Bible Study on 1John 4, verses 1 to 3, that spirit of antichrist

 

1John 4:1 ¶  Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. 2  Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: 3  And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

Here is an argument for the discernment of Christians. John is arguing against the heresy of Gnosticism. Gnostic, from gnosis meaning knowledge of spiritual mysteries, was an ancient belief that included many different things over time and through cultures. But the essence of it was an elite possessed of a secret or arcane knowledge. In this belief generally, mankind was perfectable and would become a god. It has come down to us in the form of Communism, a religion disguised as a political ideology. In Communism man is perfected after much death and destruction and becomes his own god, the socialist man. He goes back to the garden of Eden only without the God who created him, which the Communist denies exists. People are tricked and deceived into it by being told that it is the only compassionate philosophy, an ideology where people get what they need to survive. What is not said is that results from a dictatorship where an elite determines what you need and will withhold it if it suits their will and murder you if you don’t go along with them. All efforts at Communism have resulted in mass murder.

The Gnosticism that John objected to held that the God of the Old Testament wasn’t really the Creator but Satan, although they typically don’t use that or Lucifer to describe him, the Demiurge, who holds mankind in a deception where the physical world is an illusion. That God is evil and Jesus Christ came to free us from Him. Think in terms of the movie The Matrix. People are freed from the illusion in Christ. But Christ was not God in the flesh because since all matter, and hence flesh, is part of the illusion and therefore evil, God would not actually come in the flesh. Christian Gnosticism was the mixture of many Judaic, Egyptian, Roman, and others’ ideologies and philosophies and was a great enemy of the truth of the gospel in the early years of the church. This is the spirit of the Antichrist.

If a religion acknowledges that Jesus Christ existed but denies that Christ was God in the flesh, or denies that He died on the Cross, even saying it was an illusion, and denies that He rose from the dead, then that religion is a form of Gnosticism.  

This is the spirit of antichrist, which will feature so prominently in Revelation’s end times prophecy although the term is not used in that book. However, we typically call the Beast of Revelation, the Antichrist.