling and emotion is to distort His message,
by which God calls us to the order of
faith and truth, which we are to confess with our mouth and believe in our
hearts. Lost men live in the chaos of
antichrist and the chaos of their own making, for the Spirit of God is the
Spirit of order and meaning. "All
flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof
falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is
preached unto you." (1 Peter
1:24,25)
We do not
overcome antichrist by integrating him into our system, into some dream of
unity. "They overcame by the blood
of the lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives
unto the death." (Revelation
12:11)
