You Have an Unction, and John Was Not Writing to Scholars

He reads something and gets something out of it, and then he waits to find out whether he was allowed to.

That is the actual sequence and it happens every time. Something lands. He notices it landing. And immediately there is a second movement, which is a kind of holding it loosely until it can be checked, because he has learned that what a man like him gets out of a passage is provisional.

He never decided to believe that. It came in the way the important things come in: through the shape of rooms. Every reading he ever heard was followed by an explanation, and the explanation was always by somebody qualified, and the message underneath the message, delivered a thousand times without a word, is that the reading is raw material and the understanding happens elsewhere.

The cost of that is not ignorance. He knows a great deal. The cost is that nothing he reads is ever his.

There is a letter that says something about that, and it has been used badly in both directions.

The sentence, and who it is written to

Here it is, in the King James Version:

But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. (1 John 2:20)

Ye have an unction from the Holy One.

Unction is an anointing, an oil poured on somebody, and the word carries the sense of being set apart and equipped.

And look at who it is said to. This is a general letter, written to ordinary congregations, and John addresses them a few verses earlier as little children, young men and fathers, which is everybody in a room by age and nothing to do with training.

He does not say the leaders have it. He says ye have, to the whole room.

And two verses on:

I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth. (1 John 2:21)

Not because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it.

He states his reason for writing, and the reason is that they already know, which is the opposite of the assumption a man in this position has been operating under his whole life.

You have an anointing and you were never in the room as raw material. 1 John 2:20 says ye have an unction from the Holy One to an ordinary congregation, and it is the Holy Spirit who is that anointing rather than a qualification a man was not issued.

What the harder sentence cannot mean

And then the verse that has caused all the trouble.

But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him. (1 John 2:27)

Ye need not that any man teach you.

That sentence is in a letter. The letter is teaching. John is a man, teaching them, in the act of writing it, which settles what the sentence cannot mean, because he is not contradicting himself in his own paragraph.

And the same New Testament says God gave teachers, on purpose, as a gift:

And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints. (Ephesians 4:11-12)

So the sentence is not abolishing teaching. What it is abolishing is dependency: the situation where a man cannot receive anything from a page without a qualified person present to authorize it.

Read the second half of the verse, which is where the meaning actually sits: as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

It hath taught you. Past tense. He is telling them that teaching has already happened in them, and asking them to stay in what they already have.

You have already been taught things and you were never empty between explanations. 1 John 2:27 says even as it hath taught you in the past tense, and it is His Spirit who is the anointing that verse says abides rather than visits.

Where the guiding is located

And the promise this rests on, given to men who were losing their teacher.

Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak. (John 16:13)

He will guide you into all truth.

Said to eleven frightened men on the night before they lost the only teacher who had never been wrong. The answer to their situation is not a replacement person. It is a guide who does not leave.

And Paul, on the purpose of the Spirit being given:

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. (1 Corinthians 2:12)

That we might know. The knowing is the stated purpose, and it is stated about we, which in that letter is a whole congregation with a very mixed record.

You have a guide who was given so that you would know and you were never meant to hold things provisionally forever. 1 Corinthians 2:12 gives the knowing as the purpose of the Spirit being received, and it is that same Spirit who does what 1 John 2:27 says the anointing does.

What this does not license

And the guard, because a man could take this badly in one obvious direction.

Nothing here says a man's reading is infallible. He will be wrong about things. He will read something at forty-nine that he will read differently at sixty, and the reading at forty-nine will not have been worthless and will not have been final either.

The anointing abiding in a man does not make him a court of last resort. It makes him a participant rather than a spectator, which is a smaller claim and a much more useful one.

And the practical difference is not that he stops listening to teachers. It is the opposite. A man who reads for himself can actually receive from a good one, because he arrives with something in his hands, and the conversation is between two people rather than one person and an empty vessel.

You are a participant rather than a spectator and you were never being handed a court of last resort. Ephesians 4:11 keeps teachers as a gift in the same New Testament as 1 John 2:27, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes both of those true at once in a man.