2 John 11 Anyone who welcomes them shares their wicked work.
“Bad company corrupts good morals.” “You are known by the company you keep.”
I remember hearing these quotes when I was growing up. I am sure there were a few more with this same theme, but the ravages of time have eroded by memory. I am sure Ben Franklin was thrown into the quote barrel a few times.
What these quotes had in common was the idea that we are influenced by those with whom we have association, and we influence those around us. This influence is often more than what we say; it is more often what we do. Our very lives are much more powerful than our words.
The author of our text today is very aware of the affect of the influence of other people. He is seeing that influence happening to those to whom he is writing, and that influence is not a good thing, because those who are doing the influencing, or possible influencing are not following the Truth of the Gospel.
He sees them perverting the Gospel, robbing it of its power. They do this by leaving behind and moving to a different foundational belief. Instead of staying true to the central core of the Gospel, that Jesus died for our sins and rose again, they are departing and starting at a completely different foundation.
And as everyone knows, if you don’t know where you are when you begin a journey, it can be very difficult to arrive at your destination if you follow a set of instructions based on a different starting point. Where we start is just as important as where we end up. So it is with the Gospel.
If we try to end up honoring the LORD with our lives, but we don’t start with the Truth about who He is and what He has accomplished, then we certainly can’t end up honoring Him. When we divorce ourselves and our belief system from His revelation of Himself in history, and specifically in the person of Jesus, then we can’t get to the correct destination, holiness that reflects His holiness.
So the author warns his readers about these teachers, he calls them deceivers, revealing their intentions. They are teaching that Jesus was not who He claimed to be. They claimed He wasn’t really a human being, that he was some other kind of being. They claimed his body wasn’t a real human body, a phantom or spirit being, a ghost type of being. He certainly wasn’t fully human.
But the Gospel depends on Jesus being fully human. He becomes the Second Adam, so He must be human, fully human. He can’t die for a race of people to whom He is not related. He must be fully human.
And He must be fully God. No half and half. No substitutes will do. And yet this is what they were teaching. No wonder the author tells the readers to have nothing to do with this group of teachers.
There are teachers today who have followed the example of these deceivers. They have rejected Jesus as He has been understood by the Church for almost two thousand years. The are preaching and teaching about a less-than Jesus Jesus. We must avoid these teacher’s influence at all costs. We must not associate with them.
The Arnold Journey 