Wolves in Shepherd’s Clothing

John shows how to deal with false teachers by broadening our common conception of the antichrist, reassuring believers of the supernatural reality of their faith, and building a framework for discernment of false teachers.   So I’m going to read from 1 John chapter two, verses 18 to 25, which is what we’ll be discussing today together. I say discussion. It’s a sermon. Don’t answer unless it’s rhetorical, especially goes out to my children, who out of force of habit, will no doubt talk over me at some point. And security, if you could just keep an eye out for them, actually. Carry them away at the slightest misdemeanor. Children, it is the last hour and you have heard that the Antichrist is coming. So now many antichrists have come. Therefore, we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but were not of us. For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out that it might become plain that they are all not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ. This is the Antichrist, he who denies the father and the son. No one who denies the son has the father. Whoever confesses the son has the father also. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard in the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the son and in the father. And this is the promise he made to us eternal life. Children, it is the last hour. The Apostle John writes these words with the heart of a father. He is both tender and fiercely protective. Like any loving parent. He speaks with both love and with discipline. He addresses his readers as children, not because they’re immature, but because he cares for them the way a parent cares for sons and daughters who are growing up in a dangerous world. He lovingly cautions them against anything that would pull them off the godly path that they’re on. He reminds them of the truths they learned when they were young, in the faith. Truths that were simple enough for a child to grasp, yet deep enough to sustain them for a lifetime. And he does all of this with a ferocious protectiveness that will not let them be led astray by smooth-talking deceivers. Now John writes in a densely poetic manner. It’s as if he cannot merely convey the information. He must also express the awe he feels towards God. And that leads him into rich and mysterious and weighty and sometimes actually quite difficult passages. His language is evocative, even lyrical at times, because the reality he is describing is bigger than words can easily contain. Yet even in this mystery, John is not trying to confuse us. He wants to clarify, to equip. And in this particular passage, I want to suggest that we can break it down into three clear and applicable points. First, he broadens the typical conception of the Antichrist from a singular entity who has or who will directly oppose the church. And instead John takes that idea, that spirit of deception, and he pluralizes it. He tells us that many antichrists have already come. These are not necessarily the headline-grabbing monsters that we might expect. They’re individuals who subtly corrupt the faith from within. They use false teaching. They look like insiders. They sound familiar. They once sat in the same gatherings we sit in. This broadening of the concept of Antichrist is quite disturbing, but also very helpful. Secondly, he reassures the believers that their faith is a supernatural reality. These antichrists haven’t discovered some brilliant new revelation. And in fact, they’re woefully adrift. They’re not enlightened. They’ve not seen something that the rest of us missed. The true believers have been anointed by the Holy One, the Holy Spirit, and their faith therefore rests on something solid and something eternal. Thirdly, through all the passage, John builds a practical framework for discernment. He shows us how the Holy Spirit attests to the reality of the gospel message rather than generating new revelation. So with those three things in mind, let’s draw out the themes from the text, and let’s let John’s words sink in deeply. This isn’t just ancient history. This is as useful today as it has been in every age. Perhaps even more so. Children. It is the last hour, and as you have heard, the Antichrist is coming. So now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us. Who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the Antichrist. He who denies the father and the son. These people, it’s clear, were once part of their community. They shared the same meals, the same buildings, perhaps even the same public confession of faith. And then they left. But when they left, they didn’t simply disappear into private disbelief or heresy because some leave the church quietly, but some leave the church evangelistically. John’s letter is focusing on this second group, those who exit from the church but continue to try to teach or corrupt or evangelize to it. Right after the passage we’re studying, John makes his purpose crystal clear. In verse 26, he says, I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. These antichrists weren’t content to go their own way. They wanted to pull sheep after them. And that raises the stakes dramatically. So that’s the first thing to note. John is not talking about every single person who ever leaves the church. He’s speaking of a specific group known to him and his first readers. Some people leave quietly and we grieve for them, and I want to stress that point. We grieve for them. We pray for them. We long and rejoice with the Heavenly Father at the return of prodigal sons and daughters. But John is focusing on this other group. They represent not merely personal tragedy, but an active danger to the body of Christ. This is couched as a warning, not a lament. These people parallel the false prophets that Jesus warned about in Matthew seven passage that we read at the start. Jesus said, beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. John is describing something similar, right? This false prophet leadership. In his commentary on that Matthew passage, John MacArthur points out something interesting. The sheep’s clothing that Jesus is speaking of is not necessarily a disguise of an ordinary sheep trying to blend in with the flock. It can be the woolen robe of a shepherd pretending to be the one who leads the sheep. He stands up front. He teaches, he influences. He exerts ongoing authority. He’s not merely leaving to go out alone. He’s trying to draw other believers into his way of thinking. So this raises a crucial Christian skill, which is implied throughout the passage, even if it’s not mentioned outright. We see it in the language of people going out from us. We see it in John’s careful discernment, in distinctions between the true believers and these antichrists. The skill is discernment, and it’s distinct from church discipline. There are times, of course, when discipline is necessary. Jesus teaches himself in Matthew 18 that removing unrepentant members from the church is something that should happen. But there’s a distinction. There’s a difference here. You can’t excommunicate an idea. You can’t vote out a false teaching. John knows these dangerous ideas are already floating around inside the community. His concern is that they do not ruin the whole body. He’s describing chemotherapy for bad ideas. He wants to keep the patient, the church, alive. But to remove the thing which is poisoning it. That’s why this passage, and indeed the whole letter of John, is so relentlessly focused on these discernments and these distinctions. But John does not leave us fearful and anxious of these imposters. In fact, far from it. After warning of them, he immediately turns to two kinds of reassurance. Do not be troubled by those who have left. And remember the iron core of your faith. But they went out that it might become plain that they are not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you have all knowledge. I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. So we shouldn’t be overly troubled by these false teachers who have departed. Truth is not decided by majority vote, or by who stays or who leaves. We don’t believe by consensus. Our confidence rests on something far more solid. The Holy Spirit himself affirming the gospel message that we have heard. Our trust in Jesus is this pincer movement. Hearing the historical message of Jesus, his life and death and resurrection, and the Holy Spirit confirming that within our hearts. Together they keep us steady in the truth. John is therefore emphasizing how firmly our faith has been established, because ultimately it’s been established by God. We’re not somehow clinging to driftwood amidst a storm, hoping that we’ll survive. We’re rooted. Our foundation is solid. God has built a castle which we inhabit. The walls are not made of our own cleverness or briefly coherent feelings. They are built by the Holy One himself. So John is doing more than just calming our nerves. He’s actually inviting us to draw a kind of relief from their departures. When he says that it might become plain they’re not of us, He’s pointing to something clarifying and even purifying in the church. The fly has climbed out of the ointment. The counterfeits teachers have been exposed. Their leaving does not weaken the true church. Actually, it strengthens it by making the difference between true teachers and false teachers, a true gospel and a false gospel. That’s why John draws out the key distinction in verse 20. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you have all knowledge. By implication, these false teachers never knew the Holy Spirit in the first place. Their departure reveals what was already true. Therefore, it’s not a change of status, but a revealing of it. So John is then developing two things in his audience. First, reassurance. The apparent loss of faith by others should not diminish the confidence of believers. And secondly, discernment. He’s training them and us to recognize the difference between truth and error. I want us to leave here with both of those things today. This reassurance and improved skill of discernment. I want us to know what it really means when someone leaves the church, because they have embraced a fundamentally different message from the gospel. And I want us to grow in the skill that John is building, the ability to test everything against the unchanging truth of Christ. Now, I’d like us to consider the way John builds a framework for discernment. But first I want to make a case for why discernment is vital. I want to begin with the why of discernment