There’s a scene from the 1988 movie Shoot To Kill that still makes my blood run cold. Maybe you remember the movie, it starred Sidney Poitier and Tom Berringer, and it was about their search for a jewel thief who murdered his victims. During one scene in the movie there’s a group of backpackers hiking in the wilderness on a flyfishing trip. You and I as viewers know that one of the fishermen is the killer, but we don’t know which one, so we wait in suspense. The particular scene I’m talking about is where the group is hiking along a narrow trail on the edge of a steep ravine that’s a 100 yard fall into the river below. As the backpackers carefully choose their steps along the narrow trail—-the viewer wondering which of the hikers is the bad guy—-suddenly one of the hikers starts pushing the others over the cliff. The look of betrayal in the eyes of one of the backbackers as he stares in disbelief at the bad guy makes my blood run cold every time I see the move.
There’s something about betrayal that enrages us. After all you never hear of a new baby being named Judas Iscariot or Benedict Arnold. Unfortunately betrayal isn’t just something we see in the movies. There’s a kind of betrayal that we experience in the spiritual journey.
Let me tell you about a guy who used to be a member of this church back in the late 1970s named "Joe". He was a gifted musician and speaker, and he was highly involved in ministry here during our early years. "Joe" wrote music, he led our church in worship, and he and his family were part of our church family. His musical gifts didn’t go unnoticed, and eventually a Christian music producer contracted him to compose a children’s musical. But "Joe" never finished that musical, because while he sat where you sat, led us in worship, traveled to other churches speaking and preaching, inward doubts were building. Finally "Joe" concluded that God was not real at all, in his own words, "I discovered that there is no basis for believing that a God exists." By 1983 "Joe" had to admit to himself and to his friends that he was an atheist. He joined the atheist movement, he wrote a letter to the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin explaining why he was no longer a Christian, he went onto the Phil Donahue show to encourage others to leave the Christian faith, and eventually he wrote a book.
Now think about "Joe’s" story. He sat where you sit, he sang what you sing, he read what you read in the Bible, he heard what you hear. He looked and acted, sang and spoke like a devoted followers of Jesus Christ, yet one day he threw it all away, rejected every last part…Betrayed.
In preparation for today’s sermon I wrote "Joe" a letter, just to introduce myself as the pastor of the church he was once a member of and to mention the irony of me being a former atheist who became a Christian, and him being raised in a Christian home only to give his life to atheism. Here’s what he wrote me:
"Dear Tim, Nice to hear from you. I remember the church with fondness, mainly for many of the members…The bottom line for me now is this: Christianity is not true. The virgin birth and the resurrection did not happen…We don’t need Jesus in order to live a happy, fulfilled, meaningful, moral life. In fact, it is much easier without Christianity: if we truly followed the teachings and example of Jesus, the world would be in a worse mess than it is now. However, I realize many people do feel such a need, and if Christianity is the only way they can manage to be moral, then I suppose we should be happy that they have found something, even if it is false. I do a lot of speaking, concerts, and debates. If I ever get back in the area, maybe we can meet. Best wishes."
How can we make sense out of the "Joe’s" we meet in life, how can we make sense out of spiritual betrayal? As we’ve been studying John’s little letter to the Christians living in Asia Minor, they were facing this very kind of problem. Some of the members of the church in Asia minor had walked away from there faith, they’d renounced Christ and were embracing false ideas about God. Those who the members of the church thought were close spiritual companions turned out to be traitors. Today we’re going to look at how to make sense out of this kind of spiritual betrayal.
I. A Sign of the Times (2:18-19).
John doesn’t want us to get too surprised about spiritual betrayal. Now some have understood John to mean in vv. 18-19 that he expected the end of the world to come in his lifetime. The reasoning goes like this: "John and the other New Testament writers thought they were living in the last hour, that Christ would return again in their lifetimes, yet now we know that they were wrong about that." Of course if they were wrong about something as important as the second coming of Jesus Christ, what else might they have been wrong about?
