2.14 - The Last Hour
Chapter 14 The Last Hour (1 John 2:18-27)
St John in Old Age—The Veteran sure of Victory—Seceders from the Church—“Last Hour” of the Apostolic Age—Ignorance of Times and Seasons—Cyclical Course of History—Etymology of “Antichrist”— Gnostic Denial of the Son of God—Separation of “Jesus” from “Christ”—Axiom of Gnosticism—Safeguards of Faith—The Chrism of the Spirit—The Witness of the Apostles—The Promise of Christ.
―—―♦——— My little ones, it is the last hour.
And as you know that Antichrist cometh, even now many Antichrists have arisen;
Whence we perceive that it is the last hour.
From us they went out, but they were not of us;
For if they had been of us, they would have remained with us;
But it was so, that they might be made manifest, all of them, to be not of us.
And you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you all know:
I have not written to you because you know not the truth, but because you know it,
And that no lie is of the truth.
Who is the liar, except he who denieth that Jesus is the Christ?
This is the Antichrist—he who denieth the Father and the Son.
Every one who denieth the Son, hath not the Father either:
He that confesseth the Son, hath the Father also.
As for you, let that which you heard from the beginning abide in you;
If that abide in you which you heard from the beginning,
You too in the Son, and in the Father, shall abide;
And this is the promise which He Himself made to us—the eternal life.
These things I have written to you about them that mislead you.
And as for you, the anointing you received from Him abideth in you;
And you have no need that anyone be teaching you;
But as His anointing teacheth you concerning all things, and is true and is no lie—even as it hath taught you
Abide in Him.
―—―♦——— THE Apostle John is an old man; he has lived through a long day. The way of the Lord that he teaches is by this time a well-marked path, trodden by the feet of two generations. Amongst his “little children” he counts many grey-headed “fathers” in Christ. In his lifetime and since the hour when he heard the elder John say on the banks of Jordan, “Behold the Lamb of God!” centuries seem to have passed; the cumulative effect of ages—what the Gentile Apostle called “the ends of the world”—has been accomplished and a thousand years transacted in one day.
Though new in aspect and surpassing all that heart of man conceived, there is nothing of raw invention, nothing fugitive or tentative in the things of which St John writes. These teachings are as old as they are new (1 John 2:7-8); they belong to the universal Divine order; they reveal “the eternal life, which was with the Father” (1 John 1:1) and lies beyond the range of time. Swiftly laid, the foundation of the Apostles is surely laid. While “the world is passing away and the lust thereof “ (1 John 2:17), while it rocks in the paroxysms of moral dissolution, while threatenings from without and apostasies within their ranks frighten infirm believers who do not “know that they have eternal life” (1 John 5:13), the note sounded by this Epistle is that of serene assurance; an absolute stability attaches to the Apostolic witness concerning Jesus Christ. The veteran leader whose eye has long watched and his voice guided the battle proclaims the victory already won. “Our faith” has proved the temper of its weapons upon the world’s stoutest armour (1 John 5:5; see Chapter 22). Its “young men have overcome the Evil One” (1 John 2:13); its martyrs “have overcome him because of the blood of the Lamb, and because of the word of their testimony” (Revelation 12:11). The Christian brotherhood has shown itself to possess “an unction” which “teaches it about all things,” and holds it safe from poisonous error. In Ephesus, for example, faulty as the Church there was, it has “tried them which call themselves apostles, and they are not,” and has “found them false” (Revelation 2:2-3, Revelation 2:6). Whatever trials yet remain, whatever conflicts are preparing for the kingdom of God in that dim future which St John had read in the isle of Patmos through the mirror of prophecy, the faith that he and his companions have delivered to the saints is secure in the keeping of the Spirit of truth. It has no foes to meet more dangerous than those already foiled.
Time has vindicated the inference that the aged Apostle drew from his experience. The disciples of Jesus “have known the truth, which abideth in us and shall be with us forever” (2 John 1:2). The Apostolic era was a rehearsal of the Church’s entire history; and the New Testament, into which the era condensed itself, contains the principles and forces that are destined to subjugate the world to Jesus Christ. St John has but one thing to say to his successors: “Abide in Him.” The allurements of the heathen world which his converts had once loved (1 John 2:15-17), and the seductions of false prophets arising amongst themselves (1 John 2:26), are alike powerless to move those who build upon this rock. They have chosen the good part, which shall not be taken from them. As for the recent seceders from the Apostolic communion, their departure is a gain and not a loss; for that is manifest in them which was before concealed (1 John 2:18-19). They bore the name of Christ falsely; antichrist is their proper title; and that there are “many” such, who stand in imposing array against His servants, proves that God’s word is doing its judicial work, that the Divine life within the body of Christ is casting off dead limbs and foreign elements (see John 15:6) and that the age is coming to its ripeness and its crisis: “Whence we perceive that it is the last hour.”
