When Believers Become Antichrists

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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist, my name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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Today is November 19th, 2020 and if you're following along in our daily Bible reading, you're going to be reading from 1 John chapter 2.
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And that's going to be the subject of our lesson for today.
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So if you have your Bibles, go ahead and open them to 1 John 2.
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And I would encourage you later after the program to read through the whole chapter or you can pause the program now and read through the whole chapter.
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But I want to focus on one particular verse that is very important in this chapter and one that is important on not only within the context of this passage, but also for the subject of those who go away from the church, those who depart the faith.
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Oftentimes when this question comes up about those who depart the church or those who depart the faith, and I understand that there's a distinction to be made there and I'll make that distinction more fully in a second.
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But ultimately, this passage says something about those who go out from us.
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And I want to read it to you.
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It says, They went out from us, but they were not of us.
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For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us.
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But they went out that it might become plain that they all are not of us.
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Okay, so when we talk about someone leaving the faith or someone leaving the church, a distinction has to be made.
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Certainly, it is true that someone can leave one church and go to another church.
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And there can be a variety of reasons, some good, some bad.
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But there are definitely times when someone can, in good conscience, leave a fellowship and join another fellowship.
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Very recently, I did a lesson on this just a few weeks ago on the subject of how are we to respond when someone leaves the church and goes to another church.
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And I said, well, as an elder, one thing that changes when a person leaves my church and goes and joins another church is that they're no longer under the spiritual leadership of the church, of this church, of the church that they were in, which is this church.
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And so when they go out from this church and go to another church, then they're not necessarily in sin or doing anything wrong.
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But the relationship does change because the relationship of oversight, the relationship of being responsible spiritually for their well-being, the Bible says, to the elders, shepherd the flock that is among you.
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And when the flock departs, if they're no longer among you, then certainly you cannot be expected to shepherd that person.
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But this particular passage, I believe, is referring not necessarily specifically to people who go from one church to another, but rather for people who go out from the church, specifically go out from the universal church.
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They're leaving the body of Christ.
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And we see this in verse 18, it says, children, it is the last hour.
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And as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come.
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Therefore we know that it is the last hour.
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They went out from us.
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What is an antichrist? We often think of antichrist as a person, as the antichrist, as that, according to some end times views, that last main villain who is going to come on the scene and lead people astray and, you know, be the person that sort of gathers the nations against Christ.
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And Christ is going to come back and destroy the work of the antichrist, sometimes referred to as the beast in Revelation 13.
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And of course, there are some differences of opinion as to how to interpret who the antichrist is.
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Some people believe the antichrist is a political leader.
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Some people believe he's a religious leader.
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Some people believe that this is actually referring to someone who has already been on the scene looking back in history.
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So ultimately, what we need to understand is when John uses the term antichrist here, he's ultimately referring to people who are against Christ.
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And that's why he says, many antichrists have come.
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He's referring not to one specific individual.
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He's referring to the antichrists, those who are opposed to Christ, and they have come.
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And so John says, we know that they have come.
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They went out from us, but they were not of us.
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You see, these were people who once called themselves Christians.
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They were once part of the body of Christ by profession.
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And this becomes the big question.
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Well, if they were part of the body of Christ by profession, does that mean they were truly part of the body of Christ? And the answer, I believe, is no.
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And I believe we learned that from this passage.
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It says they went out that it might be complained that they are all not of us.
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They they are not of us.
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They said they were of us.
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They went out from us.
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And by going out from us, they demonstrated that they were not of us.
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You see, that's the point.
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If a person departs the faith, it's not as if they were saved and now they're lost again.
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It is that they were confessing to be a part of the body of Christ.
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And now they have departed the faith to demonstrate that they were not truly of us.
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They were they were of us in one sense.
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They were of us by name.
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They were of us by covenant identification.
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They identified themselves as believers and members of the new covenant.
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They called themselves Christians.
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They probably were of us in the sense that they shared in the same spiritual food of hearing the word of God, participation in the Lord's Supper, probably having been baptized.
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So they have received all of those things that are the outward experiences of a life of faith.
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And this is where I think Hebrew six comes in, because Hebrew six talks about the person who has tasted of the heavenly gift and who has experienced all of these things that are in relationship to being a Christian.
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And yet they have fallen away.
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They have abandoned the faith.
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They have gone out from us again, not moving from one church to another, but abandoning the faith altogether.
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And we've seen this.
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This is a reality that happens.
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It's not something that is simply a, well, this might happen.
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And we've all seen people who have gone out from us.
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They started as believers.
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They started as, and by that I mean confessing believers, not I would say they were not genuine, but they started as people who confessed to be believers.
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But as Jesus told us in the parable of the soils, that the seed fell among certain soils and sprang up for a season, but it withered away because it had no root.
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What does it mean to have no root? Well, it means that they truly, I believe, have not been born again.
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They went out from us, but they were not of us.
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They truly were not born again.
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They have become antichrists because they have become those who are in opposition to what they once proclaimed.
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They once proclaimed to be of Christ.
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Now they are opposed to Jesus Christ.
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And what do we do with such a one? What do we do with one who was among us and now has gone out from us? How do we respond to the person who goes out? I think first and foremost, we have to pray for that person because that person was deceived.
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They said they were a believer.
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They may have even believed they were a believer.
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I think of one person in particular, Dan Barker, who was who is now an atheist, very famous atheist.
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He was once a preacher.
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And so he was deceived about his own beliefs because he was deceived to the point where he was preaching to others.
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And yet he himself was not truly a believer.
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Sam Kinison, the comedian many of you are familiar with.
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He was very popular in the 80s.
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He was in the film Back to School.
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He was in some television programs.
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Sam Kinison was a Pentecostal preacher.
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And yet he departed from the faith.
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He repudiated the faith.
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He opposed it.
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He became an antichrist.
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He was opposed to Christ.
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And he went out from us, not from our church specifically, but he went out from the church.
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And the reason why he went out from us was because he was not of us.
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They went out from us, but they were not of us.
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For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us.
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But they went out that it might become plain that they all are not of us.
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So that is something that we need to consider as we are going through First John chapter two, it tells us that there are those who have gone out from us and the reason why they've gone out is because they were not truly believers.
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So we pray for them.
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We pray that their deception would be removed, that they would recognize like Dan Barker would say, I once was a Christian.
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Now I'm not.
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He needs to recognize he was never a believer.
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He was never a Christian.
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And by God's grace that can save anyone, we could pray that God would save him, that God would open his eyes to believe.
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And we know that God can, if God so chooses.
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And so we leave it in the hands of God, knowing that only he can take a heart of stone and turn it into a heart of flesh.
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I hope today has been helpful to you as you are going about your daily Bible reading.
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Again, this follows along with our daily Bible reading at Sovereign Grace Family Church, reading one chapter a day in the New Testament every day, every weekday.
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And if you'd like a copy of our daily Bible reading list, you can do so by going to sgfcjacks.org, that's Sovereign Grace Family Church of Jacksonville, sgfcjacks.org.
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Thank you again for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I have been your Calvinist.
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May God bless you.
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We love to receive your comments and questions and may even engage with them in a future episode.
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As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to him in repentance and faith will find him to be a perfect savior.
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He is the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through him.
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May God be with you.