1 John II. 18—23.
Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us; but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us. But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth. Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: but he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also.
How could St. John say that his time was the last time? Has not the world lasted nearly one thousand eight hundred years since he left it? May it not last yet many years more?
You will be told by many that not only St. John, but St. Paul and all the Apostles laboured under the delusion that the end of all things was approaching in their day. People say so who are not in general disposed to undervalue their authority; some adopt the opinion practically, though they may not express it in words, who hold that the writers of the Bible were never permitted to make a mistake even in the most trifling point. I do not say that; it would not shake my faith in them, to find that they had erred in names or points of Chronology. But if I supposed they had been misled themselves, and had misled their disciples on so capital a subject as this of Christ’s coming to judgment, and of the latter days, I should be greatly perplexed. For it is a subject to which they are continually referring. It is a part of their deepest faith. It mingles with all their practical exhortations. If they were wrong here, I cannot myself see where they can have been right.
I have found their language on this subject of the greatest possible use to me in explaining the method of the Bible; the course of God’s government over nations, and over individuals; the life of the world before the time of the Apostles, during their time and in all the centuries since. If we will do them the justice which we owe to every writer inspired or uninspired,—if we will allow them to interpret themselves, instead of forcing our interpretation upon them,—we shall, I think, understand a little more of their work and of ours. If we take their words simply and literally respecting the judgment and the end which they were expecting in their day, we shall know what position they were occupying with respect to their forefathers and to us. And in place of a very vague, powerless, artificial conception of the judgment which we are to look for, we shall learn what our needs are by theirs; how God will fulfil all His words to us by the way in which He fulfilled His words to them.
It is not a new notion, but a very old and common one, that the history of the world is divided into certain great periods. In our days, the conviction that there is a broad distinction between ancient and modern history has been forcing itself more and more upon thoughtful men. M. Guizot dwells especially upon the unity and universality of modern history, as contrasted with the division of ancient history into a set of nations which had scarcely any common sympathies. The question is, where to find the boundary between these two periods. About these, students have made many guesses; most of them have been plausible and suggestive of truths; some very confusing; none, I think, satisfactory. One of the most popular, that which supposes modern history to begin when the barbarous tribes settled themselves in Europe, would be quite fatal to M. Guizot’s doctrine. For that settlement, though it was a most important and indispensable event to modern civilization, was the temporary breaking up of a unity which had existed before. It was like the re-appearance of that separation of tribes and races, which he supposes to have been the especial characteristic of the former world.
Now, may we expect any light upon this subject in the Bible? I do not think it would fulfil its pretensions if we might not. It professes to set forth the ways of God to nations and to mankind. We might be well content that it should tell us very little about physical laws; we might be content that it should be silent about the courses of the planets and the law of gravitation. God may have other ways of making these secrets known to His creatures. But that which concerns the moral order of the world and the spiritual progress of human beings, falls directly within the province of the Bible. No one could be satisfied with it if it was dumb respecting these. And, accordingly, all who suppose it is dumb here, however much importance they may attach to what they call its religious character, however much they may suppose their highest interests to depend upon a belief in its oracles, are obliged to treat it as a very disjointed fragmentary volume. They afford the best excuse for those who say, that it is not a whole book as we have thought it, but a collection of the sayings and opinions of certain authors, in different ages, often not very consistent with each other. On the other hand, there has been the strongest conviction in the minds of ordinary readers as well as of students, that the book does tell us how the ages past and the ages to come are concerned in the unveiling of God’s mysteries, what part one country and another has played in His great drama, to what point all the lines of His providence are converging. The immense interest which has been taken in Prophecy, an interest not destroyed or even weakened by the numerous disappointments which men’s theories about it have had to encounter, is a proof how deep and widely spread this conviction is. Divines endeavour in vain to recall simple and earnest readers from the study of the Prophecies, by urging that they have not leisure for such a pursuit, and that they ought to busy themselves with what is more practical. If their consciences tell them that there is some ground for the warning, they yet feel as if they could not heed it altogether. They are sure that they have an interest in the destinies of their race as well as in their own individual destiny. They cannot separate the one from the other; they must believe that there is light somewhere about both. I dare not discourage such an assurance. If we hold it strongly, it may be a great instrument of raising us out of our selfishness. I am only afraid lest we should lose it, as we certainly shall, if we contract the habit of regarding the Bible as a book of puzzles and conundrums, and of looking restlessly for certain outward events, to happen at certain dates that we have fixed upon as those which Prophets and Apostles have set down. The cure for such follies, which are very serious indeed, lies not in the neglect of Prophecy, but in more earnest meditation upon it; remembering that Prophecy is not a set of loose predictions like the sayings of the fortune-teller, but an unfolding of Him Whose goings forth are from everlasting; Who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; Whose acts in one generation are determined by the same laws as His acts in another.