We may best expound the paragraph before us by considering in order the crisis to which the Apostle refers, the danger which he denounces, and the safeguards on which he relies—in other words, the last hour, the many antichrists, and the chrism from the Holy One.
1. “My little ones, it is the last hour—we perceive that it is the last hour.” Westcott, in his profound and learned Commentary on this Epistle, calls our attention to the absence of the Greek article: “A last hour it is (ἐσχάτηὥραἐστίν)”—so the Apostle literally puts it; the anarthrous combination is peculiar here. St Paul’s saying in 1 Thessalonians 5:2, “A day of the Lord is coming,” resembles the expression. The phrase “seems to mark the general character of the period, and not its specific relation to ’the end.’ It was a period of critical change.” The hour is a term repeatedly used in the Gospel of John for the crisis of the earthly course of Jesus, the supreme epoch of His death and return to the Father. This guides us to St John’s meaning here. He is looking backward, not forward, and speaking the language of memory more than of prophecy (compare p. 172). The “last hour” closes a succession of hours; it is the end of an expiring day. The venerable Apostle stands on the border of the first Christian age. He is nearing the horizon, the outmost verge of that great “day of the Lord” which began with the birth of the first John, the forerunner, and would terminate with his own departure—himself the solitary survivor of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb. The shadows are closing upon John; everything is altered about him. The world he knew had passed, or was passing, quite away. Jerusalem had fallen; he had seen in vision the overthrow of mighty Rome, and the Empire is shaken with rumours and fears of change. The work of revelation, he felt, was all but complete. Those deadly opposers of the truth had risen who were foretold in the words of Jesus, and in the teachings of Paul so well remembered at Ephesus; the Satanic apostasy within the Church, foreboding the last judgement, had reared its head. The finished truth of the revelation of the Father in the Son is confronted by the consummate lie of heresy, which denies them both (1 John 2:22).
A last hour it certainly was; and it might be (who could tell?) the last hour of all. The Master had said concerning John, “If I will that he tarry till I come!” (John 21:22). Many deemed this to signify that the beloved disciple would live on earth until the Lord’s return in glory. He relates the incident in the appendix to his Gospel without giving his opinion for or against this notion; he only states the exact words of Jesus, and intimates that so much was never promised. But this saying might well excite the desire for such a favour. And why was John kept waiting for so long, when all the rest had been summoned away?
It may seem strange to us that the inspired Apostles should have known almost nothing of the duration of future history; but even from Himself, in the days of His flesh, our Lord confesses that such knowledge was veiled: “Of that day or hour knoweth no man, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but theFather only.” Christ left His disciples in all matters of the times and seasons, and leaves them still, to wish and hope, but not to know. So the wise Apostle writes humbly and with guarded caution, keeping the hour of the advent an open question. He was not permitted to see into the next century. He presided over the completion of the great creative age, and he felt that its end was come. Clearly it was his last hour; and for aught, he knew it might be the world’s last,—the sun of time setting to rise no more, the crash of doom breaking upon his dying ears.
History passes through great cycles, each of which has its last hour anticipating the absolute conclusion. The year with its seasons changing from spring to winter, the day revolving from dawn to dark, image the total course of time. You have watched the sun set on a still summer evening, yielding yourself to the influences of the hour—the light slowly waning and the shadows creeping stealthily from their ambush, the colours dying out of earth and sky, the sounds of life ceasing one by one, the night wind striking chill on your cheek and whispering amongst the trees the riddle that no man reads—and you have had the strange sense that all was over! a foretaste of life’s and the world’s last hour; you came away doubting if that sun will rise again! The great epochs and “days” of human history have a similar finality. Each of these periods in turn sensibly anticipates the end of all things. The world is seen sweeping in its orbit towards the gulf; it grazes the edge, to escape it for that time, and to set forth upon a wider circuit which must bring it to the final plunge. Like the moth wheeling round the taper’s flame and flitting by with singed wings, to fall at last consumed, like some huge creature of heavy flight powerless to soar to the mark of its desire, but that circles in ascending spires passing its goal again and again, till it lands spent upon the summit—such appears to be the destined course of the world toward judgement. Many great and notable days of the Lord there have been, and perhaps will be—many last hours before the last of all. The earth is a mausoleum of dead worlds; in its grave-mounds, tier above tier, extinct creations and civilizations lie orderly interred. Eschatology, like everything else in Scripture, has its laws of development—“the blade, the ear, and the full corn in the ear.” Each “day” of history, with its last hour, is a moment in that “age of the ages” which circumscribes the measureless orbit of time.
