4:2 “In this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which agrees that Jesus Christ has come in a physical body is out of God,”
WE “know” (same as “judge” in the previous verse) the difference between the Spirit of God and the Spirit of the devil–between a teacher influenced by Christ or the antichrist–by their confession–what they teach and agree with. If they agree (The Greek word means literally to say the “same word”) that Jesus is both fully God and fully man (Literally “flesh”), that is a good sign that it is of God.
That point will quickly turn up any false religion still today–Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, etc. However, there have been some heresies that emphasize that Jesus Christ had a physical body (the Nicolatians, Hymeneas and Philetus, etc.) but the Greek grammar actually emphasizes the person of Jesus rather than the flesh-and-blood mode of His existence on earth.
The sense of it is not so much “confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh” but “confesses the Christ that has come in the flesh” (Clark 123, Cotton 415). Westcott (142) makes two notes about this phrase, first that the verb “has come” is in the Perfect tense, meaning that His coming is an abiding fact, and secondly that “Christ came in [not into] the flesh.” Jesus was not a hollow man filled with God, but truly man just as He is truly God. And whoever agrees with this is of God.
4:3 “and every spirit which does not agree with Jesus is not out of God, and this is the [spirit] of the antichrist, which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is in the world already.”
Whoever does NOT agree with this doctrine of Christ is NOT of God. I’ve heard that this is not only true of human teachers but also true of evil spirits who have conversed with humans; they cannot say “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” or “Jesus is Lord.”
Throughout this passage, John uses the phrase literally translated “out of God,” which means the Spirit was part of God, came out of Him and into us, or perhaps in reference to children of God, the verb “born” is understood from the full phrase “born out of God” in 2:29 and 4:7. The spirit that does not confess Christ did not come from out of God.
The parallel structure of this verse with the previous verse, makes the full confession “Jesus Christ come in the flesh” the obvious expansion of the one-word “Jesus” here, and some Greek texts actually expand it out, but the meaning is the same. The Greek texts, however, do not contain the word “spirit,” they just say, “this is the of-the-antichrist.” But the context indicates that it’s talking about the “spirit “of the antichrist.
That the readers had “heard” about this antichrist which was “already in the world” is almost an exact repeat of 2:18. John introduced most of his material in the first two chapters, but he keeps picking up on strands mentioned earlier and developing them. “This spirit of the antichrist [is] an attitude, mindset, and complex of ideas; and exists in the world today in every heresy and non-Christian religion–perhaps especially in the religion of secular humanism and it’s brainchild, democratic socialism a.k.a. Communism (Clark 126).
Why would John bother with repeating his statement in the negative? If he had simply left it at, “every spirit that confesses Jesus…is of God,” it wouldn’t necessarily rule out the logical possibility that some spirits who do not confess Jesus might be of God also. This negative conjunction in v.3 narrows the field so there can be no middle ground (Clark 124).
There are only two camps: One if the “US/YOU” who are “out of God” and who are influenced by the “Spirit of truth.” In the opposite camp are “THEM” who are “of the world” and who are influenced by the “Spirit of error/spirit of antichrist.”
By Nate Wilson.
