FALSE PROPHETS APLENTY

“Dear friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God. For there are many false prophets in the world. This is how we know if they have the Spirit of God: If a person claiming to be a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ came in a real body, that person has the Spirit of God. But if someone claims to be a prophet and does not acknowledge the truth about Jesus, that person is not from God. Such a person has the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard is coming into the world and indeed is already here.”
1 John 4:1-3 NLT

Hardly a generation had gone by since the New Covenant came into bring before false prophets were on the increase. Not all who claimed to be believers were true believers. Some twisted the truth about Jesus out of shape even as Peter wrote in his second letter.

“And remember, our Lord’s patience gives people time to be saved. This is what our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom God gave him— speaking of these things in all of his letters. Some of his comments are hard to understand, and those who are ignorant and unstable have twisted his letters to mean something quite different, just as they do with other parts of Scripture. And this will result in their destruction.”
2 Peter 3:15-16 NLT

Others tried to marry Greek philosophy with the Gospel, producing a Christianised form of Gnosticism which denied the reality of Jesus’ humanity.

“Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ. For in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body.”
Colossians 2:8-9 NLT

John returns to his condemnation of this heresy repeatedly. That people were peddling this false message must have irked him greatly.

The test to check the validity of the prophet was simple. If he confessed that Jesus was a real human being, the Holy Spirit was in him.
If he did not acknowledge the truth about Jesus’ humanity, he functioned through the spirit of antichrist.

Once again, John makes it clear, as he has already done in earlier parts of his letter, that the antichrist spirit specifically denies the humanity of Jesus.

This heresy is still very much around today in the form of “Christian” cults. Perhaps the most universal cult, enslaving many millions of people, is the one that propagates and holds to the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary. Since this belief is an official tenet of this religious system, and since it has pronounced Mary sinless by implication, also by implication, Jesus was not born like us but like Mary. He is, therefore, according to this doctrine, disqualified from being our substitute.

And this, declares John, is the spirit of antichrist. This system, collectively, is part of the antichrist present everywhere on earth.

How do we counter this false doctrine? Our most effective strategy is to cling tenaciously to the truth. In the following study we shall find out what John’s strategy is for overcoming the work of the devil.