Spirit of Truth, Spirit of Error

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world. You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are of the world. Therefore they speak as of the world, and the world hears them. We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 4:1-6)

In an age drowning in information and competing worldviews, how do we tell the Spirit of truth from the spirit of error?

An Age Overwhelmed by Information

We are living in an amazing time in history. We have a level of wealth and well-being that is truly extraordinary—and not just in the West. When you look at the global data, especially over the last fifty years, it is phenomenal. I have long been a student of history, and I am not sure I would choose to live in any other era. We sometimes romanticize the past, but in light of modern science, technology, medicine, and markets, I can't imagine a better time to be alive.

But there is a drawback: we are bombarded by a mass of information we cannot fully process. Consider the numbers. Three hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Ninety-five million pictures will be uploaded to Instagram today. Sixty-three thousand Google searches happen every second. Five hundred million tweets are sent daily—about half from our president.

As a result, we have had to change the way we interact with information. This is a big part of why social media platforms are so successful: they let us glance at a piece of data, and in a fraction of a second our brains categorize whether it's of value, and we swipe on by. It has created a horrible feedback loop, because we can create and broadcast so much data so quickly that the volume increases exponentially, and there is no way to grasp it all.

Counterfeits Are Getting Harder to Discern

Some researchers say our attention spans have been severely affected. I'm not entirely convinced—people will watch three-hour movies and binge eight hours of a Netflix series. So it isn't that we can't engage; it's that we cannot process all the data coming at us.

Another problem is that we are no longer sure what we can trust. We now speak of "real news" and "fake news," and it is only going to get worse. Aided by machine learning and artificial intelligence, we now have deep fakes—video, audio, or images altered to make you think they are something they are not. Video can be produced that looks like a world leader saying something that person never said. It is becoming indistinguishable from real. Countermeasures are being developed, but the technology keeps improving. Counterfeits are becoming more difficult to discern, and dangerous.

This is exactly what John is dealing with in this letter. Counterfeits are dangerous, and we need to become good at discriminating between what is real and what is fake. John faced the same thing 2,000 years ago—a counterfeit worldview with similarities to the genuine, a counterfeit gospel and counterfeit truths, what we now call heresy, confronting the church. John wrote this around AD 90-95. In the second century these counterfeits became a huge issue, and by the third century the church addressed them through ecumenical councils, such as the Council of Nicaea, to identify what is true and what is false.

The Spirit Who Dwells in Us

In this passage John has been contrasting true and false followers of God. Look at the verse just before chapter four:

Now he who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. And by this we know that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us. (1 John 3:24)

So John tells his readers—then and now—that we can know what is true because God is in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us. In saying this, John introduces a new character: the Spirit who dwells in us, capitalized in most English translations because it is the Holy Spirit. This is the first time John mentions this in the book, and it adds a new layer of complexity. Just as in our day, people in John's day held many different views about spirit and spirits, so John needs to give some clarification.

That's what 4:1 is: "Beloved, do not believe every spirit." We have the Spirit who dwells in us, but do not believe every spirit—because there are counterfeits. "But test the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world." John corresponds these false teachers to the many deceiving spirits in the world. This gives us our first point: there are deceiving spirits in the world. John wanted first-century Christians to grasp this, and it is imperative that we, twenty centuries later, grasp it too. There is more to reality than what we can see, hear, touch, smell, or taste.

Two Counterfeit Worldviews

To handle this truth, we need to understand what it meant to the original readers and what it means for us. In John's day, people had no problem with the statement that there is more to reality than what we can see. They believed in a spiritual dimension and recognized the supernatural and metaphysical as real. That is very different from much of modern Western culture.

Many people John was addressing were being affected by a growing view we now call Gnosticism. The basic Gnostic view was that there is a material world we interact with through our senses, and an immaterial, spiritual world. The material world is evil and defiled; the spiritual world is good and pure; and never do the two meet.

There are two immediate problems with this. First, it does not accord with divine revelation. Scripture reveals both a spiritual and a physical world, but it does not teach that the spiritual is entirely good and the physical entirely evil. There are unclean, deceiving things in the spiritual realm—which is precisely John's point: do not believe every spirit, because there are false spirits. Second, this view has a problem with the incarnation—the doctrine that God, who is Spirit, came into this physical world in a human body.

The Modern Counterfeit

People today don't understand the world as John's readers did. Secular, materialistic minds don't believe in a metaphysical world at all. Yet John's revelation is still helpful, because there is more to reality than we can perceive with our senses. Twenty-first-century Westerners see the world through a materialistic, naturalistic lens and are skeptical of anything metaphysical. If it can't be tested empirically, they assume it can't be true.

