Scripture: 1 John 1:1-6
This blog post is like an intermission from our little "What Love Is" series. To recap what we've learned about love so far:
- The greatest display of love ever, that truly defines love, is Jesus' sacrifice
- The result of that sacrifice is our adoption into God's family
- As in any loving relationship, trust is crucial; our trust stems from who God is and that He's given us the Spirit
"Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God" (emphasis mine).
This phrase may seem random, but it's far from it. John was battling the earliest form of heresy that threatened the church: Gnosticism.
This was a movement with a very diverse set of beliefs, because it consisted of various enlightened gurus who each had a following. The gurus' teachings differed, but they held that there was a great duality of good and evil in the universe, and that all matter was on the side of evil.
This is so different from Christianity's value on creation and human life (including physical life), that when the Gnostics began blurring their beliefs with Christianity, it wreaked havoc in many areas of doctrine. Specifically, Gnostics taught that Jesus only "appeared" to be human but was actually only a visible projection of an immaterial power. (There were many other distortions, such as the claim that Jesus' "Father" in the New Testament was entirely different from the God of the Old Testament, since that God created matter and thus must be evil.)
John was writing to a church under the influence of Gnostic thought. So he states that one must not only believe in Jesus, but that He came in the flesh.
But, as always, there is a confidence that the readers will prevail in the face of any teachings:
"...because the One who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world."
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