Reading: 1 John 2:18–23
Not many of us can easily associate the idea of Christmas with a theological battle. Yet the early history of the doctrine of the incarnation was beleaguered by those who sought to bring this glorious reality under the dimming, muting fog of human philosophy. And as we have seen, this tendency began during the decades of the writing of the New Testament itself. Today’s passage portrays the aftermath of one of these battles of yesteryear: “They went out from us because they were not of us” (1 John 2:19). But the relevance of this passage is not limited to days gone by. However we feel about Christmas as a holiday, meditating on the truth that God took on flesh to ransom us should bring us to awe and worship.
This is such an earth-shattering and world-shaping reality in fact that we who have come to know him cannot go back to the way things were. The Truth himself has captured us, granted us his life, and is leading us in his way to the Father. Yet many of us know some who have gone back to the way things were. Here John explains how this could happen. Simply put, “if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us” (2:19). Jesus’s coming, his endurance of a life and death of suffering, brings about a people who likewise endure. And, because they participate in the Son together, they endure together. The heartbreaking reality is that those who depart from the Christian community show that they never genuinely belonged in the first place.
John explains that part of the reason this works is that Jesus gives his people his “anointing,” Through this anointing (which is probably a reference to the work of the Spirit, 3:24), his people are able to recognise gospel truth as opposed to the error of the antichrists. That is why he says, “You all know” (2:20); this is something that is not limited to teachers or to an elite group who has secret awareness. This anointing is deliberately connected to Jesus’s office of “anointed one,” i.e., Messiah or Christ, and it is contrasted with the anti-Christian (the anti-anointed-one) teaching of those who have departed. Each believer has this anointing and is called to “test the spirits,” distinguishing truth from lies (4:1–6). Those who do so together, those who “confess the Son,” are those who belong together.
Rather than get distracted by speculating about a coming antichrist, John wants them to attend to two responsibilities that are as relevant today as they were back then: confess the Son and keep to the community. Whether it is overt false doctrine or a more subtle form of love for this world (1 John 2:15–17), the weapons of our warfare are truth and love for one another (see 2 John 1–6).