”Beloved, not every spirit you all be trusting, but rather you all be proving by testing the spirits, if out of God it is, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”
-They say that trust is earned, but so is distrust. Trust is actually the default setting on the human heart - kids believe what you tell them. Jesus taught us to trust like little children. And kids do that - until you or I or someone else prove untrustworthy and begin to give them reasons to distrust. As we grow up we learn that we can’t in fact trust everybody. People let us down. People make mistakes. People are mistaken. Some of us wind up so disappointed and disillusioned and wounded and jaded that we find it next to impossible to trust anyone. We still want to trust, however, especially in matters of faith. We’re hardwired to trust. Our souls retain an earnest longing for a shepherd who will watch over us and guide us and feed us, someone we can trust. We come to a setting like the church where we assume (desperately hope even) that we should be able to find truth and a trustworthy shepherd. Sadly, too often this is not the case.
-False prophets. False teachers. Liars. You can’t trust what they say - makes it hard to know who you CAN trust. Even in John’s day, there were many of them, apparently. They had gone out into all the world, Trying to deceive and lead people away from the truth. In our day it has been typified by the so-called televangelists. The preachers of prosperity who so often seem more interested in helping your money find a way into their own pockets than in helping you to find heaven and a heaping helping of soul-satisfying truth. A generation ago when there were only a handful of stations on television it was a lot easier to stumble across them. Their voice has perhaps been diluted somewhat with the rise of the new digital media and so many more entertainment mediums to choose from, but in their heydey they helped to produce an entire generation of cynics. Such false teachers are enough to turn your stomach, turn you off, and turn even the most hopeful believer into a cynic. Or a skeptic. Makes it hard to know who to believe, who to trust, or if you can even trust anyone at all. But John is not here endorsing cynicism. Life in a broken world can cetainly do that, turn anyone into a cynic. Where you question everything and everyone and are unwilling to trust at any level. You’ve been burned, or you’ve seen too much, heard one too many charlatans.
-But John is not saying that we should never trust, that we should trust no spirit whatsoever not ever - just not all of them. Because anyone can be mistaken, at any time. Even the wisest, most-learned of teachers. And, John affirms, it is possible to know which spirits are in fact from God. He wants us to take some responsibility for our diet, for our intake of truth. So he tells us to be testing the spirits. You and I and anyone really can prove whether or not what someone is teaching is true or false. Weigh what someone is saying against the counsel of Scrpiture. And be a fruit inspector - look at the fruit of their lives as well as the fruit in the lives of those who are following their teaching. John is suggesting that we all become amateur alethiologists. Alethiology is the study of truth, and he is putting the onus of knowing and being able to test truth on his readers. On us. Truth sleuths! It is easier perhaps to leave it up to someone else, to not bother to go through the trouble of testing anyone. Of course this invariably gives rise to the Pied Piper syndrome and could lead to the shipwreck of your faith. Or one could simply choose to not believe, not trust anyone. The possible outcomes here are just as ruinous, if not moreso. But as there is strength in numbers, we can do this, with the help of the One Jesus sent to help us, Who came to guide us into all truth. Pied Piper prevention. This is possible - we’ve got this.
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