Today’s Passage: 1 John 2:18–29
Yesterday’s passage closed with a warning about loving the world’s passing desires. Today the letter’s crisis surfaces directly. A group has recently left these congregations, and their departure is not incidental to the letter; it is a large part of why the letter exists. John names them plainly, calls their teaching a denial of Jesus as the Christ come in the flesh, and then does something pastorally unexpected: instead of treating their exit as a threat to the readers’ own standing, he reframes it as evidence of that standing. The people who left prove, by leaving, that they were never truly rooted. The people who stayed have something in them that never planned to leave in the first place: an anointing from the Holy One, and a settled abiding in what they were taught from the beginning.
As you read, hold this: The false teachers who left proved, by leaving, that they never truly belonged. The Spirit’s anointing is enough to keep those who stayed from being deceived.
Context A real split, not a hypothetical warning
This passage responds to an actual event, not a generic future risk. A faction within these churches recently seceded, taking with them a teaching that denied Jesus’s real incarnation, likely an early docetic view (that Jesus only seemed to have a physical body) or a related separation of “the Christ” from the man Jesus, letting a divine power depart before the crucifixion so that only the man, not the Christ, actually died. Both versions of the error struck at the same place: if Jesus did not really come in the flesh, He did not really suffer and die for sin, and the atonement collapses. John writes to steady those who stayed, not to intimidate them with a fresh threat.
1 John 2:18–21 (BSB)
¹⁸ Children, it is the last hour; and just as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. This is how we know it is the last hour. ¹⁹ They went out from us, but they did not belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But their departure made it clear that none of them belonged to us. ²⁰ You, however, have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. ²¹ I have not written to you because you lack knowledge of the truth, but because you have it, and because no lie comes from the truth.
Word study "Antichrist" — antichristos (1 John 2:18, 22)
Greek: ἀντίχριστος (antichristos), pronounced an-TEE-khris-tos. Strong’s G500.
A term found in the New Testament only in John’s letters (1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 John 7). John uses it to name two things at once: a single future figure his readers had already been taught to expect (“the antichrist is coming”), and a present pattern already operating in “many antichrists” scattered through the churches right now. The word itself carries a double edge, since anti can mean either “against” or “in place of.” An antichrist is not only an opponent of Christ but a counterfeit, someone offering a rival version of Him. Both senses fit these false teachers: they opposed the true gospel about Jesus by substituting a different Jesus for it.
“They went out from us, but they did not belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us” (v. 19), a hard verse on first read, but John intends it as reassurance, not accusation. He is not telling the readers to wonder whether they might be next to leave. He is telling them the opposite: a departure like this one is proof of what was already true, not the cause of a fall from grace. Real, abiding faith does not, in the end, walk away from the truth about who Jesus is. The split did not create a defect in the readers; it revealed one that was never in them to begin with. That is the letter’s whole approach to assurance in miniature: not manufactured confidence, but a settled reading of the evidence a life actually gives.
Study notes One antichrist to come, many already here
John is not alone in holding these two dimensions together, a specific coming figure and an already-active pattern of deception. His own second letter names the same present danger in the same term:
"For many deceivers have gone out into the world, refusing to confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist." 2 John 7 (BSB)
And Jesus Himself, describing the years before His return, warned of the future dimension in nearly identical terms:
"For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive even the elect, if that were possible." Matthew 24:24 (BSB)
Held together, these three passages describe one danger with two edges. A climactic figure is still coming. But the readers did not need to wait for him to meet the same lie already circulating in their own fellowship, wearing a familiar face.
1 John 2:22–23 (BSB)
²² Who is the liar, if it is not the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, who denies the Father and the Son. ²³ Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father, but whoever confesses the Son has the Father as well.
The antichrist’s lie is named precisely here, not vaguely: denying that Jesus is the Christ, and in doing so denying the Father and the Son together. John will not let a reader imagine they could keep the Father while quietly setting the Son aside as a lesser or separable matter. The two stand or fall together. Whoever has the Son has the Father as well; whoever does not have the Son does not have the Father either, no matter what else they claim to believe.
1 John 2:24–27 (BSB)
²⁴ As for you, let what you have heard from the beginning remain in you. If it does, you will also remain in the Son and in the Father. ²⁵ And this is the promise that He Himself made to us: eternal life. ²⁶ I have written these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you. ²⁷ And as for you, the anointing you received from Him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But just as His true and genuine anointing teaches you about all things, so remain in Him as you have been taught.
