My hope is that this series will offer my readers a chance to consider the names, characteristics and descriptions of our God in the Word.

The remaining Names of God in this series might be considered descriptors, or characteristics of the Lord. We have reviewed the three primary Names of God, along with nineteen compound Names of God in our previous posts. As we venture through these descriptors of our God, I hope we will recognize all the many characteristics of our God that we tend to take for granted.

The Word is truly rich with descriptions of the Living God, and this effort of searching in the Word was quite illuminating. He truly is the ultimate subject of the Word, and His revelation of self-descriptions, or the accolades offered Him by His priests, prophets, kings apostles and faithful truly is a blessing.

May the Name of the Lord be praised, and by thinking on His name, may you have a blessed day.

We find this morning’s name of God in a passage that the Apostle John provides us, as he is warning the believers not to trust every message they hear. He begins our passage by telling his friends not to believe every spirit. This is standard Christianity. If we have any history in our walk with the Lord, we have come across teachers or so called prophets, that claim to know the Word of the Lord, or have some secret esoteric message directly from God. Test them. Always test those spirits! I took this command with vigor in my past, and carried an attitude that contained a bounty hunter mentality. Any message would go under the microscope of Carl’s understanding of the Word, parse the word’s of the message and somehow determine the teachers motivations! It go to the point where I entertained a very suspicious nature, always looking for error, hunting for impurities in any message I heard. Of course as you read that, you have to understand I had a highly defined, very restricted view of the Bible. To describe every aspect of my faith would take much to much time. As an example, at one point in my faith, I had chosen to condemn supralapsarianism. What foolishness to chase such a highly refined, unimportant, divisive teaching. This was not John’s intent! He had one test for us. He was battling a heresy that was beginning to erupt in the early church called Gnosticism, and it taught that Jesus was God, but that he appeared as a man. Not that He was flesh and blood, but that He decieved those He walked with by looking like a man, but not being a man. He was a spirit only. This teaching attacked the very identity of our Messiah, the effectiveness of His sacrifice and the extent of His love for His people. This would not do for John and it cannot be found in our thinking. Any message that does not openly identify the Savior as the man named Jesus, and that He walked amongst us as a man of flesh and blood, is a teaching that replaces our Savior with an idea, describing our Master as a spirit that deceived the apostles into thinking they were with a man, and most importantly, did not die in place for all of humanity. He simply provided a guide for His followers, not a vicarious physical death for men and women of flesh and blood. When we get to our verse, John speaks of Him who is greater than he who is in the world. Specifically, I think John is speaking of false teachers and lying spirits when he speaks of those who are in the world. Of course, the ultimate identity behind those who spread lies about our Leader is the enemy of our souls, but in this passage John is identifying the spirit of antichrist working against believers through false teachers. As an aside, I found it interesting that the topic of “antichrist” is only spoken of by John, and only four times in his epistles. (What shocked me most was that John thought antichrist referred to multiple persons, and antichrist was present in his day!) I have provided all the passages below for your convenience. The Spirit of God, fed by the Word of God, in the saint of God is unstoppable, cannot be defeated. More to John’s point, John simply states that we are from God. The very fact that we are from God is the victory. We have already overcome those who are spreading lies of the Master by believing the truth from the apostles. We have come to know the truth, that Jesus the God-man entered our world in flesh and blood, physically suffered at our hands, died as a man in our place and rose bodily from the grave. This is the message we have believed, and have become those who are from God. He is greater than he who is in the world. As John continues in his letter, he speaks of listening to the apostles. As those who are from God, we will hear God in the teaching of the apostles, and confess that His teachings are of His apostles. 1 John 4:6 We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Why would we not listen to His apostles? Unless some dime store prophet comes by with some new trinket of “truth” that appeals to our old nature. Brothers – be content with the truth of the Word, for it is the faithful record of Him who is Greater than he who is in the world! Teaching of John on “antichrist” 1 John 2:18 Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. 1 John 2:22 Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. 1 John 4:3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. 2 John 1:7 For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.

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I would love to hear of your favorite name, characteristic or description of the Living God. Please leave me a comment, and I will include it in the list!

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