How to Test the Spirits

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; (1 John 4:2)

Sadly it has taken altogether too many years for me to just begin to appreciate the real meaning of this verse. Because of the dark misunderstandings that I grew up with about what God is like, whenever I came across things like this they seemed completely incongruent with everything else I thought about in religion and so my frame of reference prevented me from having any clue as to what John was trying to convey here. In fact, I still have to argue with residual assumptions inside my head too often as the light slowly increases inside of me.

Because so many have abused this text by trying to make it support their pet theories about the nature of Christ or other simplistic formulas of religion, it has taken a great deal of time for God to give me enough background information and understanding to begin to see the real import of this passage. What we believe about God and especially our beliefs about why Jesus died on the cross directly affect how we come to view other messages, especially about love. As long as we entertain confused ideas about a God needing appeasement or legal satisfaction, it will be impossible for us to reconcile the truths that John in particular is seeking to get across to us about the real nature of God. But when we begin to embrace the light as it is revealed in Jesus, that light will quickly begin to illuminate the inconsistencies that have long been hiding in the darkness and we will discard much of what we have learned in exchange for the life-giving glory of the truth.

Whenever I come across a phrase like this, By this you know..., I begin looking around at the immediate context to see if there may be a definitive description readily available to update my understanding about some religious term or concept. In this case John is directly addressing the key issue raised in the previous verse of our need to be able to test every spirit. Not every spirit is reflective of the truth about God but very many spirits claim to speak for Him and many with very subtle inferences. I have started to perceive that the religious spirits that a large majority of professed Christians believe are in fact counterfeits of the true Spirit of God. As John points out here, we must be very careful not to believe just any spirit.

But according to John, there is a key here that can unlock how to test spirits to see if they are trustworthy, accurate and particularly if they correctly represent the truth about God. John says that they will confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.

Now, I have puzzled over this most of my life trying to figure out why this is important or what it has to do with salvation. After all, it takes very little faith at all to believe that Jesus was a human being that had real flesh and bones and substance like the rest of us. Even unbelievers, atheists and almost anyone you talk to would likely not take much issue with this simple assertion. So how in the world can confessing that Jesus was a flesh and blood human being make any difference in our life? And even more confusing is how that fact might be used to separate and distinguish between true and deceptive spirits. There must be something missing here that needs to be brought into clarity for this thought to give us power to test the validity of spirits.

Some people will turn to a verse previous to this (3:24) that talks about keeping the commandants. They assert that if someone does not keep all Ten Commandants and teaches others to ignore them then they cannot be trusted at all. I will not argue that anyone reflective of the true spirit of God will not be found trying to undermine the principles of the Ten Commandants, but again, that is too simplistic and even leads toward a legalistic mindset that itself can be a spirit that can deceive us into thinking we are right with God while missing the point completely. Did not the religious leaders of Jesus' day specialize in keeping all the commandants perfectly? Yet they received more rebukes from Jesus than anyone else and they even ended up putting Jesus to death due to their hostility toward His claim to represent the very God of those commandants.

If we back up yet another verse it becomes clear that the commandants have more to do with love than trying to keep up a rigid performance of religion. Jesus also made it abundantly clear that the commandants are all about loving God and everyone around us. John in particular keeps bringing the issue back to love as being the core issue at stake, not external performance. And he also tries to get us to realize that true religion has much more to do with the heart and the condition of our spirit rather than a measurement of our apparent piety or how good we can keep up good appearances. So simply claiming that we can test a spirit by checking them against the Ten Commandants may fall far short of giving us an effective key by which we can test every spirit.

This verse under consideration is actually a twin with the next verse that gives the flip side of it.

...and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world. (v. 3)

Now given the religious assumptions that many have about Jesus and God, this next verse still is not very helpful in understanding how to effectively test spirits unless one has a better understanding of why it was important for Jesus to come to this earth in the first place. Too many Christians think that religion and salvation are simply matters of profession – that if we just say the right words and do the right acts that we are good to go to heaven. Or many believe that the core issue is our legal standing with God and all we need is to secure a pardon for our breaking of the rules. But these spirits too must be tested to see if they are actually from God or are deceiving spirits.

