Testing the Spirits
Text: 1 John 4: 1-6
Proposition: In a day when spiritual deception has so many faces it is critical for the church to know how to recognize that which is true and from the Lord.
Introduction: Have you ever been conned, tricked, deceived? I’ve been conned many times. Once when I was about 16 a guy on a street in London England took my picture and then convinced me that it was only fair that I now pay him for the film he had used. I’ve been conned by people who say they have run out of gas, run out of hope or just had life run out on them. The process is always similar, there is the setting of the stage, the details of a situation which need to have elements of truth woven into them. Sometimes they play upon your emotions, sometimes they use of another person to confirm their story. Oftentimes there are details given, addresses, phone numbers, information that is designed to authenticate this is real. Then when your confidence in their story (and in them) has been established they ‘take your watch’ so to speak. Confidence scams exploit typical human characteristics, even virtuous traits like compassion or empathy but typically they target character flaws like greed, dishonesty, vanity, opportunism, lust, or fear. But know this, all scams come from the deception of sin, from the Father of Lies, from the one who has mastered the art of lying, even Satan. Every deceiving human has in one sense or another been duped by a deceiving spirit and many times there is more on the table than even the thief knows of. His very soul is being traded. So spiritual deception, spiritual cons, are a concern for the world and especially for the church because there is much that is at risk of being stolen. Have a look with me at 1 John 4: 1-6 as the Apostle John warns the church.
I. Watch Out For the Deception .
As John begins this fourth chapter he speaks rather simply about how the church should consider the spirit behind the various teachings they are running into. “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.” So a couple of things become evident, there are spiritual forces at work behind the deception and there are only two realms to consider, the realm of the God and the realm of the false prophets directed by deceiving spirits whose head is Satan. The command John issues to the church is that they test the spirits teaching and hold it up to the light to see if the ‘watermarks’ of Scriptures truth are evident in them. John gives us one of the ways to test what kind of spirit it is. It’s not the only test as the twists of deception vary with each spirit, but for the church in Ephesus this is what they were experiencing as spiritual deception.
You’ll remember that when we started this series we spoke about the influences of Gnosticism. It was a teaching that essentially said the material world is corrupted and only the spiritual world is pure. The inference here was that Jesus Christ was indeed God but that for Him to take on mortal flesh would have wrapped Him in a corrupt sinful state. So to the Gnostic, Jesus Christ as God is real but His humanity is not possible. They would say that there is a God and that He loves us but that He did not incarnate into humanity and that He did not die for our sin nor rise again from the dead. The demonic spirit behind the Gnostic deception meant to use it to torpedo the redemption of the cross. In our day it’s actually the opposite deception, people believe in the mortality of Jesus but hold back from declaring that He is the Christ. They see the evidence of the historical existence of a man called Jesus, our calendar, our court systems, our language including our expletives… all give evidence to the reality of Jesus but they deny His godhood, the very opposite of Gnosticism. So the test for the church of John’s day and our day does have similarity. The test is stated in verses 2, 3, “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.” So the pivotal question is really the same, “Who is Jesus?” Let’s do a brief comparison for some of the spirits that have in a sense knocked at your door.
Islam - The Quran repeatedly states that Jesus was a human prophet, a messenger sent by God but Jesus was not God Himself. It denies the deity of Jesus but upholds His humanity.
Mormonism - the Mormon Church teaches that God the Father is a resurrected human man who is a married being who has "spirit children" in Heaven. They teach that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers in Heaven. They deny that Jesus is fully God and teach that the goal of their faith is become Gods over their own planets.
Jehovah’s Witness – they believe that Jesus was created before all the other spirit sons of God and that He is the only one directly created by God. They believe that Jesus is the archangel Michael, a created being less than God. They deny the physical resurrection of Jesus saying that Jesus lives today as a spiritual being.
John’s point is clear, by denying either the humanity or deity of Jesus you create a different Jesus, one that is like a beautiful life boat with nice cushioned seats, even a tight roof to keep the rain out. It looks like a great life boat until you get into it in the open ocean and suddenly discover that the floor is full of holes. John puts it like this, “And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world.” The spirit of the anti-Christ presents a Jesus who was just a messenger, a Jesus who is not just an equal to Satan but is his brother, a Jesus who is a created angelic being. The deity and humanity of Christ are inseparable, watch out for any spirit that would separate the two.
II. When It Comes to Deceiving Spirits, Know the Truth of Who You Are.
A lot of people are fearful of spirit beings and their powerful and deceptive capabilities. It’s a good tactic of warfare to neither overestimate nor under estimate your enemy. Know their capability and be informed of it and be wary of it but at the same time know the truth of who you are. Check out 1 John 4:4, “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.” What do you think that phrase ‘of God’ means? It points to few things. Not only does it mean God is over you in authority but it also means His authority protects what is His. It also points to the change that has happened in you. You once were dead in your trespasses, once were of the world, once were at enmity with God. Now you are a new creation by God’s doing. You are a different kind of human being than the one you were before. 2 Cor 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”You are now ‘of God’, a new creation in ways you are yet discovering. Then John says, ‘and have overcome them’. Who’s the ‘them’? I believe it refers to what John started this passage with, ‘the spirits’ but especially those that are of the Devil and the antichrist. Notice he doesn’t say you can overcome them but rather uses a past tense, you ‘have overcome’ them. That happened at the cross, because of the humanity and the deity of Jesus. In Him you have overcome them. How… “because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” That’s the truth of who you are as a new creation. Verse 5 continues to describe these spirit beings under Satan’s authority, “They are of the world. Therefore they speak as of the world, and the world hears them.” The world here refers to that which is under the domain of Satan, these spirits uphold Satan’s strategies, purposes and values and the people of the world not even knowing it, listens to them. The opposite is just as true, for Christians too are under an authority, they too are being given direction. The distinction here is that they know there is a spiritual realm, they know the difference between the Holy Spirit and deceiving spirits. It’s why John says what he does in verse 6, “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.”