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1 John 2:15-27
Today's Bible reading is from 1 John, chapter 2, verses 15 to 27, and if you've got the Red Church Bible, you can find that on page 1,900.
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, comes not from the Father, but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.
Dear children, this is the last hour, and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many Antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But their going showed that none of them belonged to us.
But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it, and because no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the Antichrist, denying the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.
As for you, see that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you will also remain in the Son and in the Father. And this is what He promised us, eternal life. 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.
This is the word of the Lord.
Where Your Treasure Is
Well, there's a lot going on. Thank you for your attention to all the different things that make up this community today. I really appreciate it. We're in the second in our series in 1 John, and we're thinking about in this gift and journey of becoming wholehearted in Jesus, what competes with that, what corrupts that, and what keeps us in that trajectory, in that journey, in that joy.
Now we're heading into VCE in our house, which some of you might remember for yourself, some of you might be there with kids, but it means a lot of conversations about essays. That's particularly the thing for us at the moment, how you structure an essay, topic sentences, getting the evidence, the arguments, what you do for your intro, what you do for your conclusion.
We're only in chapter 2 of John's letter, but if we went to the end, we would be pretty sure that he needed to go back to school, because after five chapters of this kind of networked and piled up, theologically rich, pastorally warm teaching, he ends with no farewell, no kind of clear, here's my summary, no greetings. He just says, dear children, keep yourselves from idols. Kind of feels like a topic sentence that then you should go on to expand upon.
But for him, I think he couldn't leave all that he had provided for us without reiterating just the heart of what he's longing for, for his brothers and sisters in Christ. He says, this is the center.
What you've been willing to give your allegiance and energy to is the center of being a disciple. The question of whether that thing is worth it bears repeating.
And Jesus says it this way, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. And it's not where your heart is, there your treasure will be, it's the other way around. It's very practical.
What you invest in, what you give your time, your energy, your attention, your devotion to, that is what will end up owning your heart. That is what will make your heart whole, or what will fracture it.
So John says, okay, keep yourselves from idols. And so in chapter two, he says, let me tell you what will keep you from encountering Jesus in his fellowship to taste and see that the Lord is good, like we talked about last week, walking across the garden, eating the raspberry. These are the things that will keep you from that, and being kept from that will keep you from being whole in his fellowship.
So what competes for the devotion of the heart? It is the world. Do not love the world or anything in the world, he writes.
Now he's not changing his mind on when he's written Jesus' words in the gospel of John chapter three, God so loved the world. God does love people, and we're to love them too.
But what he is naming here when he says world is the rival affection system, a way of organizing your loves that systematically leaves God out. The world is human life organized without reference to God and in opposition to God.
A world where the love that humans are meant to give and receive, because God so loved the world, gets twisted because it doesn't start and end with him.
And so then John goes on to describe the shape of these twisted loves in three ways, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, and it sounds kind of medieval, and we're like, oh, that's a bit odd. The lust of the flesh means appetites of all kinds that demand satisfaction now, that won't wait and that drive you to do anything to fill them. The lust of the eyes, it's the wanting triggered by seeing what others have, comparison, covetousness, that ache of not yet having something which seems good, and the pride of life, the need to be seen as significant, status, reputation, the curated self.
If you've read Genesis or you've encountered the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, these three are familiar. When Eve stood before Adam and Eve, stood before the fruit, it says Eve saw that it was good for food, it was pleasing to the eye, and it was desirable for gaining wisdom. Appetite, covetousness, and status, significance.
Jesus in the wilderness, hungry, alone, is offered the same three things by Satan. Turn these stones into bread, satisfy your hunger now, in this way, don't wait on God.
All the kingdoms of the world, they could be yours, look at them all, here is what you could have, let your eyes see how good it could be, I can give it to you.
And throw yourself down and let the angels catch you, and boy, people are going to really notice, they'll be extremely impressed. Prove your significance, appetite, covetousness, and status.
Augustine writing in the 5th century saw this as really the organizing principle of sin and Jesus' resistance and victory over sin. Jesus' responses in the wilderness were not merely his own private victory, they were actually the answers that God had always wanted us to give when these three things come to us. When they came to us in the garden, and when they came to Jesus in the wilderness, and when they come to us today, the second Adam, Jesus, succeeded without sin, precisely where the first Adam, all of us, failed by our sin.
And it wasn't because Jesus had no appetite that he wasn't hungry, or that he couldn't see how beautiful the world's glorious cities were before him, or that he didn't know that he was indeed the Messiah or the Son of God, and that the world would be blessed by that knowledge, no. It was because he was so anchored in the love of the Father, and the purpose that he had in the Father and in the Trinity, that none of those offers could get traction. He could be without sin, but the only one without sin. The rest of us, well this trio follows us wherever we go. It surrounds us, and it traps us, and it would keep us enslaved if we didn't have a rescuer.