Do we really think that all God wants for us is to say some words that sound religious enough to pass some litmus test in heaven so He will then take us there? What about the ways we treat each other, our disposition, our attitudes towards God, the condition of our characters? Do we suppose that God will impose some artificial change on our characters when we arrive in heaven so that we suddenly become someone we have never been before? Many in fact do believe in this theory. But such thinking denies the core principle of freedom of choice that is so vital for true love to even exist.

I have long cognitively accepted the facts that Jesus was a human and had flesh; that Jesus came from heaven and was also God and I have been willing to 'confess' those things whenever asked about them. But at the same time I also realized that doing so didn't really have any transforming effect on my own life or give me any clue as to how to discern between the spirit of others who might be out to deceive me in some way. Even John's mention of the spirit of antichrist was not very helpful to fill me in as to how to test every spirit as there are many wild and crazy ideas circulating about what the term antichrist even means or what that involves. There has to be something very significant missing here that will pull of of these facets together to make perfect sense.

As I peruse over the verses before and after this text I see a heavy saturation of references to love and about abiding in God. Those are a vital component in deciphering the meaning of these verses. But something that jumped out at me as being very relevant to my pursuit of understanding how to test every spirit shows up a little ways back in the previous chapter.

Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous; the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. (1 John 3:7-8)

The reason it is so important to test every spirit is to determine whether they are in harmony with the real truth about God or whether they are intent on conveying or reinforcing false ideas about God – in other words, deceiving us. In these last verses John again is talking about how to determine what is truthful and what is not. And it revolves having a correct understanding of what is righteous and what is sin. It also clearly points out that God is righteous and sin is of the devil.

Now that may sound too simplistic at first, but given the background of what God has been revealing over recent years about Himself, this takes on significantly more meaning for me now. As I have come to unpack better definitions of many words that have long been obscured through mistaken use and religious assumptions, coming to verses like this with a new understanding of what righteous means and what sin means opens up a whole different dimension here. In fact, this is very close to another place in this little potent book where John explicitly gives a definition of the core message that Jesus came to reveal and for us to pass on to others.

This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)

All of these clues factor into understanding how to test every spirit.

• Any spirit that promotes any dark views of God in any way is going to be a counterfeit spirit that should be turned away from immediately.
• Any spirit that is not rooted in and filled with love and promotes the practice of abiding in Christ will be a false spirit, a spirit that is against Christ and is an antichrist.
• Any spirit that in any way participants in the works of the devil is going to be a spirit that should be avoided at all costs.

But knowing what the works of the devil are is important to determining the nature of a spirit that is in harmony with the devil and his principles.

Here are a few direct statements about what the devil is up to:

"You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. (John 8:44)

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. (John 10:10)

And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (Revelation 12:9)

It starts to become clear that when Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil that He came to expose the lies of the devil for what they really are; He came to defeat death and bring life and He came to stop the devil from stealing, killing and destroying. But how we perceive the way in which Jesus accomplishes this makes all the difference in how we go about testing every spirit.

I am not going to spend time reciting the false teachings so prevalent about the reason Jesus died on the cross. Rather I want to get straight to the point that is only recently becoming more clear to me about the real truth of the cross. This truth is so potent that I am beginning to appreciate more fully why the early church had such compelling attraction and power to draw thousands to want to know God more for themselves. The true Spirit of God was so present in that group of believers that the message about God was irresistible except by those who clung firmly to their own agenda and preconceptions. All who were honest of heart and seeking for the real truth and were willing to let go of their misconceptions about God amd were drawn to join with the rapidly growing movement. And not any amount of vicious persecution could slow down the progress of the gospel spreading over the whole world.

So, what does Jesus coming in the flesh have to do with any of this? Here is what has come to my attention recently that helps make far more sense than the confusing explanations I have heard much of my life.

When I step back to view the great cosmic conflict from the larger perspective, it begins to make much more sense how all of this fits together. Ever since sin entered our world and blinded us to the love of God and the truth about how good He is, how fair He is, how just and truthful and compassionate He really is, we have harbored a deep resentment against Him, because in our hearts we have blamed Him for all the pain, suffering and tragedies that plague all of our lives. Part of the diabolical effects of Satan's lies has been to feel that God is ultimately the cause of all this mess because, we assume, He could have prevented it long before it ever reached this planet. And He could still intervene to prevent tragedies and horrific crimes from taking place if He would just assert His authority and use His superior power to intervene and forcefully stop these things from transpiring even now.

