EPISODE 159 1 JOHN CHAPTER 1 "Oh those darn heretics"

Welcome to Share the Word. As we kick off 1 John chapter 1, we're quickly reminded that one of the big problems of the early church were the false spiritual teachers. These pretenders were attempting to advance themselves as leaders, and how do they do that? Keep listening and find out that and more. 1 John chapter 1. Oh, those darn heretics, the doctrinal test.

We have in our New Testament not only the Gospel of John, which we looked at in our first podcast series, we also have three epistles from the Apostle John. Epistles just means letters he wrote. In the first century, letters were the only way of distance communication, and passing those letters around widely, the only way of mass communication. So while the apostles were spreading the gospel and establishing Christian churches, they wrote many letters, some of which still survive. And some of the apostles' letters became part of our Bibles because they contained timeless truths, spiritual guidance needed not just for their original recipients, but for us too, for future generations. That's why we call the first, second, and third epistles of John, which are part of our New Testament, general epistles, there for everyone.

And they contain vital truths not just for John's era, but for every generation to understand. So we're going to start, not surprisingly, with the one called 1 John in our Bibles. As he was in his gospel, John is clear about why he wrote this letter as well. He states this way near the end of his book. This is chapter 5, verse 11 through 13. This is the testimony.

God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life. Whoever does not have the Son does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. Wait, we can know that we possess eternal life, like right now? That's what the Apostle John is saying?

Yes, that's exactly what he's saying. I can't think of anything more important to be sure about. God wants us to know, to live in the assurance that we have eternal life. The Apostle John, who authored the fourth Gospel, as again now in this letter, is clear that salvation, eternal life with God, is based on our believing into Jesus, having personal faith in the Savior God sent. So, do you ever wonder if your faith is real? Is the kind of faith that really will lead you safely to eternal life?

That's what First John is about. In this letter, the Apostle gives us some actual tests. Let's call them the tests of life, to examine the reality of our faith. If we've really been born again into God's eternal family, we should pass these tests. Remember, John, in his later years, was living around the important city of Ephesus in what is today southwestern Turkey. That might not seem like a terribly important spot today, but toward the end of the first century, it was a vital hub of growing Christianity.

These letters, we call his epistles, were first written for the benefit of churches and believers there in and around Ephesus. John was acting as an overseer in his old age of these early Christian churches, and he was very concerned to spiritually protect and nurture the believers who were part of them. In addition to discussing the tests of life, we're going to get introduced to some of the false religious teaching that was popular near the end of the first century. Satan has always been about trying to distort the gospel and turning people away from the truth. That's why I entitled this lesson, Oh, Those Darn Heretics. Let me say before we get into this text, spiritual warfare is real.

If Satan had the audacity to use King Herod to slaughter infants around Bethlehem just in an attempt to kill Jesus before his life even got started, and he had the audacity to tempt Jesus in the wilderness to try and co-opt him before he began his public ministry, and having failed there, the audacity to put it into Judas' heart to betray Jesus to those who would kill him. You know that the battle between light and darkness is real. We don't know how much detail Satan understands about the plans of God, certainly not in complete detail, but what he thinks he knows, he tries to subvert and confuse. After the resurrection of Jesus, as the gospel began to spread and people began to turn to Christ in large number, not surprisingly, the enemy tried many different ways to undermine and stop that. One of his most effective techniques was to alter and confuse the message using false teachers.

That's kind of a soft term. I prefer the term heretics. He's the father of lies, Jesus said, the author of confusion. Clear back in the first century, in John's time, the foundational tenets of the Christian faith were already under assault by heretical, satanically inspired false teachers, and the apostles of Christ were very aware of this. Two of the most foundational Christian truths the heretics targeted and revolved their teaching around was, first, the real identity of Jesus, exactly who he was, and second, what salvation means. So who was Jesus, and how was a person really reconnected with God, saved?