However a close reading of these words reveals something very different. John could have either used the word "hour" literally to describe a 60 minute period of time or figuratively to describe a longer period of time. I doubt anyone believes that John thought that Christ would be returning in 60 minutes from when he wrote these words, after all it’d take longer than that for this letter to get delivered to the Christians living in Asia Minor! So he must be using the word "hour" figuratively to describe a longer period of time than 60 minutes.
The Bible pictures the entire church age, from the time Jesus came into this world to die on the cross and rise from the dead all the way to his second coming at the end of the age as "the last days" or "the final hour." You might think of the "final hour" as the final chapter of the book. When the Spirit of God transformed the first 120 Christians into the church on the day of Pentecost, Peter stood up and quoted the Old Testament prophet Joel to tell the crowd that the "last days" or the "final hour" had begun. Hebrews 1:1-2 affirms this same idea: "In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (NIV).
So the "last days" or the "final hour" is the final chapter, the final stage in God’s redemptive plan that will climax with the second coming of Jesus Christ, when he will right every wrong and ushers in God’s Kingdom on earth. John is reminding us that we as Christians live in this same final chapter, just like the Christians in the first century did.
John’s friends knew that an antichrist figure would come shortly before the close of this final hour. Now antichrist simply means "against Christ" and broadly it describes anyone who opposes Jesus Christ and what he stands for. The Bible teaches that at some point in the future a person will arise who embodies this opposition to Christ. Paul calls him the "man of lawlessness" in the book of 2 Thessalonians, and this figure will "will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God" (2 Thess 2:4). This person will embody every hostility toward Christ that’s ever been expressed in all of the world’s history, all in one person. Throughout history there’ve been many people who’ve been precursors to this final antichrist figure who’s yet to come: The Roman Emperor Nero, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, in our own time Saddam Hussein...yet none of these people proved to be the final coming antichrist.
Now this is not an invitation for us to speculate on who this coming figure might be, because the "final hour" could last another 1,000 years if God wants it to. Throughout 2,000 years of church history Christians have found it difficult to resist the temptation to speculate on who this antichrist is. Just since 1945 the list of people that Christians have claimed were the antichrist includes Pope Pious XII, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson, King Juan Carlos of Spain, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and Mikhail Gorbachev (Kyle, The Last Days Are Here Again 131-32). Recently I ran across a claim that Barney was the antichrist, and that if you took the words "Dancing Purple Dinosaur" and added up the numerical value of the numbers, it added up to 666. I think the claim was a joke, but knowing some Christians maybe not.
All John is saying here is that the appearance of men and women who oppose Jesus Christ is a precursor of the coming antichrist, that’s all.
What makes it all the more difficult for John’s readers and for us as we think about people like "Joe", is that these people came from their own church. Just like "Joe" from our own church, John says that these people opposed to Jesus came out from the church in Asia Minor. These are people they’d worshipped God with, people they’d prayed with, people they’d shared the Lord’s Supper with and served God together. John says that the fact that they abandoned the Christian reveals that they never truly were one of us, they looked like followers of Jesus Christ, they talked the talk, but the fact that they didn’t remain with us reveals that inwardly something was wrong all the time.
Now remember, he’s not talking about people who go to another church, or people who step on a spiritual landmine and are incapacitated for a while, but he’s talking about people who abandon Christ and the Christian community.
The key word here is in v. 19 that word "remained." This verb "remain" is used 7 different times in the verses we’re looking at today, and it means to "abide," to "continue," to "persevere and to persist." John is telling is that those who truly know Christ are those who abide with Christ and the Christian community. People who abandon the Christian community and become opposed to Jesus are people who don’t remain, they’re people who never truly abided in Christ in the first place.
Here we learn our first important lesson about spiritual betrayal. WHEN WE FACE SPIRITUAL BETRAYAL WE NEED TO REMIND OURSELVES THAT IT IS A SIGN OF THE TIMES WE LIVE IN.
