1 John 4:1-6 –The Word Made Flesh

Lesson Focus:

Our beliefs about Jesus’ nature are important for how we daily live out our faith. 

Lesson Outcomes:

Through this lessons students should:

1.     Understand that not everyone who claims to have authority to teach is from God.

2.     Understand that what we believe about who Jesus is matters for how we practice the Christian faith.

3.     Understand that the nature of Jesus as God incarnate drives our call to embody the love of God for those around us in the church and the world. 

Catch up on the story:

John has just finished up describing for us the marks of someone who has truly been born of God.  His primary focus is the tangible love that believers show toward their brothers and sisters in Christ.  This love, we have said, is practice for how we are to go out and love our world.  If we see one of our Christian brothers or sisters in need and yet do not help them, we will not be able to help those outside of our community who desperately need it.

John moves on, though, to discuss other marks of being a true child of God.  He begins to emphasize belief as a mark of being born of God.  The kind of belief that John advocates is not just a mental assent to the idea of God, but rather a belief in Jesus that is born out in action.  John will have more to say about right belief in this week’s text.          

The Text:

John’s main concern for our text this week is Christological in nature.  That is, it is all about what we believe about who Jesus is as the incarnate Word of God.  The conversation, however, is set up the same way as many of the arguments in First John have been to this point.  There is a negative example and then a positive one. 

First, we are admonished to not believe every spirit, and by proxy those who say they have the Spirit and who are claiming to be teachers.  Crucial to understanding John’s comments here is remembering the context in which John has been writing.  There have been people, or rather a group of folks, in John’s community, that have broken away and have begun to teach in ways that deny or place significantly less stress on Jesus’ humanity.  John, in other places in the letter, will refer to these people as antichrists (In Greek, anti means “against” or “a substitute for.”  So, antichrist is “against Christ” or “a substitute for Christ.”).  These people had mostly or completely spiritualized Jesus.  They thought that Jesus either only seemed to be human, or that Jesus’ humanity is completely taken over by his divinity.  Either way, there was a significant denial of Jesus’ humanity going on. 

The Council of Nicaea in AD 325, from which we get the Nicene Creed, affirmed that God was indeed present in Jesus and not as some subordinate divine being, but as God himself.  The Council affirmed what John says at the beginning of this letter, that Jesus was “from the beginning.”  He is co-existent with God the Father before creation.  While at Nicaea the church affirmed Jesus’ divinity, it was not until over one hundred years later at the Council of Chalcedon that the church affirmed the balance between Jesus’ divinity and his humanity.  Jesus, in the incarnation, is fully human and fully divine.[1]  We might add as well that Jesus continues, even to this day, to be fully human and fully God.  The incarnation does not end with Jesus’ ascension. 

It is in this context that John admonishes his hearers to test the spirit of those who claim to be dispensing right teaching.  For, as John says, many false prophets have gone out into the world.  We do not know, but can suppose, that at least some of these false prophets have come from John’s own community of faith.  This makes them even more dangerous.  There is a way, John confesses, that we can know if teachers are from God or not.  If the spirit confesses through the person claiming to have authority, that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh and is from God, then that testimony is to be accepted.  If a spirit denies the humanity of Jesus then it is not from God.  Those who confess this way have the spirit of the antichrist. 

At this point we might ask, why does it matter if Jesus is both human and divine?  Why is it so important that we confess that Jesus became human in such a significant and permanent way? If God the Son is not embodied in the concrete historical person of Jesus then there can be no salvation for us.  We need Jesus to be fully God because we cannot save ourselves.  We need Jesus to be fully human so he can live the perfect life in a way that we are unable to.  If Jesus does not really and physically die, then the power of death is not defeated in Jesus’ physical resurrection.

For John, if we deny Jesus’ humanity then all of this talk about embodied and tangible acts of love become unimportant. The Christian faith, as the church has defined it through thousands of years, through the Councils which shaped our Creeds, is an embodied faith.  It is a faith that cares for more than just our souls and where they end up after we die.    If Jesus is just spiritual then there is no need to care for anyone’s physical needs.  This spiritualizing of Jesus has always been a temptation.  Indeed, even today there are many who, though they probably do not know it, functionally deny Jesus’ humanity by placing too much emphasis on the spiritual.  To be sure, we need both Jesus’ humanity and his divinity.  His divinity allows us to enjoy fellowship with God now and forever.  The truth is, however, that the nature of Jesus Christ is embodied, and if we want to be like him, then we must live our lives in the same kind of incarnational embodiment as he did.  Any teacher who does not confess the physical nature of Christ, through both word and deed, is not to be accepted. 

