Chapter 4 – One God Translation

1 John

   4 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 By this you know the spirit of God: every spirit which confesses Jesus Messiah as having come[1535] as a fully human being[1536] is from God, 3 while every spirit which does not confess that Jesus, the one so identified, is not from God. It is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard is coming, and now that spirit is in the world already. 4 You are from God, little children, and you have overcome them, because the One who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. 5 They are from the world, so they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are from God; the person who knows God listens to us, while the person who is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the spirit of the truth[1537] and the spirit of falsehood.
    7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God. Everyone who loves has been fathered by God and knows God. 8 The person who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 By this the love of God was revealed in us: God has sent His unique Son into the world[1538] so that we may live through him. 10 In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice[1539] for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us in this way, then we ought to love one another. 12 No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another God lives in us, and His love is perfected in us. 13 By this we know that we live in Him and He in us: He has given us a portion of His spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.
    15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God,[1540] God lives in him, and he in God. 16 And we have come to know and have believed the love which God has in us. God is love, and the person who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him. 17 By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence on the day of judgment, because as Jesus is, so are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The person who fears has not been perfected in love. 19 We love, because He first loved us. 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. If he does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? 21 And this command we have from Him: the person who loves God should also love his brother and sister.

1 John

[1535]

“Coming” does not mean arriving from a previous life somewhere else! It means making his appearance from birth from his mother, in the case of Jesus uniquely by virginal begetting (Lk. 1:35; Mt. 1:18, 20: “begotten in her”; cp. 2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 2:7; Isa. 9:6: the “child will be begotten [by God]”).

[1536]

Dr. Geoffrey Lampe at Cambridge rightly charged “orthodoxy” with the failure to embrace a fully human Jesus. He complained that a preexisting Jesus could not be a genuine human person: “The Christological concept of the pre-existent divine Son…reduces the real, socially and culturally conditioned personality of Jesus to the metaphysical abstraction ‘human nature.’ It is this universal humanity which the Son assumed and made his own…According to this Christology, ‘the eternal Son’ [according to orthodoxy] assumes a timeless human nature, or makes it timeless by making it his own; it is a human nature which owes nothing essential to geographical circumstances; it corresponds to nothing in the actual concrete world; Jesus Christ has not, after all, really ‘come in the flesh’” (God as Spirit, p. 144). Dr. Lampe wrote also of the dangerous threat to monotheism once Jesus was declared to be God. This would make two Gods. Luther mistranslated this verse and thus altered John’s meaning by rendering, “into the flesh.” This has been corrected in all modern German versions.

[1537]

John’s favorite definition of the holy spirit is “the spirit of the truth.” Spirit must be defined and it is always linked with the truth. Hence Paul spoke about the need for “a passion for truth in order to be saved” (2 Thess. 2:10). John said the spirit is the truth (5:6; cp. Jn. 6:63).

[1538]

To be sent into the world is nothing to do with arriving from another realm literally. John the Baptist was “sent from God” (Jn. 1:6) but he did not “preexist.” Jesus sent us the disciples in the same sense as God sent him! (Jn. 17:18).

[1539]

Since the Son died, he cannot by definition be God, who cannot die.

[1540]

Assuming that “Son of God” is understood in its original biblical, Messianic sense, not the unbiblical “God the Son.”