2. The Apostle John saw the proof of the end of the age in the appearance of many antichrists. He could not say that “the Antichrist” had come, whom the Church looked for to herald the second coming of the Lord Jesus; but “even now” there were many who deserved this name. Their appearance was the signal of a crisis which, for aught one could say, might be the prelude of the final judgement. The word “antichrist” has, by etymology, a double meaning. The Antichrist of whose coming St John’s readers had “heard,” if identical, as one presumes, with the awful figure of 2 Thessalonians 2:1-17, is a mock-Christ, a Satanic caricature of the Lord Jesus; the “many antichrists” were not that, but deniers of Christ and destroyers of the true faith concerning Him. This the epithet may equally well signify. There is no real disagreement in the matter between St Paul and St John. The heretic oppugners of Christ who started up before St John’s eyes in the Asian Churches, are fore-runners, whether at a greater or less distance, of the supreme antagonist (2 Thessalonians 2:4), messengers who prepare his way. They are of the same breed and likeness, and set forth principles that will find in Antichrist their full impersonation. The Antichrists of St John’s last hour, the opponents then most to be dreaded by the Church, were teachers of false doctrine. They “deny that Jesus is the Christ” (1 John 2:22). This denial is other than that which the same words had denoted fifty years before. It is not the denial of Jewish unbelief, a refusal accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah; it is the denial of Gnostic terror, the refusal to admit the Divine Sonship of Jesus and the revelation of the Godhead in manhood through His person (see Chapter 19). Such a refusal makes the knowledge of both impossible; neither is God understood as Father, nor Jesus Christ as Son, by these mis-believers. To “confess” or “deny the Son” is in effect to “hold” or “not to hold” the Father (1 John 2:23). The man who in this way “denies the Father and the Son,” he is “the antichrist” and “the liar” (1 John 2:22). His denial negatives the central truth of Christianity, as St John conceived it; it dissolves the bond which gives unity and force to the entire new covenant, and nullifies the Gospel absolutely. The nature of the person of Christ, in St John’s view, was not a question of transcendental dogma or theological speculation; there lay in it the vital point of an experimental and working Christian belief. “Who is he,” the Apostle cries, “that overcomes the world, except he that believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” (1 John 5:5); and again, “Every one that believes that Jesus is the Christ, is begotten of God” (1 John 5:1). The one saving and conquering faith is that which beholds in the crucified Nazarene the Son of God seated at the right hand of power (see Chapter 22). The traditions of the rise of heresy point to the attempts made about this time, and especially in St John’s province of Asia, to divide Jesus Christ (whose Messianic title had by this time become His proper name) into the human Jesus on the one hand, mortal and imperfect as other men, and the Christ, a Divine on or emanation, that descended upon Jesus and was associated with Him from His baptism till the hour of His death. This was to make of Jesus Christ two beings, to break up His Divine-human person, as the disciples had known Him, into shadowy and discrepant fragments (compare Chapter 19). Those who taught this, denied that “Jesus is the Son of God.” They denied “Jesus Christ come in flesh” (1 John 4:2-3); they renounced the Incarnation, and thereby abandoned the basis laid by Christianity for fellowship between God and man; they closed the way of access to the Father given us in the Son of His love.
This error, which beset the Church for generations and deeply affected its development, grew from the philosophical notion of the incompatibility of the finite and infinite and the absolute separation of God from the world (see pp. 88, 363). With this axiom were involved the postulates of the illusive nature of phenomena and the intrinsic evil of matter—assumptions that implicate in their fatal coil every truth of religion, doctrinal and practical, and that struck at the root of Apostolic faith. To St John’s mind, there was no lie to compare with this. Those who brought such maxims with them into the Church, could never have been Christians. Christ Jesus the Lord was, from the outset, to them a non-reality; the critique of their philosophy dissolved the facts about Him into a play of the senses, a Doketic spectacle. The manifestation of the Godhead in Jesus, upon this theory, was a train of symbols, grander and fairer it might be than others,—a shadow still of the heavenly things and not their “very image,” a parable of ideal truth that each man must unriddle as he could. To maintain this was to take away all certainty from the Gospel, and all fellowship from the Church. In proceeding from St Paul’s chief Epistles to this of St John, the doctrinal conflict is carried back from the atonement to the incarnation, from the work to the nature of Christ, from Calvary to Bethlehem. There it culminates. Religious truth could reach no higher than the affirmation, error could proceed no further than the contradiction, of the completed doctrine of the Person of Christ inculcated by St John. The final teaching of revelation is countered by the “antichrists.” The Apostle justly specifies this as the conclusive issue. For Christ is all and in all to His own system. “What think ye of the Christ?” is His crucial question to every age. The two answers—that of the world with its false prophets and seducers (1 John 2:19; 1 John 4:5), and that of the Christian brotherhood one with its Divine Head—are now delivered in categorical assertion and negation. Faith and unfaith have each said its last word. Subsequent debates of Christ with Antichrist will be only the repetition, upon an ever-enlarging scale, of what is contained, and in principle settled and disposed of, by the word of the Apostles of the Lord and within the pages of the New Testament (compare Chapter 19).
