John’s readers anticipated the imminent arrival of an Antichrist figure. Rather than fuelling their speculation, John wrote to warn them of a far greater threat: an antichrist spirit. Even as they looked for the Antichrist to come, they missed the fact that many antichrists had already come, and those antichrists were a far greater threat to them than the Antichrist they were expecting. While these verses were written in a specific context to a specific church, there are important lessons that we can draw from them. We will consider these lessons under three broad headings.