Word study "Anointing" — chrisma (1 John 2:20, 27)
Greek: χρῖσμα (chrisma), pronounced KHREE-smah. Strong’s G5545.
A deliberate wordplay against “anti-christ.” Christos means “Anointed One,” so an anti-christos is, among other things, someone set against the Anointed One and His anointing. Against that counterfeit claim to special, secret knowledge, John tells his readers plainly that they already carry a chrisma, an anointing, “from the Holy One.” They have no need to be taken in by a rival teacher offering them a higher spiritual insight, because they were never lacking the real thing. It is the same Spirit who, John recorded in his own Gospel, would teach and bring to remembrance everything Jesus had said:
"But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have told you." John 14:26 (BSB)
The anointing does not make ordinary teaching or Scripture unnecessary; it means a believer already has what it takes to recognize a counterfeit gospel when one is offered.
Word study "Abide" — menō (1 John 2:24, 27, 28)
Greek: μένω (menō), pronounced MEH-no. Strong’s G3306.
The letter’s single most repeated verb, returning more than twenty times across its five short chapters. Yesterday’s reading closed with one of its early, repeated appearances: “whoever does the will of God remains forever” (v. 17). Today it becomes the passage’s own refrain, used five times in three verses: let what you heard “remain” in you (v. 24), so that you will “remain” in the Son and the Father (v. 24), the anointing “remains” in you (v. 27), so “remain” in Him as you were taught (v. 27), and “remain in Christ” as the passage turns toward confidence at His coming (v. 28). Menō names an ongoing, settled dwelling, not a one-time decision to look back on but a continuous, present-tense relationship: in the truth, in the Son, in the Father. Security in this letter is not static. It is relational and continuous, matching the letter’s whole method of testing a life again and again rather than certifying it once.
“Let what you have heard from the beginning remain in you. If it does, you will also remain in the Son and in the Father” (v. 24). Continuity with the earliest apostolic teaching is itself part of the test; a gospel that departs from what was originally handed down is, by definition, a different gospel. And the promise attached to that continuity is not modest: “eternal life” itself (v. 25), the same phrase the whole letter has been building toward since its opening claim to proclaim “the Word of life” (1:1).
1 John 2:28–29 (BSB)
²⁸ And now, little children, remain in Christ, so that when He appears, we may be confident and unashamed before Him at His coming. ²⁹ If you know that He is righteous, you also know that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of Him.
Abiding now produces confidence later, not shame, “at His coming,” a word (parousia in the underlying Greek) this series will meet again directly on Day 7. The chapter closes by tying righteous living back to having been “born of Him,” the same “born of God” language Day 5 takes up in full. John has moved, in twelve verses, from a real and painful church split to a settled confidence for those who stayed: an anointing that teaches, a truth that abides, and a righteousness that traces back to actually having been born of God.
Personal Application
- The first test you apply. What would it look like, practically, to let a teaching’s answer to “who is Jesus, really?” be the very first test you apply to it, before its warmth, its confidence, or anything else about it gets the chance to appeal to you?
- Memory or abiding? Do you tend to locate your own security in the memory of a decision made once, back at some point in the past, or in an ongoing, present abiding in what you were taught? What would change if you leaned harder on the second?
- Whose voice teaches you? Where in your life right now do you already lean on the Spirit’s own quiet teaching, through Scripture and the truth you were first given, rather than an outside voice claiming some special or exclusive insight?
Pray to Close
The truth to carry forward: those who left proved, by leaving, that they never truly belonged, and the anointing already given to those who stayed is enough to keep them from being deceived. Abiding, not a memory of a single decision, is where lasting confidence is found.
Praise: that God has not left His people to be talked out of the truth by every confident voice that comes along, but has given every believer an anointing that teaches.
Confess: any point where a persuasive voice, rather than what was taught “from the beginning,” has been allowed to define who Jesus is.
Ask: for a life so settled in abiding, in the truth, in the Son, in the Father, that His coming would be met with confidence rather than shame.
Worship for Today
Firm Foundation (He Won't) · Cody Carnes
This song answers the passage’s central pressure with the same plain confidence John offers his readers: whatever else moves, shifts, or tries to talk you off your footing, the ground beneath a believer’s feet does not. Its refrain, that God is a firm foundation and He won’t move, gives contemporary voice to exactly what it means to “remain in the Son and in the Father” (v. 24) when a group that once stood alongside you no longer does. Abiding is not a passive holding-on; it is trust placed in a foundation that was never going to give way, no matter how many voices insist otherwise.
Listen: