26. Teaching

Meditations in 1 John : 26 : Teaching

1 John  2:26,27   I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit–just as it has taught you, remain in him.

It is always a funny thing about people who fall off the rails morally or intellectually; they always seems to want to convince others to think and act the same way as them. Maybe it is a sub-conscious form of justifying what they are thinking or doing, trying not to be different but getting others to be like them.

That was how it was then in John’s time. There were people who had veered away from the apostolic teaching, bringing their own slant to what had been taught in the  church by the apostles, but now that ‘different slant’ brought a different God, and a different gospel, and from John’s clarity he can see that these people were trying to lead astray those left in the church.

When the apostle Paul met with the elders from Ephesuson the beach, he warned them “Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them.” (Acts 20:30). There is that same thing that John had said previously, “They went out from us.” (2:19) This is the sad thing about all this; so often Satan is able to take those in the church and then through them bring deception and division. So often the danger doesn’t come from outside the church; we are aware that unbelievers will be against what we believe, but when it comes through people who had been in the church, now bringing “a different teaching”, that is so much more subtle and potentially dangerous.

Now he encourages those who are left in the church: “As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you.”   He’s already spoken about this and we’ve considered it in some detail before, but now he just reassures them about it. It’s all right, he is saying, you’re still in the church, you still have the presence of the Holy Spirit within you, you haven’t fallen out of fellowship with the Father and the Son, you’re still all right.

Then he says something that could be easily misunderstood: “you do not need anyone to teach you.”   Now does this mean they no longer need teaching, these people still in the church? No, because disciples go on needing teaching throughout their lives, but the point he is making is that they don’t need NEW teaching. They don’t need to hear something beyond the apostolic teaching they have received about the Gospel. If you come across someone who purports to be bringing something IN ADDITION to the Gospel revealed in the New Testament, know that they are not of God. If it is the Gospel PLUS something else, know that they are wrong. This is why we know that the Mormon church fits in here because whenever you talk with them, they may say they believe the Gospel but they are not happy with just that. It has to be the Gospel PLUS the Book of Mormon. False teaching!

Note what he then says: “But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit–just as it has taught you, remain in him.” Let’s examine that in bits. First, “his anointing teaching you about all things.” The fact that you are indwelt by the Holy Spirit means that He will show you what is right and what is wrong. This is not about Him adding anything to what you find in the Bible, but it is about Him conveying through your spirit, an awareness of the truth of things before you. Someone new appears in church, and you find yourself feeling uneasy about them. The Holy Spirit is giving you the gift of discernment and revealing there is something about them you need to be careful about. Someone, a guest speaker, comes to the church and as you listen to his teaching, again you feel uneasy about what you are hearing. This is simply the Holy Spirit pointing out there is error in what he is saying. In case this all sounds very negative, let’s give another illustration. A difficulty arises in life and, as you pray, you suddenly get an insight as to how to deal with it. You apply it and the difficulty is overcome. It was just the Holy Spirit within you giving you the gift of wisdom, to know how to deal with it. In each case He is ‘teaching’ you, and we need this again and again in life in these many different forms. It is not adding any new teaching to the Bible but just making it real in everyday circumstances.

Then he says, “as that anointing is real, not counterfeit.”   That is a truth you need to know and it will then help you because, speaking of the Holy Spirit, he then says, “it has taught you.”   Look, he is saying, you know the presence of the indwelling Holy Spirit and you know the reality of it; it isn’t something made up, conjured up, formulated, stirred up, pretended, unreal or counterfeit. It is the real thing. You know the experiences we’ve just been talking about, how He has revealed what is wrong, shown what is right, and shown you the way ahead. You know the reality of all this, you know He is real. Therefore, in the light of all this, “remain in him.”   You don’t need anything else; you don’t need some other additional teaching or additional experience beyond that which you find in the apostolic teaching (of the New Testament, as it came to be.) Just rest in Him, rest in your experience of Him, remain in Him, and be content with what you know and have experienced and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! Ok?  Ok!

22. Anointed

Meditations in 1 John : 22 : Anointed

1 John  2:20   But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth.

Observe the starting word here – ‘but’. John is now contrasting the Christians with those he has just been speaking about. He has been speaking about people he calls antichrists, people who started off with the truth, but became deceived and accepted variations of the Gospel that ended up with them being against Jesus and the Gospel. These people are deceived. You, by contrast, says John, know the truth. You know what is true, what is right. Why? Because you have an anointing from God Himself.

Now that is interesting language. We don’t usually speak about Christians generally being anointed; we do talk about leaders, preachers or ministries being anointed, but we don’t usually think about ordinary Christians as being anointed. So what does John mean when he speaks like this?

Let’s see the use of the word anoint or anointing in the Bible. Well, first of all it referred to pouring oil on a priest to consecrate them: “Take the anointing oil and anoint him by pouring it on his head,” (Ex 29:7), but the same thing was done to consecrate a king: “The LORD said to Samuel,…You are to anoint for me the one I indicate….. So Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers, and from that day on the Spirit of the LORD came upon David in power.” (1 Sam 16:1,3,13)  In the Old Testament period it was a pouring of oil over the head of a leader – a priest or a king – as a sign of him being set apart to God for the task given to him, which he would fulfil with the enabling of the Holy Spirit.

Note the three elements there: a) being set apart, b) for a task and c) with the enabling of God’s Holy Spirit.  Jesus was referred to as ‘the anointed one. In the prophetic Psalm 2 we find, “The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the LORD and against his Anointed One.” (Psa 2:2)  The early church applied that prophecy when they prayed and then referred to Jesus – “your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed.” (Acts 4:26,27) Preaching to the Gentiles in the house of Cornelius, Peter declared, “You know what has happened throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached– how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.” (Acts 10:37,38)

The emphasis was not there on Jesus’ being (as the New Testament testifies to again and again) but to the fact that it was by the power of the Spirit that the human being, Jesus, who was the Son of God from before birth, actually operated. He did what he did because he was God or, if you like, because the power of God was manifested through him. In the synagogue in Nazarethtook the Isaiah scroll and read, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” (Lk 4:18) The whole point was to emphasise that he was sent by God, set apart by God, to perform a task and to do it in the power of the Spirit.

So now we come to us, to John saying we have been anointed. Elsewhere we are told that we are now indwelt by the Spirit (e.g. 1 Cor 3:16) but the emphasis that John now places on this is that we have received the Holy Spirit to set us apart for the task of revealing God (hence the earlier references to revealing His love through who we are and what we do), and to doing it through the enabling and power of the Holy Spirit. The apostle Paul said a similar thing: “Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.” (2 Cor 1:21,22) God has put His Holy Spirit upon us and in us. We live and stand firm by the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit.

John is going to say a lot more about this a bit later on in this chapter but for now he just introduces us to the idea. He does it to emphasise how different we are from the antichrists that he has spoken about. They were into deception but we are into truth because we have been anointed by and are indwelt by the Spirit of Truth (Jn 14:17, 15:26, 16:13).  Of course John had described Jesus as being “full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14) and so if we are expressions of Jesus, we too will be expressions of truth, but we will see more of that in the following verses.  For now, let us remind ourselves, we have been set apart by God to represent or reveal Him and to do that by the enabling of the Spirit who he has put within us when we came to Christ. Amen? Amen!