NOTES for Jo1 4:1-12

The apostle proposes testing the spirits because many false prophets have gone out into the world. John does not write about this, but we are entitled to develop his warning: we ourselves might mistake a voice from the darkness for a voice from above and become such false prophets. To prevent this, John offers a simple criterion: pay attention to how the spirit claiming to be prophetic responds to Christ. Such a spirit will not necessarily reject Him openly; it may even speak respectfully of Him. Yet even then, sooner or later, it will inevitably begin to qualify its praise of Christ with numerous “buts,” whose ultimate purpose is to deny the real Christ who came in the flesh. Thus we can distinguish what we are dealing with: differences of opinion, whose inevitability the Apostle Paul wrote about, or a distortion of the very foundations of the Gospel.

False prophets often claim to possess special knowledge, but as a rule they have no love, which is unsurprising because they do not have Christ. The presence or absence of love may seem to many an overly simple and unreliable criterion, especially in our time, when the accumulation of information has become one of the foundations of civilization. Both ancient false teachers and modern ones lay claim to knowledge, not to love; love seems insufficiently serious to them, and if it is acknowledged at all, it is reduced to something else, such as sentimentality, and that is not even the worst possibility.

But there is no sentimentality in the sacrifice of Golgotha.