“Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.” (Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline)

I read these lines when I was a freshman in college. They set a course for my life, because as I read them, I determined that I was going to be a deep person. No matter what it took, I was going to be one of them. Its seems like almost everywhere I go, people (especially young adults) are disillusioned by the degree of shallowness in the Church. It can easily become a topic for griping and complaining. Though I can’t say I haven’t ever participated in such ill speech, I realized a long time ago, that unless I was going to proactively be part of the solution, I was merely perpetuating the problem. Many are content with complaining because it is exceedingly easier than radically reorienting your life in the pursuit of a different end.

Leo Tolstoy once said, “Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing themselves.” In an age where being extremely shallow and narcissistic has become the norm—where our concepts of reality come from the hyper-idealized world of movies, where our heroes are celebrities who occupy a fantasy world enabled by exorbitant wealth—the only way change will happen is as we personally wrench ourselves out of the spell cast by modern society and begin to dwell deep.

The second principle in this series discussing Principles and Practices for the Spiritual Life is as follows:

Becoming a deep person is the most fruitful long-term approach to loving God and neighbor.

with its negative formulation as follows:

Remaining content with being shallow is not loving or helpful to anyone.

In John 15, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” To be connected to the vine, means to draw life-giving nutrients from the source, such that, over an extended period of time, there is a slow and gradual process of growth. It is only this slow and gradual process of growth that produces fruit, and as Jesus says, much fruit. This is what I mean by “becoming a deep person” – unplugging from the hectic mayhem of our narcissistic culture and engaging in a process of growth, whereby, over time, your entire being is both opened to and ultimately flooded with the life-giving presence of Jesus. We can often tell the difference between people who answer problems with cliches, and those who have real, helpful answers; people who are merely repeating the words of another, and those who can speak from the heart; people who wax eloquently about God, and those who seem to have been with God; people who have plastic smiles, and those who can empathize with your pain; people who interact with life in a detached and low-risk manner, and those who have a passion for life, engaging in the full range of its joys and sorrows; people who can network, and those who love affectionately and deeply; people who relate to others on the basis of what they can get, and those who give freely from the heart, laying down their lives for others in love. It is to the latter that we are invited as we open ourselves to God, allowing him to enter deeper into our lives, and in such, we become deep people.

Related posts

• Why Greek Matters (Part 5) – Closing our bowels (1 John 3:17) (0)
• Prayers for Revival – Hatred of Sin (1)
• Love is How We Open to Life (Principles and Practices for the Spiritual Life, Part 1d) (1)
• First Be Filled, Then Control the Outpouring (Principles and Practices for the Spiritual Life, Part 2b) (2)
• Why Greek Matters (Part 4) – The Lamb is Worthy (Revelation 5) (0)

I’m unsure if you’ll believe me, but I am not preparing to launch into a discussion on bodily processes, but rather, New Testament Greek and the New Testament concept of love. I have often heard sincere Christian people define love as something like “acting to promote the well-being of others.” I can understand, both the perspective that would see this definition as initially odd, as well as those who would affirm it in reaction to sentimentalized or exclusively eroticized understandings of love. However, I would contend it is impossible to define love as “acting to promote the well-being of others.” This may be something we include in our understanding of love, or indeed make part of the core – but this in itself cannot occupy the place of primacy. As an illustration, the person working at a restaurant who washes their hands prior to preparing your food is certainly “acting to promote your well-being,” but one would be hard pressed to further assert that they were “loving” you. Like illustrations could be multiplied ad nauseum, demonstrating there must be something more fundamental to love than “beneficial action” that in fact constitutes it as love.

I think the one of the clearest Biblical portrayals of such is in 1 John 3:17. The NRSV for this verse reads:

How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

The NASB is a little closer when it says:

But  whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him,  how does the love of God abide in him?

The TNIV is closer still (though in a less literal fashion):

If any one of you has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in you?

