Read with Me
1 John 2:18-19 (HCSB)
Children, it is the last hour. And as you have heard, “Antichrist is coming,” even now many antichrists have come. We know from this that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. However, they went out so that it might be made clear that none of them belongs to us.
Listen with Me
John is now an old man in his nineties living in Ephesus. He has seen a lot in the sixty plus years since he first met Jesus when he was an in idealistic disciple of John the Baptist. He had lived as a member of the twelve Apostles (Matthew 10:2-4), as well as one of Jesus’ inner circle of three (Matthew 17:1, 26:37) for more than three years, coming to know Jesus as He truly was.
But John had also experienced the persecution and murder of his brother James at the hands of Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:1-2). And he himself had suffered severe persecution. And when the emperor failed to put him to death by boiling him in oil (contemporary witnesses report that the oil did not harm him in the least), he had been exiled to the iron mines on Patmos until the emperor’s death.
In all these trials, John had held to what he knew was true concerning Jesus’ identity as the eternal Word of God made flesh (John 1:1-3, 14), and as the Lamb of God whose death had been had paid the penalty for the sins of the world (John 1:29, 3:16-17). He had seen the explosive growth of the Church on and after the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:41, 4:4). And at the time of this writing, he was living in Ephesus, a city that had been completely pagan, but which now was the home to a large and thriving Christian community.
But John was also seeing something that troubled his heart greatly. Many people who had once professed faith in Jesus, and who had in fact been part of that thriving community of faith, were turning back to paganism, denouncing Jesus, and sometimes drawing some of the faithful away with them.
Many were looking at that time for a specific person whom they called the Antichrist, the one who would rise in opposition to the cause of Christ and His people. But John saw all those who had turned publicly against Jesus as embodiments of the antichrist spirit, opposing the gospel and doing damage to the Church.
John’s heart broke at the understanding that those men and women who were now doing such damage had once been accepted into the heart of those in the Church and had now used that closeness to do their damaging work. He understood that a true brother or sister in Christ would have never turned against those who had counted them as family, so, he believed that they had been dishonest the whole time, not really believing in Jesus, but professing faith for their own dark purposes. And for that, he condemned them.
Pray with Me
Father, the cruelest cuts usually come from those whom we have let into our hearts, and it is frustrating and discouraging to have a brother or sister in Christ turn against you and walk away. But John also realized that, despite the sting of betrayal he was still feeling from those few, there were many more who were true brothers and sisters in Christ, and who had remained true to the cause of the kingdom. And it was on those that the future of the kingdom hung. Lord, help me to never allow myself to become discouraged by those who fail or fall, but to always keep my eyes on Jesus to point the way forward and upward at every juncture. Amen.