1 John 4:2

2. Hereby First test of a true spirit. This test is aimed at the Docetist, who denied the flesh and body of Christ, and made him a phantom.

Every spirit… of God The apostle’s language is seemingly sweeping. Is the spirit that confesses Jesus come in the flesh, and yet denies other truths, truly of God? Or, as Augustine (quoted by Wordsworth) asks: “Arius, and Eunomius, and Macedonius, and Nestorius, own that Jesus came in the flesh; are not they, therefore, of God?” To this Augustine answers: “Those heresiarchs did not, in fact, confess Christ come in the flesh, because, whatever they might do in words, they in their works denied him. (Titus 1:16.) They have not charity because they have not unity;” that is, unity with the Church. Wordsworth gives a different answer, which is in effect, that to confess Christ come in the flesh is to confess him as Messiah, with all that embraces; namely, his divine atonement for our sins.

Compare our notes on 1 John 4:15 and 1 John 5:1. Perhaps the apostle would say, that whatever error Arius or other heretic believed, he derived from a false spirit; but whatever truth he held, as the incarnation of Christ, came from a good spirit and was of God. The spirit, here, is not wholly the man, but the inspiration from good or evil in the man. But our own view is that the apostle is deciding between two claimants to being of God, the one denying and the other affirming that Jesus is come in the flesh; and he pronounces for the latter. So that of the two sides he that confesseth is of God.