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Transcript 113C
How Does One "Test the Spirits"? [1 Jn 4:1]
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Good evening. I've been looking at I John 4, and it's got me puzzled. It says, "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world." How can you test them? How can you know?
HC: The easiest way we can test the spirits is to discover what the person is doing with the Bible. Well, let me see if I can develop this just a little bit, because this is a very excellent question.
First of all, the question is: How are we to test the spirits? We read in verse 1 of I John 4: "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, to see whether they are of God." And then in verse 2 it tells us how to test the spirits: "By this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist."
Now is this saying that if anyone at all acknowledges that Jesus is come in the flesh, then we can know that that person definitely is of Christ and not of Satan? No, it's not saying that. The key word here is the word confess. Now we have to understand what confess means in the Bible. Satan and his evil spirits, you know, acknowledge that Jesus came in the flesh. When Jesus cast out demons, the demons would says to Him, "We know who you are. You are the Holy One of God." Or they would say, "Have you come to torment us before our time?"
But you see, that was not confession. That was acknowledging Jesus. But you see, the word confession in the Bible means to repent. It means to have the same mind with God. And the evil spirits, of course, could never confess Christ because they were antagonistic toward Christ. Their wills were deliberately opposed to that of Christ.
And so just because people today say, "Jesus this" and "Jesus that," that in itself is not confession. Just because they say, "Lord, Lord this" and "Praise the Lord, the other thing," that in itself is not confession. Confession means that our will has been surrendered to Christ.
Now the Word of Christ is the Bible. And if I say I am surrendered to Christ, and yet I do not submit to the authority of the Bible, if I say, "The Bible is the Word of God, but there's also these other revelations that are from God," and so on, going quite contrary to the Word of God, then I am showing by this that I am not confessing Christ. I am showing by this that my will is not surrendered to the Word of God as the holy book, as the only infallible Word of God. I have a gospel that goes beyond the Bible.
And so this shows that I do not belong to Christ at all.
CALLER: I do appreciate your help. Thank you. Good night.
HC: Thank you for calling. Good night.