Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

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.