18"Children, it is the last hour." John speaks with tenderness and alarm together. The Greek phrase for last hour appears nowhere else in the New Testament, and it has no article, so it names a kind of time more than a point on a clock. It is the stretch of history between Christ's first coming and his last, and John's readers lived in it, as we do. The word antichrist belongs to John alone among the New Testament writers. Popular expectation looked for a single figure, and John points instead to a crowd of deniers already present, the teachers who had just walked out.
19"They went out from us, but they were not of us." This sentence was written out of a wound. People John's readers had worshiped beside were now teaching against the faith, and some were still pulling the faithful after them. John says the leaving showed something, and the WBC commentary observes the logic that belonging shows itself in staying. This steadies anyone who has watched a loved one drift from the faith. It says the ones who remain are held, and the sifting does not catch them.
Then John turns to his readers with confidence. 20"You have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge." The Greek word for anointing, *chrisma*, appears only in this passage in the whole New Testament, and it shares a root with *Christos*, the Anointed One. The secessionists claimed a special anointing that set them above ordinary believers. John says every believer has one, a gift of the Holy Spirit that belongs to the whole church, and he stresses the small word all. He writes to confirm what they already hold.
Then he gives the test. 22"Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ?" The teachers who left had a great deal to say about God, and John says no account of God holds if it skips the Son. The Father and the Son come as a pair.
The remedy is remaining. 24"Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you." The verb *meno*, abide, is the passage's structural word, and its direction matters. The thing to hold on to is something old, and the newness the false teachers offered is what John asks his readers to be suspicious of. The faith they first heard is the faith that keeps them in the Son.
The passage ends with the anointing. 27"You have no need that anyone should teach you." The sentence can be misread, because John is himself teaching as he writes. He means they need no new, secret knowledge from those who left. The Spirit's anointing teaches 27"just as it has taught you," in agreement with what they heard at the start. The Spirit keeps the old truth alive in the heart and adds no novelty to it. John's last word is the one he has been building toward: 27"abide in him."
Ask what you test a new claim against when it sounds deeper than what you first heard about Jesus.
Prayer
Father, thank you for the anointing we received from your Holy One, and for the truth we heard from the beginning. Keep us abiding in your Son and in you. When voices tell us there is something deeper than Christ, teach us to test them by what we first believed. Hold those we love who have wandered, and hold us. In Jesus' name, amen.