1 JOHN 2:18-27 - Antichrist!

So Tuesday is Groundhog Day. You know what the difference is between Sykesville and Punxsutawney? In Sykesville, we shoot those pesky groundhogs! Nothing against the Groundhog Festival or all the history and culture associated with Groundhog Day, but if you grew up around here you know that groundhogs don’t mix well with farm equipment, livestock, gardens, and so on.

On our farm, we had one of the best groundhog elimination teams ever—our dogs Sam and Eli. Sam was a lanky, goofy black lab mix and Eli was half Australian Shepherd and half border collie (the smartest half of each!) They had a foolproof method of eliminating groundhogs, who are notoriously hard for a dog to catch, since they can dive back into their burrow at a moment’s notice. Sam would stand and bark at the groundhog, distracting it just long enough for Eli to sweep in from his flank and nab him. They pretty much cleared out our fields and pastures with that method, and when Sam died suddenly one summer, Eli’s success rate as a solo hunter dropped precipitously!

Now, I bring that story up this morning because the same sort of thing happens whenever the subject of “Antichrist” comes up—everyone gravitates toward the horror-movie interpretation of films like Rosemary’s Baby or The Omen, or the books and movies of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series. The currents of much of Twentieth Century biblical scholarship has virtually identified the figure of the Antichrist with the Beast of Revelation and spawned decades-long speculation from Christians and non-Christians alike concerning who “the Antichrist” is, when he will arrive, and what he will do.

And I think that all of that fixation with the advent of some mysterious dark figure—the black lab of “THE Antichrist” if you will—has distracted the groundhog of the Church from the Australian shepherd of the Spirit of antichrist that currently has us by the throat. (Sorry, my metaphor may have gotten away from me there for a minute…)

We’re so distracted by waiting on some dark horror-movie figure to arrive on the world scene that we have completely ignored the fact that the spirit of “antichrist” already has its grip on far too much of the church in America today. I say this because of what God’s Word clearly says in 1 John 2:18:

1 John 2:18 (ESV)

Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.

So what I aim to do is to start where we should always start—with God’s Word guiding us, and not our own imaginations or pop culture interpretations of the end times. Whatever your view of eschatology, the fact is that the spirit of antichrist is already here—it was present in John’s day, and it is present now. So I would argue that the great need of the hour is not to prepare for the coming of some evil figure onto the world stage—let’s deal with the antichrists that have already come! And what I want you to walk away with this morning from God’s Word is that

A Christian RESISTS the SPIRIT of antichrist by the SPIRIT of Christ and the WORD of God

So let’s begin this morning by defining our terms—we know what Roman Polanski or Hal Lindsey means by the word “antichrist”—but what does John mean by it? The word itself only appears 5 times in all of the Scriptures—four times in 1 John and once in 2 John, and (I think significantly), not once in the book of Revelation, which John also wrote.

In any case, John is thoughtful enough to give us an explicit definition of what he means by “antichrist”. Look at verse 22 of our text:

1 John 2:22 (ESV)

Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.

The antichrist, according to John, is someone who denies that Jesus is the Messiah, the “Christ”. As we’ve mentioned before in this study, one of the major themes of John’s writing is to demonstrate that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man—He is God Himself in human flesh. The heresy that John is fighting here in his epistles (and in his Gospel) is that Jesus only appeared to be God; that He was only a man who was possessed by God for a short period of His life. This is a heresy that “denies the Father and the Son”—it denies that Jesus Christ was the only begotten Son of God, it denies what John records Jesus claiming in John 10:30:

John 10:30 (ESV)

I and the Father are one.”

Remember again the statistic that I’ve quoted before--- sixty-one percent of born-again, Bible-believing Evangelicals who attend church every week believe that “Jesus was the first and greatest being created by God” (data retrieved 12/23/2021 from https://thestateoftheology.com/dataexplorer/). The spirit of antichrist has us by the throat, with a majority of Evangelicals denying the equality of the Son with the Father, and meanwhile we’re all worried that George Soros might be THE Antichrist!

This passage shows us that Christians resist the spirit of antichrist by the spirit of Christ and the Word of God—so let’s look at what John tells us about the spirit of antichrist in these verses. First of all, we see that

I. Antichrists ATTACK CHRIST (1 John 2:18)

The attack comes directly at Christ’s identity—denying that He is God in human flesh, denying His equality with God. And John tells us something important connected with their attacks—that they are limited in time. Look at verse 18:

1 John 2:18 (ESV)

Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.

