AP

2 John 1:9-11  Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teacing of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.  If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not take them into your house or welcome them.  Anyone who welcomes them shares in their wicked work.

As the Early Church grew and spread out it attracted many people from different backgrounds and cultures.  Among these were those who wanted to ‘update’ the simple gospel message, to make it more amenable to the contemporary culture, more intellectually satisfying, even more ‘spiritual’, more mature.  The aged apostle John could see the effect such heresy was having: these ’teachers’ were so ‘advanced’ in their thinking they had even left God behind!  There was no longer any place for God in their ‘modernised’ theology.  They didn’t seem to realise that ‘God-the-Father-revealed-in-Christ-his-One-and-only-Son’ is a package deal!

The Church has continued to run that risk in every age, and no less in our post-modern era.  The Lord Jesus Christ made it quite clear who he was and why he came.  By ‘the teaching of Christ’ John means both the divinely inspired apostolic doctrine about Christ as well as what Jesus himself taught.

Our modernistic world might scoff at conservative, Bible-believing theology that insists that there is no salvation apart from Jesus, that he is God the Son who came into our world in human form, that he is the promised Messiah who gave his life on the cross as our substitute to save us from our sin, that he rose bodily from the tomb and now rules at God’s right hand, etc, etc.  It might consider such thinking outmoded and intellectually naive, but none of this accords with actual biblical truth.

In my own ministry training in a course that was liberal in its approach at every level, I was constantly accused of ‘still being at a ‘Sunday School’ level’, and was encouraged to put that behind me and to ‘grow up’ into ‘more mature, adult thinking’.  By God’s grace alone, and the ardent prayers of many friends, I was able to resist the temptation to become ‘more academically acceptable’.

Jude, addressing a situation similar to the one John found himself in, and which I had to battle against, urges us to ‘contend for the ‘faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints’ (1:5).  There is no other way to God.  Notice that John also warns us against ‘welcoming’ such false teaches because Satan’s wiles are often so subtle that we can too easily be seduced away from God’s revealed truth, for the sake of ‘being relevant to modernist culture’, without really noticing it.  “Tell me the same old story when you have cause to fear that this world’s empty glory is costing me too dear; yes, and when that world’s glory shall dawn upon my soul, tell me the old, old story: ‘Christ Jesus makes thee whole’” (Kate Hankey).

– Bruce Christian