The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes declared, “There is nothing new under the sun!” (Eccles 1:9) He saw the same things happening time after time, which led him to a depressing view of life and its meaninglessness. I certainly do not share that conclusion, although as I look back over history I do sometimes despair when I see humanity making the same old mistakes time after time. It has often been said that the one thing we learn from history is that we never learn anything from history.

War and poverty

I am old enough to have seen many of the things that are happening today also happening earlier in my lifetime. War in Europe occupied much of the 20th century and certainly much of my own boyhood, when the Second World War was meant to be ‘the War that ended all war’ . I suppose it counts as a great achievement that peace among the nations of Europe has held for seventy years.

But now our newspapers and TV screens are filled with images of bloody war in Ukraine and there are growing fears that NATO may become involved, and we could even get to the point of an exchange of nuclear weapons that could devastate the northern hemisphere. These are not just fictional fears – they are objective reality, with sinful, violent, irrational human beings having in their hands weapons of mass destruction.

The horrors of poverty and hunger in Victorian Britain and again in the 1920s could be repeated in the 21st century.

It is not only war that we have seen before but chronic inflation in the economy to make things worse. The 1970s saw the same sort of things we are seeing today, compounded by the national miners’ strike that brought untold suffering to multitudes of families, with women unable to feed their children and men fighting on the streets. It could all happen again – and be even worse as the national debt mounts and spirals out of control followed by widespread bankruptcies, redundancies, household evictions, unemployment, and the state unable to pay benefits or support the National Health Service. The horrors of poverty and hunger in Victorian Britain and again in the 1920s could be repeated in the 21st century.

A gospel to Jews and Gentiles

It is not only in the nation that we are seeing the same things happening time after time, but also in the Church – not only in a single lifetime, but over the centuries from the Early Church. Gnosticism was the first great deception to hit Christianity. Gnosticism comes from the Greek word ‘gnosis’ meaning ‘knowledge’, and it was something that was particularly virulent among Greek-speaking Christians who were known as the Hellenists. In New Testament times, after the Hellenists were forced to leave Jerusalem, following the stoning of Stephen, they established their main base at Antioch. It was from there that Paul and Barnabas set out on their first missionary journey to take the gospel across Asia Minor and into Europe.

Gnosticism was the first great deception to hit Christianity. Gnosticism comes from the Greek word ‘gnosis’ meaning ‘knowledge’.

The Hellenists were the first to preach the gospel to the Gentiles when Philip baptised the Ethiopian eunuch on the road to Gaza (Acts 8). The gospel preached by Paul was that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah foretold in the Jewish Scriptures, was also the Messiah for Gentiles, because God had declared that all people would be blessed through Abraham (Gen 12:3). Abraham was saved through faith in God and in the same way those who have faith in Jesus Christ are brought into a right relationship with God through faith.

The Hellenists loved the message of the gospel, and faith in Jesus spread rapidly across the Greco-Roman world, establishing major centres in Alexandria, Carthage, and Rome, as well as in Greek cities such as Ephesus, Corinth and Athens. From the earliest days, the Hellenists who became Gnostics were determined to make what was essentially a Jewish message intelligible to Greeks.

Gnosis – special knowledge

The Gnostics claimed to have special knowledge, revealed to them by God, to express the faith in concepts similar to Greek philosophy so that it could be readily understood and embraced by Greeks. They set about divorcing Christianity from its Hebrew roots and their leaders were known as Gnostics. Gnostics were usually antisemitic; Marcion, a leading Gnostic born in A.D. 68, in his version of Scripture, deleted the whole of the Old Testament along with Matthew’s Gospel, which he saw as too Jewish. He even deleted the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel because a virgin birth would not appeal to Greeks.

The earliest Gnostics named in the Bible are probably the Nicolaitans who were troubling the church in Ephesus when John wrote the letters to the Seven Churches in the Book of Revelation. Nicholas is thought to be one of the Seven Deacons named in Acts 6, where he is said to have been a Greek convert to Judaism who then converted to Christianity.

The earliest Gnostics named in the Bible are probably the Nicolaitans who were troubling the church in Ephesus when John wrote the letters to the Seven Churches in the Book of Revelation.

The Ephesian Christians had spent a lot of time and energy rooting out heresy in dealing with men like Nicholas the Hellenist who claimed apostolic powers maintaining that he was hearing God more clearly than others, but in doing their investigations they had lost the love they used to show in their community of believers. In spite of this, the message to Ephesus was not all bad: John commends them for exposing heretical false teaching in their midst and expelling these teachers from the company of believers.

Modern gnostic groups

The Gnostics were small groups of men claiming to have a special revelation of God’s truth. They were essentially elitists, setting themselves up above other people and claiming prophetic anointing. Gnosticism was widely condemned by the Church Fathers and later by men such as Tertullian and Augustine, but different forms of Gnosticism appeared in many generations afterwards.

Throughout church history, from time-to-time Gnostics have arisen and have attracted groups of followers. In my own lifetime not only has New Age thinking been prevalent but also a group called the Kansas City Prophets arose in the 1980s, who said that a great revival would begin in London in 1990. It was false prophecy. They were followed by another group in Toronto in 1994 who claimed to have a special spiritual connection (being ‘in the River’) that enabled them to lay their hands on people and pass on a blessing from God.

The Gnostics claim to have a spiritual power that equips them for ministry, taking the truth that they believe they have received and communicating it to others.

The Gnostics claim to have a spiritual power that equips them for ministry, taking the truth that they believe they have received and communicating it to others. This takes them out of the realm of rational behaviour with a driving force to communicate their revelation under the conviction that they are the only ones who really hold the truth. This is the danger of Gnosticism because at root it is a spiritual power that drives its believers.

The current scenario

Almost on a weekly basis, we are being presented with new research findings that flag up dangers and adverse effects from the various Covid vaccines (though these require to be set against their benefits). People are increasingly aware of the devasting effects that lockdowns inflicted on our nation (and the world), socially, medically, emotionally and financially – and many are wakening up to the fact that you can’t repeatedly switch a sophisticated 21st-century society on and off like a computer without disastrous, unpredictable consequences.¹ Many also have concerns about the psychological use of fear to manipulate and control populations, and how this may lead to societies becoming increasingly totalitarian.

At the same time, there is a mountain of false news and ‘conspiracy theories’ that are affecting Bible believing Christians as well as secularists in their search for truth in the rapidly changing world that faces us today. We must avoid becoming entrenched in an obsessive gnostic mindset that consumes our thinking and offers only the bleakest of outlooks. The only sure hope for Christians today, as it was in the Early Church, is to adhere closely to the word of God as we have it revealed in Scripture. This, along with radical discernment, is what is required to help distinguish between what is truly happening in our world and what is purely conspiracy.

We must avoid becoming entrenched in an obsessive gnostic mindset that consumes our thinking and offers only the bleakest of outlooks.

Test everything

We need to bring all our thoughts, especially those that are prophetic in the widest sense of that word, before the bar of the word of God. This would be in accordance with the instruction that Paul gave to the Thessalonians when he said, “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire, do not treat prophecies with contempt. Test everything. Hold onto the good. Avoid every kind of evil” (1 Thes 5:19-22).

We are surely drawing close to the days described in 2 Timothy 3 when “everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil men and imposters will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” Our hope and our safety lies in Jesus who promised that the Father would send the Spirit of Truth to believers. He will never leave us alone.

Endnotes
1 Madeline Grant, ‘The Telegraph’ 02.10.22