Believe the Right Things

Did anybody else watch the Perseverance rover land on Mars this week? Did anybody else force the rest of their family to watch it?

I think it’s just amazing that we launched a vehicle the size of an SUV from earth last year, that it traveled 300 million miles to Mars and then landed itself within a mile of the target destination.

If you’ve been following this, you have already seen a few very cool photos of the lander as it descended toward the surface of Mars and of the Martian landscape around where it finally set down after what NASA officials described as seven minutes of terror, during which the fate of the entire mission was out of their hands.

As we watched the video feed from NASA on Thursday, I got to thinking about what people used to believe about Mars.

It’s pretty incredible, when you stop to think about it, that we have learned nearly everything we know about the planets in our solar system during only the past 60 years or so.

Since then, enough spacecraft and Mars rovers have been sent that, even if you’re not a nerd like me, you have almost certainly seen photos of the dusty red wastelands and deserts of this planet.

But it will not be hard for most of you to remember that there was a time when some folks actually believed there were little green men who lived there.

Some of you younger folks are laughing, but it gets even worse. Prior to the first mission to the moon, there were people who believed that the moon was made of green cheese.

Stranger yet, perhaps, are those who believe that we never went to the moon — that those missions, and presumably the Mars missions of today — were all simply huge Hollywood productions paid for by the government.

Many of those same people adamantly believe that these missions are impossible, because the earth is flat, a theory that Columbus disproved when his ships bumped into the coast of North America instead of falling off the edge of the earth.

People have believed ridiculous things throughout history, and we can laugh and have a little fun at their expense when the ridiculous things they believe have to do with little green men on Mars or with a Moon made of green cheese.

But truth matters, and lies can be dangerous. Think of the lies of the Nazi party in Germany and the horrible price the Jews of Europe paid because so many Germans bought into those lies.

In the end, even when it comes to faith in Jesus, WHAT we believe matters just as much as THAT we believe.

In his fantastic book, Mere Christianity, the early 20th-century English author and former atheist, C.S. Lewis, spoke to this very point.

Arguing against those who would minimize the powerful message of the gospel by saying that Jesus was simply a “great moral teacher,” he wrote this:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.” [C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Collins, 1952), 54-56]

Lewis understood quite well that WHAT we believe about Jesus Christ is just as important — if not more so — than THAT we believe.

The Apostle John understood this, too, and, in fact, he set out WHAT we believe about Jesus as one of the three tests of fellowship with God in the message that we know as 1 John.

As you are turning in your Bibles to 1 John, chapter 2, let me remind you what we’ve covered so far in this study.

I have told you that one of the themes of this book is the tests of fellowship with God. Remember that John wrote this message for a group of believers, so the tests that John puts forward here are not tests of life through Christ.

All who have come to Jesus in faith that He is who He said He is and that His sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection are their only means of reconciliation with His perfect and holy Father have life in them.

Instead, the tests John talks about — remember them? righteousness, love, and belief — these are tests of the degree to which a saved person is in intimate fellowship with God, tests of the degree to which they abide in Christ.

You may recall that I said John presents these tests in three cycles that reveal how righteousness, love, and belief are all interconnected in the lives of believers.

Today, we will take a look at the test of belief as we conclude the first cycle.

We’ll be picking up with verse 18 of chapter 2.

1 John 2:18–19 NASB95

Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have appeared; from this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us.

Now, one thing that I haven’t mentioned so far in our study of this book is that there seems to have been a problem in the churches of Asia Minor, and part of the reason John seems to have written this message was to address that problem.

The problem was that false teachers had come into those churches, teaching false doctrine to the believers there.

We do not know with certainty what they were teaching, but many commentators have concluded that what John was responding to was an early form of Gnosticism.

Gnostics believed, among other things, that Jesus Christ was not the incarnation of God on earth, that He was fully human, but not fully God. Gnosticism did not come into full flower until the second and third centuries, A.D., but during John’s time, there may have been the very beginnings of that false theology from a false teacher in Ephesus named Cerinthus.

