Examine the spirits
1 John 4:1-6
Part 7 of our series on 1 John.
4:1 My dearest friends, don’t give credence to every spirit but examine the spirits, [to see] whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 You recognise the spirit of God by this: every spirit which concurs that Jesus Christ has come in flesh, is of God. 3 And every spirit which does not acknowledge [that] Jesus Christ [has come in the flesh] is not of God. And this is the [spirit] of the Christ-opposer, which you heard that [it] is coming and now is already in the world. 4 You are of God, children, and you have defeated them, because the one that is in you is greater that the one that is in the world. 5 They are of the world; for this reason they speak ‘from the world’ and the world listens to them. 6 We are of God: the person that recognises God, listens to us: the person who is not of God, does not listen to us. It’s from this that we recognise the spirit of truth and the spirit of deception.
I don’t think there’s any section that gives as much space to a clear injunction like this, to test or examine or make trial of ‘spirits’. John’s dichotomies are really simple and clear. That said, I think four interpretive questions leap to my mind when reading this passage:
Who are the false-prophets that he has in mind?
Why this whole discussion of spirits? And how does that link to the false-prophets
Why the emphasis on the incarnate coming of Jesus?
There are some unclear referents in v4, so who do they refer to.
And then, what do we do with all this? And, of course, not all of these questions have answers.
John has just mentioned, in 3:24, that one of the marks by which we recognise that he remains is us, is the spirit he has given us. That’s what raises the question of spirits. More than this, though, we ought to remember that John lives in a world of spirits, which we almost certainly do not. We don’t conceptualise the world like that, and most of us just don’t live in a world where we think of spirits that often. John does though. So, it makes perfect sense for him to move onto this topic. Not every spirit, however they manifest, through prophets or whatever, can be believed. And so, whatever spirits there are, need to be examined and put to the test. John’s dominant refrain of ‘of God’ is closely aligned with proper confession of Jesus Christ, and appropriate response to this by the practice of love.
John also lives in a world where false prophets abound, whether inside the church or outside. The primary test of a spirit’s credibility, and alignment with the truth, is whether it confesses Jesus Christ’s full bodily incarnation. The reverse, in v3, might be elliptical. That is, we could take John to be saying:
every spirit which does not acknowledge that Jesus Christ [has come in the flesh], is not of God.
OR
every spirit which does not acknowledge that Jesus Christ, is not of God.
I think, given the context and style of John’s writing, that the former makes good sense. The latter would still need to be ‘filled in’ with some content. We might rephrase a little, and say that a spirit that declares that Jesus is not ‘of God’, is itself not of God.
If verses 1-3 provide a stark and startling warning, 4-6 provide a confidence giving reassurance. John’s tone changes slightly, as he addresses his readers with tenderness, and emphatically reminds them that they are ‘of God’, and [his] children. I take this to be God’s children, more than John using an endearing phrase. More than this, they have conquered/won/prevailed over ‘them’. It’s impossible to determine who ‘them’ refers to, except that the choice of a masculine pronoun rather than neuter suggests a broader reference than only the spirits mentioned above. Probably it includes false-prophets and [other] Christ-opposers. John’s confidence may seem counter-intuitive, ‘you have conquered’, but no more (nor less) than Jesus in John 16:33, where he anticipates the cross. It's the cross that speaks ironically against the defeat of believers in the world with a victory already secured. Believers’ victory is extrinsic and vicarious.
Reading verse 5 needs to consider Jesus’ words in John 8.23, and again at 15.19, and 18.36. Jesus is not of the world, but his opponents in John 8 are; His disciples are in the world, but not of it; his kingdom, too, is not of this world. Again, the unclear reference of ‘they’ refers to opponents, detractors, those outside the faith. Their whole characterisation is ‘worldly’ – they are of the world, speak to the world, and the world listens. The fundamental reference point is the world, and therefore not God.
‘We’, on the other hand, refers to John, his circles, and his readers who join that circle by their unity in faith and love. I think a similar dynamic occurs in some of Paul’s letters, where ‘we’ can be read as Paul and those with him, but is inclusively embracing of his addresses by virtue of the fact that they share in orthodoxy and orthopraxy with Paul.
In contrast to the opponents and detractors and deceivers, the message of John is apostolic eyewitness testimony to the truth of Jesus (back to chapter 1), and receiving and accepting that message is a criterion for being of God. How to discern truth and error, or the spirits, or what is right from what is false, misleading, evil? Return to the apostolic testimony about Jesus, come in the flesh.
