Nobody Asked the Spirit About Jesus

The New Testament commands one test for any spirit claiming to speak for God. In the cave at Hira, nobody ran it. It got answered anyway.

Before anything else, I want to name what I admire, because a man who cannot say what is good in a thing he opposes has not understood it and has no business writing about it.

The Quran’s insistence on the oneness of God is serious theology. It is not an observation about divine arithmetic. It is the claim that everything which exists hangs on one uncreated source, that the universe is contingent and God alone is necessary, that human pride before the Creator is a kind of cosmic absurdity. That is a large idea, held with a consistency that puts most of us to shame. And the practice built around it is extraordinary. Tens of millions of people alive today can recite the entire text from memory, a feat of devotion that has no parallel anywhere on earth. I am not going to pretend that is nothing. It is a great deal.

But a man may be sincere, disciplined, devout, and terrified, and still have been visited by something that was not from God. Like Sahih al-Bukhari 5917, or Ibn Sa’d Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir vol 1, p.237 or Al-Tabari The History of Al-Tabari, vol vi, p.111 says.

That is not a cheap shot. It is the reason the test exists. And somebody wrote the test down, in plain language, five centuries before anyone climbed that mountain.

Paul did not leave a loophole

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. (Galatians 1:8)

Look carefully at what Paul has just done.

He does not say a false angel. He does not say a demon in disguise, an impostor, a trick of the light. He says an angel from heaven. The genuine article. Radiant, terrifying, unmistakably supernatural, the kind of being that drops a grown man to his knees.

Even then.

Paul has removed the messenger from the evidence. The grandeur of the encounter proves nothing. The terror it produces proves nothing. The sincerity of the man who received it proves nothing, and neither does his generosity, his honesty, his kindness to the poor, or the good opinion of everyone who has ever known him.

Having closed those doors, Paul does not tell us what to open instead.

John does.

The test is a command, and it has one question in it

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. (1 John 4:1-3)

This is not advice for the unusually cautious. It is an imperative. Do not believe. Test. The assumption behind it is that spirits lie, that many of them are abroad, and that anyone who does not test them will eventually be deceived by one.

And the test contains exactly one question. Not: did the spirit frighten you. Not: were you sincere. Not: are you a good man who keeps ties of kinship and feeds the poor.

What does this spirit say about Jesus Christ come in the flesh?

That is the instrument. Simple enough for a child, sharp enough to sort every spiritual claim ever made.

Now take it up the mountain.

What the cave actually records

Everything that follows comes from Sahih al-Bukhari, Book of Revelation, hadith three. This is not hostile Western scholarship or an orientalist reconstruction. Within Sunni Islam, Bukhari stands second in authority only to the Quran itself. What follows is the tradition’s own account, told the way the tradition tells it.

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