St. John has a very neat way of dividing people, teachings and actions into opposites. Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, Love and Hate, We and You, Us and Them, Christ and Anti-Christ.
Either one is in or not - there is no middle ground. St. John's measures are very clear too. It is quite simply the anointing of the Holy Spirit that both informs what you believe and guides how you live and therefore places you 'in' or 'out'.
His logic is simple and straightforward. The Holy Spirit is the means be which we understand the Gospel, it is the means by which we recognise and accept Jesus as divine and one with the Father and it is the way that we recognise truth and have our lives our shaped by it.
This is of course not a rational argument but it is rooted in orthodox Christian experience. When the Church comes to make decisions and understand the truth, it absolutely must be led by this same Holy Spirit and remain connected with the apostolic experience and message. We are all connected through this Holy Spirit in a way which is real or not - it is not something that comes and goes - it is the source eternal life and the life starts now.
Antichrists are not strange people who have occult powers to corrupt, they are simply ordinary people who deny Jesus - his divinity and his claim on their lives and thereby denying themselves the presence and work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. The eternal life of the Gospel is something that is always there and there are a thousand antichrist arguments that sound so reasonable, but from St. John's perspective - you either know or you don't. Sometimes, the simplest choices are the hardest and the ones we are keenest to avoid.
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