before we get to the how. And would you indulge me a youth pastor moment? Just a minute. I’m not leaving. Was this on anyone’s bingo card? I used to be an arborist a long, long time ago. Sort of my first proper job when I finished high school. If you look at a chainsaw, there’s a little line here. It’s quite small, but it’s very important. This is your felling line, and this line points where your tree is going to fall. Assuming it’s straight. But that’s too complicated to get into. Now when you make your cut at the base of the tree, this line is what you can sight across, which is where your tree is going to land. And it’s really important to get that pretty precisely lined up. And the reason for that is that, okay, you might be an inch or so off-center down here, but when you exaggerate that error with 50, 80, maybe 100 foot of tree, that could be the difference between a destroyed house or a dead colleague. Right. Everyone laughed at that one. The last sermon as well. There wasn’t meant to be a joke. It’s really serious. The discernment that John is advocating for is predicting this kind of problem. Right? These kind of mistakes. Okay, it’s 100 foot of trunk an inch or so down here can make a huge difference, right? And so it is with the lack of discernment in our life can mean that our mistakes are exaggerated across a lifetime or across a lifetime of a church, right? The heresies that we think John is dealing with in this letter persist to this day, right? The false teaching affects believers for hundreds of years thereafter, and even up to our present day, the stakes are significant. So that’s the why of discernment, right? It’s not a mistake today. We can’t just gloss over those subtle perversions of the gospel or of Jesus’s identity, because they last for a very long time. So John uses a simple test, a simple tool to invite us into an infinite reality. He gives what looks like a very simplistic method for distinguishing true believers from antichrists. Confess that Jesus is the Christ. That’s it. Admit that Jesus is the promised Messiah the defined son, the Savior. The reason this is extraordinary is because it’s simple enough for a child to understand and yet complex enough to spend a lifetime unpacking as we mature in the faith. Would you indulge me a very English metaphor? In the United Kingdom, we have a beloved television show called Doctor Who. The doctor travels through space and time in something called the Tardis. I see a few excited nods in the audience there. Thank you. Anglophiles. So this Tardis from the outside looks like a very normal English telephone box, right? It’s about eight feet tall. It’s about this wide. You could fit two people in it if they were close friends, perhaps. But once you step inside, it’s this vast, mysterious spaceship. It’s almost infinite, with endless rooms and corridors and wonders. And so in Britain, we have this phrase, ‘it’s a bit of a Tardis’, to describe things that look much smaller on the outside than they are on the inside. You know, a little cottage that you go in and suddenly it’s airy and spacious. We’d say it’s a bit of a Tardis. This is what confessing Jesus is the Christ is like. On the outside it’s a neat small package, which is simple enough for a child to proclaim. But once you step into that truth, you discover a cavernous reality. There are endless rooms of wonder. You can explore the depths of his deity, his humanity, his atoning death, his victorious resurrection, his kingly rule, or his coming return. The truth abides in us, as John says early in the letter, and we grow more and more familiar with its riches. And Jesus is always a sticking point. That’s why John’s identification of the Antichrist, those who rejected Jesus, is such an enduring litmus test for false teaching. In our own day, for example, it’s culturally repulsive to many people to see Jesus as king and judge. Jesus himself was unswerving in his commitment to sorting true believers from those merely jumping on a bandwagon. Much of our theology of hell comes straight from Jesus own words. Yet in our culture, we often discard him as the authoritative King and Savior we need by ignoring his role in judgment as well as salvation. The identity of Jesus becomes corrupted and we invent a Jesus who is our spiritual buddy. Always affirming and never convicting. In John’s day, the distaste for Jesus was his physicality and his full humanity. In our day, the distaste is often for his authority or his holiness, his exclusive claims. In drawing his reader’s attention to Jesus as the Christ, John evokes not just the person to which we are loyal, but the person whose life we emulate, whose commands we obey, and whose promises we believe. So we’ve considered how John identifies these antichrists with this simple test, and he contrasts them with true believers. Let’s look at what we can learn from this passage about some of the detail of discernment. Well, firstly, John gives us quite a dramatic context for this discernment. If we look at the passage as a whole, children, it’s the last hour. And he repeats it’s the last hour. And then at the end of the passage, and this is the promise that he made to us eternal life. In doing this, John brackets this passage with two themes. It’s bracketed by urgency and by