The real answers to these questions are at the very heart of the Christian faith. But heretics from the very beginning did their best to confuse them. We need to understand at least the basics of what those early false teachers' ideas were to make sense of some of the things that John writes in this letter. So let me try to explain some of the wrong ideas that were gaining currency in John's day. I realize that for most of us, me included, philosophy is a very, very boring subject, but stick with me for a few minutes as I tell you a little about these false teachers and their ideas that plagued early Christianity. I want you to see just how counter they were to the truths the apostles taught, the official representatives of Christ.

What they taught and believed contradicted in many different ways what the false teachers were saying. Now, it's a little murky, but these ideas of the false teachers grew in part out of the teachings of the influential Greek philosopher Plato, who lived about 400 years before Jesus. Their ideas spread around the Mediterranean world with Greek culture during the years leading up to the time of Christ. Plato developed a worldview we call dualism. Dualism. Dualism, in a nutshell, says that there are two great competing forces in the universe which are in opposition to each other.

Sort of like positive and negative charges. Plato used terms like mind versus matter, or spirit versus body. Some in John's day, based on Plato's philosophy, were teaching that man's spirit is pure and good, but his physical body, made of matter, is evil. Proponents of this view taught that human beings in our world could not have been created by the highest God, who is perfect and good, but had to have been created by an evil inferior being. They said we humans have a spark of divinity within us, but that we are confined in these evil, fleshly, dark bodies in a material world. The way the divine spark inside us can grow, they said, we can escape the evil of the material world, they said, is through gaining knowledge, becoming more godlike through illumination, through esoteric secrets.

We call this kind of teaching today Gnosticism from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge. When Christianity came along, as it invaded these areas where these false philosophies were prevalent, the Gnostic teachers tried to synthesize Christian ideas and terms into their existing philosophy in order to co-opt the Christian movement. This began already late in the first century and really gained traction in the second and third centuries. These Gnostic philosophers and teachers claimed to have knowledge that went well beyond the things the apostles had taught, well beyond the things in the New Testament writings. Higher knowledge, more accurate knowledge. That's what they taught was key to enlightenment, to achieving oneness with the highest God, which was their idea of salvation.

Gnosticism is very foreign to my thinking, and I'm not going to pretend to understand it very well. But I do understand how some of their key ideas fundamentally contradict Christianity. Most importantly, let's focus on the Godhead and the true nature of Jesus Christ. Christians, based on the witness of the apostles and Jesus' own claims, believe that God eternally exists in three persons. We call them Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is often referred to as the Trinity.

Admittedly, the Trinity is pretty hard to wrap our minds around too. But God is far beyond us, and this is what He's revealed about Himself: that He is one holy and all-powerful God, but eternally existing in three persons, and He's the only God. Christians believe that Jesus was the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, we call Him, who for a time humbled Himself and came into our world as a real flesh-and-blood man. Miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit in His human mother's body, Jesus was literally the Son of God. So Jesus, during His time on our planet, actually had two natures. He was both God and man at once.

This is why John refers to Him in his Gospel as absolutely unique, or the one and only Son. When he wrote, for example, And the Logos became flesh, that is human, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten Son. That word only begotten means one and only, or unique. John's understanding is that Jesus was, in reality, the Word, the Logos, our Creator, who entered the world as a real human being. He came down out of heaven to tell us the truth, to reveal things we could never figure out on our own. And he came to do something we could never do for ourselves because of our sinful nature, and that is be reconciled to a holy God.

As we saw in the important doctrinal book of Romans, Jesus became a real man because that qualified him to be our representative. When he lived a perfect life before God, he was our representative. When he died on the cross, he was also our representative. His life, death, and resurrection, too, were all for the purpose of saving us, reconciling us to God. But although he came into our world as a real man, he did not cease to be God. He still had a divine as well as human nature.

In fact, it's only because he was God that his death on the cross was valuable enough and powerful enough to atone for the world's sins and sufficient enough to save all who would believe into him. So be very clear about this. Biblical teaching, Orthodox teaching, is that Jesus was both God and man, and that is essential to the Christian faith. But the Gnostics, of course, confused all of that by mixing together Christian ideas with dualism. They taught, for example, that there is a higher God who is pure goodness and light, but that is not the God who created our material world, because that transcendent, pure God could never have created the dark material world in which we live, which is so much full of evil. So they taught a lesser god was responsible for this material world and all that's in it.