Here's the thing: no one who holds this view actually lives by it consistently. They believe in love, yet you cannot verify love with empiricism. They believe in human dignity, but you cannot verify a human being's value empirically. Beauty, morality, ethical judgments—you cannot make a single ethical judgment as a pure naturalist, and yet they make them all day long. Empiricism cannot answer the questions of truth, morality, beauty, love, or dignity. So even naturalists believe in things outside the empirical purview.

Whether you hold a first-century Gnostic view or a 21st-century naturalistic one, according to John both may very well be counterfeits—and counterfeits can be incredibly dangerous. The first-century counterfeit said: everything physical is evil, therefore Jesus did not come in the flesh. The problem? If Jesus did not come in the flesh, His death on the cross is insufficient to deal with our sin. The 21st-century counterfeit says: everything is physical, therefore Jesus is not God. The problem? If Jesus is not God, He does not have sufficient power to save us. Both counterfeits lead to a wrong—and catastrophic—understanding of who Jesus is.

Where Do Your Thoughts Come From?

Both counterfeit worldviews are spiritually derived—they originate from a spiritual source. That trips the circuits of Westerners who don't believe in the metaphysical. But it begs the question: where do your thoughts come from?

Have you ever thought about that? We say things like, "The thought came to me." Why do we talk that way? Because we're not sure where our thoughts come from. The immediate response is, "I just came up with it." Really? Consciousness is a sticky issue for empiricists. They cannot describe where it comes from; philosophers have wrestled with it for centuries, and neurologists now say it's just 100 billion neurons firing. Yet you've had the experience of wrestling with a problem all day, going to sleep without an answer, and waking with the answer. Where did that come from? According to Scripture, it came from a source outside of you.

So John is promoting the concept that ideas—the manifestation of thoughts—and the ideologies that flow from them originate from a spiritual source, and we cannot trust every spiritual source because deceiving spirits are in the world. That is our second point: I cannot trust every spirit. A false prophet is a professor of a false ideology, and we have many modern-day prophets professing false ideologies. Where did those ideas come from? A spiritual source. And though we don't have time to develop it today, the primary objective of these false spirits, as revealed by Scripture, is confusion and disorientation—so that people separated from their Creator will not be reconnected to Him or to one another. Look at the confusion in our culture, and it seems these spirits are doing a good job.

The Test: The Incarnation of Christ

So how do we test the spirits? Thankfully, John tells us:

By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world. (1 John 4:2-3)

Our third point: the Spirit of truth confesses the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Is it really that simple? According to John, yes. The Spirit of truth confesses that God, who exists outside the cosmos because He created it, came into the cosmos in the man Jesus Christ.

John gives a stark contrast: either the Spirit of truth or the spirit of error, the Spirit of God or the spirit of Antichrist. Either/or—no fuzzy, murky middle. These stark contrasts make Americans uncomfortable, because they require category statements, discernment, and discrimination, which are major problems for 21st-century Westerners. So the question is: do you believe that Jesus Christ is God? Do you believe that God came to earth in Jesus Christ? If not, John says immediately, that is of the spirit of error, the spirit of Antichrist.

Wisdom Is Justified by Her Children

A necessary clarification: if someone does not confess this fundamental axiom, it doesn't mean everything they profess is false. An unbeliever can look at the cosmos and reach right conclusions about science, technology, and medicine. But as it relates to fundamental reality—values, morality, purpose, identity, origin, destiny—everything they conclude must be suspect.

Our culture is possessed by a pathological ideology, and we see its effects. Jesus said something I constantly return to: "Wisdom is justified by her children." You will know the value of an idea by what it produces. This pathological ideology has been teaching for decades: What is our origin? Random chance and mutation over billions of years. What is our destiny? You die and are absorbed into the ground; the best you can hope for is to pass along your DNA. What is your identity? You're the highest form of animal—and maybe not even that, since dolphins have bigger brains. What is your purpose? You have to invent your own. What is right and wrong? The postmodern view says no one can say; it's just your opinion.

What do you end up with? A hopeless nihilism. And wisdom is justified by her children. That nihilism produces outcomes—like Gilroy, California, last Sunday, and El Paso, Texas, yesterday. Fascinatingly, Friedrich Nietzsche is remembered for the phrase "God is dead." Go read his short piece The Madman—it takes under five minutes. In it a madman runs into the street crying, "God is dead, and we have killed him. What shall become of us, the murderers of God? How shall we clean up the blood?" Nietzsche predicted the 20th century would be the bloodiest of all centuries—because with no moral accountability and no ultimate purpose, that is exactly what it became. And the 21st century has only begun.

