At the beginning of each letter Christ says, ‘I know thy works.’ I see clearly what is going on and what you are doing.
Now, some of the infiltrators at that time were no doubt those people called the Judaizers. They were Jewish people who were not truly converted and they got into these churches and they taught them, ‘Faith in Christ is not enough. You must also take up aspects of the Jewish ceremonial law. And if you are a Gentile, you must be circumcised and keep the Jewish Sabbath.’ They would say, ‘You cannot be saved without these works.’ Then there were the false apostles. They undermined the exclusive authority of the word of God, because they bought their special revelation as people are doing today, and they said all kinds of amazing things and pinned these things onto people as though they had to do them. There are whole areas of modern Bible-believing Christianity doing all kinds of things that are not in the word, because some great man in their midst had it as a revelation or a vision from God.