eternity. Discernment then sits between these two. There’s the urgency of making your decision quickly. You can’t waste time. There are people being led astray. And yet he stretches out our vision to eternity, the eternal consequences for good or for ill. We have to keep these two things in mind, knowing that what we decide has consequences, but that we do not have an eternity to make that decision. Even if the consequences may well become eternal. So urgency inspires speed, and eternity inspires caution. That’s what makes discernment an art. It’s balancing between these two. It has to thread a needle. When I was an EMT in the UK on blue light driving courses, we’d have this phrase right drive to arrive. You’d think it might be get there as quickly as possible. But the trainers knew from experience that actually rushing meant that you may never get there at all. But equally, we couldn’t just drive as safely as possible 20 miles an hour, observing all the speed limits, their stop lights, stop signs. Actually, there was still an emergency to get to. So if we just have urgency or we just have eternity, we often don’t discern. So John keeps these things at the forefront of our mind. What we often do instead is we hurry without thinking of the consequences, or we procrastinate hoping a decision doesn’t yet have to be made. So we find ourselves gripping these two realities, neither of which John allows us to release. Even if they pull us in opposite directions. But as we cling to these opposing forces, our discernment develops strength and vigor. But how does this look in everyday life? How do we make decisions, especially about teaching and truth, when the stakes may be lifelong or even eternal? How do we avoid getting lost in overthinking? Interestingly, when I look back at my own life, some of my biggest decisions and the most far-reaching ones were made relatively quickly. But they were on a foundation that had lasted years. Take my wife, Imogen, for example. I don’t know if she knows I was going to use this example. Sorry, darling. It’s nothing embarrassing, maybe of me, but. I’d known her for some time. We had some mutual friends. We had a, you know, I knew her reputation well enough, and she knew mine well enough. But the actual decision was pretty quick, right? I sat in my parents house thinking, I like her, I think I think this is good, I think God is in this. And then deciding. I didn’t spend a long, long time thinking about it. It seemed foolhardy, right? I was 18 years old, but what they didn’t see was the years of preparation that had come before it. Believe it or not, when I was 13 years old, I decided I wanted to find a wife. I don’t know what got into me. I think the Holy Spirit was redeeming a desire to date girls into something more honorable and enduring. And I was about as successful as you’d expect for a 13 year old boy, especially when you consider my main criteria was pretty and my second criteria was Christian. But by the time I was 18, I knew what I was looking for. A woman of commitment, a willingness to let Christ into every part of her life. So when I met Imogen, I had already front-loaded this long-term perspective. It meant that when urgency came, and it was urgent, because she’s a real catch and I couldn’t just leave her on the market. I could respond with clarity and with speed. I had looked far enough down the road to know where I was going. We can bring the same attitude to testing, teaching, and recognizing false teachers. John keeps bringing his back, bringing us back to the message they heard from the beginning. Why is he doing that? Well, that message must be our daily focus. We should talk about it, remind one another of it, read books about it, encourage one another, challenge one another. And then when a novel viewpoint arises, we’re prepared, right? We can make those decisions with the urgency that they require. So after emphasizing the importance of weighing these false teachers and the eternal consequences of doing so, John gives us a focus for our efforts. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. What you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the son and in the father. Therefore, these efforts at resisting false teaching are not mainly negative. They are a positive effort to abide in the simplicity of the good news about Jesus. Summarized as luck would have it most succinctly by John in his gospel. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life. Now this part of the letter that we’re studying today, the letter of one John, sits at the point where John labels those who have been corrupting the congregation, calling them antichrists. Right. Fierce criticism. The letter may have been written in response to an early form of Gnosticism. This was a derivative of a culturally dominant philosophy in Greece. It held that the physical world is somehow bad and perishable. But a mere representation of a somehow truer, purer spiritual world. And many in the history of the early church attempted to reconfigure Christianity along these lines. This especially impacted the view of the incarnation. The scandal and the surprise of God taking on flesh took on a new significance to people who were used to denigrating the body and conveniently justifying sin as action in what was