We should therefore be suspect of ideologies that don't accord with the truth of who God is. This does not mean every Christian always does good—people have done terrible things in the name of Jesus. But they were always in conflict with the core teaching of Scripture. When a naturalistic materialist does something vile, it is not in conflict with his worldview. That's the frightening thing: when someone takes an AK-47 and shoots twenty people, it is not in conflict with the worldview of nihilism. It comes down to this—"Jesus Christ has come in the flesh," the nature of Christ, who is God.

Three Parts of the Test

John gives both a positive and a negative declaration to emphasize its importance. The test comes in three parts: Jesus Christ / has come / in the flesh.

First, "Jesus Christ." Some think Jesus is His first name and Christ His last. No—Jesus is His name and Christ His title. Jesus means "Jehovah is salvation," and Christ means that this Jesus of Nazareth is that promised Savior, the one the prophets predicted.

Second, "has come." This word troubles translators; some versions say "is come." In the original Greek's present perfect, it can imply both—that He has come at a specific point in the past, and that He is the coming one. At the very least it implies He came from somewhere else. Jesus Himself declares in the Gospels, "I, the Son of Man, have come down from heaven." He has come from the spiritual realm.

Third, "in the flesh." The Gnostic would agree He came, but deny He came in the flesh. Second-century Gnosticism held two views: one said Jesus was merely a man upon whom the Spirit of Christ came at His baptism and departed before the cross; the other, called docetism, said He only appeared human, an apparition, a spirit. John destroys both: "Jesus Christ has come in the flesh"—Son of God and Son of Man.

This destroys both the ancient and the modern counterfeit. Because Jesus is Son of Man, His death on the cross is a sufficient sacrifice to atone for our sin. Because He is God, He has the power to save us. And everyone who does not hold this confession is of another spirit—"this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world."

Do Not Be Surprised or Afraid

Our fourth point: we should not be surprised by, or afraid of, an antichrist spirit in the world. These are the two typical Christian reactions. Don't be surprised—John says you've already heard it was coming, and it's already here. And don't be afraid. Why not?

You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are of the world. Therefore they speak as of the world, and the world hears them. We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 4:4-6)

There are deceiving, untrustworthy, antichrist spirits motivating false worldviews and ideologies, promoted by teachers and prophets who profess false things. We shouldn't be surprised, and we shouldn't be afraid—which brings us to point five: the Spirit in us makes us overcomers by His mighty power.

Already Overcomers

Underline the words "have overcome." John does not say, "You are of God, little children, and hopefully you will overcome them." He says you have overcome them—the perfect tense, a wholly completed event. What is the probability of little children overcoming this great antichrist spirit? None—except that greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world. We overcome not by our strength but by the working of the Spirit of God in us. The word "overcome" means to prevail, to conquer, to vanquish. As Romans 8:37 says, we "are more than conquerors through Him who loved us." Because of what He accomplished by His love, we are already overcomers.

So what is the Christian's position in a world in conflict with an opposing spirit? Our place is to be lights in a dark world, bearing the truth of God to those who have believed a lie, so they may come to the knowledge of the truth and be set free. That is why God placed you in your neighborhood, on your campus, in your office, on the construction site, in your family—to bear witness to the truth so those believing the lie that leads to their destruction can come to the truth and be set free.

We don't go out to fight the spirit through Dominion-theology tactics. We proclaim the gospel, because the gospel brings truth to those who believed a lie. Once you were in darkness, but He has given you light, mercy, grace, and truth to set you free. And one way we see the value of this truth is in its outcomes: everywhere the gospel has gone, it has set people free. It will set you free—you wouldn't be here today if it hadn't.

In a few minutes we go out to our mission field: San Diego County, 3.2 million people, 110 languages spoken, many different worldviews. Every one of those ideologies is spiritually motivated, and if it does not align with the reality of who Jesus is, it is of the spirit of error. That's hard to say because it might offend, but the gospel is an offense to those who are perishing. There is no better thing than to set up a stumbling block before someone running headlong toward a cliff—that they would know the truth and be set free. Amen?

Closing Prayer

Father God, we need Your Spirit. We need Your ability to be witnesses of You here where we live. We are not sufficient of ourselves to think anything as being of ourselves, but our sufficiency is from You, and You are the one who enables us to be ministers, servants of the gospel. I pray that You would give Your church Your enabling power to be witnesses of Your grace to this world—a world possessed by pathological ideologies that lead to confusion, disorientation, and death, and do not result in abundant life here or in eternity. God, I pray that we would share the truth of the grace of the gospel, so that others would know this abundant life we have through truth, grace, liberty, and mercy. Enable us to be witnesses of this in this world. In Jesus' name, amen.