NOTES for Jo1 3:21-4:6

The world is filled with spiritual phenomena, events, and teachings. All this is very diverse, because even from one spirit — the Holy Spirit — very different gifts and fruits can proceed. But the Holy Spirit is not the only spirit acting in the world. How are we to understand, how are we to discern, from what spirit one or another phenomenon or teaching comes?

The apostle John offers a criterion that at first glance is somewhat unexpected. Did everything that the Spirit of God revealed to people (in the Old Testament, for example) always speak of Jesus Christ? Directly, it would seem, no. But Jesus says to the disciples: "Search the Scripture, because it speaks about Me." And the apostle Paul calls the Old Testament a "tutor leading to Christ." In fact, the chain of covenants that forms the axis of sacred history gains meaning and purpose only when it leads to the fullness of the union of God and man, and therefore to the God-manhood of Christ, to the Son of God come in the flesh.

Does this criterion "work" now, when spiritual phenomena have become more diverse than ever before, and when every teaching in one way or another is forced to reckon with the phenomenon of Christianity? I think it does "work," as a necessary but not sufficient criterion. A teaching that comes from God will necessarily affirm the God-manhood of Christ, but "mimicry" is also possible, when a "spirit not from God" teaches: "Yes, Christ, of course, but we still need..." And here we cannot do without a special gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of discerning spirits.

The apostle speaks to us about the necessity of testing the spirits, that is, distinguishing what is God's and what is satanic in life. Before these words the apostle stresses that what is characteristic of a Christian is faith, keeping the commandments, and a heart open before God. And he formulates the famous words sometimes called "the criterion of the apostle John." Every spirit, says the apostle, that confesses Christ come in the flesh is from God. If we look attentively at the history of the dogmatic development of Christianity in the era of the Ecumenical Councils, we will see that in the end all false teachings were rejected by the Church precisely according to this criterion. And conversely, correspondence to it helps distinguish Christian confessions from quasi-Christian sects.

But besides their dogmatic and historical significance, these words are also very important in the practical life of Christians. First of all, the apostle John speaks about distinguishing the spirits that speak in the human heart. What is right and what is wrong, what is worthy of a Christian and what is unworthy: to a significant degree, for distinguishing this in one's own life, one must use precisely the criterion of the apostle John.

The question of what is and what is not sin becomes one of the central questions for every religious person. What criteria can one follow in this case? The Bible offers us commandments and many different interpretations of them.

In essence, all biblical books are in one way or another connected with the question of keeping or violating the commandments given by God. But one can relate to keeping them in different ways. One can be guided by external criteria, as most believers usually do. In that case much depends on how one understands this or that commandment, how one interprets it. What, for example, should be considered or not considered murder, theft, sexual immorality, blasphemy?

The Decalogue already forbids all this. But there have been and still are many variants of interpreting the commandments of the Decalogue. Above all because all interpreters in one way or another analyzed them from outside, as if from the side, trying to establish rules and laws given once and for all. The Bible itself refutes such an approach. Already the Old Testament offers us at least two variants of legislation based on the Decalogue. And they do not coincide in everything. Thus the Bible seems to tell us: do not seek the only true and only possible interpretation; it does not exist. The fulfillment of the commandments depends on place and time.

Only God's will is unshakable, those divine intentions that stand behind each of the commandments of the Decalogue. A person's behavior can differ in different situations. Old Testament legislation is only an example of how the commandments can and should be applied in real life. There could have been more such examples. And in order not to become confused, God's commandments must become for a person an inner spiritual imperative. What in Gospel times was called the inner Torah.

Its commandments, as Jeremiah said, are not carved on stones, but written in the human heart. Then every situation will be perceived by a person through the prism of this inner Torah. And one will be able to rely on one's heart in what concerns sin or its absence. If the heart, led by the inner Torah, does not condemn a person, then he can calmly turn to God. Such a person, of course, is not sinless either, but he can say to himself and to God from a pure heart: in the struggle with my sin I have done everything I could.

It was observed for a long time that the main theme of John's messages is the theme of love. Of course there is nothing surprising here: because even the last conversation of the Savior during the Last Supper was also devoted to love, this love which becomes the hallmark of Christians and the hallmark of the Kingdom. It would seem, before a lot was said and written about love, including in the biblical books. Then why Jesus speaks about love, as "a new commandment"? And why the apostle repeats His words, linking this love to the personality of Jesus Christ, to Whom without trust it is impossible?

Of course if it was about this love, which was known for a long time before the coming into the world of the Savior, there would have been nothing really again in the commandment about love. But He says Himself: love each other, as I loved you. It is not surprising that the apostle connects the possibility of Christian love between people to the faith in Jesus Christ: without trust in the One, Who revealed this new love to the world, without communicating with Him, without the fact of living with Him the same life of the Kingdom, nobody of men can love like that.

And the problem here is not in the intensity or the depth of the relationship (and love in the sense, in which the authors of the biblical books understand this word, is not emotion, but especially relationship), but in its new quality. Of course love remains love also in the Kingdom, and in the not transformed world. But in the not transformed world it can be nothing big, than relationship. But here is, in the Kingdom it becomes not only relationship, but also this spiritual environment, inside which this relationship is born and develops. This kind of environment also exists in the not transformed world, but here it remains natural, psychic (because the psyche is also a part of the nature, although completely special).

But in the Kingdom, where the human nature is transformed, relationships between people can’t already exist any more in a purely natural environment, here they ask for a spiritual mediation, because the Kingdom is also penetrated by the breath of God, it is above all spiritual, and only after natural. And the love becomes this spiritual environment, inside which are build all the relationships of the Kingdom. One could call love the main substance of the Kingdom, its own nature. And the concrete forms of the existence of this nature are defined by these relationships of love, which connect the inhabitants of the Kingdom between them. It is not surprising that John calls Christians to love: because it is the same thing as to call them to live the life of the Kingdom. The only life that we can consider Christian.

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.

The thought that the apostle John wants to convey to us is extremely simple: believe in Jesus and love one another. But how many times does the apostle repeat it in this short text and in an epistle that is not very long? He approaches it from different sides and uses examples from Holy Scripture and from life in order to communicate what is most important and self-evident to him. This clarity is the clarity of the spirit; beyond it, everyone encounters the powerlessness of words, which are unable to convey spiritual experience, the experience of touching the truth. It is impossible to keep revelation within oneself: streams of living water flow from the person who has come to know God who is Love; and every time the apostle says, “love one another,” it is obvious to him that there truly is nothing more important. But these words will remain an empty sound until the person reading them touches the living God, until they simply love. Only then does a person become able to understand that nothing is more important than love, and that this is precisely why evil attacks so fiercely any sign that somewhere—even only a little, and not yet in the way John writes about it—people choose not hatred but love.