God’s word is Truth. If we are to follow Christ and become more like him, then we are to follow and obey the Truth of His Word. Within His Word, you will find many truths, one of which is a warning against false teaching. 1 John 4:1-6 is a dense portion of John's writing that details how the church was to identify and safeguard themselves from false teaching and false teachers. Today I'll give a brief history of some false teaching within the history of the Christian church and current iterations, beliefs, and statements that reflect contemporary false teaching. We will look at Antinomism, Adoptionism, and Marcionism, and see how these false teachings are relevant in today’s churches.

A single read through will "start the wheels" turning in our mind regarding Revelation as a book given to us by God, through Christ, to John. I'm not promising to write comments on each verse, or each chapter. But today, as we get started reading Revelation, here are some comments to share with you that I'll share with my family as we read Revelation 1 today. 

This view sees Revelation as a preview of the entirety of history after the Incarnation of Christ. According to this approach events that occur throughout history have been previewed in Revelation. In this way there are parts of Revelation that are viewed by Historicist interpreters as having already taken place, and other parts that have not yet taken place. Steve Gregg provides some examples of the historicist approach:

The Idealist approach avoids any particular ties to specific events in the past, present, or future. If I was to suggest a meme to summarize the Idealist approach to Revelation, it would have to be from Pirates of the Caribbean since the Idealist interpretive framework looks for the grand lessons of Revelation rather than getting caught up in all the details. In this way the Idealist interpreter sees historical events (and future events) more like guidelines for interpretation rather than rules for interpreting Revelation.

Today we are taking a look at the interpretive opposite of the futurist view called the "Preterist" view. The word for this view comes from Latin word "praeter" which means "past". While the futurist view sees Revelation as mostly in the future, the preterist view sees Revelation as mostly in the past. While the futurist sees John's testimony as referring to signs and events that are in our future, preterist interpreters view John's prophecy as either symbolic retelling of events in John's past or prophetic forecasts of things which were in John's future, but our past.

1 John is filled with cycles and repetition. Yesterday we talked about what those two terms mean and gave some examples throughout the Old and New Testament of both cycles and repetition. Today we're going to look at some of the eye-catching repeated words throughout 1 John.

While today we have a wide variety of digital methods for conveying importance or grabbing attention, writers in the Bible also employed means of emphasis. Two of the most easily recognizable means for calling a reader's attention to a particular theme or message were cycles and repetition. Cycles are often repetitive thematically, while repetition may be as simple as an author using the same word use again and again.

One of the unique aspects of John as a person is the period of time over which we see his faith lived out. While some New Testament writers only contributed a single letter to the New Testament, like James, Jude, Matthew, and Mark, John contributed multiple writings over multiple decades. While the Apostle Paul was used by God to write the greatest number of New Testament letters, John was used by God to write over the longest period of time.