False teachers speak the world’s language. They promise bodily pleasure and satisfaction. They promise riches, beauty, and material gain. And they promise that by following their teaching you will win the approval of others and increase your status in this world. False teachers are absorbed in what is transitory and they speak to people whose hearts love the world and its lusts rather than God. They are in it for the money, for the status, for the pleasures they crave, and they promise their hearers that they will enjoy the same by following them and their message.

As history moves closer to the return of our Lord Jesus Christ, we should expect a rise in false teachers, false prophets, and false messiahs. Jesus prophesied about the increase of such deceivers in , , , and . The Apostle Paul echoed our Lord’s warning in , reminding Timothy that imposters will proceed from bad to worse in the last days. Why does the number of false teachers increase as we move closer to the second coming of Christ, and how can believers identify those the New Testament cautions us against following? As we conclude our series on identifying false teachers, I want to consider how one of the final books written in the New Testament helps us understand why false teachers come and how to identify them.

The Apostle John lived longer than any of the Twelve Apostles, with many scholars dating his death near the end of the first century. He composed the letter we call 1 John some time in the 80s. He was writing to a church that had just experienced a significant split, with some in the church departing over the doctrine of Christ. These factious people taught a defective view of the Son of God. While scholars debate the specific nature of their heresy, it seems evident that they did not believe that the Son of God had come in the flesh, which also led them to deny that the Son of God had shed His blood for the forgiveness of the sins of the world. Their false teaching was essentially a denial that Jesus was the Messiah (). From John’s description of these false teachers and their departure from the church, it seems that some of them wielded significant influence over members of the congregation, so John wrote to equip these believers to mark and avoid such deceptive false brothers. In so doing, John also explained where these false teachers come from.

False teachers, according to 1 John, are a clear sign that we are living in the last hour because false teachers are aligned with the spirit of antichrist. In , John says, “And every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.” John’s point is that false teachers arise because they are motivated by the same spirit that ultimately will motivate and empower the final antichrist at the end of the age. That spirit is the spirit that works in those who belong to this present world (). In , the Apostle makes clear that the world is under the power of the evil one, the devil himself. The spirit of antichrist, therefore, is the evil one who exalts himself as god and opposes God and His truth. During the last hour, the activity of the spirit of antichrist will increase so that many arise who corrupt the truth about Christ and seek to keep the world in its deceptions and under Satan’s power.

False teachers come as a clear signal to Christians that we are living in the last hour and that Satan is making his final attempt to destroy Christ and His blood-bought people.

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