Consider this one piece of evidence: millions of people who have spent years attending church, and yet they don’t know God.
Their heads are filled with stuffing about Jesus, but they do not experience him, not as the boys did on the beach. There are millions more who love Jesus Christ, but experience him only occasionally, more often stumbling along short of the life he promised, like Lazarus still wrapped in his graveclothes.
Can anything be more diabolical?
If you sent someone you loved to school for a decade, yet they remained illiterate, how would you feel about the education? If you referred someone you loved to a doctor, yet despite years of treatment they not only failed to recover from their cancer but contracted AIDS, hepatitis and gangrene, what would you have to conclude about the treatment?
I am not making accusations; I am stating facts.
Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath. His enemies decided to kill him. Do you really think that’s over?! Why would that have ended with the time of Christ? Really now—it would be just a little arrogant for us to assume we could not fall under the same religious haze.
Thus George MacDonald, that old Scottish prophet, asks, “How have we learned Christ? It ought to be a startling thought, that we may have learned him wrong.” It is a startling thought.
“That must be far worse than not to have learned him at all: his place is occupied by a false Christ, hard to exorcise!” Hard to exorcise, indeed, because religion gives the impression of having Christ, while it inoculates you from experiencing the real thing. Most wicked. If you want to destroy an economy, flood the market with counterfeit bills.
So the apostle John gives a last word of warning:
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. … This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood. (1 John 4:1-3, 6)