(Depending on your translation, this verse might read “you have heard that the antichrist is coming”—the difference is because the Greek equivalent of the word “the” is missing here, which often happens in Greek when an author is talking about a general quality instead of a specific entity. It can be correctly translated either way). But look at something else here about how John introduces the topic of antichrist—he says that the coming of “many antichrists” is proof that we are now in what he calls “the last hour”. So we can say that

Antichrist has a LIMITED PERIOD of time

The death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ has ushered in what the writers of the New Testament call “the last days” or the “latter times” or “the end of the age”—Peter quotes from the Old Testament prophet Joel to demonstrate that the outpouring of God’s Spirit at Pentecost shows that they had entered “the last days”:

Acts 2:16–17 (ESV)

...And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams;

the writer of Hebrews says that the “last days” have commenced with the incarnation of Jesus Christ, that there is no further revelation from God regarding salvation:

Hebrews 1:1–2 (ESV)

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.

And the Apostle Paul says in 2 Timothy 4:3-4

2 Timothy 4:3–4 (ESV)

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

This fits well with what John is warning here in our text, doesn’t it? That the “last days”, the “last hour” are a time when people turn away from listening to the truth, who deny that the Son and the Father are one.

Ever since John’s day, there have been teachers who deny the deity of Christ, who work overtime to pull people away into error and deception. In John’s day it was a teacher named Cerinthus, who lived in Ephesus at the same time as John. Cerinthus taught that Jesus was only a man, and that the “Christ Spirit” descended on Him at His baptism and fled from Him while He was on the Cross.The ancient church father Irenaeus records a story from the Church Father Polycarp (who was a disciple of John’s) that one day John was walking into the bath house in Ephesus and saw Cerinthus inside—Polycarp says that John ran out of the building yelling, “Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down; for Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside!” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerinthus, retrieved 1/20/2022) Irenaeus also writes that John wrote his Gospel specifically “to remove that error which by Cerinthus had been disseminated among men.

So from all of this we understand that false teachers who deny the deity of Christ are nothing new—these “antichrists” have been on the scene since the Apostles’ day—but we are reminded that they only have an hour! In other words, their time is limited. They will not have the final say; they may deny that the Son and the Father are one all they want, but their days are numbered!

The spirit of antichrist has a limited period of time—and verse 22 shows us that

Antichrist is a PRINCIPLE of spiritual ERROR (1 John 2:22)

1 John 2:22 (ESV)

Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.

And a couple of pages over, in 1 John 4:3, John says it again:

1 John 4:3 (ESV)

and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.

Our Hollywood-inspired image of “the spirit of antichrist” puts us in mind of some malevolent, sinister figure that strikes fear and loathing into our hearts (Mia Farrow crying, “What have you done to his eyes, you monsters!?!!”)

But John says something very different—his description of antichrist would point us in a very different direction. For one example, consider Dr. Bart Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written many books on the subject of Christianity, among them, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.

In the introduction to the book, he describes a conversation he once had with a Christian friend who described the core of her beliefs as “the idea that in Jesus, God had become a man.” (To which every one of us could add a hearty Amen.) Dr. Ehrman writes that her statement revealed to him how far his beliefs had changed, that he no longer believed that Jesus was God. “As a historian”, he writes, “I am no longer obsessed with the theological question of ‘how God became man”, but with the historical question of how a man became God.” ( Ehrman, J. G. D. P. B., & Ehrman, B. P. D. G. J. A. (2016). How Jesus Became God. Van Haren Publishing.)

God’s Word says Bart Ehrman is a liar. God’s Word says Bart Ehrman is an antichrist. Antichrists attack Christ—they attack His declaration that He is God in the flesh. And, as Dr. Ehrman himself demonstrates,

II. Antichrists ABANDON the CHURCH (1 John 2:19, 22-23)

Look at verse 19 of 1 John 2—John writes of the antichrists who have appeared

1 John 2:19 (ESV)

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.

Five times in this verse John uses the pronouns “they” and “us”—he is making it clear that those who, like Dr. Ehrman and others, abandon their previous affirmation that Jesus Christ is God come in the flesh were never Christians to begin with. That is, in our permissive and non-confrontational day, a shockingly rude and “judgmental” thing to say. But that is what the Word of God says. They were never really believers, no matter what they claim, no matter how sincere they tell you they were. If they really were believers, they would not have abandoned the truth: “If they had been of us, they would have continued with us...”

John says here that antichrists abandon the church—that means that

They may DESERT the FELLOWSHIP (1 John 2:19)

They may, like Bart Ehrman or Abraham Piper or Jerry DeWitt or Josh Harris, formally renounce their faith and leave the church. They walk away, they reject their former identity as believers, and they now openly deny that Jesus is God (or even deny the existence of God altogether).

Now, we have to be careful to note that not everyone who deserts the fellowship is denying Christ. There are many other issues that can cause someone to abandon the church, and we ought always to keep watch on ourselves and our fellowship to address those issues—some are driven away because of sin in the church. The things that the New Testament warns us about—dissensions, strife, quarrelling, gossip, judgmentalism, or other outright godlessness that can take place in a church.

