16 February 2025
John's first letter reminds us of the vast difference between the spiritual and worldly frame of reference. The whole point of the term "spiritual" is a reference to eternal concerns, not the concerns of this world. Spiritual people want to escape the lusts of the fleshly nature, and do all they could to vanquish habitual sin.
The cults clustered in and around Ephesus did not fight the flesh; they arose from the fleshly nature itself. They appealed to the flesh, in part by elevating the intellect, which is still just the flesh. They claimed to be logical, but were apparently unconscious of how the flesh steers logic and reason to seek out opportunities for the flesh. Even the cults claiming to deny the flesh were seeking to overcome the flesh by the power of the flesh. There is no possible way for your fleshly mind to separate between the lusts of the fleshly nature and some higher purpose. There is no higher purpose without the Presence of of God. The flesh cannot see beyond itself, no matter how that self-will is obscured by mythology.
Those cultists who claimed to be reaching out to divine powers were clearly not getting hold of Jehovah, the Father of Jesus Christ. This was obvious by how they utterly failed to do things Christ taught and did.
The Spirit of God gives guidance and power; it is the Spirit of Christ. He's the one who said that His Law is for us to love each other as He loves us. This is the signature issue that distinguished the cults from Christ. Did the cultists get annoyed at something believers did? John reflects upon how this was manifested in the story of Cain and Abel. Cain was not a spiritual man; he operated on a fleshly orientation. Abel was a spiritual man. His orientation didn't make sense to Cain, and Cain never understood how he had offended God. His murder of Abel symbolized how the fleshly nature makes demands on spiritual people to conform to the fleshly orientation.
Notice something: the scolding of the fleshly nature, which eventually leads to murderous hatred. God does not scold. Instead, He makes you feel the sorrow and pain sin causes Him. He allows you to hang with His Son on the Cross. John also mentions in Chapter 3 the conscience. In his overly simplified Greek grammar, he uses the word often translated as "heart", but he's referring to the conscience. Under the fleshly guidance of this world, your conscience can learn to scold and make you feel false guilt about things you cannot change. The worldly orientation does that about a lot of things. God is not like that.
John says your conscience can learn. When you spend enough time communing with the Spirit of God, a part of your discipline of the flesh is correcting your conscience. You are using the Word to wash out false values and learning how to hear from the Spirit. Eventually your conscience stops the scolding and you can begin to recognize peace with God. You learn not to condemn things He doesn't condemn.
Satan doesn't give you a clear conscience. His whole goal is to teach you to destroy yourself, and a damaged conscience loaded with false guilt is part of that. Not that it is silenced when one introduces a libertine philosophy; it's still there, nagging in the background. And it's still lying about what matters. It's a two-pronged attack of falsehood, trapping you in the middle. Your flesh never had the power to obey your conscience in the first place. The conscience without the Spirit cannot even begin to understand how morality works, so a human conscience alone is always loaded with nonsense.
We need to invest in working out spiritual values in opposition to the scolding values of this world.
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