Jesus the Messiah Has Come in the Flesh
“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...
Thursday, April 26, 2007
[Currently listening to : Symphony No. 6 In D Major by Antonin Dvorak,
Dopo La Vittoria, by Arvo Pärt
Legende by Georges Enesco, and
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 by J.S. Bach]
Tintoretto, The Maundy (1556)