Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
1 John 2:22–23
“Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.”
John has been speaking generally of antichrists who left the community and of the lies they propagated. In today’s passage, he names the heart of the matter. The defining mark of an antichrist is the denial that Jesus is the Christ.
“Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ?” John asks (1 John 2:22). The confession that Jesus is “the Christ” is not merely the assertion that He is some kind of anointed teacher or prophet. It is the confession that He is the Messiah, the eternal Son of God who took on flesh in time to redeem His people. The false teachers troubling the Ephesian church appear to have denied precisely this. Some held that the divine Christ only seemed to take on a human body; others held that the divine Christ came upon the man Jesus at His baptism and departed before the cross. Either way, the confession that the eternal Son had truly become flesh was under attack.
To deny that Jesus is the Christ in this sense, John insists, is to be the antichrist: “This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son” (v. 22). Note the breadth of John’s claim. The denial does not merely affect one’s view of Jesus; it strikes at the doctrine of the Father as well. The Father has revealed Himself supremely in the Son. To reject the Son is necessarily to reject the Father who sent Him.
Verse 23 presses this point home in both its negative and positive forms: “No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.” The two clauses must be read together. There is no neutral ground, no possibility of relating to the Father apart from the Son. Those who imagine that they can worship a generic deity or hold to some abstract monotheism while setting the Son aside have, on John’s testimony, no relationship with God at all. Conversely, those who confess the Son enjoy fellowship with the Father by virtue of that confession.
The implications for our day are pointed. Various religions and philosophies claim to honor the same God whom Christians worship while denying the deity and incarnation of Christ. Some have desired to soften John’s words on this point, but the Apostle does not allow it. The Father is known only through the Son. Whoever confesses Jesus as the Christ in the full sense that John has in view enjoys the Father; whoever does not has no part in Him.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
The exclusivity of Christ is not a doctrine that the church may set aside in the interests of cultural peace. To know the Father at all, we must come through the Son. Let us hold fast to the Apostolic confession that Jesus is the Christ and pray that those who deny Him would yet come to confess Him.
For further study
- Matthew 11:27
- John 8:24
- John 14:6–7
- 2 John 7–9
The bible in a year
- Isaiah 38–40
- Colossians 2:6–3:17