The underlined phrase in each verse is literally the expression “closes their bowels from them” (kleisē ta splanxna autou ap autou). The Greek work splanxnon means “intestines” and is the seat of the passions and strong emotions.[1] Here John brings together what cannot be separated – action to alleviate the suffering and needs of others, which is motivated by a deep-felt concern. One apart from the other is not love. John is adamant – if one shut’s their bowels from another, if they fail to have deep and powerful feelings that motivate acts of service and kindness, “how does the love of God remain in them?” Failure to have compassion is a failure of love that cannot be compensated even with action. Obviously, this is challenging, for we know it is impossible to turn on powerful emotions at will. However, let us not create a “theology of barrenness,” which seeks to justify our condition and surely falls short of God’s own nature and his expressed intentions for us. Does God act for us in a beneficial but detached manner? Is this the highest modality we could envisage for humanity? Rather, let us seek to know the Love of God. We love because he first loved us. Let us open our hearts rather than close them. Let us devote ourselves to consider, meditate on and receive the Love of God, and that as it remains in us, find ourselves transformed as people who love others from the depths of our affections.

Related posts

• Why Greek Matters (Part 4) – The Lamb is Worthy (Revelation 5) (0)
• The Insanity of Our Time (1)
• Prayers for Revival – Hatred of Sin (1)
• Love is How We Open to Life (Principles and Practices for the Spiritual Life, Part 1d) (1)
• Becoming what we behold (6)

The word eternity never occurs in the New Testament. Neither does the word forever.

This is the third part in a series attempting to show some of the difference it makes in reading or studying the New Testament using Greek rather than only English. Since I teach NT Greek, I am often asked regarding the purpose or benefits of learning Greek to study the Bible. Unfortunately there is no magic in Greek which suddenly makes the Bible unlock its secrets. Instead, there are a lot of small differences and nuances that reading the Greek text makes, which add to a considerable cumulative whole. The present series hopes to identify and illuminate just a few of these. This ideally will encourage those currently or considering studying Greek to persevere in their aims. It also should be of help to those who do not know Greek to simply understand a little more what is going on “under the hood” of their English Bible.

Rather than the words “eternity” or “forever”, what occurs is the Greek word aiōn, which literally means “age.” This is not age in the sense of how old someone is, but age in the sense of “a long period of time.” Aiōn is from where we get our modern English word “eon.” Two phrases in Greek, “into the age” (eis ton aiōna) or “into the ages of ages” (eis tōn aiōnōn tōn aiōnōn) are almost always translated as “forever” or “forever and ever” in English Bibles. The adjectival form of aiōn (aiōnion) is usually translated as “eternal.”

Granted, when aiōn is used in these ways the sense of limitless duration is often implied. The question at hand however, is how does the meaning transfer or change when brought into English? In ancient Greek usage, aiōn was used to speak of a person’s life, their lifetime, a generation, an “age,” or length of time in the past. It was not until Plato (ca. 429-347 BC) that it began to mean “eternity,” which for him was a “timeless, ideal eternity, in which there are no days or months or years” (TDNT I, 198). Does aiōn in the New Testament mean eternity, or furthermore mean Plato’s definition of timeless eternity? Obviously, since nearly all English Bibles translate eis ton aiōna as “forever” the answer to the former and often latter is assumed yes. What the English Bibles don’t show, is that these and many other passages also use the word “aiōn:”

Matt. 12:32 “Whoever  speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever  speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.

Matt. 13:22 “And the one on whom seed was sown among the thorns, this is the man who hears the word, and the worry of the  world (lit., “age,” aiōn) and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.

Matt. 13:39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil, and the harvest is the  end of the age; and the reapers are angels. 40 “So just as the tares are gathered up and burned with fire, so shall it be at the  end of the age.

Mark 10:30 but that he will receive a hundred times as much now in  the present age, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and farms, along with persecutions; and in the age (aiōn) to come, eternal (aiōnion) life.