They labeled him the demiurge. Some even identified the demiurge as Satan. Are you starting to get confused yet? Believe me, if you are, I understand. But what I want to try and explain, why the New Testament writers attacked these teachings of the Gnostics and considered them heretic, is because their philosophies denied the real identity of Jesus, that he was God, or in other cases, that he was really human. When you get who Jesus was wrong, then you are way, way off track from Christianity.

And so, not surprisingly, they also redefined what salvation even means. To them, it meant enlightenment, some kind of mystical union with the knowledge of the divine, not the forgiveness of sins and an actual eternal life in heaven. One early version of Gnosticism was advocated by a philosopher-teacher named Cerinthus. Cerinthus, doing his very best to mix Gnostic doctrines with Christianity, taught that Jesus was just a normal human, the natural son of Mary and Joseph. But for those three years of his public ministry, he became the Christ, being indwelt by the Spirit emanating from God, which he called an aeon. These came on him at his baptism when the dove descended from heaven and landed on him, but later left Jesus when he was on the cross.

That's why, Cerinthus said, he cried, My God, why have you forsaken me? just before he died. So Cerinthus was teaching in John's day that for those three years, Jesus was the Christ, and he was imparting higher knowledge, but not all of it is known in the New Testament. There was much more to know, and a select few were taught it by him. To Serenthus, salvation was about gaining that knowledge. It was for the select few who would be initiated into the secret world of Gnosticism and learn about the true nature of the universe and the divine.

So these Gnostic teachers, they were like gurus who convinced their followers they were privy to secret higher knowledge. Their followers could rise up from initiates up the knowledge ladder to essentially one day becoming godlike themselves, once they understood and were enlightened enough by the secret knowledge. Kind of got the idea? Interestingly to us, Serenthus was actually a contemporary of the apostle John for a time, and they both lived in Ephesus at the same time, late in the first century. The second century Christian writer Irenaeus relates a story in his book titled Against Heresies that as an old man, John would visit a certain public bath in Ephesus, like an indoor pool, health spa kind of place. And he would bring with him those he was teaching.

They would spend time there. On one such occasion, upon entering, he learned that this Serenthus character was also in the building. According to Irenaeus, John grew so agitated he told his followers, We need to fly from this place, lest even the bathhouse itself fall down on us, for Serenthus, the enemy of the truth, is within. The enemy of the truth. I guess John was not a subscriber to the you have your truth and I have my truth, we can all have our own truths school of philosophy. To John, Serenthus was an enemy of the truth because he taught false ideas about who Jesus really was and about what salvation really means.

You know, there are still schools of spiritual philosophy and religious movements today that are teaching forms of Gnosticism, like Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and, dare I say, some elements of the Masonic Lodge. Several popular schools of Gnosticism developed during the early centuries of Christianity. But one thing they had in common was denying either the full deity of Jesus or the full humanity of Jesus, his dual nature. And that's very central to the Christian faith. To make matters worse, some of the Gnostic teachers wrote their own gospels, often falsely attributing them to Jesus' apostles or others closely associated with them. Ever heard of the Gospel of Thomas, or the Gospel of Judas, or the Apocryphon of John?

Thomas, Judas, and certainly the Apostle John never had anything to do with those heretical Gnostic writings. They were actually writings from the second and third centuries. But I hope you can see how Satan could and did use these false teachers and their writings to distort key truths taught in the New Testament. Those darn heretics! As we go through the Epistle of 1 John, I'm going to point up how the Apostle John clarifies true doctrine and refutes some of the early Gnostic ideas. If truth matters, and for Paul and John and Jude and Peter and the other apostles of Christ, it mattered very much, then these heretical teachings had to be identified and refuted.