Cerinthus taught that Mary was not a virgin when she conceived Jesus and that she and Joseph had Jesus through the normal course of human sexuality.

Instead of Jesus being the divinely conceived Son of God, he taught that Jesus was simply a man who received the Spirit of God during His baptism by John the Baptist and that God’s Spirit departed from Jesus before His crucifixion.

But what we believe about Jesus matters.

The gospel cannot simply be a narrative history of the life and human character of Jesus. The gospel must also be about the deity of Jesus, the fact that Jesus is God’s eternal Son, that He is God in the flesh of a man.

This is what Jesus claimed about Himself, and to believe anything else is to call Him a liar or — as C.S. Lewis put it — a fool or a lunatic or the devil himself.

Furthermore, to believe that Jesus is not fully man AND fully God would leave us lost in our sins, because only the perfect and holy God Himself could atone for the sins of mankind.

The gospel says that God sent His unique and eternal Son, Jesus Christ, to live a sinless life as a man and to give Himself as a sacrifice on the cross, taking upon Himself the punishment for the sins of all mankind, so that those who put their faith in Him as their only means of salvation could be reconciled to God and have eternal life with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

We who are guilty are saved by God’s grace through faith in the innocent Jesus Christ.

But some people had come to these churches of Asia Minor and taught some other gospel, and John is calling them out in this passage. He calls them antichrists — people who are against Christ.

And he sees their appearance within the church as evidence that we are in the last hour — the last days before the return of Jesus. He sees them as forerunners of the Antichrist of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation — the one who will not just oppose Christ but who will claim to be Christ and exalt himself above God.

And by leaving behind both the fellowship and the doctrine of the true apostles of Jesus Christ, these men showed themselves to be outside of the Christian faith.

Now, another theme that we see in this book is that of assurance — the assurance of eternal life that we who have put true faith in Christ can experience. And so, John next moves to assure those who have believed the truth, rather than the lie, that they are, indeed, in Christ.

Look at verse 20.

1 John 2:20–21 NASB95

But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you all know. I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it, and because no lie is of the truth.

These believers have an anointing from God — they have been baptized in the Holy Spirit. And therefore, they know the truth that Jesus is the Son of God.

And since they have recognized the lies some were teaching for what they were, they could be confident in their relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

Look at verse 22.

1 John 2:22–23 NASB95

Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father; the one who confesses the Son has the Father also.

Here, John states explicitly the content of saving faith in Jesus, the WHAT that people must believe in order to be Christians, and it is in two parts.

First, they must believe that Jesus is the Christ, the promised Messiah of the Old Testament, who would come to save mankind from its sins.

And second, they must believe that Jesus is the Son of God. “Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father.”

As Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” He said, “No man comes to the Father but by Me.”

You simply cannot be a Christian — you cannot be saved — if you deny the deity of Christ, if you deny that He is exactly who He said He is. But if you confess that Jesus is the Son of God and that He alone can save you from the penalty you deserve for your sins, then you will be saved.

This is the message the recipients of this letter had heard from the beginning, and it is the message you have heard from the beginning, as well.

Look at verse 24.

1 John 2:24 NASB95

As for you, let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you also will abide in the Son and in the Father.

This true gospel — the message that the innocent Son of God gave His life for guilty mankind and then was raised from the dead by His Father — should abide in the hearts of all believers.

But when John writes, “Let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning,” we should recall that we’ve heard that phrase before in this book. Look back at verse 7 of this chapter.

1 John 2:7 NASB95

Beloved, I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard.

Do you remember that commandment, the one John said they “had from the beginning”?

That’s right. “Love your neighbor as yourself. Love one another.”

And so, we see John here telling us that if we hold fast to the gospel message and if we love one another with that impossible love that’s possible only through the power of the Holy Spirit, THEN we will abide in the Son and in the Father. THEN we will experience true, intimate fellowship with God in Christ Jesus.

