Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard
that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have appeared; from this
we know that it is the last hour. [2:18].
When
we read New Testament passages showing that the Apostles believed themselves to
be living in the last days or in the last hour we can excuse them as being
mistaken in light of their expectancy of Christ’s return or we can believe what
they said and align our belief with theirs. If we accept the testimony of the
Apostles in every other facet of doctrine and practice what warrant do we have
to dismiss their clear teaching that the last days began in the first century?
When those who have a high view of Scripture explain away the apostolic
teaching of the inauguration of the last days we do what others do who make no
pretence of viewing Scripture as the Word of God – we bend the Bible to our
understanding rather than seek to conform our understanding and belief to the
Bible. The Word of God is not to submit to us, we are to submit to the Word of
God.
John
writes that the fact that many antichrists have arisen is a sign that it is the
last hour. As the Kingdom
of God breaks forth into
the world through the Incarnation and Resurrection and Pentecost the powers of
darkness manifest themselves in opposition to Christ, an opposition which often
takes the form of false Christs. Jesus tells us that there will be those who
claim to be Christ, the Apocalypse portrays the Beast demanding worship – the
antichrist, in whatever form he may take is opposed to Jesus Christ – in one
sense the enemy doesn’t much care what we believe as long as we abandon our
testimony of Jesus Christ; the Christ of the Cross and the Cross of Christ is
always the focal point – that is the testimony that we are to live for and to
die for.
We
are called to worship God in spirit and in truth, we are called to be a
spiritual people who are sitting in the heavens in Christ Jesus, while we may
live on the earth we are not to draw our understanding and our breath from the
earth; as 1 Corinthians Chapter 2 makes clear, the natural person cannot
receive the things of the Spirit of God for they are spiritually understood.
Spiritual understanding corresponds to Scripture, and true Scriptural understanding
is understanding enlightened by the Holy Spirit. If we do not “see” that the
Apostle John lived in the last hour then it is incumbent on us to ask our
gracious Father to enlighten the eyes of our understanding so that we will see
as He sees.
This
is a passage (1 John 2:18 – 24) that we like to gloss over, especially verse
18; for unless we gloss over verse 18 we have to stop and ask the question, “Is
this true or was John mistaken? Was it the last hour when John wrote?” If
John’s statement is true then what does that say about our preoccupation with
“End Times” excitement, about the energy and money and attention given to
popular “End Times” teaching, about investment in the “End Times” industry?
As
John’s letter makes clear, the central question for the believer and the church
is Jesus Christ: the confession of Christ, our obedience to Christ, our abiding
in Christ, our love to one another in Christ, our overcoming the world and the
enemy in Christ, our life in Christ. The question does not hinge on world
events, the question hinges on the Person of Jesus Christ; and the primary
context for John’s letter is not the world at large but the professing church
in particular – this is not typically the context of the End Times industry.
What
matters is our faithfulness to the confession of Jesus Christ; when John saw people in the professing church denying the Son he knew that it was
indeed the last hour. The fact that the “hour” is a bit longer than we might
expect does not invalidate John’s statement but rather challenges us to
understand the flow of cosmic history from a Biblical perspective – we should
live and think as sons and daughters of our eternal Father and not, as
Revelation terms it, as “earth dwellers”.
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