But when it comes to declaring the deity of Christ and the Gospel, it seems that the sin of the church all too often is cowardice. The fear that speaking clearly about the deity of Christ may come across as too “dogmatic”, that calling for repentance from sin and embracing Christ for salvation might sound “judgmental”, and “drive people away...” But John says here that, as computer programmers would say, that is not a bug, it’s a feature.

The faithful proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ—including the affirmation that He is God become Man, is a divisive thing to say. Jesus Himself said in Matthew 10:34-36

Matthew 10:34–36 (ESV)

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.

And so there will be times when unbelievers abandon churches that preach and affirm the deity of Christ. But there have also been times when believers have had to abandon a church that has slipped into the spirit of Antichrist and abandoned the affirmation of Jesus’ full deity and full humanity.

But to John’s point here, we must also remember that not all who deny the deity of Christ leave the church, either! But even if they do not leave the church,

They DENY the FAITH (1 John 2:22-23)

There are those who reject the Biblical teaching on the nature of Christ but continue to maintain that they belong to the Christian faith. But John says that it is impossible to deny Jesus is God and still be a Christian:

1 John 2:22–23 (ESV)

Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.

It’s a “package deal”, John says—if you deny Jesus is God, you don’t have the Father either. And again, this truth from God’s Word is set dead against the prevailing attitude of people today who say that they believe in God, but they don’t think Jesus was anything more than a good moral teacher. It doesn’t work that way. You simply cannot “just” believe in God and reject Jesus Christ. As one preacher put it, We need to be far more particular about Who we are talking about when we talk about God with people in our culture. We need to be clear that when we are talking about God, we are talking about "the God you cannot know and the God you cannot have if you do not have Jesus Christ” (John Piper). To deny Jesus Christ is to deny God altogether.

The spirit of antichrist is the spirit that denies Jesus is God. And Christians resist the spirit of antichrist by the Spirit of Christ and the Word of God. Antichrists attack Christ, antichrists abandon the church, and

III. Antichrists ASSAULT the CHRISTIAN (1 John 2:20-21, 24-27)

It is a hard thing to live among so many voices that attack Christ and deny the faith. Seeing another high-profile Christian publicly renounce their faith and reject Christ and the Gospel feels like a physical blow sometimes, doesn’t it? Somehow it feels like it would be easier if the spirit of antichrist manifested itself like some kind of brooding Mephistopheles, with cat’s-eye pupils and pointed teeth, an archetypal image of eeevil that we could openly oppose.

But that’s not how antichrists appear in this last hour, is it? They are the mild-mannered, middle-aged professors with horn-rimmed glasses and male pattern baldness, sitting comfortably in their mahogany office warmly discussing their latest book on a Zoom interview. They’re the Instagram influencer or Discord debater who always has the flashy quotes or witty comebacks that make believing in the deity of Christ seem stupid or weak-minded. (Ehrman’s book on Amazon is piled with almost exclusively five-star reviews!)

What hope do you have of making any kind of dent in the seemingly iron-clad opposition to (and disdain for) the deity of Christ in our modern society? Well, the Apostle John will tell you, you have all the power in the world because you have already overcome them in Christ!

1 John 4:4 (ESV)

Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.

Jesus Christ dwells in you, Christian, and He has already conquered the spirit of antichrist! John says this another way in verses 20-231 of our text—that

You have the ANOINTING of the SPIRIT (1 John 2:20-21, 27)

1 John 2:20–21 (ESV)

But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth.

1 John 2:27 (ESV)

But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him.

In his Gospel, John calls Jesus “the Holy One” (John 6:69 “and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.””), and says that Jesus is the One Who sends His Spirit to seal you (John 15:26 ““But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.” )

Christian, you have been sealed by Christ Himself and given a knowledge of Him that no book or internet personality or academic monograph about the religio-philosophical dynamics of First Century society caused people to “turn Jesus into a god” can ever give you—you know Jesus is God because Jesus Christ Himself has sealed you with His Spirit

John 14:17 (ESV)

even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

The antichrists who deny Him have never had what you have—the intimate, personal and unshakeable knowledge of Christ as God and LORD, given to you because of the indwelling presence of His Holy Spirit who “seals you for the day of Redemption” (Ephesians 4:30).

You resist the spirit of antichrist because you have the anointing of the Spirit, and because

You have the AUTHORITY of the SCRIPTURES (1 John 2:24-26)

Look at verses 24-26:

1 John 2:24–26 (ESV)

Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that he made to us—eternal life. I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you.

