The Crowning Lie; First John

May the mumbling commence!

Today, I start my journey through some of the epistles.  I will spend thirty days each with one epistle or a portion of a larger epistle.  LaHaye (in his book How to Study the Bible for Yourself) directs us to spend the first thirty days with First John.  No surprise there – that is where we started our journey.  It’s like coming home again.  Welcome home!

I will be reading a variety of translations and paraphrases as I reread these epistles.  Today, I read First John in the Phillips Modern English translation.  Welcome back to the epistle of love and light and truth.

There are so many knock-offs and imitations and downright falsehoods that it is good to become acquainted with some of the ways that the world tries to deceive us.  What is the crowning achievement of lies?  Read from First John chapter two:

God has given you all a certain amount of spiritual insight, and indeed I have not written this warning as if I were writing to men who don't know what error is. I write because your eyes are clear enough to discern a lie when you come across it. And what, I ask you, is the crowning lie? Surely the denial that Jesus is God's anointed one, his Christ. I say, therefore, that any man who refuses to acknowledge the Father and the Son is an anti-Christ. The man who will not recognize the Son cannot possibly know the Father; yet the man who believes in the Son will find that he knows the Father as well. (Verses 20-23)

The author of First John writes to those people whose eyes are clear enough to recognize a lie when it crosses their path.  How clear are our eyes from the pollutants of the world?  The clearer our eyes, the more we will recognize even the best disguised lies and fabrications of our Enemy – Satan or the anti-Christ.

And what it the crowning lie of the anti-Christ, Satan?  It is the denial of Jesus of Nazareth being God’s anointed – the Messiah or Christ.  To refuse this fact is to refuse to acknowledge God and His Son, whom He sent.  If we fail to recognize Christ Jesus for who he is, then we cannot possibly hope for a rightful relationship with God the Father.  To believe in the Son means knowing the Father.  That is the truth that reveals the crowning lie for what it is.

This idea is important to cement in our minds as follower of the Way of Christ.  The author of First John repeats something very similar at the beginning of chapter four.  Read the passage below:

Don't trust every spirit, dear friends of mine, but test them to discover whether they come from God or not. For the world is full of false prophets. You can test them in this simple way: every spirit that acknowledges the fact that Jesus Christ actually became man, comes from God, but the spirit which denies this fact does not come from God. The latter comes from the anti-Christ, which you were warned would come and which is already in the world. (Verses 1-3)

Here, we have yet another way of denying Christ.  To deny that Jesus did not come in the flesh… that Jesus did not take on the form of human flesh denies God.  We can neither claim Jesus as a spiritual being only nor can we claim that Jesus was not anointed with the very Spirit of God – that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ.  They are really two sides to the same coin.  Each one tries to sully the truth of God from a different angle.

Do not be fooled.  Know Jesus for who he is – fully man and fully God incarnate.  Know this and know God.  Know these things and allow yourself to be known – to be shaped for the work of the Father.

Love and truth and light dispel all falsehood and deception and lies.  Thank God for this precious gift!

Enough mumbling for now…

Peace Out