If I should ever speak to you of the Apocalypse of St. John, I shall have to enter much more at large on this subject. But so much I have said to introduce the remark, that the Bible treats the downfal of the Jewish polity as the winding-up of a great period in human history, and as the commencement of another great period. John the Baptist announces the presence of one ‘Whose fan is in His hand, and He will throughly purge His floor and gather His wheat into the garner, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’ The Evangelists say, that by these words He denoted that Jesus of Nazareth, who afterwards went down into the water of Jordan, and as He came out of it, was declared to be the Son of God, and on Whom the Spirit descended in a bodily shape.
We are wont to separate Jesus the Saviour, from Jesus the King and the Judge. They do not. They tell us from the first, that He came preaching a Kingdom of Heaven. They tell us of His doing acts of judgment as well as acts of deliverance. They report the tremendous words which He spoke to Pharisees and Scribes, as well as the Gospel which He preached to publicans and sinners. And before the end of His Ministry, when His disciples were asking Him about the buildings of the Temple, He spoke plainly of a judgment which He the Son of Man should execute before that generation was over. And to make it clear that He meant us to understand Him strictly and literally, He added,—‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ This discourse, which is carefully reported to us by St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke, does not stand aloof from the rest of His discourses and parables, nor from the rest of His deeds. They all contain the same warning. ’They are gracious and merciful—far more gracious and merciful than we have ever supposed them to be—-they are witnesses of a gracious and merciful Being; but they are witnesses, that those who did not like that Being, just because this was His character—who sought for another being like themselves that is, for an ungracious and unmerciful being—would have their houses left to them desolate.
When, therefore, the Apostles went forth after our Lord’s Ascension, to preach His Gospel and baptize in His name, their first duty was to announce that that Jesus whom the rulers of Jerusalem had crucified, was both Lord and Christ; their second was to preach remission of sins and the gift of the Spirit in His name; their third was, to foretel the coming of a great and terrible day of the Lord, and to say to all who heard, ’ Save yourselves from this untoward generation.’ It was the language which St. Peter used on the day of Pentecost; it was adopted with such variations as befitted the circumstances of the hearers by all who were entrusted with the Gospel message. It was, no doubt, peculiarly applicable to the Jews. They had been made the stewards of God’s gifts to the world. They had wasted their master’s goods, and were to be no longer stewards. But we do not find the Apostles confining this language to the Jews. St. Paul speaking at Athens—speaking in words specially appropriate to a cultivated, philosophical, heathen city—declares that God has ’ appointed a day in the which He will judge the world by that man whom He hath ordained;’ and points to the Resurrection from the dead as determining who that man is. Why was this? Because the Apostles believed that the rejection of the Jewish people was the manifestation of the Son of Man; a witness to all nations who their King was—a call to all nations to cast away their idols and confess Him. ‘The Gospel was to explain the meaning of the great crisis which was about to occur; to tell the Gentiles as well as the Jews what it would imply; to announce it as nothing less than the commencement of a new era in the world’s history when the crucified man would claim a universal empire, and would contend with the Roman Cesar, as well as with all other tyrants of the earth who should set up their claims against His.’
This Scriptural view of the ordering of times and seasons entirely harmonizes with that conclusion at which M. Guizot has arrived by an observation of facts. Our Lord’s birth nearly coincided with the establishment of the Roman empire, in the person of Augustus Cesar. That empire aspired to crush the nations, and to establish a great world supremacy. The Jewish nation had been the witness against all such experiments in the old world. It had fallen under the Babylonian tyranny; but it had risen again. And the time which followed its captivity was the great time of the awakening of national life in Europe—the time in which the Greek republics flourished, the time in which the Roman republic commenced its grand career.