Rom. 12:2 And do not be conformed to this  world (aiōn), but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may   prove what the will of God is, that which is good and  acceptable and perfect.

Eph. 2:2 in which you formerly walked according to the  course of this world (“age”, aiōn), according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

Furthermore, the sheer fact that we frequently see the word aiōn appear in the plural indicates to us that a strict concept of eternity is not possible, for to speak of “eternities” is illogical. If eternity is limitless, there cannot be two or more “eternities” in the future.

Without wanting to oversimplify the issue, it seems to me like the word aiōn generally means what it literally means: “age.” In a Jewish context, this would refer to the “two-age eschatology” which had been significantly developed in the intertestimental period (though derived from the canonical Hebrew Scriptures). The present “age” is characterized by unrighteousness, suffering, disorder, injustice, etc. However, they believed God would intervene and enact a “coming age,” in which justice, life, peace and joy would prevail as God vindicates his afflicted people. This “age to come” would be inaugurated by the resurrection of the dead and the advent of renewed bodily existence. This gives a completely different picture “aiōn” than the too-often Platonized concepts we read into “eternity.”

Thus “eternal life” is not simply floating off into an ethereal realm of whimsical timeless, formless existence. It does not even mostly refer to the limitless duration of it (though it certainly implies that). Rather, “eternal life” is the “life of the age,” that is, the life of the “age to come” (TDNT I, 206). Eternal life is participation in the restoration of all things when God redeems and re-creates the earth and all that is in it, in full righteousness, justice, peace and prosperity. Eternal life is the undoing of Sin and Death’s every effect, and is further the consummation of God’s intent for his creation to experience the heights of joy ordained for our physical, bodily, sensory, emotional, relational, communal, and cultural existence on earth.

This highlights how radical it is when Jesus tells his followers that they presently possess eternal life (Jn. 3:36; 5:24; 6:47). He is not simply telling them they will live a long time. Neither is he telling them they will certainly get into heaven. He is telling them that the “life of the age to come” has somehow burst forth in the midst of the present and is the shared possession of all those who believe in Him. The eschatological restoration has begun in, among and through those who have given their full allegiance to Jesus, the Lord of the new world.

Related posts

• Why Greek Matters (Part 7) – The Genesis of Jesus the Messiah (Genealogies Really Matter!) (0)
• Why Greek Matters (Part 6): Christ in Y’all, the Hope of Glory (5)
• Why Greek Matters (Part 5) – Closing our bowels (1 John 3:17) (0)
• Why Greek Matters (Part 4) – The Lamb is Worthy (Revelation 5) (0)
• Why Greek Matters (Part 2) – New Creation (2 Corinthians 5:17) (2)

When Jesus rose from the dead, splendor returned to the world. From the depths of death’s dark gloom, Jesus emerged triumphant and the light of new life shone out permeating the entire earth. God’s redemptive purpose to not abandon the earth to its decay, death and misery, but to restore, renew and indeed re-create it with greater glory than it possessed in its pristine state, though prophesied throughout the Old Testament, was enacted in and through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

In the last post I discussed the Jewish concept of “resurrection” as an expectation which was

bodily (entailing a return to the life of the physical body),

earthly (as opposed to other-worldly),

corporate (it happened to all the people of God),

simultaneous (all at one time), and

eschatological (as the transitional event between this age and the age to come in which all things would be restored).

In such, I began to assert the notion that the resurrection of Jesus was not simply a fantastic miraculous event, perhaps the best of all the miracles in Jesus’ career. Rather, the resurrection of Jesus, as understood in its Jewish context, marked the irruption of the life of the Age to Come into the present. This Age to Come, was heralded by the Hebrew prophets as a time when death would be no more (Isa. 25), when all areas of life would be renewed and restored, whether they be ecological, agricultural, physical, political, economic, relational, etc., and God’s people would forever rejoice with gladness (Isa. 35:10).  In short, the entire earth and all that is in it would be renewed and re-created. When Jesus was raised from the dead, this re-creation began. The restoration of all things had its inauguration. As Jesus stepped out of the tomb, the springtime of all creation started to blossom and the age-anticipated promises of God for life, righteousness and freedom began to find their fulfillment. This notion is termed inaugurated eschatology, meaning that eschatological realities of the age to come have been inaugurated, that is, they have begun, even now in the middle of the present age, while yet awaiting a future consummation of fullness (this is often discussed in terms of the Kingdom of God being both “already but not yet”).

