1 John 5:21

21. Idols As above remarked, John’s immediate readers were probably expected to be mostly Gentiles brought by Christ to an understanding of the true One. They were surrounded on every hand with idols in Ephesus and in all Asia Minor. In Ephesus the temple of Artemis (Diana) was still standing in pride and power. Hence it became the little body of Christians, one and all, to beware of idols. It is the last tender warning of the venerable apostle to his little children at this same Ephesus, to keep themselves from Artemis and her images, and adhere to the true God in his Son Jesus Christ. John closes with as emphatic an abruptness as he commences this epistle. Note on 1 John 1:1. But there was a special danger arising from the seductions of the errorists condemned in this epistle; who, in fact, advocated the participating in the sacrificial banquets of the pagan temples. An idol is an image, a pretence, a phantom, an unreality, in opposition to the true God, (1 John 5:20,) who is the infinite reality.