The Spirit of the End Times False Prophet / Antichrist
The Spirit of False Prophets/Antichrist (Deceit) (1 John 4vv. 1b, 3) In the early years of Christianity, before the New Testament was completed (AD 100) and before the first creeds of the church were formulated (AD 325), there were no official, universal theological benchmarks for evaluating Christian preaching and teaching. To complicate matters, the early Christians were pneumatics; that is, they believed themselves to be filled with the Spirit of God, which provided divine backing for their messages. This is why Paul said in 1 Thessalonians 5:19–21 that Christians should, on the one hand, not despise prophecies of the Spirit, while, on the other hand, they should discern whether the spokesperson truly was inspired by the Holy Spirit. John is calling for much the same in 4:1–6: his community needed to discern whether a speaker was inspired by the Holy Spirit. For John, however, there was indeed at least one theological benchmark: if the person confessed that Chris...