This is love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, that as you have heard from the beginning, you should walk in it. For many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. Look to yourselves, that we do not lose those things we worked for, but that we may receive a full reward. Whoever transgresses and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God. (2 John 1:6-9)
John likely wrote this letter to a congregation in the Ephesian region sometime in the last couple of decades of the first century. Like the first epistle, John is very interested in the church remaining faithful to the truth in a time when false teachers corrupt the truth, and disciples fall away. Like the first epistle, John urges the church to love one another, a command from the Old Law given new meaning by Jesus Christ. But there is more to Christian love than loving one another: our obedience demonstrates our love for God.
Loving God Through Obedience
In the first epistle, John underscores the need for obedience. The apostle says we lie if we claim to know God but do not keep His commandments. If I keep His commandments, I demonstrate that I know God. And John says my obedience perfects my love for God: “But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him.” (1 John 2:5) He recapitulates this idea in 1 John 5:3, “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.”
Of course, within the context of 2 John, we understand John emphasizes the importance of loving one another. I cannot claim to love God but fail to love my fellow Christians. I will lose my salvation if I hate other Christians. But let’s not overlook the broader point: consistently obedient attitudes and behaviors show God we love Him. John wants us to walk in the light, practice righteousness, and have fellowship with God, so he tells us to be obedient disciples. However, a second danger threatened the churches of John’s day: some false teachers altered the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Maintaining the True Doctrine of Christ
As I mentioned in our previous study of 1 John, early forms of Gnosticism were gaining traction in the latter stages of the first century. Among the many tenets of Gnosticism was the belief that all matter is inherently evil and that anything of a spiritual nature is good. This led some to the erroneous conclusion that Christ could have never been part human if He was the perfect Son of God; He could not have occupied an evil material body. Thus, Christ appeared like a man, but the appearance was a facade—He was an entirely spiritual being; sort of like a ghost.
Such alterations to the gospel were, in John’s estimation, a willful attempt to deceive the church. Having interacted with Jesus for the better part of four years, the apostles were supremely confident that Jesus was born of a virgin, spent His years among us in the flesh, and died like every other human being would under similar circumstances. John and his fellow apostles testified that Jesus was both human AND divine. John calls those who preach otherwise to be both deceivers AND antichrist. Because of popular interpretations, the word antichrist compels one to imagine an archvillain.
Deceivers and the Doctrine of Christ
But in the vernacular of 1 John and 2 John, anyone who preaches a false gospel is, by definition, an antichrist. “[E]ven now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour,” the apostle says in 1 John 2:18. 1 John 4:2-3 says, “By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.” Those who altered the gospel or the doctrine of Christ were enemies of Jesus; they were “antichrists.”
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