In our hearts we naturally tend to sympathize with those screaming out at God after some terrible tragedy asking why He seems so impotent to stop all the evil in this world. Others cling to a hope of a final day of reckoning and vengeance (read revenge) when the scores will finally all be settled and all the perpetrators of evil will get their 'just dues'. Of course that logic runs into problems when we also promote a belief in forgiveness, so we insert Jesus' horrific death on the cross as a substitute for the punishment we believe sinners deserve for breaking the rules set down by heaven.

In all of these assumptions the truth about unconditional love, God, justice and pretty much every other term becomes distorted and confused. But even so, our own hearts sometimes secretly wish that, like Job when he suffered so much and could not make sense out of it all, we wish that we could just be able to drag God into a court of real justice so we could expose Him to the reality of how bad things really are down here that He seems to be overlooking. And sometimes we hurt so badly that many wish they could just get their hands on God so they could make Him aware of the suffering that they feel He is allowing (a way of expressing our desires to settle the score or inflict revenge).

One of the deepest cravings that most of us experience is the desire to have something we call balance. Even our symbols for justice include a mythical set of scales that infers a need for balance between good and bad, righteousness and wickedness. But if we think about this it can be a bit confusing as to why we assume that adding enough righteousness will somehow offset an 'equal' amount of wickedness and thus satisfaction can be achieved. Yet this thinking has been inherent in the human psyche ever since our first parents imbibed of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The principles inherent in that tree are still very much the basis by which we interpret reality to this very day. It is the principle of balance between good and evil, ying and yang, whatever terms you might want to employ.

Now here is the true power of the cross. It is not a revelation of an offended God executing His rage against sinners against His own Son as a substitute to satisfy some distorted notion of justice. Quite the opposite, the cross is a stark revelation of the real truth about a God who is so humble, so gracious, so perfectly agape love that He was willing to become a human with vulnerable flesh and bones that could feel and hurt and know pain for the purpose of giving humans opportunity to vent all the rage pent up inside us against a God whom we could not previously get our hands on because He was out of reach.

As sinners we have intuitively felt that if we could just have the opportunity to inflict enough pain on God that somehow that we could sooner or later get Him to react in some way similar to how we react when we hurt. We have felt that God has somehow been unfair in judging us for indulging in violence and revenge while not really understanding why we do these things. So to answer that very issue, Jesus allowed demoniacally inspired humans to torture Him as much as they could in a feverish attempt to intimidate or compel Him to react in some way like we would react under such treatment. We were certain that given enough pain that sooner or later God would begin to understand our situation better and would finally take offense, resort to retaliation or do something that would then justify our own reactions when we indulge in those same emotions.

Yet to the amazement of the whole universe, God in the flesh could not be swerved from the totally selfless love and unconditional forgiveness that make up His character. Jesus explicitly demonstrated this at the cross under the most extreme circumstances. Beyond all the physical torture, demons added a another layer of intense mental and emotional torture that the world could not witness that went on for hours inside of Jesus. This inner torture from an assault of accusations, lies about God and diabolical insinuations that have perpetuated the whole system of sin since its inception, brought so much torture to the mind of Christ that the physical pain was hardly noticed. Yet through all of this Jesus demonstrated as never before seen in history, the true character of God who is pure love, pure compassion, pure forgiveness. And He did it in a way that could not be displayed any more clearly.

When this view of the real purpose of the cross is taken as our basis for understanding it, these messages from John take on a whole new dimension. Now it can be readily seen that any spirit that denies that God is like what Jesus demonstrated cannot be a spirit that comes from God but is against the truth about God (antichrist). False prophets – people claiming to represent God but not in harmony with the truth about His pure agape love – will promote all sorts of ideas about God that are not in harmony with the real truth about Him as revealed by Jesus. And only those who are willing to lay aside all their preconceptions and distorted views of God in favor of embracing the clear picture of God as only revealed in the life and death of Jesus who is the perfect revelation of God, will begin to grasp the true message of the cross and will begin reflect the same spirit as that revealed by Jesus.

One last note about the nature of how to discern and test every spirit. Any spirit of a person claiming to speak the truth about God that uses fear as a motivation to compel people to accept their message is immediately suspect at best. For John makes it very clear that fear and God are not in any way compatible.

We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment (the day when everything hidden will be exposed); because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us. (1 John 4:16-19)