The Jewish nation had been overcome by the armies of the Roman republic; still it retained the ancient signs of its nationality; its law, its priesthood, its temple. These looked ridiculous and insignificant to the Roman emperors, even to the Roman governors who ruled the little province of Judea, or the larger province of Syria, in which it was often reckoned. But they found the Jews very troublesome. Their nationality was of a very peculiar kind, and of unusual strength. When they were most degraded, they could not part with it. They would stir up endless rebellions, in the hope of recovering what they had lost, and of establishing the universal kingdom which they believed was intended for them, and not for Rome. The preaching of our Lord declared to them that there was such an universal kingdom, that ‘He, the Son of David, had come to set it up on the earth.’ The Jews dreamed of another kind of kingdom, with another kind of King. They wanted a Jewish kingdom which should trample upon the nations, just as the Roman empire was trampling upon them: they wanted a Jewish king, who should be, in all essentials, like the Roman Cesar. It was a dark, horrible, hateful conception; it combined all that is narrowest in the most degraded exclusive form of nationality, with all that is cruelest, most destructive of moral and personal life in the worst form of imperialism. It gathered up into itself all that was worst in the history of the past. It was a shadowing forth of what should be worst in the coming time. The Apostles announced that this accursed ambition of the Jews would be utterly disappointed. They foretold that the ambition of the Romans would also be disappointed. They said that a new age was at hand—the universal age—the age of the Son of Man—which would be preceded by a great crisis that would shake not earth only, but also heaven; not that only which belonged to time, and the condition of man as related to time, but also all that belonged to the spiritual world, and to man’s relations with it. They said that this shaking would be that it might be seen what there was which could not be shaken, which must abide.
I have tried thus to show you what St. John meant by the last time if he spoke the same language as our Lord spoke, and as the other Apostles spoke. I cannot tell what physical changes he or they may have looked for. Physical phenomena were noticed at that time; famines, plagues, earthquakes. Whether they or any of them supposed that these indicated more alterations in the surface or the substance of the earth than they did indicate, I cannot tell; these are not the points upon which I look for information from them; I should probably not understand their information if they gave it. ’That they did not anticipate the passing away of the earth—what we call the destruction of the earth—is clear from this that the new kingdom they spoke of was to be a kingdom on earth as well as a kingdom of Heaven. But their belief that such a kingdom had been set up, and would make its power felt as soon as the old nation was scattered, has, I think, been abundantly verified by fact. I do not see how we can understand modern history properly till we accept that belief.
Hence you will understand what St. John says in the next verse, ‘You have heard that antichrist shall come.’ We are told by St. Luke, that when Jesus went into the synagogue of Nazareth, where He had been brought up, shortly after the commencement of His public ministry, He opened the book of the prophet Isaiah, and read these words, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor; He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised; to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.’ He added, ‘This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.’
Now all in that Synagogue, and throughout Galilee, had heard that a Christ was to come. By the word Christ, they meant one who would be anointed by God—one who would be marked out by God as a king. Here Jesus declares what kind of anointing this king would receive, and how all might know that he had received it. He would not require some visible oil or unguent poured upon his head, but he would require a Spirit, the very Spirit of God Himself, to enable him to do the works of God.
What these works of God are, the same passage declares. One who healed the broken-hearted, preached deliverance to the captives, opened the eyes of the blind, would be proved to have the true anointing, the true Spirit. One who wanted these characteristics, whatever others he might possess, would be proved not to have the true anointing, not to be endued with the Divine Spirit. On this ground Jesus rested His own claim. On this ground the Jews rested their denial of Him. They did not want such a Christ as this. This was not the anointing they had dreamed of. When the Apostles went forth, declaring ‘Jesus is the Christ,’ to the Jews, they testified that this was the kind of Christ their prophets had spoken of. When they delivered the same message to the Gentiles, they testified, ‘This is the kind of King, the kind of Christ you are wanting; this is the true Desire of Nations.’ Those who gave heed to them, whether Jews or Gentiles, confessed, ‘We have been looking for such a Person, He fulfils our cravings. Such an One we believe to be the Head of human beings.’ ’In His name, therefore, they fraternized; in His name they became a Church.
Our Lord had clearly intimated in His last discourse to the disciples, that before the end came, false Christs should arise, and should deceive many. Such an announcement could not surprise His disciples, if they seriously reflected upon it. Unless the Jews had a false idea of a Christ, an idea of some being wholly unlike Jesus the Crucified, what did their treatment of Him mean? Unless the Gentiles had the idea of a Christ wholly unlike Jesus the Crucified, why did they look up to any tyrant, to any sophist, with more reverence than to Him? No doubt their notions were in many respects different; ‘The Jews,’ said St. Paul, ‘require a sign, the Greeks seek after wisdom.’ One set before themselves the image of a great ruler who should do strange signs to establish his dominion, and make men tremble. The other set before themselves the image of some being of profound sagacity, who should make them fear him for his wit and wisdom, who should rule over their souls, as well as their bodies. Might not these two different conceptions, some time or other, come into one? Might not some emperor support his pretensions by alleging that he had spiritual powers to work out his ends; or might not some priest claim to have temporal as well as spiritual power combined in him? Might there not be some one person to whom men would pay homage as their king or Christ, who should be in all respects the opposite of Jesus; who should not heal the broken-hearted, who should not be a deliverer, who should not proclaim a jubilee to the captives, who should bind the world with new and more terrible fetters?