Antichrists Already at the Door
Now it's good to talk about sin. I have spent the last seven years trying not to talk too much about sin, it's just not my kind of, you know, I want to be invitational and inspirational, and I put the, you know, oh look at the amazing Carmen.
But actually, talking about sin is really healthy and important. Christopher Watkin is a Melburnian. He's written a book called Biblical Critical Theory.
And it sounds very scary, and it looks very scary because it's massive. It's very accessible. And he talks about how good it is to talk about sin in our world as we're trying to make sense of it and engage it.
He says that the Bible's declaration that all have sinned, that we're all with these trio, resists actually what we're seeing today, that competition, that self-serving narrative that make one group or one idea or one social structure the source of all the world's problems.
Every system, he says, locates the fault line between good and evil somewhere out there in the other political party, the other class, the other race, the other oppressor. But the Bible locates it within every single human heart, including mine.
This is not pessimism. This is the most realistic and hopeful account of human nature available.
This is why, actually, we think that democracy is a good idea because we know that there is no person, not even one, who will not be tempted by these three things when given power.
We build institutions to restrain power, to have checks and balances, to have separation of powers, not because we think people are generally fine and they're really going to do a good job and we can definitely trust them.
We build them and we support democratic governance because we know from scripture, from history, from honest self-examination that we are all sinful and that power in sinful hands tends towards its own expansion and others' diminishment.
And it also gives us, helpfully, what the philosophers call a hermeneutic of suspicion, the discipline of asking, even of our own thoughts and motives, is this really what I think it is? The lust of the flesh tells itself that it's just self-care. The lust of the eyes tells itself that it's just reasonable ambition. The pride of life tells itself it's just healthy self-esteem. John says, learn to look harder. The first step toward wholeness is the courage to name what is actually happening, sin.
Now, everything we've described really is just the air we breathe. This is the world. It doesn't require anyone to plan it or target it.
You don't get up in the morning and think, which of these three will I do today? Well, maybe you do. But if you do, let's talk about it. Bring it into the light. But it doesn't really require a lot of planning. It just is.
But secondly, John wants to talk to us about those who are intentionally, deliberately setting out to corrupt their faith. So he's mentioning now something that comes to your door with a face and a voice and an argument and a plan.
And John calls them antichrists. And they are already at the door.
Dear children, it is the last hour. And as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come.
Now, Phil told me I was not allowed to mention any names in what I thought this should be mapped onto today or at any other time. And I said, I'm not sure if I can do that, darling. But I am going to be able to do that. It's OK.
The word antichrist actually appears in the New Testament only here, in John's letters. It's not actually in the book of Revelation, where we think, ah, this is that kind of end times thing. It's not in 2 Thessalonians, where Paul is talking about the coming of the man of lawlessness and how we'll meet Jesus in the air.
And it's not in Jesus' language either, although I have to say absolutely all three of those places do warn of false teachers, false prophets, and speak of an individual who will stand against the church and against the rule of Jesus.
But that more popular cultural image of the single end time global dictator, one world government, and a quick exit for Christians before all heck breaks loose, that's more of a more modern construction. It's got some 19th century theological dispensationalism and a lot of popular novels and movies thrown in.
But Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, they wouldn't have recognized that as this picture of the Antichrist. Now, that is not to say that the New Testament doesn't seem to anticipate an intensification of evil at history's climax.
And the possibility that we are closer to the end than any of us realize deserves to be taken seriously. I don't want to be glib about the times we're living in. They shock me. Pauline and I talk about it all the time.
But what John actually says is more immediate and simpler, actually. His Antichrists are plural. And they are those who have gone out from us. They're not strangers. They're not sort of persecutors from another religion.
And they're not, in this setting, someone who has power over them in a kind of abundant way. They're former members of the community, people who had worshipped alongside John's readers, whose voices were familiar to them. And they'd left voluntarily, from what we can tell.
And they didn't then simply disappear. They kept going, sending people back into the communities to make their pitch for what it was that they had changed in their understanding of Jesus.
And so that's why, towards the end of this passage, John says, I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you, present, tense, active, ongoing people at the door with a compelling argument. Now, the three, lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, pride of life, they're pretty relatable to us. But the argument that these anti-Christ people were teaching is kind of a cluster of related errors that we're working out through a bit of detective work in the text.
We think, from some of the writings from John's mates in the next generation after the scriptures were written, that some of the followers, some of the people who'd left were followers of a guy called Serinthus. And his thing was that at the baptism of Jesus, Jesus the man got the Christ spirit. And so he did the Christ thing until he got to the cross. And the Christ bit left. And it was only Jesus, the human, who died. So the Christ never truly suffered, wasn't really involved in that cross and resurrection moment.
There were others that we call them docetists now who said that Jesus actually had no real flesh at all. He was just appearing to be like a man, kind of a spiritual being that was projecting this.
