Lying evil spirits, and society.

1 John 4.4-6.

In the previous passage I mentioned how evil spirits like to feed us false information to drive us away from God’s kingdom. And thus far, John points out, his audience has overcome these evil spirits, and overcome the fake prophets they encouraged to proclaim false things. His audience does know Jesus, and knows better than to fall for the false teachings of people who claim Jesus isn’t human, isn’t Messiah, isn’t Lord.

1 John 4.4-6 KWL

4Children, you’re² from God.

You overcame the fake prophets,

for the Lord among you² is greater

than anyone in the world.

5They’re from society;

this is why they speak of society

and society listens to them.

6You’re² from God.

Anyone who knows God, listens to us.

Whoever isn’t from God, doesn’t listen to us.

From this, we know the spirit of truth

and the spirit of error.

The second half of verse 4, which the KJV renders, “because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world,” gets quoted a lot. And commonly misinterpreted: Christians figure “he that is in you” is Jesus, who lives inside our hearts; and “he that is in the world” is of course the devil, who got thrown down to earth after it fought Michael and lost, Rv 12.9 and ever since has been harassing Christians. Rv 12.17

I translated it a little differently. There’s no “he” in these verses; there’s the determiner ὁ/o, which usually indicates a subject noun. But when there actually is no subject noun—like we have here—it becomes the subject noun, and now it means “the one.” Which one? Well, you gotta figure that part out from context. The writers of the KJV decided to not figure it out, and go with “he,” since o is after all a masculine-form word. And like I said, Christians figured “he” refers in the first instance to Jesus, and in the second to Satan.

I have to keep reminding Christians that the person of the trinity who actually does indwell us is the Holy Spirit. “I have Jesus in my heart” is a metaphor representing how Jesus has my allegiance, obedience, trust, and love, but Jesus isn’t physically in me; he’s at the right hand of the Father. Ac 2.33 Meanwhile the Spirit is actually within us, working on us; and we Christians are collectively his temple. But rather than pedantically insert “Holy Spirit” into verse 4, I figured “Lord”—because the Spirit is Lord, same as Jesus; they’re coequal with the Father—works too.

As for the devil being the other o, I don’t know that it is. Really the other o could be anybody in the world; any malevolent person, whether evil spirit or evil human. Does it matter? The Holy Spirit can overcome them all.

Fake prophets’ motivations.

Throughout history, Christians have wondered why evil spirits strive to mislead us, ’cause the scriptures don’t actually say. Seriously, they don’t. The devil is a dirty liar, and the “father of lies,” but the bible never tells us why it seems so hellbent on deceiving humanity. So we’ve speculated.

Some figure it’s revenge on God for ejecting the devil and its angels from heaven. But part of this explanation is based on assuming the devil’s fall took place before creation… and not, as Revelation 12 has it, after Jesus’s birth. The devil got Adam and Eve to sin millennia before Michael defeated it, and cast it down. So it can’t be revenge for that. Nor for foreseeing it; if the devil were any good at foreseeing stuff, the things it tells fake prophets about the future would be way more accurate.

Christian myths claim the fight against Michael had to do with Satan trying to overthrow God. Which on its face is a ridiculous theory. Overthrow the Almighty? You’d have to be 20 kinds of stupid to entertain the idea. But that myth comes from pagan mythology, in which the Jötunns tried to overthrow the Norse gods, and the Titans tried to overthrow the Greek gods. Those gods most definitely aren’t almighty; they can be overthrown, and the Norse even believed someday they would be overthrown. Medieval Christian poets borrowed from those myths to create their fictions, but again: It’s not a plausible theory. God is not weak, and Satan knows God is not weak. It’s why it still flees from Christian opposition Jm 4.7 —if we have the Holy Spirit within, Satan knows it’s as good as defeated again.

C.S. Lewis had an interesting guess. He imagined it’s like fishing: If a devil catches you, it gets to keep you, and in some sense consume you. Devils lack God in their lives, and feel this emptiness greater than a human does, and if it can possess a creature made in God’s image, this’ll fill its emptiness somewhat.

Me, I figure a devil’s motivation isn’t far different from a human’s motivation. Why do we lead one another astray? Well, sometimes we’re astray, and think we’re helping—“No no, Christianity has it wrong, and let me tell you what’s really going on here”—and we’re trying to enlarge our cults. In some cases I’ve seen people who led themselves astray: People manufacture an idea that’s pure fiction, but so attractive they can’t bear to give it up, even if it’s easily disproved. (Narcissists in particular do this.) And if they can get people to actually believe their bushwa, they love that.

But usually it’s for fun and profit. We mislead people for the evil entertainment of watching them wreck themselves over this false belief. We lie to them so we can get money out of ’em. The devil can’t personally do a whole lot with money and wealth. It can do quite a bit with power. And it can troll as much as it wants, and does.

For fake prophets, their motives are the very same. Money, wealth, prestige, power, and they get to mess with people and laugh at what silly suckers they are. So they pay attention to society, and heavily invest themselves in it so they can speak to it, and tell it everything it wants to hear, 1Jn 4.5 and thereby extract these things from it.

So in verse 5, John indicates another way we can identify a fake prophet: If they only tickle the itching ears of the public, but don’t actually uplift Jesus, promote his kingdom, and produce good fruit. If they make tons of money but have no good deeds to show for it; if they have a massive church campus, and a millionaire pastor, but they don’t feed the hungry, clothe the naked, treat the sick, visit the prisoner, nor preach the gospel to the poor ’cause the poor don’t pay.

Such people pretend to follow Jesus to a point, but ultimately Jesus is competition. If they really do follow him, they’d have to correct and rebuke their followers, and that’d lose them power and money, and they can’t have that. So yeah, there’s a lot of the spirit of antichrist in there—’cause they kinda want to be Christ. Be wary.