3. While the Apostle John insists on the radical nature of the assaults made in his last days upon the Church’s Christological belief, he points with confidence to the safeguards by which that belief is guaranteed.
(1) In the first place, “you (emphatic ὑμεῖς—in contrast with the Antichrists) have a chrism from the Holy One (i.e. Christ); all of you know” the truth and can discern its verity (1 John 2:20-21). Again, in 1 John 2:27, “The chrism that you received from Him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone be teaching you. But as His chrism teaches you about all things, and is true and is no lie, and as it did teach you, abide in Him.” Χρίσμα is “anointing,” as χριστός is “anointed”; the argument lies in this verb connexion. The chrism makes Christians, and is wanting to Antichrists. It is the constitutive element common to Christ and His people; it pervades members and Head alike.
We soon perceive wherein this “chrism” consists. What the Apostle says of the chrism he says of the Spirit afterwards in 1 John 5:7: “It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth.” And in 1 John 4:6 he contrasts the influences working in Apostolic and heretical circles respectively as “the spirit of truth” and “of error.” The bestowal of the Spirit on Jesus of Nazareth was described under the figure of unction by St Peter in Acts 10:38, telling “how God anointed (christened) Him—made Him officially the Christ—with the Holy Spirit and power.”56 It was the possession without limit of “the Spirit of truth” which gave to the words of Christ their unlimited authority; “He whom God sent speaketh the words of God, for He giveth Him not the Spirit by measure” (John 3:34-35). Out of the self-same Spirit which He possessed infinitely in His Divine fashion, and which His presence and teaching continually breathed, “the Holy One” gave to His disciples. All members of His body receive, according to their capacity, “the Spirit of truth, which the world cannot receive,” but “whom” He “sends” unto His own “from the Father” (John 14:17; John 15:26, etc.). The Spirit of the Head is the vital principle of the Church, resident in every limb; by His inhabitation and operation the Body of Christ subsists. The communion of the Holy Ghost is the inner side of all that is outwardly visible in Church activity and fellowship. It is the life of God within the society of men. This Divine principle of life in Christ possesses an antiseptic power. It affords the real security for the Church’s preservation from corruption and decay. The Spirit of God is the only, and the sufficient, Infallibility on earth. He is our pledged protector against mortal sin and deadly error; for He is the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of truth,—who “abideth with you,” said Christ to His people, “and He shall be in you.” It is His office to teach, no less than to sanctify (John 14:26; John 16:13). To the true believer and faithful seeker after the knowledge of God He gives an instinct for truth, a sense for the Divine in knowledge and in doctrine, which works through the reason and yet above the reason, and which works collectively in the communion of saints. For this gift St Paul had prayed long ago, on behalf of the Ephesian and Asian Christians: “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him—the eyes of your heart enlightened to know” the great things of God (Ephesians 1:17-23). This prayer had been answered.
Paul’s and John’s children in the faith were endowed with a discernment that enabled them to detect the sophistries and resist the blandishments of Gnostic error. This Spirit of wisdom and revelation has never deserted the Church. Through centuries rife with all kinds of ignorance and perversion the Apostolic truth has been preserved to this day, and Scripture retains its unique authority, its light shining more brightly for every eclipse.
“You know, all of you,” the Apostle says in 1 John 2:20.57 This is the most remarkable thing in the passage. “I have not written unto you,” he continues, “because you know not the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth.” St John appeals to the judgement of the enlightened lay commonalty of the Church, just as St Paul when he writes, “I speak as to men of sense; judge ye what I say” (1 Corinthians 10:15). We look in spiritual matters too much to the opinion of the few—to experts and specialists, priests, Councils, Congresses; we have too little faith in the Holy Spirit filling the Church, in the communis senses of the body of Christ avid the general suffrage of the citizens of the Divine commonwealth. Yet, however we disguise the fact, it is with this grand jury that the verdict ultimately lies.
