Anointed by the Holy One

The false teachers’ departure from the Ephesian community exposed the fact that they had never truly belonged (1 John 2:18–19). Those who remained needed reassurance that what they confessed and believed is indeed the truth. John provides exactly such reassurance in today’s passage by reminding them of an extraordinary privilege that they enjoy.

“But you have been anointed by the Holy One,” John writes, “and you all have knowledge” (v. 20). The “Holy One” here is most naturally understood as Christ Himself, the One on whom the Spirit rested without measure (John 1:32–34). The anointing that John has in view is the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is given to all who belong to Christ. By this anointing, every believer is enabled to know the truth of the gospel and to discern the lies that attempt to undermine it.

This statement would have resonated in the Ephesian church. The false teachers had advertised themselves as possessors of a higher knowledge that ordinary Christians could not access. Their teaching was supposedly available only to a spiritual elite who had ascended past the simpler believers. John dismantles this claim entirely. Every Christian has been anointed and knows the truth. The humblest believer who confesses Christ has received the same Spirit who indwells the most learned Apostle.

John makes his confidence in his readers explicit: “I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth” (1 John 2:21). John does not write to introduce his readers to the truth. They already possess it. He writes, rather, to confirm what they already know and to remind them of its incompatibility with the falsehoods that they have lately encountered. No lie can come from the truth. The doctrines of the antichrists, however attractively packaged, are necessarily incompatible with the Apostolic gospel.

This pastoral approach is instructive. John does not flatter his readers, but neither does he exaggerate their danger. He treats them as those who genuinely belong to Christ. This is the proper note for shepherds to strike with congregations who have weathered theological storms. We do not protect believers by treating every error as evidence that they are near apostasy. We protect them by reminding them of what they already know and have and by helping them stand fast in it.