Daily Archive

Notable Gnostics

I’m going to run very quickly through a couple of Gnostic heresies to show you what John was up against as he wrote his epistles to the churches. There have been, throughout history, identifications made of elders in several key churches around the Mediterranean in the first 200 years of the church. We know who these men are because they have unsound doctrinal systems named after them, things that they began to teach in the church that led the church astray and led to horrible, terrible church splits and conflict. These are some of the people that John is writing about, possibly even some that were alive during this time who he knew.

“Who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ,
he is the Antichrist who denies the Father and the Son.
Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either.
He who acknowledges the Son has the Father also.”

This is what we know looking at history. From the Gnostic heresy came an attack on the person of Christ. And this was the hidden knowledge that the Gnostics claimed to teach. The Spirit is good and pure. The flesh is corrupt and evil. And so our goal in the Christian life is to free the good and pure spirit from the evil, corrupted flesh. Now, how do you do that? Well, according to the teachings of Christ, you repent, you believe, you obey Him, you walk in sanctification, you grow in grace, you do all of these things, mortify the deeds of the flesh, and your sanctification will end in the process as we are then glorified.

The Gnostics taught that the Spirit is good, the flesh is evil, and so in order to free one from the other, since the flesh imprisons the Spirit, then here’s a simple solution. You don’t have to do all of this lifelong obedience to Christ and all of this holy living and all of this obey this and obey that. Here’s what you do. You do whatever you can do to kill the body because then the flesh will be free. What kills the body? Sin. So the more horrible sin you can commit, the faster you can kill yourself. Not actually put a gun to your head and commit suicide, but live in such a way that your actions will result in your death so that your spirit is free. That’s insane. That’s Gnosticism.

And here’s how it was taught. It was taught first by one of the men, one of the elders actually in the church in Alexandria, Egypt, known as Cerinthus. And this is what he taught. Jesus, the man, was a physical man, but he was not God in the flesh. Instead, the Spirit of Christ came upon him at his baptism, anointed him to be the Messiah, but then before he was crucified, left him, because Cerinthus taught God cannot die. So who died was just a man named Jesus, who for a time had been possessed by the Spirit of Christ. Once the man Jesus died and had set an example for us, then the Spirit came back, raised the body to life, and then we had a resurrected Messiah to follow. Now, this is a doctrine that is known as Adoptionism.

Interestingly, by the way, Cerinthus began to teach that he had come to understand that this was the truth about Jesus one night when an angel came and told him the story. And as he taught this then, he claimed that Jesus was just the man, not the Son of God, empowered by the Spirit of Christ who is now departed. Jesus, his body is in a grave somewhere, but that Christ’s spirit lives on, and his power is available to us.

This idea of Adoptionism has given birth to what we know now as Unitarianism. The idea that everything spiritual is good, everything physical is bad, and we are to seek to free the body from the spirit, to set the mind and the spirit free through all of these different activities.

Carpocrates was another, known as a Libertine Gnostic. He said that you have to free the spirit from the body by indulgence in sin. He actually taught a form of hedonism, that you do whatever you want to do so that you can free the body. He also began to believe in reincarnation. And this is what he taught. He took some verse  from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, I’ll have to look up the exact verse, but he twisted one single verse and said from that verse that it was taught that you in your life had one lifetime to experience all that there was. And if you didn’t experience it all, then you would be sent back again to live again in a new carnation, incarnation, reincarnation, so that then you could experience what you missed the first time around. But if there was a way for you to experience it all in one lifetime, then you would be set free and go on to heaven into paradise and wouldn’t have to continue in this cycle of reincarnation.

He was an elder in a Christian church! And this is what he was teaching. And so actually what he then began to teach was that you indulge your flesh in everything you can imagine. Because if you’ve experienced it all, you don’t have to come back.

Somebody who followed him and followed his teachings and was influenced by him is a man that we know as the Marquis desade. You know who the Marquis de Sade is? Another person who embodies what he taught was a poet and a writer named Lord Byron. And he embodied this doctrine in a shocking, lengthy poem that we know as Don Juan. We get the watered down, cleaned up, edited version. If you read the original of that, it is worse than any R-rated movie you could go subject yourself to. All of the things that Don Juan seeks to experience in this lifetime to take it all in. And this was taught as if it were the truth about Christianity.

There was another named Arius. You’ve all heard of Arianism, but this is not the white hate group Arianism. This is Arius, and followers of Arius, Arianism. They deny the Trinity. They claimed that Christ was actually created by God as a created being, not that he had always existed, that He was not part of the Godhead or the Trinity.