St John’s “chrism” did not guarantee a precise agreement in every point of doctrine and practice; covers essential truth, such as that of the Godhead of the Redeemer here in question. Much less does the witness of the Spirit warrant individual men, whose hearts are touched with His grace, in setting up to be oracles of God. In that case the Holy Spirit must contradict Himself endlessly, and God becomes the author of confusion and not of peace. But there is in matters of collective faith a spiritual common sense, a Christian public opinion in the communion of saints, behind the extravagances of individuals and the party cries of the hour, which acts informally by a silent and impalpable pressure, but all the more effectually, after the manner of the Spirit. The motto of Vincent of Lerinum, which John H. Newman so sadly misapplied, is after all true and indispensable: “Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus.”
(2) To this inward and cumulative witness there corresponds an outward witness, defined once for all: You know the truth . . . that no lie is of the truth. . . . That which you heard from the beginning,—let it abide in you” (1 John 2:21, 1 John 2:24). So we have an objective criterion given in the truth about Christ and the Father, as St John’s readers heard it from the Apostles at the first and as we find it written in their books. Believing that to be true, the Church rejected promptly what did not square with it. In the most downright and peremptory fashion St John asserts the Apostolic witness to be a test of religious truth: “We are of God: he that knows God hears us; he that is not of God hears us not. By this we recognize the spirit of truth and the spirit of error” (1 John 4:6; see Chapter 19). His words echo those of Christ addressed to the first disciples: “As the Father sent me, even so send I you. . . . He that receiveth you, receiveth me” (Matthew 10:40; John 20:21). And St Paul made the like claim when he said, “If any man thinketh himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him take knowledge of the things that I write unto you, that they are a commandment of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 14:37). This touchstone, however contested, is equally valid today.
Here is the exterior test of the inner light. The witness of the Spirit in the living Church, and in the abiding Apostolic word, authenticate and guard each other. This must be so, if one and the self-same Spirit testifies in both. Experience and Scripture coincide. Neither will suffice for us apart from the other. Without experience, Scripture becomes a dead letter; without the norm of Scripture, experience becomes a speculation, a fanaticism, or a conceit.
(3) The third guarantee cited by St John lies outside ourselves and the Church. Behind the chrism that rests upon all Christians, and the Apostolic message deposited with the Church in the beginning, there abides the faithfulness of our promise-giving Lord. His fidelity is our ultimate dependence; it is involved in the two safeguards previously described.
Accordingly, when the Apostle has said, in 1 John 2:24, “If that abide in you which ye heard from the beginning, you too shall abide in the Son and in the Father,” he adds in the next verse, to make all sure: “And this is the promise which He made to us,—the eternal life!” It is our Lord’s own assurance over again: “Abide in me, and I will abide in you. ... Verily, verily, I say unto you, If anyone keep my word, death he will never see” (John 8:51; John 15:4). The life of fellowship with the Father in the Son, which the Antichrist would destroy at its root by denying the Son, the Son of God pledges Himself to maintain amongst those who are loyal to His word. On this rock He builds the Church; “the gates of death will not prevail against it,” while it stands upon the true confession of His name. To the soul and to the Church, the individual believer and the community of faith, the same promise of life and incorruption is made. So long as we hold His word, Christ holds by us for ever.
“He has promised us” this (care is αὐτὸςἐπηγγείλατο)58—He who says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” No brief, no transient existence is that secured to His people, but “the eternal life.” Now eternal life means with St John not a prize to be won (as St Paul loves to represent it), but a foundation on which to rest, a fountain from which to draw; not a future attainment so much as a Divine, and therefore abiding, possession in the present. It is the life which came into the world from God with Jesus Christ (1 John 1:1-2), and in which every soul lives that is grafted into Him. Understanding this, we see that the “promise of life eternal,” in 1 John 2:25, is not brought in as an incitement to hope, but as a re-assurance to faith. “These things have I written unto you,” the Apostle says, “concerning those that mislead you” (1 John 2:26). Christ’s word is set against theirs. His promise stands fast, the unchanging rock amidst the tides of opinion and the winds of doctrine, unshaken by the storms that break up one after another the strongest fabrics of human thought and policy. Our little “systems have their day”; but the fellowship of souls which rests upon the foundation of the Apostles, has within it the power of an indissoluble life.
Such are the three guarantees of the permanence of Christian doctrine and the Christian life, as they were asserted by St John at his last hour, when the tempests of persecution and of skeptical error were on all sides let loose against the Church. They are the witness of the Spirit in the soul, of the word on the lips of the Apostles transmitted by their pen, and of the living Christ, the pledged executor of His own promise of eternal life.