The word “abide” appears five times between verses 23-27—John is making his point clear. You resist and overcome the spirit of antichrist in this last hour by remaining in this Word! Like the old saying, “Dance with the one that brung ya!”, John is saying that you live in the Gospel that brought you to salvation! You were brought to the promise of eternal life in Jesus Christ by trusting in His death, burial and resurrection for the forgiveness of your sin. The antichrists who are trying to deceive you want you to move away from this Gospel, they want you to qualify your faith in Christ with their ideas of logic and reason, they want to chip away at what this Book tells you, erode your confidence in what you have heard from the beginning of your Christian walk.

But John says that you must abide in this Word—an the way that happens, he says, is if this Word abides in you first. You live in this Gospel when this Gospel lives in you. When the truth of your forgiveness of your sins and your eternal life through the death, burial and resurrection of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, is so much a part of who you are and so much a part of your daily life that you can’t imagine life without Him. When this Gospel abides in you like that, then you know you are abiding in the Son and the Father—no matter how much the spirit of antichrist wants to deny the Son and the Father!

The Word and the Spirit are your weapons against the spirit of antichrist that is being revealed here in the “last hour”. And the great hope that you have, Christian—the great promise from Jesus Christ Himself—is that you are being kept by His power until the day you awake in His presence for eternity! When you are sealed by His Spirit, sanctified by His blood, you belong to Christ, and nothing will tear you out of His hand! John writes the same thing in his Gospel:

John 10:27–29 (ESV)

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.

There is a beautiful statement of this truth in one of the modern confessions of faith, The Baptist Faith and Message:

All true believers endure to the end. Those whom God has accepted in Christ, and sanctified by His Spirit, will never fall away from the state of grace, but shall persevere to the end. Believers may fall into sin through neglect and temptation, whereby they grieve the Spirit, impair their graces and comforts, and bring reproach on the cause of Christ and temporal judgments on themselves; yet they shall be kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation. (“God’s Purpose of Grace”, retrieved from https://www.utm.edu/staff/caldwell/bfm/2000/5.html accessed 1/19/2022)

Christian, see here what great hope you have—that your life in Christ and your security in Him is guaranteed by the power of God the Son, Jesus Christ! He will hold you fast, no devil, no Antichrist, no liar or scoffer or skeptic can tear you away from Him!

And mark it well—there is real and glorious hope for those who have renounced their faith in Christ as well! For all of the believers that we have seen walk away from their profession of faith in Christ and who now deny Him—Josh Harris, Rhett McLaughlin, Link Neal—and even those who now openly mock Him—Abraham Piper, Frankie Schaeffer—the Word of God says that if they truly are believers who have gotten tangled up in the lies of antichrist, they will someday be delivered by the faithful power of the Savior that they now ridicule and deny! No matter how badly they have fallen into sin through neglect and temptation, no matter how badly they have grieved the Holy Spirit and brought reproach on the Name of Christ, no matter how many earthly judgments they pull down on themselves, if they are sealed by the Spirit of Christ, they will be delivered at last!

Where there is life, there is hope! So for that friend, that loved one who has broken your heart by their loud and insistent rejection of the faith in Christ they once claimed, you have real hope! Don’t give up praying for them, don’t give up standing against the lies of antichrist that have entangled them—you have already overcome those lies because you abide in Christ and He abides in you, and you resist the spirit of antichrist by the Spirit of Christ and the Word of God!

If you have been listening to the lies of antichrist, if you have drawn a line in your mind that says that Jesus Christ was a great teacher but couldn’t have actually been God Himself, then at the very least today you need to stop calling yourself a Christian. Stop saying that you believe in God but don’t necessarily believe that Jesus was God—if you don’t have the Son, you cannot have the Father either. If you won’t take Jesus as God you can’t have God at all. If you won’t take Jesus as God you have no salvation at all.

Listen to the Scriptures, listen to what God’s Spirit is telling you, what He has brought you here this morning to hear:

1 John 2:23 (ESV)

No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.

Do you want God for your Father today? Do you want to have forgiveness for your sin, peace in this life and hope for your eternity? Then confess Jesus Christ as Lord today—1 John 2:24-25 “Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that he made to you—eternal life!”

BENEDICTION

Jude 24–25 (ESV)

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

What are the dangers of too much speculation about the person John identifies as “antichrist”? How can we keep a Biblical perspective on this subject?

Why don’t antichrists remain in the fellowship of the church? Why do true believers remain in the fellowship?

What does John mean when he writes that antichrists appear “in the last hour”? How does the truth that antichrists only have a set period of time encourage you?

How can you use both the Word of God and the Spirit of Christ to stand against the spirit of antichrist?

Think of someone you know who has deliberately “walked away” from their faith in Christ. Do these verses offer any hope that they may someday return to Christ? Spend some time this week using John’s words here to pray for their repentance!

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