Such an one the Apostles looked for, before the end of the age. ‘Ye have heard,’ says St. John, ‘that antichrist shall come.’ He is far from contradicting the opinion; no one, perhaps, was so fully possessed with it. But he says, ‘even now are there many antichrists, whereby we know that it is the last time.’ There might be some one person hereafter, in whom all the features should be combined, which did not belong to Jesus—all that were most exactly the reverse of His; but in the meantime there were many who were exhibiting some of these features, who were showing themselves to be possessed by the spirit which was not in Him, by such unclean, lawless spirits as He came to cast out.
‘These antichrists,’ St. John says, ‘have gone out from us, because they were not of us.’ We can understand very well what he means, by the facts of Church History. The belief of spiritual powers was strong in that age. The Gospel strengthened and deepened it, but it existed before the Gospel. The Gospel declared what manner of spirit it was that men were to receive. It said that Christ would baptize them with the Holy Spirit; this was their distinguishing peculiarity : not the exercise of power; not the possession of an inspiration ; but the exercise of powers for a holy end,—the receiving of an inspiration from a Holy Being. But many of those who had joined the Church exulted in the gifts for their own sake, in the inspiration for its owy sake. ‘These became enchanters and impostors of the worst kind. The spirit of which they boasted, instead of uniting them to their brethren, was merely a ground for self-exaltation. What they were, signified nothing. ‘he wonders - they could do was all they thought of, or wished others to think of. Such persons often described themselves as Christs. They used the very name. But whether they did or did not, they were assuming the powers of Christ, for the ends which were the contraries of His ends. They were therefore antichrists. Their chrism or anointing was to set them in high places ; His, made Him the servant of all. Theirs, was to make men wonder at them, and be their tools; His, was to make them free, and to give them life. Such persons, therefore, St. John pronounces, were not of them ; they did not choose to belong to a brotherhood ; what they cared was to assert their independence of others, their superiority to their fellows. It was far better, he intimates, that such men should not continue in the Church, to be its disturbers and tormentors; that they should go out from it, and become its enemies. It was far better that they should not belie the name of Jesus, by acts that were directly the reverse of His; but should at once avow that they renounced Him.
But, continues the Apostle, in words which have surprised many: ‘Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things.’ You will see at once upon what word the emphasis in this sentence rests—they had an unction, of anointing from the Holy One. God had given them His Holy Spirit. If they believed they had that Spirit, if they submitted to His teaching, these antichrists would not and could not deceive them. A divine instinct would tell them, ‘This is not the kind of being we need; this is not the person to whom we owe allegiance; this is not God’s anointed One.’ They could trust to this instinct much better than to any cleverness of theirs in finding out, by collating passages of Scripture, whether such a pretender was or was not the Christ. They might be deceived in their interpretation of a book; their intellects might fail to discern the force of sentences; but if they were simple and childlike, if they yielded to the guidance of that Spirit who was to make them simple and childlike, they would not be deceived about a man, they would know whether he was true or a liar.
I do not wonder that many should think such confidence very much misplaced, seeing that the persons to whom St. John wrote must have been, many of them, ignorant people, or in his own language, little children. But that fact, I suspect, gave good warrant for his confidence. The most experienced people will tell you that they had rather trust the judgment of an innocent woman, even of a child, about character, than their own. The surest divination of a rogue and of an honest man lies in those who are guileless, and who do not boast of their own sagacity. St. John tells us the reason: ‘They have an unction from the Holy One.’ A better wisdom is guiding them; they lean upon that wisdom, not finding they can rely upon their own. They know all things, even what seems the most inscrutable, unfathomable thing of all—a human soul.
He adds, therefore, ‘I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth.’ There is the modesty and the sound philosophy of an Apostle! Many of us think that we can put the truth into people, by screaming it into their ears. We do not suppose they have any truth in them to which we can make an appeal. St. John had no notion that he could be of the least use to his own dear children of Ephesus unless there was a truth in them, a capacity of distinguishing truth from lies, a sense that one must be the eternal opposite of the other. He can write to them about those antichrists, because they have a chrism, because there is in them a power of listening to his words and of understanding them. The presence of that power does not make the words unnecessary, any more than the fitness of the ground for receiving the rain makes the rain unnecessary. An Apostle can help them to reject those men who would blind them and lead them captive, because they have in them an anointing which shows them that only He Who brings light and freedom is the anointed of the Father.
