1 John
1Jo 2:20-23 - What do you Know? How do you Know it?
by Joe Holder
But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth. Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: (but) he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also. (1Jo 2:20-23)
Here we find one of those passages we often lift out of context and try to make fit in every area of our discipleship. But it doesn't fit and we intuitively know it. If all Christians know everything they need to know without Scriptural study, why have the Bible in the first place? And why does the Bible repeatedly urge believers to study it intently? What truth did John intend by this statement? The context and other Scriptures generally make clear that John did not intend to apply this point to all areas of spiritual knowledge. Within the context he carefully defined the area of knowledge he intended to address. The fact that his readers, the original recipients of this letter, had this knowledge does not impute their knowledge to us. We gain that degree of knowledge the same way they obtained it. The points that follow relate to Jesus as the Messiah of Old Testament prophecy and to His relationship with the Father, to His essential deity. Does every person who claims faith in Christ believe these fundamental truths? No they unfortunately do not. Do you believe them so clearly and so definitively as to need no more instruction in them? How do you gain that knowledge? John makes no reference to private revelations here. In fact he opposes the idea, for it was a basic tenet of the gnostics whom he opposed in this letter. Excessive claims of personal revelation often reveal entrenched error or entrenched slothfulness. We inherently know we cannot defend our ideas by Scripture, so we claim that God revealed this idea to us. Then we impute to our private revelation purity and authority equal to, or actually superior to, Scripture, for if our revelation contradicts Scripture, we are inclined more to hold to our revelation than to reject it in favor of Scripture! In the other case we decide what we want to believe and simply refuse to invest the time and mental or spiritual energy necessary to verify and document the idea from Scripture. Often people who hold to this view will reduce all ideas about the Bible to just that, ideas. "My opinion is just as valid as yours." They subtly reject any concept of fixed Bible truth and revelation in favor of a sadly relative truth philosophy. In this philosophical view all ideas are no more than one person's opinion, and they are all relative to the sincerity of the person holding them. Since this person believes himself/herself to be most sincere, his/her views are more relatively true than yours. They have little or no concept of a fixed truth and a fixed revelation of truth in Scripture. Granted that none of us can claim absolute knowledge of all Bible revelation and truth, but we all should go to Scripture with a high view of its content as a self-disclosure from God to us. We should inherently hold that the major truths of Christian faith are as self-disclosing in Scripture as God Himself. Therefore when we go to Scripture with this high view of its character, we will submit our preconceptions to its final judgment. As we submit to Scripture, we grow closer to agreement with others who also submit to Scripture alone as the source for Christian authority and faith.
To deny that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, is to deny His relationship to Old Testament prophecy. It undermines all His claims to deity as well as to fulfillment of prophetic Scripture.
To deny the "Father and the Son" implies denial of Jesus' deity and of His inherent eternal equality with the Father. John calls this denial antichrist, no small concept for a Bible Christian. Combined, these two denials precisely reproduce the error of the Docetic gnostic teachings that John rejected and opposed throughout this letter and in most of his writings. They held that God, whatever god meant to them, could not contact anything material, much less actually take onto Himself a human form and live in human flesh as a man. This they blatantly denied, and this John blatantly rejected and opposed. That Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy and that He represented God manifested in human form John viewed as a basic and foundational truth of the faith. Think of the gravity of this error.
For the moment recreate Jesus in your mind, but strip Him of every vestige of deity and every concept that He fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. What do you have? Forget the idea that you have the greatest human philosopher who ever lived. He claimed to be God incarnate. He claimed to fulfill Old Testament messianic prophecy. If He was neither, then He was the most self-deluded man who ever lived! He must be everything He claimed to be or He must be rejected as the greatest hoax in human history, either a madman or a skilled charlatan! There is no rational ground between these two views of Jesus. He was everything He claimed to be or He was a hoax.
Clearly John comes down on the side of Jesus as the Messiah, God incarnate. And he as clearly rejected any idea that views Him in any lesser position. He can't be one of many gods or one of many ways to God. He can't be a mere man who "realized his deity," a favorite New Age gnostic view that attempts to make human godhood an attainable and desirable goal.
Preeminently New Testament Christianity corresponds to reality, a critical test of its authenticity. Most New Age gnostic philosophies at some point depart from the real world. Have you ever heard anyone say, "We make our own reality"? Or "That is your reality, but it is not mine." What happens when your "reality" and mine collide? Let's suppose that you are walking across a busy street. You are in a hurry so you deny the red signal prohibiting you from crossing the street. You deny the Mack truck racing down the street toward your intersection at fifty miles per hour. These things simply don't exist in your "reality." So what happens when you walk out into the intersection? The reality of the Mack truck will collide with your imaginary reality, and you will end up either in the mortuary or in the hospital! The idea that we create our own reality is phony and does not correspond to the real world in which we live. Taking this New Age philosophy one step deeper into its unrealistic teachings, many of its advocates will tell you that every pain, every difficulty, every misfortune that occurs in your life is simply your way of working off "karma," moral debt from a former life. Of course it must accept Eastern Hindu reincarnation and karma to reach this conclusion. How well will this idea correspond to reality? Let's try this. Let me break into your house, beat you to within an inch of your life, and steal all your valuables. Why should you call the police and file a report? I merely helped you work off some of your karmic debt! I didn't do anything wrong; I'm simply helping you work off bad karma! These ideas are as ridiculous to the thinking Christian as anything one could imagine. They do not correspond to the Bible or to the real world in which we live.
John takes us back into sanity and into the real world. To deny that Jesus fulfilled numerous Old Testament prophecies is to deny reality! Many contemporary Bible "scholars" attempt to deny this truth by any creative means they can unearth. They will allege that many of the books containing messianic prophecies were actually written centuries later than they claim, actually after the events they supposedly predicted. But this idea will not stand the test of historic fact. They will tell you that Jesus never claimed to be God, much less equal with God the Father. And the studied established Bible student will cite specific passages and ask, "Which Bible are you reading?" Have they ever read John's gospel, one of several New Testament books filled with repeated and clear statements of Jesus claiming both full deity and full equality with the Father? What corresponds to reality and to documented historic truth? New Testament Christianity corresponds better than any other worldview. Sir William Ramsay was one of Great Britain's leading archeologists in his time, and an energetic atheist. He decided the best way to disprove Christianity was through archeology, and he set about to use his profession and its discoveries to prove that Christianity was a hoax. He died a devoted Christian and a prolific Christian writer! Are you prepared to trust God and Scripture equally?