Evaluation for Truth and Error; 1 John 3:24-4:1

1 John 3:24 ^NASB “The one who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. We know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us. [4:1] Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

What you think you know from those verses you are probably wrong! The subtleties of John here are incredible. The key word that we see in verse 2:28 down to 3:10a is phaneroo [fanerow], variously translated in English Bibles as “manifest” or “appear.” 1 John 2:28 ^NASB “Now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming.” Then in 3:2, “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.” Then 3:5, “You know that He appeared in order to take away sins…” 3:8, “…The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.” 3:10, “By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious…” That is five times we have a form of phaneroo. That tells us that the theme here is manifestation, and what John is emphasising is that we need to be ready to appear before the judgment seat of Christ.

Notice in 3:10 that in the translation there is a colon after “By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious [manifest]:” This is another important grammatical insight that is going to seriously affect the interpretation of this passage. What has happened is that the translator has made a decision, and that is a decision that what this refers to comes after the phrase “by this,” and then he is going to tell us what it is. John’s style is this: when he says you will know something, if he is talking about what is coming he uses a subordinate explanatory clause. For most of the time he is talking about what he has just said. That is really important because if we don’t get that right we are going to create some real interpretive problems in 1 John and some tremendous confusion. In verse 9 he says, “No one who is born of God practices [does] sin,” and what that emphasises is that when the believer is abiding in Christ he doesn’t sin. Then in v. he says the children of God and the children of the devil are apparent. By what? By the fact that they don’t sin. When we are sinning we have chosen not to walk by the Spirit but according to the sin nature. When we are not sinning but are walking by the Spirit we are walking in dependence upon Him, and while we are walking by the Spirit it is impossible to sin. We have to choose to stop walking before we can sin.

If we don’t understand these two verses we will really blow it in 1 John chapter four. Notice the phrases “the children of God” and “the children of the devil.” What we want to do is naturally take those terms as believers versus unbelievers, but that doesn’t fit the context. John is not contrasting believers versus those who are unbelievers, he is talking about believers and saying that some believers act like children of God and abide and don’t sin; the other believers still act like they did before they were saved and are acting like children of the devil and are not abiding, and that is inconsistent with their new position in the royal family of God. They are born into a new family and ought to live like they are in a new family, but they live like they’re still in the old family of the devil. That is what he is talking about. So the phrases “of God’ and “of the devil” are not soteriological but they have to do with the ultimate source of the value system and the information that they are operating on in their Christian life.

If we look at the grammar here we understand that that phrase “by this” refers back to the principle of verse 9, and then there is a shift in subject in the second half of verse 10. After “By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious” there needs to be a paragraph mark in there to indicate that is the start of a new subject section. Notice he says, “anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother.” John is correlating the practice of righteousness—not positional but experiential—with loving “his brother.” Notice the first inclusion was phaneroo—appear, manifest. The next inclusio focuses on the word “love,” loving one another in 3:10b, and we see it repeated again in 3:23: “This is His commandment, that we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as He commanded us.” So we see here that he talks about “manifest” and then he changes the subject. Now he is talking about love. All through the section from 10b-23, again and again he talks about love—how we know love. “By this” refers to what goes before unless it is followed by the subordinate clause, the explanatory clause. In verse 16 we have, “We know love by this, that [because] He laid down His life for us…” So when John uses a subordinate explanatory clause the “by this” is what comes after. But when he has it in an independent clause what it refers to is what goes before.

In verse 24 John shifts to a new subject: the one who keeps His commandments. What John is getting at here is that positionally we are indwelt by God the Son, we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and our bodies become the basis for that temple that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 6:13. So here we have John saying that if we keep His commandments and are abiding in Him then that is the place of spiritual growth and spiritual blessing. But just as Israel also disobeyed, even though they had the positional place of blessing with the indwelling of the Shekinah in the holy of holies, they were under judgment and they lost blessing. That is the correspondence between the Old Testament and the New Testament, but John is saying here “The one who keeps His commandments abides in Him.”

We need to review a little. “The one who keeps His commandments” refers to the believer who is living inside that soul fortress. He is said to be filled by means of the Spirit, and he is said to be walking by means of the Spirit because he is using those spiritual skills to solve problems, to make decisions if life, so that he stays in fellowship rather than try to solve problems by the sin nature and by his own efforts. That means that as long as we continue to stay in that position, inside the soul fortress, we are abiding in Christ. The term “abiding” is related to a noun form of the verb which means to take up residence, to make a home. A home is a place where there is a family living and a relationship developing. We can unpack that word to emphasise a greater depth of fellowship.