To continue to demonstrate this idea of the resurrection of Jesus heralding the advent of God’s New Creation (i.e., inaugurated eschatology), I would like to quickly breeze through the Gospel of John – a whirlwind tour perhaps, and show how the notion of “new creation” is present in this work.

To begin with, the familiar opening words of John are “In the beginning…” What is strikingly obvious to us, would have been equally apparent to hearers/readers in the first century. John is intentionally mirroring the initial words of Genesis, the famed creation story. While this would not be conclusive in itself (but will be made much more clear as we proceed), why might John be intentionally beginning his Gospel with the first words of Genesis? He continues to speak of the incarnation in terms of “light shining in the darkness,” a further allusion to the first chapter of Genesis. Is it possible that John is setting us up for precisely what it sounds like – a second (new) creation story?

In John 5:24-25, Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and  believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and  does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life. Truly, truly, I say to you,  an hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.”

Three points are of note.

1)    The person who believes has, that is, currently possesses eternal life. This phrase translated “eternal life” literally means “life of the age” and was used in Jewish writings from or before the time of the New Testament to mean the “life of the age to come” (Dan. 12:2; Pss. Sol. 3:12; 13:11; 14:10; 1 Enoch 37:4; 58:3). Furthermore, in the Synoptic Gospels, the terms “eternal life” and “Kingdom of God” are used interchangeably on a number of occurrences (Mk 9:43, 45, 47; 10:17-30; Mt. 19:23-29; Lk. 18:24-30). Thus, when we come to the Gospel of John and see that the term “Kingdom of God” only occurs twice, it seems very likely that the often used phrase “eternal life” (i.e., “life of the age”) is John’s preferred way of referring to the same reality the Synoptic Gospels prefer to call the “Kingdom of God.”[1] This life of the age to come, this experience of God’s Kingdom is available in the present as the possession of those who believe in Jesus.

2)    This possession of eternal life entails “passing out of death into life.” Here we see clear resurrection language, as will be confirmed in the following verses. This further clarifies the reception of the life of the age to come. There is a sense to which the believer in Jesus transfers from the present evil age into the Age to Come, while yet remaining in the present age. Jesus uses a verb of motion, “passing out of,” to describe the believer’s participation in eternal life. This militates against the pure internalized understanding of these verses, as if Jesus is speaking mostly of an internal, immaterial, “spiritual” change in the believer. Jesus does not view this change as internal, but as external. It is not a “change of heart,” but rather a change of location for the entire person. Their “inner being” does not move, but “the one who believes” in their entirety of personhood moves beyond the realm where death has sway and into the resurrection life of the age to come.

3)    Finally, if this wasn’t already clear, Jesus emphasizes that the time in which this happens is now. This is significant because the resurrection events that will soon happen to Jesus in the narrative cannot be construed solely as an isolated incident for Jesus. We are meant to understand the dynamic connection between what happens to Jesus and what is available to the believer. As Jesus rises from the dead in the life of the Age to Come, so likewise all believers are able to participate in that life in the present.

In John 11 Jesus makes a remarkable statement: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.”

As Christians, we have heard this verse so often, I think it ceases to strike us as strange. Jesus claims to be the resurrection. But the resurrection is an event. How can a person be an event? Furthermore, how can a person be an event that properly belongs to the entire people of God at an eschatological transition between the Present Age and the Age to Come? It seems like Jesus is telling us that he is somehow God’s future in person. He is the personal presence of the life of the Age to Come. Here among us, in the midst of a world inundated with decay and death, the light of God’s New Creation is beginning to shine. It is walking among us in the person of God-himself made flesh.