These Ephesians had learnt ‘that no lie is of the truth.’ ‘Common-place learning enough!’ some will say. ‘Most people know as much as that.’ Do they, indeed? Alas! half the doctors in Christendom have not known it. They have thought that some lies are of the truth, that some lies may serve the truth. Their cleverness has led them to think so. Their notion that the truth was left to them to take care of and keep from harm, and to defend against impugners, has led them to think so. ‘Just a little fraud, a pious fraud, will help us here. The people cannot take in truth; spice it with falsehood, and it will ’go down.’ These have been the sage conclusions of divines and men of God. And so Christ has been mixed with antichrist; so the way has been prepared for antichrist to come in and claim the whole ground which Christ once occupied. It is for the latter days of an age that such a catastrophe as that is reserved. There is a mingling of the false and the true, of the foul and the fair, till then. At length the false appears in its falsehood; the foul asks homage because it is foul. And then they who will not bow down to it, perceive that no lie is of the truth; that they must purge their hearts of every base mixture. And since they cannot depend upon their own truthfulness, they ask the Spirit of Truth to guide them into all truth.
Now he comes directly to the point: ‘Who is a liar but he that denieth that JESUS is the CHRIST?’ He appeals to them as men seeking truth and loving truth, and endowed with a capacity for discerning truth. He says, ‘These men that I am speaking of, these men that have gone out from us, affirm very loudly that Jesus, the humble man, He Who went about doing good, He Who was crucified, is not at all the Christ for human beings. They will only honour one who is not a humble man, one who does not go about doing good, one who has not been crucified. They especially scorn that last characteristic. They say that that defeats all the pretensions of Jesus to be a king. He could not have submitted to death if He had been King.’ Ephesians have heard these words uttered; you have known the people who spoke them. Yes, and the words had an attraction for you. The men did look like men who had high spiritual pretensions. But what was it in you that their words attracted? What was it in you that was inclined to receive these men? Do you not know that it was the lying temper in you which went along with their boasting? Do you not know that so far as you yielded to them, you were yielding to a lying temper? And were you not prevented from doing this altogether by a Spirit of Truth which forbade you to obey the false inclination within you? Here then is a clear witness in yourselves, that to say ‘Jesus is not the Christ, to set up another Christ who is unlike Him, is to be a liar.’
I have hinted already that the grand distinction between Jesus and these antichrists was, that He said He came from a Father, and received His anointing from a Father; and that they came in their own names, boasting of themselves as great ones. This is the contrast which St. John pursues in the following verses: ‘He is antichrist that denieth the Father and the Son.’ In his Gospel St. John illustrates this point at great length. All our Lord’s discourses with the Jews at Jerusalem which he records, have reference to His Father and His relation to the Father. All their misunderstandings of Him, their rage against Him, their condemnation of Him as a blasphemer, have reference to His language on this point. Ultimately He was put to death as a rebel against Cæsar; as a rival king. But the dislike of the Jews to Him, that which prompted them to deliver Him to the Gentiles, was gathered up in the complaint, ‘He calleth God His Father, making Himself equal with God.’ Was He proud; or were they? Was this the height of exaltation, or the depth of self-humiliation? Was it, as the Jews said, that He made Himself equal with God, or, as He said Himself, that He could do nothing without His Father, that what He saw His Father do, He did likewise; that He came down from the Father to become in all things like the meanest of men? All the difference between Christian ethics and antichristian ethics; between the ethics which treats it as the highest glory of God that He can stoop to us, and the ethics which makes it our highest glory that we can lift ourselves to be as Gods,—is latent in this question.
I will not press it further upon you now. It will come before us again in connexion with the beautiful verse which opens the next chapter. But I cannot conclude without saying that I am not so far as I may seem from those who speak of this day as one of the latter days. I cannot tell how close we may be to the end of our age, to our judgment. If we are very close to it, the hints which St. John gives us respecting the end of his age, respecting the judgment which was approaching then, will be all the more precious, and should be all the more earnestly pondered. God gives us what we need for our necessities. We may require to be warned of antichrists, and to be told what they will be like, as much as the Ephesians. Certainly we want to know the characteristics of the true Christ as much as they did; certainly we cannot know them unless that same anointing Spirit who abode with them, who is truth and no lie, has been assured to us and to our children for ever.