When we abide in Christ he is also abiding in us. That abiding has to do with a richer level of fellowship; it is a two-way road here. There is a reciprocity here in abiding. Remember that at salvation God the Holy Spirit, God the Son and God the Father all take up residency inside the believer positionally. What John teaches and is really emphasising in this section is that the believer that gets into spiritual maturity develops an intimacy of fellowship with all three members of the Trinity—a two-way intimacy. This isn’t mysticism, so don’t say that you are just automatically going to know some things. That is what we have to be aware of when we get into the first couple of verses in chapter four, the direction the charismatics and/or the mystical crowd has gone. That is not what this is talking about. We have this greater level of intimacy because we spend more time with God. We learn who he is because we spend more time studying His Word. This is how the believer comes to know God and know things that God wants in his life. it is not because he has some sort of mystical flash of insight but because he has so saturated his mind with the thinking of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16) that we begin to think like He thinks.

The doctrine of the indwelling and the filling of the Holy Spirit (cont)

7. The indwelling of the Spirit is the platform for the Spirit’s ministry of filling. Because the believer is indwelt the Spirit can fill him when he is in fellowship and He is not going to when he is out of fellowship.

8. The indwelling of the Spirit sets apart the believer’s body in time to be a temple for the indwelling of Christ. Just as the body is the home for the soul, which is immaterial, the body also becomes the home for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who creates a temple, i.e. the dwelling place for Jesus Christ.

9. Just as the indwelling of the Spirit becomes the platform for the filling of the Spirit the indwelling of Christ is the platform for abiding in Christ, which has to do with developing greater intimacy, fellowship and rapport with Jesus Christ as we learn His Word.

The doctrine of reciprocity and fellowship

1. What we see in this verse is that we don’t just abide in Christ, he abides in us. It is a two-way road, a mutuality. The more we abide in Him the more He abides in us. There is an element of growth and development and increase of the level of our fellowship and our level of abiding.

2. Up to this point John has said very little about this mutuality/reciprocity. He has said that the anointing abides in us in 2:27, and that is related to the filling of the Holy Spirit. As we are filled with the Holy Spirit then reciprocity fills us with His Word, and that is part of the process of anointing.

3. Jesus emphasised this in the upper room discourse. There He commanded the disciples: “Abide in Me and I in you.” Notice the reciprocity. If we are not abiding in Christ he doesn’t abide in us. He indwells but does not abide. John 15:5 ^NASB “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.”

4. When this mutual abiding takes place it is evidenced by doctrine being applied. It presupposes that you know doctrine! You can’t apply what you don’t know, and you can’t know what you haven’t taken the time, the energy and the discipline to learn. It doesn’t come naturally.

5. This is further related in the Gospel of John to an advanced relationship with God the Father. John 14:23 ^NASB “… If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.” How do we know if we love Jesus? It has nothing to do with how we feel but has everything to do with keeping His Word.

(The new subject starts at 3:24, not 4:1)

1 John 4:1 ^NASB “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. [2] By this you know the Spirit of God:” We need to put a line here between “God” and the next word. “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” is an independent clause, therefore it refers to the preceding and not what comes after. So in the English there should be a period here instead of a colon, and a slash mark to indicate that “every spirit” indicates and goes to the next verse, and the “by this” goes back to 4:1. How do we know the Spirit of God? Because we have a feeling? No, it is because you have tested the spirits to see whether they are from God. That is how we know.

We have to understand what that means. How do we test the spirits? First of all we have to understand what this word “spirits” means when John uses the word pneuma [pneuma] here. There are about nine different meanings to the word—breath, wind, spirit in terms of the Holy Spirit, spirit in terms of an evil spirit or a demon. Spirit in terms of the thinking part of the soul, or it can mean spirit in terms of an attitude. Paul told Timothy that we don’t have a spirit of timidity but of courage, boldness. There he is using that word in terms of an attitude, of thinking, a belief system. That is how John is using it here. Test every thought, test every person who is teaching a thought to see if it is from God or not; test the thought, the attitude. The word for “test” here is dokimazo [dokimazw] which means to evaluate. In order to evaluate anything we have to have some kind of objective secondary standard by which we evaluate something. So which is the objective standard by which we are to evaluate various thoughts, ideas, teachings that people have? It is the Word of God. The people John is addressing are false teachers who have come out of Jerusalem, used to be associated with the apostles, and now are teaching some false things about Christ.