Faith Is The Victory
By Professor S M Blaiklock MA Litt D
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THE ANTICHRISTS:
It is this contrast between the denizen of the passing world and the servant of the eternal Christ which leads 1 John chapter 1 in vv. 18 and 19 to speak of the "antichrists."
The arrogance of man, unchecked by repentance and the grace of God, leads inevitably to the usurpation of God's very throne.
John had seen that pernicious evil, the worship of the Emperor, striking root in the Roman world. He saw the same spirit maturing in varied rebellion. He saw indeed a climax taking shape, and it is necessary to look closely at a phrase which opens 1 John 1 v. 18.
Nothing is so damaging in the study of New Testament prophecy, it should be observed, as to imagine that the Eternal God, who stands above and outside of time, is bound by the clocks and calendars of men. "It is the last hour," says John, and because he wrote those words almost nineteen centuries ago, there are those who imagine he was wrong. Note carefully that it is in a sense irrelevant what John himself meant.
A prophet, who is inspired, can utter words whose sense transcends the conceptions of his own mind. But in the widest signification John was indeed writing in "the last hour." The only event in world history which can equal the first inruption of God into human history, the First Advent of His Son, is the second inruption, His Second Coming. And what are twenty centuries compared even with the age of an infinite universe, itself the creation of an Eternal God? Calvin says correctly: "He calls that 'the last time' in which all things are being so completed that nothing is left except the last revelation of Christ."
John based this solemn warning on the vision of mounting apostasy, and there is little doubt that he had in view the self-styled 'enlightenment', preached and propagated by Cerinthus and his school. They were, says the Apostle, 'antichrists. The word is interesting. The New Testament is clear about the coming danger of 'false Christs'
and as the student traces the theme through the book, he will become aware of the emerging reality of one supreme figure who sums up in his grim person the characteristics of all Satanic opposition to the Lord. (See Matt. 24: 5, 24; Mark 13: 22, 23; Acts 20: 29; II Thess. 2: 3; Il Tim. 3: 1; II Pet. 2: 1). For all this, the actual word 'Antichrist' occurs only in the first and second of the letters we are studying. (2: 18, 22; 4: 3; II: 7). The next occurrence of the term outside the corpus of Scripture, is in John's disciple Polycarp, a fact which helps to establish the Johannine authorship of the Epistles. The word means more than 'false Christ.' It conveys the idea of a counterfeit, a rival, a usurper. And how vividly in this world of deified dictators and Marxist evangelism can we echo John's words.
The 'antichrists,' John proceeds to say, were nominal members of the Church, but never really part of it. How could they be, accepting as they did 'a lie'? Dodd remarks: "The supreme enemy of Christ's redeeming work is radically false belief. (The quaint old notion that it does not matter what a man believes so long as he leads 'a decent life' needs no confutation in a world buzzing with 'ideologies'). The conflict between Christ and Antichrist is fought out upon the field of the mind. 'We do not war,' says Paul, 'according to the flesh. . .
We demolish arguments and every proud thing that lifts itself up against the knowledge of God. We take captive every thought into the obedience of Christ'." (Il Cor. 10: 3-5).
John was not prepared to regard the purveyors and entertainers of deadly heresy as the members of Christ. Such, in a word, was his position. "They withdrew," he says "to make it plain that they were none of us." He does not mean that this was a deliberate demonstration on the part of those who had left the fellowship. The heretics left the Church in anger and bitterness. They thought to build something greater, and in pursuit of a perverse design abandoned the Lord's people. Out of evil God brought good. The secessionists were seeking their own wicked advantage. It turned out that they fulfille a plan of God whereby the truth was protected. Falsehod declared itself and withdrew. In calm confidence that nothing could baffle the protective love of the Father, John abbreviates the process with a simple clause of purpose. It was all
providential. In the Greek text, there is nothing to justify the 'no doubt' of the Authorised Version. It arises from an attempt of Tertullian to render a Greek particle which needs no special rendering and which merely marks potentiality. The mistake found its way into the Vulgate, and has been dogging English versions since Tyndale and Cranmer.