<p>4:2 <em>Hereby do you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ came in the flesh is of God</em>- The Judaist infiltrators claimed to have the Spirit, as the true Christians did. For being without the spirit of Christ makes a man &quot;none of His&quot;. So exactly what &quot;spirit&quot; they claimed to have needed to be tested. People here are called 'spirits' because of the close identification between a person and their 'spirit'. True Christians would have the spirit of Christ at their core and would thereby be personally, openly identified with Him. John's Gospel has spoken of the difference between claiming faith in Christ, and confessing or professing Him before men. The cross elicited open and total confession of Him before men. John the Baptist is presented as an example of a man who confessed and did not deny the Lord (Jn. 1:20), and Joseph and Nicodemus are presented as examples of men who went from secret faith to the open confession required of a true Christian. Many Jewish 'believers' refused to confess Jesus as Christ because the penalty for such confession was exclusion from the synagogue system and the Jewish world (Jn. 9:22; 12:42); see on 2:23.</p><p>So firstly, a person filled with the spirit of Christ, the Messiah, would actually confess Jesus as Christ, as Messiah. The Judaist infiltrators would not openly confess Him in this way. But they must confess that He &quot;came in the flesh&quot;. They had to openly accept that Jesus was a real person; for already incipient ideas of Docetism 'seeming' and Gnosticism were being advocated by the Jews as a way of clouding the whole issue- that a man born of Mary was Son of God and Messiah, having a perfect character, and now risen, was able to share His spirit with believers in Him. I demonstrated in <a href=http://www.realchrist.info/><em>The Real Christ</em> </a>that much false teaching about the nature of the Lord began with Jewish attempts to cloud the true Christian teaching about the Lord; and these attempts later morphed by further extension into the absurdities of Trinitarian doctrine.</p><p>The idea of &quot;Christ comes...&quot; cannot be pressed to support any idea of pre-existence. It was a standard Jewish phrase to refer to the arrival of the Messiah (so used in Mt. 24:5; Jn. 4:25;&nbsp;7:27,31,41,42; 11:27). So the idea would be that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah who should &quot;come&quot;; and He came as an actual human being, &quot;in the flesh&quot;. He was the manifestation of God &quot;in the flesh&quot; (1 Tim. 3:16). Already Judaism was beginning to suggest that Messiah was just some abstract, idealistic personification rather than a literal person. That idea is popular in reform Judaism to this day.</p><p>There is another possibility. The Lord had promised that despite His physical departure, He would &quot;come&quot; to the disciples, in that the gift of His Spirit in their hearts would make His presence as real and moreso as when He was literally with them (Jn. 14:18). His 'coming' to His people was therefore through His Spirit indwelling their flesh. The very same Greek words are used when Paul explains that the life of the risen Jesus, His Spirit, is made manifest &quot;in our mortal flesh&quot; right now (see on 2 Cor. 4:11). The Spirit gift would be given to &quot;all flesh&quot; (Acts 2:17 s.w.). Hence Paul could say that &quot;Christ lives in me... in the flesh&quot; (Gal. 2:20). In this case, the &quot;spirit&quot;, the person claiming to have the Spirit, would confess that the spirit of the Lord Jesus had entered them, their &quot;flesh&rdquo;.</p>