False Teachers Deny the Doctrine of Christ

1st John 4:1 tells us to the test the spirits. But what really do we test? Maybe we can learn from John. In this passage, John is giving us a specific test pertinent to his own situation, and the situation he faced in the first century was Gnosticism.

Here is the red light warning he put up: 1st John 4:2-3 –
“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. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world.”

The test is the doctrine of Christ. Is Jesus the Christ sent by God who came in the flesh? This is the fundamental doctrine of Christianity. It stresses that Jesus is both God and man.

Remember the battle John was fighting? The disease of Gnosticism had infected the early church. The Gnostics claimed to have greater knowledge than anyone else, and they stressed the importance of the spiritual over the physical. So, in the teaching of Cerinthus, a Gnostic spokesman, Jesus was a normal born man on whom the Spirit of God came at His baptism. Then, according to Gnostics, the Spirit of God left just before the cross.

But this teaching destroys the truth of Scripture. Scripture stresses the incarnation. Jesus was Immanuel, God with us, God in human flesh. He wasn’t a normal man that God’s Spirit came upon for awhile then left, like happened often in the Old Testament.

What difference does it make? All the difference in the world -Think about it! What benefit would the cross be if Jesus wasn’t who He claimed to be? Not much, maybe Jesus would be a good example, but not capable of bringing salvation.

But that’s the purpose of false doctrine: To destroy the way of salvation. False teachers want to get you to believe a lie so you won’t get saved. If Jesus was just a normal man, sinful at birth, He would have had to die for His own sins. He would have been ineligible to die as our substitute. Only the innocent can stand in for the guilty, not another guilty man bearing his own guilt and conviction. So Jesus had to be born without a sin nature, and had to live a sinless life.

Except only God is sinless, but God can’t die. Therefore, God must become a man. That’s exactly what Scripture tells us happened. And He was virgin born so that He wouldn’t inherit the sin-nature that comes through the Father.

Can we deny the virgin birth as the liberals do? No! Not without destroying the possibility of salvation. But that is the mark of a false teacher. They might say all kinds of wonderful things about Jesus, “He was a great moral man, a great teacher,” but they will not affirm the doctrines that are necessary for salvation. And one is that Jesus was 100% God and 100% man. That’s where the rubber meets the road. No matter how charming and how plausible and how eloquent they may be, If they don’t teach the truth, they are false, and will lead you to hell.

And, according to John, they bear the spirit of antichrist.
1st John 4:3 says:
“And every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world.”

This is not the antichrist of the book of Revelation that comes on the scene during the Tribulation, but they will both have the same spirit within them. And it’s not the Holy Spirit in them, but the spirit of Satan.