Verse 25

1 John 2:25 NASB95

This is the promise which He Himself made to us: eternal life.

Every Christian receives the gift of eternal life. But not every Christian experiences the joy of abiding in the Son and in the Father.

Unfortunately, many Christians — those who fail one or more of these tests of fellowship — will never experience the blessing of a life here on earth that is filled with the joy of God.

Many stray and never find their way back to that well-lit path to walk with God, who is Light. Many are enticed by sin to give up the abundant life on earth that they have been promised in Christ. Many have given up intimate fellowship with God by choosing to have their fellowship with the world. They do not abide in God as He abides in them.

But those who DO abide have a rich resource within them by which they can discern between true and false teachers.

Look at verse 27.

1 John 2:27 NASB95

As for you, the anointing which you received from Him abides in you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you; but as His anointing teaches you about all things, and is true and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you abide in Him.

For Christians walking in the Light — for Christians walking with Christ — the anointing of the Holy Spirit makes for a powerful antidote to false teachers. The Spirit gives us understanding as we study God’s word. The Spirit gives us discernment as we listen to those who preach God’s word.

John isn’t saying here that we should never listen to human teachers. If he had meant that, he wouldn’t have written this letter.

“He wanted his readers to remember that the Holy Spirit was the teacher, the real source of illumination. His point was that we should not look to other human beings as the ultimate source of our learning, an attitude the false teachers were encouraging.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), 1 Jn 2:27.]

The Holy Spirit uses God’s word to teach us, and He uses human teachers to do so, as well. In fact, Paul wrote that God gives human teachers as a gift to the church.

“The false teachers appear to have claimed that God had inspired them, but He had not. John was warning his readers about false teachers who claimed revelation beyond what Jesus Christ and the apostles had taught.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), 1 Jn 2:27.]

John’s readers were doing well in their walk with Christ, but he wanted them to continue to grow, to abide in Christ.

Look at verse 28.

1 John 2:28 NASB95

Now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming.

If we are in Christ, we are called to be ready for Him.

This takes us full circle back to righteousness, and we’ll talk more about that again next week.

But the point that John is making here is that as we abide in Christ through proper belief in Him, and as we abide in Christ through proper love for one another, then we will also abide in Christ through proper obedience to Him, and we will have no reason to be ashamed when He returns for us.

“‘Confidence’ is freedom or boldness of speech that comes as a result of a clear conscience. John’s idea was that if we walk in fellowship with God now we will not feel embarrassed to meet Him whenever we see Him. The prospect of our seeing Jesus Christ one day soon should motivate us to abide in Him now.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), 1 Jn 2:28.]

Sometimes I ask myself whether I’d be ashamed at what I’m doing or how I’m acting if Jesus came back at that very moment.

On the one hand, it’s a silly question, because Jesus knows what’s going on in my life from one moment to the next, whether He is here in the flesh or not, and the Holy Spirit living within me can be quenched or grieved by my actions when I act in some way or do something that is opposed to God’s righteousness.

But I think asking that question is a good way for us to remember that we are called to a higher standard. We are called to hate the things of this world and to love righteousness. We are called to believe the truth about Jesus and shun the lies about Him that the world would prefer we believe.

What you believe about Jesus is even more important than THAT you believe in Him.

And if I can make one application from today’s message, it is this: Pay attention to what you are taught, and be discerning about what you believe.

There are many good preachers and teachers on the radio and a few good ones on television. But there are countless people out there proclaiming a false gospel of one kind or another.

Jesus said they would “come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”

Test them. Test what they say.

Do they proclaim Jesus as the Son of God and the promised Messiah who brought mankind the opportunity for salvation by His death and resurrection?

Or do they hold him up merely as a great teacher with moral lessons that can help us be better people?

Test them. Abide in the Spirit, and He will help you be discerning in whom you listen to and what you believe.

What you believe is supremely important.