However, is this New Creation life restricted to the person of Jesus, as in, he possesses the life of the Age to Come, but the rest of us need to wait until his return to experience it? Does this New Creation, resurrection life, Kingdom of God presence leave the earth when Jesus ascends to heaven? The previous passage addressed (John 5) expresses the contrary quite emphatically, but even in this verse, Jesus informs us of the participation of the believer in the same eschatological realities. Since “life” and “eternal life” are interchangeable in the Gospel of John[2],  and since “eternal life” means the “life of the Age to Come” (see above), it stands to reason that the phrase “resurrection and the life” is a hendiadys, in which the two words joined by “and” should be taken together as a single idea. If not, since “life” certainly means the “life of the Age to Come,” we should at least see “resurrection” as the event which initiates the “life”[3] In either case,”life” in verse 25 certainly means “resurrection life” and thus the occurrence of the same word in the next verse, the “everyone lives” in verse 26, would mean, “everyone who has the life of the kingdom of God.” This is further advanced by Jesus’ assertion that unless one eats of the bread of life they have no life in them (John 6:51), meaning they do not have the “life of the age to come.”[4] The one who believes is the one who truly lives, who shares the life of the resurrection that Jesus himself embodies in the present.

If we skip forward a bit, we come to Holy Week.

On the sixth day of the week (Friday), after flogging him, robing him in purple and crowing him with thorns, Pilate displays Jesus to the crowd with the words, “Behold the man!” (John 19:5). Note that in Genesis 1 (remember our previous discussion about John 1 quoting Genesis 1 – “in the beginning…”), on the sixth day of the week, God created the human beings, those who were meant to rule the earth. Now on the sixth day of this week, Jesus is displayed as the true human, as a mockery dressed in royal attire, yet refusing to retaliate to the false rulers, to those whose greed and violence had corrupted their humanity to the point of unrecognizability.

The power hungry inhuman forces of violence succeed in killing the one who truly embodied what it meant to be fully human. The rulers of this world put to death the world’s true Lord. After doing so, he was laid to rest in an empty tomb. It was here that Jesus spent the seventh day of the week. As God rested from his labors on the seventh day of the creation account, so too, Jesus spends the seventh day in a Sabbath rest – the utter stillness of death.

John 20 begins with the words, “on the first day of the week.” Is it possible that more is going on here than a mere temporal indicator? As we observed this Gospel starting by alluding to the Genesis 1 account of creation, saw how Jesus understood himself as embodying the life of the Age to Come and sharing it with those who believe in him, and walked through days six and seven of creation during the weekend proceeding the first Easter, are we meant to understand that the timing “on the first day of the week” signals something much bigger than we were expecting? As Jesus rises from the dead, we are beholding the advent of God’s New Creation life bursting forth from the tomb! The Jewish concept of resurrection and new creation seems sufficient in itself to indicate such, but there is more in text itself. In verse 15, John tells us that Mary, seeing the resurrected Lord, believed him to be a gardener. What an odd detail. Why would Mary mistakenly believe Jesus to be a gardener, unless they were actually in a garden? And does not being in a garden, yet again allude to the biblical creation account? As Jesus rises from the dead, he is the New Adam in a renewed Garden of Eden. Eden has been restored and humanity once again has been given access to this Paradise once Lost.

In verse nineteen, we are told that “it was evening on that day, the first day of the week.” Apparently we need reminding that this is not any day – it is the FIRST day of the week. John repeats himself in order to emphasize, however allusively, the full scope of what happened on that day. Though the doors were shut, Jesus comes and stands among them saying, “Peace be with you.” After showing them his hands and side, “He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.” Just as God breathed the breath of life into an inert Adam and he became a living being, so now Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into his disciples at the dawn of God’s New Creation. Yet this new life of the Kingdom of God, is not merely for the disciples’ enjoyment. He charges them, “as the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” As the Father sent Jesus to be the living presence of the life of the Age to Come, so now as the followers of Jesus share in that life by believing in him, they are commissioned likewise to be agents of God’s Kingdom and resurrection life.