As we turn to verse 4, John begins to encourage his hearers by reminding them that they have believed and acted rightly.  They are from God.  In faithfulness to the divine/human Jesus they have ousted these false teachers from their ranks.  This probably means that they have rejected their teaching and not allowed them to have any teaching authority.  How have they done this?  They have done it because they are from God and the one that is in them, John says, is greater than the one who is in the world!  This is truly Good News!  The Spirit of the God who created and sustains the heavens and the earth resides in us, teaching us, cleansing us, helping us to discern right teaching and right practice from what is not right.

It is because of this that the church need not worry about being defeated.  We can look out at our world, which often seems to be in such a chaotic mess, and say with confidence that we will not be defeated.  The church, so long as it remains faithful to the incarnated Son of God, so long as it remains willing to allow the Spirit to teach and guide it, will never be destroyed.  Greater is the one who is in us than the one who is in the world!

John continues to talk about those who are the false teachers and prophets.  They are from the world, and so it is no surprise that the world flocks to them and listens to them.  Here is a warning to us.  Whenever we see a preacher or Christian personality gaining great fame outside of the church we should be a little suspicious.  The message of Christ is foolishness to the world (1 Corinthians 1:18-25).  It convicts the world and challenges the way it works.  It is not easily accepted.  If it is, what is being preached just might not be the true message of the crucified yet risen Christ. 

The believing and confessing community, however, is from God.  John squarely places himself and those he is writing to in that camp.    He then goes on to say that whoever knows God will listen to the message John is proclaiming.  Those who are advancing false teaching and professing to have received a message from the Spirit, they are the ones who will not listen.  Proof of their not being from God is in their lack of willingness to hear and confess.  So, we will know if a person has been inspired to teach by the Spirit if they do two things, confess that Jesus was both human and divine and is willing to listen (and submit) to the community of faith and its message. 

So What…?

To this point in the letter, John has stressed love as the mark of being a child of God.  This love that works for the benefit of the other is to a large degree what defines the Christian faith.  In just the next passage, John will confess that God is love.

Indeed, our belief and confession that God is love comes straight from our confession about the historical and physically embodied reality of Jesus Christ.  Right belief drives right practice and right living.  Right living and practice confirms our right belief.  In this case, and I believe that this is what John wants us to hear, our right belief about Jesus being fully in the flesh compels us to exercise love for our brothers and sisters in the faith and in the world.  If our beliefs about Jesus are not inline with the church’s confession concerning him, then our expression and practice of the Christian faith will look vastly different than it did for much of church history. 

Belief and practice go hand in hand.  The bottom line is this, Jesus became one of us and remains one of us.  He gave himself up, in death, for us so that we might have freedom from the power of sin and death.  He was resurrected in the flesh.  He ascended to be with God the Father for all of time, in the flesh.  He will come again one day, in the flesh, to judge the living and the dead.  We live, day in and day out, as bodies who confess that this Jesus is God and that what he did he did in the flesh because of his great love for us.  If we want to truly claim that we follow this incarnated Jesus, then we must live as he lived, in the flesh, in love, among the hurting, needy people of our church and of our world.  “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:11)   

Critical Discussion Questions:

1. What does God look like in this text/Who is God in this text/What is God doing in this text? 
1. John wants us to understand that what God has done is that he has become completely one of us, in the body, so that we might love through him.  John also confesses that God in Christ is stronger than anything that is from the world.  

2. What does holiness/salvation look like in this text?
1. Salvation and holiness begin with right belief and confession concerning Jesus.  Right belief is proved, not just through our words, but through how those beliefs influence our daily behavior.  We cannot be holy without believing the right things about who Jesus is.   

 

3. How does an encounter with this story shape who we are and who we should become?
1. We should constantly be testing the beliefs that are being taught to us, not just by our clergy, but other outlets as well.  We should be able to begin to recognize the importance our beliefs have on our daily lives.  The belief that God’s great love is on display for us through the concrete reality of Jesus should compel us to exercise our belief in and love for God through our own incarnational ministry in the church and in our surrounding world.     

Specific Discussion Questions:

Read the text aloud. Then, read the text to yourself quietly.  Read it slowly, as if you were very unfamiliar with the story.

1.     Why does John admonish us to test every “spirit” to see if they are from God?  To which “spirits” is John referring? 

2.     Who are these “false prophets” that have gone out into the world? 

3.     How will we know what comes from the Spirit of God?

4.     What does “antichrist” mean?  Is there just one antichrist or are there many?

5.     John claims that the true mark that a spirit is from God is that it affirms the physical person of Jesus.  Why is it important that we believe and confess that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine?  Is there salvation for us if Jesus only seems to be human?   

6.     Jesus honors or dignifies our bodies by becoming one of us.  If bodies matter to Jesus, how might that affect how we live out our faith?

7.     Last week John asked us this question, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?”  (1 John 2:17)  In what ways might John’s stress on the importance of Jesus’ incarnation help us better understand John’s question in chapter 2?

8.     This week, what is one way in which you can express your belief in Jesus through action?

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[1] D. Moody Smith, First, Second and Third John, Interpretation: A Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), 102.