So, with all of this background you've now absorbed in your minds, listen to the opening lines in the first Epistle of John. We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He is the Word of life. This one who is life itself was also revealed, and we have seen him and now testify and proclaim to you that he is the one who has eternal life. He was with the Father, and then he was revealed to us.

We proclaim to you what we ourselves actually have seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. The one who existed from the beginning, that's Jesus, with both God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. John wrote the very same thing in his Gospel's prologue, if you remember: the Word of life, the Logos, was with God in the beginning. That's to say, he was not just an aeon, an emanation from God, a lower form of God. He is the creator of life itself. What I've told you about Jesus is from my own firsthand experience, John was saying.

I saw him with my own eyes. I touched him with my own hands. So he was real man, not some kind of apparition, as other Gnostics thought. As an apostle, an eyewitness of Jesus, John is sharing with his first readers what he knows is true about Jesus, so that they could be in fellowship with him, he says, and with God the Father, and with Christ himself. Fellowship means to be in a good and close relationship with someone. To be in a good and close relationship with John, and more importantly with God and with Jesus himself, you have to believe the right things about who Jesus was.

If you get who Jesus was wrong, you're going to get everything else wrong in your theology. So this is the first test of life. I want you to remember this. We'll call it the doctrinal test, and it's, what do you really believe about the identity of Jesus? John is more than implying, if anyone accepts the teaching of those Gnostic heretics who never knew Jesus, never laid their eyes on Jesus, never heard him teach even one time, if you accept their teaching that Jesus is something less than God, or if you accept their teaching that he did not really come in the flesh as a real human being, or the idea that he was just an ordinary man who for a short time became the Christ and then died as any other mortal, if you believe any of this wrong stuff about the identity of Jesus, John is saying you cannot have fellowship with me, or with God the Father, or with his Son Jesus Christ.

To accept the teaching of those deceivers is to reject essential truths of Christianity. And God's whole plan for our salvation hinges upon who Jesus really was. So I hope you can see why this was a major battle going on in the first century between truth and error, as the apostles saw it. You know, there's nothing the enemy has worked harder to distort than the truths about who Jesus was. And that's because of who he was, he is the only qualified Savior to reconcile us sinners to God. This is why the apostle John is saying at the outset, if I can paraphrase him, you can listen to these guys who've had no firsthand experiences with Jesus, these self-appointed gurus who claim to have secret knowledge, or you can listen to someone who was there with Jesus from the beginning, who knew him personally, who was instructed by him extensively.

Believe me, I have faithfully passed on to you the truth about who Jesus really was and why we can have eternal life only through him. When I say, Oh, those darn heretics, I'm not really joking. Darned is just a less offensive way of saying damned. When you step back from all of this and think about it, it's hard to imagine a graver sin than to deliberately be turning people away from the truth about Jesus' identity and how we can only be reconciled to God through faith in Him. I'm pretty sure there's a special place in hell for people who do that. And that's not just my view.

The other apostles of Jesus knew these false teachers were tools of Satan. John would not be in the same building as one for fear the judgment of God could fall on him then. You cannot love the truth and be indifferent to heresy. You cannot love the truth and be indifferent to those who distort it and spiritually lead people astray. The truth is indispensable. So the first test of life: what do you really believe about Jesus?

Who was He? The truth of that is essential and precious. Guarding it and passing it on accurately is a very serious obligation the apostle John cared deeply about, and which we at Share the Word care deeply about too. This is Paul. Thanks for listening. So much rich wisdom in this episode.

An important point that Paul makes is this: there is nothing that the enemy has worked harder than to distort the truth about who Jesus was. And by distorting the identity of Jesus, doubt filters in. Think about the fact that at that time there was no complete version of the New Testament that believers could reference. This gave all of those false teachers the ability to go after churches and teach their own ideas. In the absence of those like the Apostle John, who was an eyewitness, if you were to take that doctrinal test, where would you stand? With the pretenders or with Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life?

The Prince of Lies has attempted to distort the truth from the very beginning with Adam and Eve when he said, Did God really say? Don't you find it interesting? He's still trying to sell the same lie today. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.