And so again, no real death on the cross, no real resurrection. And still others had an issue with Jesus, the human being, the Messiah, the actual Son of God.
And we see questions about this even today all the time. Did Jesus really think he was the Son of God?
Good guy, for sure. Really fascinating teaching, very challenging. But did he really think he was God the Son, the Son of God?
What these things had in common was that they'd taken real things about Jesus, his transcendence, his kind of spirituality, his eternal life, but they'd detached them from the really messy, painful, historical, costly doctrines which the apostles were witnessing to.
They separated Jesus from his flesh, Christ from the cross, the Son from the Father's dealings with Israel. But John says, no one who denies the Son like this has the Father.
These ones wanted God, of course. But actually it was the Son in whom that access could be found. These are the stakes. The fellowship that we were made for flows through the real Son.
Strip him of his true humanity and you lose the atonement that we talked about last week. How can all the sins of the world go on him, be taken away and paid for?
Strip him of his true divinity, God the Son, and you lose the Savior, someone who can not only bear the weight of the world's sin, but break death itself. Either move cuts the cord to the Father.
The spirit of the Antichrist is one that says, Jesus' death and resurrection is not the way in which your heart will connect with God. Follow a spiritual Jesus. Follow a spiritual Jesus.
Two Things at Your Fingertips
Follower Jesus who doesn't cost too much, who's not too messy, who's not too embarrassing, who's much easier to explain and especially who doesn't call us to confront the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life because that bodily stuff wasn't his bag anyway. But it's right here then at the moment of this kind of maximum pressure, what's corrupting, what's competing, that John brings the word what is keeping. You have an anointing from the Holy One and all of you know the truth. It's actually okay. You have two things woven together right at your fingertips, not far away, not with the spiritual elite, not with the people that are coming to tell you you've missed out. Two things, the word you received from the beginning and the Spirit who abides in you.
See that what you have heard from the beginning remains or abides in you. If it does you also will remain in the Son and in the Father and this is what he promised us, eternal life.
You might remember if you were here last week, John says this we have seen with our eyes, our hands have touched it, we were there, we've heard it. Our apostolic testimony about the real historical bodily Jesus who died and rose again is not a starting point from which you mature.
It's not something just to give to the kids, it's not the beginners version, it is the anchor, the whole thing, the thing and the whole of the thing and John's instruction is to remain in it. It's that same abiding word that he used in the vine and stuff in John's gospel.
Get in it, let it take up actual residence in you and you take actual residence in it. Do whatever you need to do to get it to move from background information to living reality. It's not content to be consumed, it is relationship itself.
But you also have the anointing. As for you, the anointing you receive from him remains in you and you do not need anyone to teach you those people knocking on the door. But as his anointing teaches you about all things just like it was promised the Holy Spirit would bring you into all truth and as that anointing is real not counterfeit, just as it is taught you remain in him. This word the anointing and don't worry we're coming to the end is the word chrism or chrisma. It's not charisma but chrisma like Christ the anointed one, chrisma. And again it's only John that uses it here in the New Testament.
But he's not only wanting us to think chrism, Christos, you know we're Jesus people, he wants us to think about the anointing that happens all throughout God's plans for the world.
In the Old Testament anointing was the right of inauguration into each of the three great offices of Israel, prophet, priest and king. Prophets were anointed, oil, to speak God's Word. Priests were anointed for consecrated service in God's presence. Kings were anointed as the central moment of their inauguration.
We could have done that to Jane today, get a bit messy, just have to decide what you're going to wear. Each anointing was a declaration, God's presence is particularly with this person, God's favor rests on them, they're set apart for a purpose.
Jesus when he comes into the temple or the synagogue and he says the spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, the day of the Lord's favor. He's claiming fulfillment of all of those three, prophet, priest and king, here am I. And Peter makes it explicit in Acts, God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, not turning him into the Christ but anointing him to show that he is the chosen one to bring salvation, to proclaim the day of the Lord's favor. And so John says, you share in this.
There's a really weird little Psalm, Psalm 133 that talks about how good it is when people live together in unity and love and it's like oil running down Aaron's head into his beard and down onto his robe and it's kind of like, that's not, I don't feel that that image has really come across into 2026 in the way that it might have been intended. But the point is Jesus is the head and we are the ones who are actually receiving his anointing as it comes down, drips down and sets us apart. We are anointed, sealed, given the Holy Spirit as a guarantee that actually we know the Son and therefore we know the Father.
The whole hearted life is not the life that gets the most, that fulfills our appetites, that chases things that are already fading away. It's not the life that has the Jesus that seems the most spiritual, it is the life that actually receives from the real Son, the anointing that brings us into that purpose and favor with the Father.
So John's question to us is simply this, in your longing for your heart to be whole, where is your treasure? What is the shape of the idol that will be there?
And when you see it, you are invited into the one who has accomplished full forgiveness. Come to him, the real Jesus. Keep yourselves from idols.
