Discern Carefully
1 - What are the spirits?
2 - What are the tests?
2a - Who is Jesus?
2b - Who is listening (and to what)?
The entire section thus sets in “bold relief” God and the “world,” truth and delusion (Bultmann, 64). As the heretics are “in” the worldly evil one, and the evil one is in their world (vv 3–5), so the believer is in Christ, and Christ in the Christian (vv 2, 4, 6).
behind every statement is a spirit, a pneuma, but not every spirit is the Spirit of God
John is interested in the source of the prophetic message. One should not receive as true every prophetic pronouncement just because the prophets claim to speak with divine authority. Perhaps in their readiness to hear from God John’s readers were unwisely open to what the false prophets had to say. The verb “test” (dokimazete) means “to prove, to examine,” like coins that are being tested for genuineness and proper weight—something that should be done on a continual basis.
The actuality of the incarnation is not secondary or optional. It is essential. The Spirit of God always gives honor to Jesus the Christ, the Son of God. John’s concern with the mode of Christ’s coming again reveals that he is battling a Docetic Christology of the false prophets. Jesus himself was the incarnate Christ, and “far from coming upon Jesus at the baptism and leaving him before the cross, the Christ actually came in the flesh and has never laid it aside.”81 Therefore, no matter how convincing or eloquent the deceivers may be, they still must be judged by their own confession to Christ. The confession is crucial. It will affect every other aspect of one’s theology and worldview. What one thinks about Jesus always has far-reaching ramifications.
As Hiebert explains, “They draw the substance of their teaching from the godless world.” Further, their message is attractive to those who think like the world. Their words entice and capture those for whom the world is their home. “The world listens to those who speak its own language.”88 The words of these false teachers spring from the world, and “no stream rises above its source.” This is the precise reason that the world hears them. The world “recognizes its own people and listens to their message, which originates in its own circle and reflects its own perspective.”
Therefore one who affirms the world’s message is from the world, and, likewise, one who affirms the message that Christ came in the flesh is of God. Whoever “knows God listens to us,” and he is attracted to the apostles’ message because of his abiding commitment and relationship to the true God. This readiness to hear springs from a growing knowledge of the truth, which welcomes and appropriates the message of God’s prophets.93
John summarizes his intentions and claims that this is how we know the Spirit of truth from the spirit of falsehood (ta pneuma tēs planēs). The spirits may be tested by first examining their confession, which comes through human instruments, and then by examining the character of their audience, who would give them credence. We can know the true from the false, the Spirit of God from the spirit of the antichrist. It is imperative that we be vigilant in this assignment.