THE BOOK OF 1 JOHN
As the early Christians became further and further removed from their Jewish roots, they opened themselves up to the false beliefs of their newly converted Gentile neighbours. The primary challenge came from a religious group whose wrong ideas about creation led them to reinterpret the teachings of Jesus and the apostles through the lens of a Greek philosophy known as “Gnosticism.”
While there was a fair amount of diversity among these Gnostic groups, the belief that unified them was the idea that the material world was inherently corrupt. They reasoned that the one true God would never allow Himself to be contaminated by our base, physical reality. In fact, He would never have created such filth in the first place.
When these people read the old Testament, they concluded that YHWH must be an inferior God. After all, He created everything and thought it was pretty good. YHWH described Himself as having physical characteristics such as hands and eyes (Ex 7.5, Psa 34.15). The real God, they reasoned, would be appalled to be thought of in such a way.
Continuing along this line of reasoning, most of them figured that Jesus couldn’t have been both divine and human, those two categories were mutually exclusive in their minds. A sort of sub-category of Gnosticism developed, known as Docetism (from the Greek word doxa, which means “to seem”). Docetists claimed that Jesus only seemed human. Others claimed that Jesus was a human who only became divine when the Holy Spirit came upon Him at His baptism, and then went back to being human when the Holy Spirit left Him at His crucifixion.
They were trying to protect God from being polluted by this material world.
To them, anything physical was evil and inconsequential, only “spiritual” things mattered. A person was really a spiritual being trapped inside a physical shell of a body, trying desperately to get out and be reunited with the “real God,” who only lived somewhere “out there.” The way to escape and get to God was to deny yourself anything physical (don’t get married, never have sex, don’t enjoy your food, and so on). If you refused to indulge your whiny physical body, it would leave your spirit alone.
Another group of these Gnostics went to the opposite extreme, figuring that if they could appease their bodies, maybe the impulses would be sated and leave their minds alone. They reasoned that they could get away with committing sexual immorality as long as their minds were pure. You’re not really your body anyway, they believed. The body is just a prison the spirit lives in, so it doesn’t really matter what a person does with his or her body. Feed it or starve it — it’s going to burn up anyway.
Sound familiar?
Prayer
God of promise, You have been working throughout history to overcome the alienation and estrangement that took place at the Fall. Your glorious redemptive plan that led to the incarnation of Your Son provides the only basis for our forgiveness, atonement and eternal life. But since the days of His earthly ministry, there has been a concerted effort by the enemy of our faith to distort the biblical teaching about His identity. Teachers have denied Jesus’ full deity on the one hand or denied His full humanity on the other, and this still happens now. We are such creatures of extremes — the extremes of Jesus as God but not man, and of Jesus as man but not God, the extremes of asceticism and of indulgence, the extremes of seeing matter as evil and of worshiping the earth. But only the biblical revelation of the full God-Man is enough to save us from our sins.
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