Though not in the Gospel of John, one more verse bears mentioning. In Luke 24:30, Jesus is sitting at a table with two disciples with whom he has walked from Jerusalem. When Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them, Luke tells us that immediately “their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” Where else in Scripture do we have two people, who upon eating, have their eyes opened? Adam and Eve, after consuming the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, experience their eyes being opened into a shameful self-awareness of their nakedness. In Luke however, the resurrected Lord is reversing the curse of Adam’s sin. He is inaugurating the life of the Kingdom of God, the New Creation, whereupon partaking of blessed and broken bread (a clear allusion to the Church’s practice of the Lord’s Supper), eyes are opened from woeful disillusionment into a hope-filled recognition of the Risen Lord. After this experience, the two disciples immediately run out and announce the  Gospel: “Jesus is risen!” The experience of the life of the Age to Come, the initiation of overturning sin’s curse, in John’s Gospel results in being sent just as Jesus was sent, and in Luke results in the proclamation of the Resurrected Lord. The presence of God’s Kingdom is in our midst, inaugurated through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This new life is the very impetus behind the Church’s mission in and for the world. Through proclaiming the Gospel of the Risen Lord and the arrival of God’s Kingdom, we become those who share and impart the life of the age to come amidst a world embroiled in the challenging yet, for those who believe, inevitably triumphant conflict with death.

[2] ibid.

[3] George R. Beasley-Murray, John (Dallas: Word, 1999), 190.

[4] ibid, 191.

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• The Spirit of the Resurrection Part 2: Gnosticism and Schizoid Spirituality (3)
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12: No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us…
16b: God is love, and  whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

13: By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

In verses twelve and sixteen love brings forth the abiding of God. In verse thirteen, the Spirit takes that role. In fact, in either verse, Spirit and love seem virtually interchangeable.  Paul adds an additional insight when he adds that “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5.5)

Altogether, we see that “the gift of God is the Holy Spirit. The gift of God is love. God communicates himself in the Holy Spirit as love.” The Holy Spirit is Love itself. “The basic and central meaning of what the Holy Spirit is and what he effects is ultimately not “knowledge” but love.”

What sets the Holy Spirit apart, that is, what makes the Spirit Holy, His set-apart-ness is love. This gives us a crucial window into the “wholly otherness of God.” God’s holiness, his transcendence is not abstractly manifest apophatically, but concretely in love and relationship.

Apophatic theology refers to a theological method in which God’s nature is expressed through negations. Because God is infinite and uncreated any actual description would be false. Examples include:

• Self-existence – God’s existence is un-derived
• Self-sufficiency – God’s existence is non-dependent
• Eternity understood as a-temporality (timelessness)
• Infinitude – without limits
• Simplicity – God is in-divisible
• Immutability – without change
• Immovability – without movement, unable to be moved
• Omnipresence – in-definable by any of our concepts of space and location

This passage indicates to us that God’s transcendence, specifically the holiness of the Spirit is not primarily to be found it negative descriptions of God, but in love. Love forms the foundation of a cataphatic theology, in which we can truly make affirmations about a God whose essential nature is relationship. His essential nature is not difference. Such would be impossible. Neither is the most we can say about God that which concerns difference. Such would make him utterly unknowable.

Certain theologians throughout history have only been confident about understanding God through the negations of all we know (matter, earth, time, space, even ourselves). Understanding God in the fellowship of the Spirit, the Spirit who is love (indeed the God who is love), we can be confident in affirmations about a God who has made himself known beyond the difference that exists between us.