Spiritual betrayal is not something novel or new, but it’s part and parcel with life in the last hour, life between Christ’s first and second comings. John is trying to soften the sting by reminding his friends that they live in a time when these things happen.
Jesus once told a story that illustrates this, a story about a guy who planted wheat, but while he was sleeping an enemy came and planted tares among the wheat. As the wheat began growing, so did the tares. The thing about tares and wheat is that they look exactly the same until it’s time to harvest, and then you can tell the difference. We live in that period of time before the final harvest, when both tares and wheat grow among us--even as a church family.
John’s telling his friends, "Welcome to the final hour, things are like this." This helps his friends know that they’re not going crazy, there’s not something wrong with them or with their church that made these people turn into those opposed to Christ.
II. Resources (2:20-23).
So this first insight from the apostle John helps us place our experiences of spiritual betrayal in perspective, it helps us see these experiences in light of the big picture of what God is doing. Yet what about how to deal with it, are we just left to fend for ourselves or are there resources we can draw on? In the next section we’re going to see that WHEN WE FACE SPIRITUAL BETRAYAL, WE NEED TO REALIZE THAT GOD HAS GIVEN US THE RESOURCES WE NEED TO AVOID IT OURSELVES. Specifically we’re going to find two resources John mentions, two tools in our tool box that God has given us to avoid spiritual betrayal derailing our spiritual journey.
In verse 20-23 mentions these two resources. Let’s talk about the second resource first, this truth that they already know. The first resource God’s given us is the gift of GOD’S TRUTH. God’s revealed truth is our measuring rod. John knows that his friends already have the truth, they have the gospel he wrote--the fourth book of the New Testament--they had the message they received about Christ when they first came to know him personally. So like a good pastor, John’s gently reminding them that they already have truth, that all they need to do is to utilize what they already have.
We also find a hint about what these former church members were now teaching. Somehow they were denying that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah or Anointed One. Most Bible scholars believe that these former church members had separated Jesus and Christ into two different people, as if they were two different entities rather than fully Godhood and full humanity joined in on person. For the apostle John, being wrong about Jesus’ identity is the same as denying Jesus. We can’t just claim Jesus was a good guy or a clever moral teacher or a gifted rabbi, but according to the Bible anything less than viewing him as fully God and fully human is denial of who he truly is. And denying him means denying God the Father, since the Father sent the Son into the world to provide for our salvation and forgiveness of our sins.
If the Christians John is writing to had some truth to draw on, we in the 20th century have even more truth. When John wrote these words the fully New Testament hadn’t yet been collected and bound together, so they only had the Old Testament, John’s Gospel, and now this letter. We today have 66 books that make up the Bible, including all 27 books of the New Testament, the full account of the eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life and resurrection. This gift of God’s truth is given to us so we don’t get derailed when those around us experience spiritual betrayal.
But John also mentions a second resource he calls an ANOINTING. Now back then an anointing was when someone rubbed oil on a person in order to visibly set that person apart for a special task. In the Old Testament, kings and priests were all publicly commissioned for their work by being anointed. In fact the word "Christ" means "anointed one," that is the One God has anointed, who God sent to do the work of our salvation. To be anointed meant you were officially appointed or assigned a special task. The Latin equivalent is the word unction. This picture of a king or a prophet being publicly anointed with oil for a special task becomes a picture for us of the Holy Spirit coming to live inside of us when we trust in Jesus Christ.
2 Corinthians 1:21-22 says, "God...anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come."
This means that every person who’s trusted Jesus Christ and become a follower of Jesus Christ has this same anointing, it’s just a special word picture that describes what it means to have God’s Holy Spirit living in us. I’m no more or less anointed than you are if you’ve trusted in Jesus Christ, but we’re both anointed by God through the Holy Spirit living in us.