an insignificant vessel, the body. One John is full of clues that John is refuting this way of thinking by reiterating that Jesus was indeed physically present. John describes himself as seeing and touching Christ, and he also affirms that true believers see sin as serious and love of others as paramount, practical love of others as paramount. Additionally, his refrain here in the passage and elsewhere in the letter that his audience should hold to what they heard from the beginning, indicates a novel philosophy was threatening the gospel. Therefore, a key part of John’s framework for discernment is maintaining an awareness of prevailing cultural trends, which are prone to pulling us off course. I want to outline one of those now, but I want to explain with a metaphor first why it’s important to be aware of cultural trends when we are discerning false teaching in the church. About why we don’t just look at the gospel, but we’re aware of some of the invisible forces that might be impacting that. Who here has navigated by a compass before? And you must be the good ones, because I guess the ones who weren’t very good at it are still out there somewhere. So you think it’s simple, right? A compass points north, and then you can work out if you’re going east or west or north west or north east. Actually, compasses don’t always point north, right? So your map has a north on it, but that north changes over time. The Earth’s magnetic field isn’t completely aligned with where we’ve drawn our maps or even how the earth spins. And so you take account of something called magnetic declination, which is the difference between your magnetic north and what you might call true north. And it can be as much as 180 degrees. If you’re up in the poles in somewhere like Alaska, it can be 50 degrees. Here it’s only about five, right? But you need to take account of where locally your magnetic north isn’t quite accurate. Cultural trends do something similar. They give us a false reading of True North. C.J. Mahaney puts it this way. Today, the greatest challenge facing the American evangelical is not persecution from the world, but seduction by it. Not persecution by the world, but seduction by it. So, like John, we need to be fiercely perceptive of what is going on in the wider culture and be able to articulate the Christian life and message and how it’s different. To that end, let’s look at a couple of authors briefly who I think are quite good at articulating the magnetic declination in our present age, the way our culture is subtly adjusting our navigation. In his book The Big Ego Trip, British psychiatrist Glenn Harrison covers the shift towards a high self-esteem, towards high self-esteem as the proposed foundation for all human flourishing. It’s a critique, really, from a Christian standpoint and a chronology of how we got this way. In the book, he captures the mid-century tipping point 50 or 60 years ago quite well. It took George Lucas’s Star Wars, sorry to disparage Star Wars, I’m just quoting. But it took George Lucas’s Star Wars movie to capture the final ascendancy of the self. Arriving at the finale, our two heroes are seen walking proudly through this vast cheering crowd of admirers. Now, having learnt to trust their feelings, they’re about to be awarded with the highest prize of all, the claim of the people, the approval of their peers and the worship of the masses. The self has triumphed. It’s no longer simply part of a greater story. The self is the story. And here, receiving the acclaim of its peers, it may be found at the very pinnacle of where it wants to be. However, our self, our emotional core, our feelings, our deep desires brought to the surface by introspection and carefully built through a process which Karl Truman calls expressive individualism, is not the final piece or the ultimate piece of your life, and that can be painful to hear. Right? Star Wars has a message which sits gently within the culture, doesn’t it? Discover yourself. Trust your feelings. There’s greatness inside of you. There’s bad people out there that corrupt you. But once you can get rid of them, the true you will rise up and be a blessing to the world. So it can lead us to wonder, where’s this thinking going to lead? And I think we have a very strong magnetic declination, a very strong cultural pull to elevate self as the as the focus of human flourishing. The idea that who we are inside is inherently good, that loving and expressing our authentic self is how we will bless the world, not just flourish personally, but then we open to Philippians two, verses 6 to 8, and we see a very different picture of human flourishing. Jesus, who though he was in the very form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. The contrast. Right. The expressive individualism as the way that I will flourish personally and the way I’ll really bless the world versus Jesus, creator of all things. The one who really only ever, and certainly most ever, deserved honor. Being humble, becoming a servant. Therefore, we must be ready for people to depart from us. We do hold as biblical the idea of the perseverance of the saints that God will sustain true believers to the end. But what is not biblical is the idea that everyone who ever calls themselves Christian truly is one. In