Related posts

• The Person and History of the Holy Spirit Part 2: Trinitarian Ecstasy (0)
• Spirit and Flesh Part 2 (2)
• We’ve Been Unbabeled: When the Day of Pentecost Had Fully Come (Part 2) (1)
• The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God – IHOP Outpouring/IHOPU Awakening (2)
• The Ability to Love is Within Each of Us (1)

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.  2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus the Messiah has come in the flesh is from God;  3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the anti-messiah, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.” 1 John 4:1-3

These words from the apostle John are very strange to us. He seems to be establishing a litmus test to aid in discernment of whether or not something was of God. If evangelical Christians were in charge of writing this section of John we would probably have written that every spirit that does not confess that Jesus is divine is not from God. Something is Christian if it maintains Jesus’ status as fully God. Though true, this is not what John is emphasizing in this passage. In our zeal to defend the divinity of Jesus, which we should, at times we have lost sight of the significance of Jesus’ humanity. To John, the spirit that does not confess Jesus as fully human is not from God and is indeed the spirit of anti-messiah. This type of speech makes no sense for modern Christians who have too neatly split their constitution into a body and a soul, the soul being that which is obviously more important. I’ve spoken to many people who simply cannot identify with their bodies and insist that the “I,” “me,” or “self” is the soul living “inside” the body. Once establishing this type of strict dualism one is only a small step from denigrating the role of the body to an extreme. If the soul is the real me, if I am in essence a spirit-being, then my body is simply a shell that in actuality hinders the life of my soul. Salvation then becomes freedom from bodily, physical existence – a freedom from the earth to heaven. This type of logic is what John calls the “spirit of anti-messiah” and is commonly associated with the heresy called gnosticism. Biblical Christianity always asserts that “I” am the cojoining of body and soul. My body is not a possession of mine as if it were external to me. I do not “have” a body, I am a body.

Antichrist is a commonly misunderstood term. Modern use of the prefix “anti” means “opposed to” or “against.” However, this is not what the prefix meant in first century Koine Greek. Rather it means more along the lines of “instead of.” It implies not the idea of fierce opposition but substitution. The spirit of antichrist is not necessarily vociferously against Jesus but attempts to furnish a replacement Messiah. The Jesus without his physical body is not the Messiah. Even common language can be confusing. The term “incarnation” literally means in-fleshed. This can give the impression that Jesus is the “soul” and he went into a body.

This is not what the Bible says however. John 1:14 tells us that “the Word became flesh.” Jesus did enter a human, he became a human. He did not get a body, he became a body. A cursory reading of Colossians 2:9 could also be easily distorted: “For in Him (Jesus) all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form.” The fullness of deity does not dwell in a body, but in bodily form, in other words the fulness of deity exists as a body. Again in Philippians 2, Paul says Jesus was “made in human likeness.” Jesus became something rather than merely indwelling a body. This is also affirmed by the historic creeds of the church. The Nicene creed proclaims that “by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became human.” Note the wording carefully: Jesus himself, not simply his body was born of the Virgin Mary. He himself became human.

The spirit of antichrist is that which does not confess (or denies) that Jesus has indeed come as a full human being. As George McDonald has said, in doing so Jesus has “forever hallowed the flesh.” The Athanasian creed (ca. 5th century) confesses that by the incarnation humanity was taken up into God’s own God-hood. In other words, the human body itself has been given an indescribable dignity beyond recognition. One would think that creation in the image of God was enough to afford respect to humanity, but furthermore has God glorified us in taking our own form into the divine fellowship of the Trinity. The spirit of antichrist seeks to replace this view of Jesus and its requisite view of humanity and the human body. The spirit of antichrist sees the human body as something so full of indignity that the divine cannot possibly take it on. Full blown forms will assert Jesus’ body to be an illusion while more insipid forms will see the body as simply a shell for the soul of divinity. The Spirit of God brings a radically different message of a God who does not scorn the flesh but draws near in the fullest manner possible, being made like us in every way (Hebrews 2:17) and thus declaring that human flesh is indeed worthy of partaking of the divine.

The implications of this are tremendous, and to them I will turn in a later post…

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