Notice the repetition of that key word "remains" in v. 27, that the spiritual traitors didn’t remain, but the anointing of God does remain on those who are still walking with Jesus. This anointing teaches us what we need to know, it’s a genuine anointing, not a phony, and it teaches us--there’s that key word again--to "remain" or "abide" in Christ.
This second resource is the gift of GOD’S HOLY SPIRIT. Now some have taken John’s words here to mean that Christians who are truly spiritual don’t need any teachers in their lives. That would seem odd since John is teaching them with his letter and the New Testament speaks often if our need for spiritual teachers. But in the Christian journey a teacher isn’t going to add anything new to what God has already said in his Bible. These false teachers, these former church members claimed that they had special knowledge from God, that in order to truly experience God you had to be under their teaching. John is saying that we don’t need that sort of thing.
The two resources of God’s truth and God’s Spirit provide us with everything we need to avoid spiritual betrayal. God’s given us His truth in the Bible and His anointing through His Holy Spirit through our faith in Jesus Christ. Every follower of Jesus has these resources to ensure that someone else’s spiritual betrayal doesn’t devastate us.
III. Direction Check (2:24-25).
Now all of this isn’t to suggest that spiritual betrayal is no big deal. When someone we love and trust walks away from Christ it can devastate us. Just this last week I was told about a student at a major university here in Southern California who was raised in the church--his dad’s an elder at their church--and after taking a philosophy class this young man has announced to his family that he’s an atheist now. Those parents are devastated, as well as that young man’s home church, they’re torturing themselves with questions about what they did wrong. Spiritual betrayal is painful, if it wasn’t it would be betrayal.
But John knows that someone else’s spiritual betrayal can be a teachable moment for us. Again notice the repetition of that key word "remain" or "abide." Up to this point John’s been describing, but here he shifts to the imperative, the mode of command, to tell his friends to make sure they are remaining where they should. You see, when spiritual betrayal confronts us, we’re tempted to throw up our hands and say, "What’s the use?" That’s why one person’s spiritual betrayal can actually derail lots of other Christians. So John says it’s time to do a little inventory, time to check the map and make sure we’re on course spiritually. Is the message of Jesus Christ--the message that’s from the beginning--truly remaining in us, or have we been substituting some other message for it, perhaps the message of our culture, perhaps the message of a persuasive teacher or TV personality. The message of Christ is our map, we can get our bearings by comparing our direction to the truth of that message.
If our lives are in sync with that message, then we’re still remaining with Christ--abiding with him--and if we’re remaining with Christ, we’re still with God the father as well. If we’re remaining with Jesus, then we have eternal life, this is his gift to us here and now, not just the kind of life that last’s forever, but the kind of live that knows God in the here and now.
John is concerned that other people’s spiritual betrayal will get his friends off track in their own spiritual life. That word "lead astray" literally means "to cause someone to wander off the right path." The spiritual journey he’s talking about has lots of forks in the road, lots of rabbit trails people tend to wander off on their own.
So here we find the heart of John’s concern. WHEN WE FACE SPIRITUAL BETRAYAL WE NEED TO EVALUATE THE DIRECTION OF OUR SPIRITUAL JOURNEY.
When someone else abandons the Christian journey that’s a great time to do a little evaluation of your own spiritual progress. Do you need to make some mid-course corrections? What may seem just a little bit off now will grow more and more significant the longer you go, just a few degrees off can mean the difference between arriving at your destination or getting hopelessly lost.
Spiritual betrayal can devastate those who are left behind. Some of you are still hurting 18 years later from "Joe’s" spiritual betrayal. You keep thinking how you trusted him, you prayed together, he led you in worship, he worked with your children in ministry. John wants us to know that even though it hurts, we shouldn’t be too surprised at spiritual betrayal because it’s a sign of the times in which we live, he wants us to regain our confidence that he’s given us the resources we need to deal with spiritual betrayal, and he wants us to use the opportunity to evaluate the direction of our own spiritual journey.
