<p>2:20 <em>And you have an anointing from the Holy One and you know all these things</em>- The grammar here means that the &quot;anointing&quot; is the thing anointed with, as it were the oil used in the anointing. But literally, it means 'a Christ-ing', for &quot;Christ&quot; means 'anointed'. The reference is to the Spirit. John in his gospel has recorded how the Lord promised the gift of the Comforter, to the point that the disciples would feel His personal presence as if He were physically present as He had been in the brief years of His ministry. Note that John applies this allusion to the Comforter to &quot;you&quot;, his converts, who had not met the Lord. The promise of the Comforter was therefore not just to the original disciples but &quot;for ever&quot;, to all subsequent believers. This presence of the Spirit was effectively the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ personally in their hearts. And by this &quot;you know all these things&quot;, referring to their knowledge of the Judas-like individuals who had entered their community and then gone out from them- presumably, because they &quot;knew&quot; them. Perhaps the allusion is to how the Lord through His spirit &quot;knew from the beginning&quot; those such as Judas who didn't sincerely believe and should betray Him (Jn. 6:64). His spirit had been given to the believers; the &quot;anointing&quot; was the means by which He abode within them and taught them &quot;all things&quot; (:27), and He abides in His people by His Spirit (3:24; 4:13; Jn. 14:17). The &quot;things&quot; immediately in view here are about the Judaist plot to infiltrate the fledgling churches. Paul had the same revealed knowledge, but seems to have been less successful in stamping it out than John was in his community.</p><p>We read in :20,27 that we have each been anointed. The idea of anointing was to signal the initiation of someone. I'd therefore be inclined to see this as alluding to baptism; when we become in Christ, in the anointed, then as 2 Cor. 1:21 says, we too are anointed in a sense by the gift of the Spirit. We're given a specific mission and purpose. &quot;The anointing that you received&quot; would therefore refer to our commissioning at baptism and the empowerment of the Spirit to achieve it. The Comforter passages are in the specific context of promising empowerment in obeying the great commission of preaching the Lord to all nations. And it is that same commission which is in view here. It seems to imply a one time act of being anointed / commissioned / inaugurated for service. Baptism isn't therefore merely an initiation into a community; it's a specific commissioning for active service, in ways which are unique to us. We do well to bring this point out to those we prepare for baptism. The words for 'anointing' are unique to 1 John but they occur in the LXX to describe the anointing / initiation of the priests, and of the tabernacle / dwelling place of God (e.g. Ex. 29:7; 35:14,28). John sees us as the dwelling place / tabernacle of the Father. There is some historical evidence that candidates for baptism in the early church were anointed with oil. References- uninspired of course, just for historical interest- are Tertullian, <em>De Baptismo</em>, 7.1,2; and various references in the 'Didascalia', the Acts of Judas Thomas, and the Pseudo-Clementine epistles. It could be that in the house ecclesias to whom John was writing, there was already this practice in place, and the initial readers would've understood this clearly. Paul, writing to a different audience, uses a different figure when he speaks of being &quot;sealed with that holy spirit of promise&quot;. We are after all baptized into the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So the anointing which we've received would in my view refer back to our baptism. It was the initiation of us into service, just as the priests and tabernacle parts were anointed. The question we much each sort out is, what are our specific talents, our gifts, the potential uses for which the Father and Son intend us, the paths of service they potentially mapped out for us and initiated us for at our immersions?</p>