<p>1:7 <em>For many deceivers have gone out into the world, especially those that do not confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist</em>- The &quot;for&quot; connects the warning against false teaching with the call back to <em>agape</em> love in :5,6. The end result of understanding that the Lord was of our nature is love, love as He loved. I suggested on 1 Jn. 4 and 5 that John's communities were up against the problem of Judaist infiltrators (also in Gal. 2:4 and in the churches Paul founded). They did not &quot;confess&quot; Jesus as Christ, lest they be put out of the synagogue (Jn. 9:22). Yet they had entered into the Christian churches, with an agenda of bringing them to Judaism and destroying their faith in Jesus as the Messiah. They had come up with the idea that the Lord was not really fully human, or that the Jewish Messiah was not to be a person &quot;in the flesh&quot;. The ideas of deceit and &quot;antichrist&quot; are elsewhere associated by John with the Judaist system. These people were not therefore sincere Christians who genuinely misunderstand some Bible verses. These deceivers were out to deceive, and had gone out into the Jewish world as part of a conscious program of deception of Christians. Heb. 10:5 uses the same phrase for how the Lord 'went out into the world'. They were false, imitation Christs, which is the idea of 'anti' Christ.</p><p>That we can&rsquo;t be secret believers is brought out here. Anyone who does not confess publicly that Jesus came in the flesh is described by John as a deceiver and even anti-Christ. The French Segond version is clearest: &ldquo;ne declarent pas publiquement&rdquo;. Whilst the passage is open to a number of interpretations, in our context the point perhaps is that to secretly believe in Christ isn&rsquo;t possible- it must in some way be declared publicly or else we are &ldquo;deceivers&rdquo;. The Judaist infiltrators did not confess Jesus as Christ publicly lest they be cast out of Jewish society (Jn. 9:22); and this was the evidence, John says, that they were not of the Spirit of Jesus and were frauds, false Christians.</p><p>We may wonder why John is at such pains to point out that Christ &quot;came in the flesh&quot;, and why he pronounced anathema upon those who denied that (2 Jn. 7-9). It seems to me that his converts had come up against Jewish attempts to re-interpret Jesus in terms of apostate Jewish thinking about Angels and the whole nature of existence, the kind of heresy battled against in Hebrews and Colossians. Take Jewish views of the Angels who appeared to Abraham. Josephus says they &quot;gave him to believe that they did eat&quot; (<em>Antiquities</em> 1.197); Philo claimed that &quot;though they neither ate nor drank, they gave the appearance of both eating and drinking&quot; (<em>Abraham</em> 118). The Bible states simply that they ate. And that Jesus likewise ate after His resurrection. John emphasizes that the Lord Jesus had been fully tangible, the disciples touched and felt Him (1 Jn. 1:1-4); and that His death was equally real (1 Jn. 1:7; 2:2; 4:10; 5:6-9). And he presses the point that this is what had been believed &quot;from the beginning&quot;, indicating that already new ideas were coming into the Christian communities about the nature of Jesus. This of itself shows that the whole issue of who Jesus is <em>does</em> matter; that the Christ was and is the <em>real</em> Christ was for John crucially important, as it is for me. Hence this book. The inspired apostle didn't simply shrug off these new ideas as well meaning misunderstandings. He speaks against them in the toughest possible terms.</p>