Arius was put out of the church because of his misunderstanding here, his denial of the Trinity. Do you know who teaches Arian doctrine today? The Jehovah’s Witnesses. They mirror exactly, word for word, what Arius taught. It is heresy.

Marcion was another, not Martian, but Marcion. Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament was not the same God as the God of the New Testament. He taught that the God of the Old Testament was actually somebody underneath God, parading as God, masking themselves as God, but it wasn’t really God. It was a demi-God, a sub-God that was wrathful and wicked and horrible and wanted to stir things up and kill people and cause chaos. And in order to deal with that God, the true God had to send Jesus to demonstrate His power in the New Testament of love and peace and justice and tranquility in order to undo all that the bad, wicked God of the Old Testament had done. This is known as Dualism.

He taught also that Jesus, so as not to be contaminated by sinful flesh, actually was just a spirit. In fact, he referred to him as the phantom, the phantom Jesus. That he was a spirit without a body, but it looked like he had a body. And if you went and touched him, he would feel like he had a body, but he was just a ghost that materialized. He appeared to have a body, but was not a physical form.

And at the time of the crucifixion, since you can’t nail a ghost to the cross, this is what happened. When the darkness came and there was the earthquake and all these other things, the phantom Jesus caused all of the crowd to hallucinate and they thought they saw him die when in reality he just evaporated into heaven. This is what Marcion taught. It’s a doctrine known as Dualism. You know who holds Dualism? The word faith crowd. They do. Because they teach specifically God manifested Himself differently in the Old Testament than in the New. And the New Testament God contradicts and trumps the Old Testament God. In the Old Testament, God is wrathful and vengeful and hateful. In the New Testament, Jesus is loving and gracious and kind. It’s also know as Marcionism. It is a heresy.

The last we’ll look at is Sabellius. Sabellius taught that there was one God with one person, but who manifested himself differently throughout the ages of time. Again, denied the Trinity, denied the deity of the Son. He said that God was God, and he showed up in the Old Testament as God the Father. He showed up in the New Testament as Jesus the Son, and he showed up now in the church age as the Holy Spirit. But it’s just one person, no Trinity. They believe what we know as Modalism.

In fact, when they baptize you, they will not baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If you’re baptized in one of their churches that still exist today they baptize you only in the name of Jesus. They’re known today as Oneness Pentecostals. T.D. Jakes is one of their biggest leaders. He’s a heretic. He’s a false teacher. He teaches a false gospel, a different God, and a different Christ. We don’t need to give him room to come in and describe what he believes. He believes heresy. He believes what Sabellius taught. He believes this idea, and so they baptize you in the name of Jesus. No, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One name baptism. One other way that this has crept in, by the way, it’s crept into the church through the Jesus movement.

If you’re familiar with the Jesus seminar or the Jesus movement, here’s what the Jesus movement does. They have worked hard and long to get all of these professors of New Testament and history and of Greek and of Hebrew to tell us all that we have to make a difference and we have to differentiate between what they call the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. The historical Jesus was a real man who lived, they will tell us, but we don’t know all of what he did and said because the Bible was not written by who it was claimed to be written by. It is not an accurate representation. They will tell you that if you go through the Scriptures, that Jesus actually probably only said maybe about 5% of what is attributed to him. The rest of it was all made up by the disciples and by his followers to found this new religion.

And so they tell us that our quest in the Christian life is to find the historical Jesus, the true actual person of Christ. And we do this by coming to know the Christ of faith. This is the Christ that we accept even though we know that there are errors and all sorts of things about him that aren’t true. Well, what are you doing there? You’re dividing Christ. You have a historical person and a spirit, the flesh and the spirit. This is nothing but Gnosticism put in a new package.

You see what John was writing against? Don’t love the world system. Don’t love the things that drive the world system. All of this is lust. Don’t love lust. Why? Because the people who are driven by their lust are liars. They present other Christs, other avenues of salvation, other means of redemption, other saviors.

“But you, you, dear children, you have anointing from the Holy One, and you know. You have the Holy Spirit. So you know the truth. I’ve written to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and that no lies of the truth. And here is who the liar is, he who denies that Jesus is the Christ.”

Where do the cults get off? They deny some aspect about the person and work of Christ. Every one of them will deny something that we clearly see taught in the Scripture about the person and work of Christ. If you do that, you’re an antichrist. You deny the Father and the Son. Interestingly, then, whoever denies the Son does not have the Father.

Here’s the other truth. You cannot claim to worship the God of the Bible if you’re not worshiping Jesus Christ. Because Jesus Christ is the God of the Bible. If you reject Jesus, you also reject the Father. The truth is, if you reject the Son, you reject the Father. If you deny the Son, you deny the Father. He who acknowledges the Son has the Father also. (John 5:23).