This coming Lord’s Day we are going to continue our look at 2 John 1:7-8 where the beloved Disciple warns the church about a grave danger she always faces, that of false teaching. And John’s concern is the spread of a brand of false doctrine that specifically centers on the Person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ.

As you remember, the situation that John is addressing is the fact that an unspecified number of former church members have left the fellowship of believers in Asia Minor. And having defected from the congregation, they have begun to travel around the area, visiting church after church, and seeking to encourage and recruit believers to embrace their malignant teachings.

At the very heart of their false message is the belief that our Lord was not the Son of God and Savior of the world as we understand Him to be. They refused to “confess” that Jesus is both fully God and fully man (v. 7). And by the way this Epistle reads, it would seem that these false-prophets enjoyed some measure of success among the churches.

So John has written to the local church in Asia Minor seeking to warn them and to help them to confidently identify these “many deceivers” who are seeking to lead the unsuspecting into a disastrous theological error.

But then in the last part of verse 7 things seem to change, and we read about “the deceiver” and “the antichrist”:

“Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist. Watch yourselves, so that you may not lose what we have worked for, but may win a full reward.”

By any measure, that’s a very ominous warning for the church and for all of us who are followers of Jesus. The “many deceivers” (plural) are in some way linked to “the deceiver” and “the antichrist” (singular). What does this mean? What is their connection? And what do we do? What is our duty in light of this most dangerous and deadly situation confronting us in the world?

The answer according to John is summarized by one word, “watch.”

As we prepare for worship, let us pray that through the proclamation of God’s Word we can learn what it is to “watch.”