2 John 1:7 Commentary and Bible Study

Note the word ‘many’; Satan does not do things by halves. When he sends false teachers into the world, he does not send one or two; he sends tens of thousands of them. False teachers do not just happen, they are sent. What a hint the inspired apostle gives us by putting it in such a cumbersome way – ‘are entered into the world’ – with a menacing, threatening purpose, the destruction of truth. We learn from 1 John that many of them started off in the churches and they tried to corrupt from within. But then they went out from the churches and attacked from the outside. ‘Who confess not,’ who do not believe in or subscribe to Jesus Christ having come in the flesh. We have met this before in the writing of John in the first epistle. A really shallow and limited interpretation will say, ‘Ah, this means that they do not believe in the incarnation.’ No it does not. It means you deny not just the incarnation, but everything that Christ could only do as the Son of God come in the flesh. To say, ‘I believe in the incarnation of Jesus Christ but I do not believe he died on Calvary’s cross, a substitutionary atonement for my sin’, is to deny that he has come in the flesh.In the very early stages of the church there was the Judaising movement: people who professed Christ but it turned out they were not really saved. They were telling people, ‘Oh but you cannot just be saved by Christ, you must obey the ceremonial law. You must be circumcised, you must be Jewish as well.’ They were putting this across to Gentile churches, of all people, and they would follow the apostle Paul and the other evangelists around, and where people were converted and a church was formed, they would come in and they would pull rank and say, ‘Oh we are from Jerusalem, and we know what we are talking about, and we tell you that you cannot do it with Christ alone. This message of justification by faith alone, this is wrong. You need all the ceremonies of the ancient Jewish law.’ Of course the very first deceivers included the Gnostics as we call them today. That is a modern term. They believed that all matter was evil, and there were so-called Christian Gnostics. They believed that, because all matter is evil, Christ could not have really had a human body. God would have not entered in to something that was evil, human flesh. So they believed that Christ was a phantom, not real flesh. And when he suffered and died on the cross, he did not really die, he did not come as the God-man literally taking our punishment and dying.But as time went by heresy was constantly changing. The so-called Modalists did not believe in the three persons in the Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There was only one God who appeared in different forms at different times. Then Arianism cropped up which was not many streets away from Modalism. Christ, yes, came, but he was not unique, he was not divine. You still get Arians today. They are called Jehovah’s Witnesses and of course Unitarians. But the biggest and most long-lasting heresy that did the most damage began to arise probably a little before but mainly in the fourth and fifth centuries, and that is the Roman Catholic church. Their first pope was at the end and into the beginning of the fifth century, and they invented all kinds of terrible things apart from monasticism, the domination of one bishop, the Bishop of Rome, the pope, who they claim goes back to Peter, which is a complete nonsense and a fabrication, and he had absolute authority. And their pope and their church councils, and their pronouncements constitute tradition and the tradition of their early Roman Catholic church and the doctrines they invented and the views they invented are more important than Scripture. Of course, they do not say that. They say tradition and Scripture are equal, but wherever tradition and Scripture contradict each other, tradition wins in the Roman Catholic church and the Scripture is set aside, wherever there is a conflict. Justification by faith went, salvation is by obedience to the church and is dispensed through its priesthood and its sacraments, quite different from Scriptural salvation. And the Roman Catholic church held sway from the fifth century right up to that glorious year 1517, the spark, the beginning of the Protestant Reformation when the Scriptures were reaffirmed once again.