the Matthew seven passage that we began with, Jesus words are sobering. Many will say to him on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name? And he will say, I never knew you. In a close friends church in the United States, a sizeable group left because they believe the gospel was mainly a tool for political change and felt that that was not being emphasized enough. We must be prepared, even in this congregation, to see people step away when the real Jesus becomes too costly, or a mere instrument to achieve a different goal and begin to change the gospel to align with that. Now, John implies that it’s often difficult to tell who those people really are until the moment of departure. So we don’t live with a paranoid suspicion of is it me? Is it them over there? Instead, we take the same difficult but sober piece that John advocates for. When people step away from the gospel, they haven’t changed their status, they’ve simply revealed their status. I want a light briefly on something else as well as we think about discernment in the present age. We also face brand new arenas where discernment is suddenly required. Consider generative artificial intelligence that can produce large amounts of text on any topic. This is not the AI that simply sorts ripe plums from unripe plums. This is AI that can generate theological discourse, Bible studies, or pastoral advice. I got caught out by this a few weeks back. I was looking for kind of good theology for young people on Amazon. Or perhaps it was the first mistake. And I read some reviews on this great systematic theology for teens. Author seems respectable chap, got the book, was going through a lot of hyphens in here. He’s weirdly repetitive and found out partly through kind of an expose that we’d done on this kind of theology book that had become popular, that this book was AI generated, and the author wasn’t even a real author. Right? He also had an AI generated photograph. He did look unusually handsome and even an AI generated bio. Right? It’s not a real person. It’s not the kind of weighty wrestling that happens when you try to come up with theology. And I’ve found even using it in my master’s studies, you know, perhaps you’re trying to understand a dense medieval theologian, densely written, not it’s not a comment on their intelligence, or you’re trying to locate a good source, right. It can be quicker than Google sometimes, but I found repeatedly that it subtly shifts away from the gospel. Most commonly and most glaringly, it drifts towards a workspace gospel. It might describe prayer as something that contributes to your salvation. Most insidiously, it often carries at its core, the same common cultural message that reality should shape itself around you yourself, your expressive individualism, because really it treats you as its master and it treats your feelings as your master. So we’re living in a strange moment in human history where lies can be generated not only by humans, but by the machines the humans have created. We must now test the tools and voices that shape our thoughts in ways previous generations had only ever imagined until very recently. So how do we balance all of this? Well, I want to suggest that we walk a tightrope, and that seems to be the kind of idea that John is getting at. The gospel is a reality which is stretched taut between Jesus’s birth, life and resurrection. And at the other end, his second coming. In the grand story of God, it’s simply the most visible expression of a straight line that stretches from before time began and into eternity. The story of God’s unfolding plan of salvation. That straight line doesn’t deviate with a culture. It doesn’t change course with a new revelation. But it’s not simply a case of us walking that tightrope. We need to balance as well. John reminds us in this passage that the Holy Spirit illuminates the good news. It’s like the balance bar a tightrope walker holds to keep them centered. As verse 20 puts it, we are anointed by the Holy One and you have all knowledge. But the tightrope is tiring. We grow weary. We want to step off and rest in the comfort of majority opinion. We want to deny the parts of Jesus our culture dislikes to shape him into a culturally congruous gospel. But John points us to a greater rest, a greater rest in that final sentence. And this is the promise that he made to us – eternal life. There’s a story of a missionary, and the source is unclear, but it goes like this. After decades of difficult but faithful service in Africa, the missionary returns home to New York. By coincidence, he arrives on the same boat as Theodore Roosevelt, who’s coming back from a safari. Thousands have gathered at the airport. Ticker tape parades, paparazzi, a band. The president stepped off the boat. The weary missionary felt a pang of discouragement. He whispers to God, why don’t I get a welcome like that when I come home? In the quiet of his heart, he sensed the Lord’s reply. Because you haven’t come home yet. One day the true king will return. Every false Christ, every seductive lie, every wolf dressed in shepherd’s clothing, will be exposed for what he is. The sheep who know his voice will hear the words that we all long for. Well done, good and faithful servant. And we will finally be home. Let’s pray.