THE SPIRIT IS THE KEY

“But you are not like that, for the Holy One has given you his Spirit, and all of you know the truth. So, I am writing to you not because you don’t know the truth but because you know the difference between truth and lies…. So, you must remain faithful to what you have been taught from the beginning. If you do, you will remain in fellowship with the Son and with the Father. And in this fellowship, we enjoy the eternal life he promised us.”
1 John 2:20-21, 24-25 NLT

John is careful to remind his readers that the Holy Spirit in them, the Spirit of truth, is the crucial key in the issue of deception.

Many deceivers were already around in John’s day. Legalistic Judaism was out to lure Jewish and Gentile believers back under its yoke as a safeguard from persecution. The Roman government tolerated Judaism, but this new Way that challenged the Emperor himself was intolerable. Christians refused to acknowledge Caesar as Lord. They bowed to no one but Jesus, this Nazarene whom they claimed had come back from Roman execution by crucifixion to live again.

An even more subtle deception was being propagated in the form of “Christian Gnosticism”. The crux of this heresy lay in the philosophy that spirit is good, but matter is evil. Since the body is matter, Jesus could not have had a real human body. Hence the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary, the heresy spawned to get around the problem of evil matter. If Mary was conceived miraculously and without sin, this took care of the humanity of Jesus.

The Holy Spirit in the believer guides and convinces us of the truth. John urges his readers, then, to stay in and remain faithful to the truth so that they may remain in fellowship with the Father and the Son. Only in this way can they (and we) continue to be assured if eternal life.

Fellowship implies being in harmony with the Father and the Son, loving what they love and sharing in their work on earth. We cannot enjoy this fellowship unless we believe and stay faithful to the real Jesus, the God/man who came to reveal the Father and to take us to the Father by reconciling us to the Father through His atoning sacrifice.