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Each weekday in the month of August, we will pursue “prepositional truth” by zeroing in on a single Greek preposition in a single verse, noting the theological richness so often embedded in the humble words we so often overlook.
For more than 100 years, virtually every map of North America showed California as an island.
This was surprising, especially since the sailors who had explored its coastline during the 1500s had made no such observation.
All that changed in 1602, when Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino sailed up the California coast. A priest who accompanied him, Father Antonio de la Ascension, kept a journal of the trip.
Ascension seems to have been geographically challenged. He claimed that California was a separate land mass, perhaps even a new continent, cut off from North America by a waterway over a thousand miles long. Ascension even gave the body of water a name. He called it the Mediterranean Sea of California.
Historians have never figured out exactly how and why Ascension came to these conclusions. But mapmakers quickly decided he must have known what he was talking about.
In 1622, the first map appeared showing the future Golden State as an island. For the next century, the world’s mapmakers became a living illustration of an enduring principle of human nature: Once an idea gets a foothold in the collective imagination, it can be exceedingly hard to overturn.
Was California an island? Apparently so. Every map confirmed it. Case closed. The problem, of course, is that actual visitors to the West coast could never find that new Mediterranean Sea.
Gradually it became clear that future fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers would not have to travel to the World Series by boat. Finally, in 1747, King Ferdinand VII of Spain issued a royal edict: California is not an island. Therefore, please stop depicting it that way.
Of course, if the San Andreas Fault really does produce the kind of earthquake geologists are forecasting, those old maps might come in handy one day.
Why had this map-making myth persisted for more than a century?
The vast majority of the world’s population had no means of traveling to California to check things out for themselves. They had put their faith in someone who claimed to be an expert – to have been there and done that. In this case, their faith was misplaced. The notion that California was an island turned out to be baloney.
Knowing who to trust in the midst of today’s technology-driven, data-saturated, 24-hour-news-cycles is no small matter.
Inquiring minds have to sort through various claims of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” not to mention folks on both sides of the political divide deriding their opponents as shameless liars. When it comes to describing reality, who, exactly, is worthy of our trust?
Astronomers recently announced they had observed the collision of two neutron stars billions of light years away from the earth. Apparently, we’ll just have to take their word for it. Most of us have no idea how to interpret a brain scan. It appears we’re going to have to believe that neurologists know what they are talking about.
But trusting God is a different story. We can consult any number of spiritual “experts.” In fact, that’s often a wise thing to do.
But it was never God’s intention that the most important decisions we will ever make – whether God is worthy of our trust, and whether we will actually choose to trust him over the next 24 hours – should come down to second-hand information.
That brings us to a verse that is quite simply unlike anything else in the Bible.
The apostle John writes, “But you have an anointing from (APO) the Holy One, and all of you know the truth” (I John 2:20).
Hang on for just a moment. Every follower of Jesus “knows the truth”? Just like that? Whatever happened to the spiritual discipline of diligent study? What about Jesus’ call in the Sermon on the Mount to ask, seek, and knock?
Context, as always, helps immensely. Check out the two prior verses:
“Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us (I John 2:18-19).
We should point out that I John is the only book in the Bible that uses the word “antichrist.” Scripture never applies that term to an end-time Satanic leader – a notion that’s become popular in recent years in certain Christian circles.
Instead, John is warning his readers about certain false teachers, whom he calls “antichrists” (with a small “a”), who have apparently been dismissing Jesus of Nazareth as someone worth following.
John pushes back. He assures his readers that they have the capacity to tell the difference between a fake savior and the Real Thing. That’s because they have received “an anointing.” That’s the Greek word krisma, which describes the process of pouring oil on the head of a priest or a king. It’s related to the word “Christ,” which means “the Anointed One” – the individual specially chosen by God to rescue his people.
Krisma is also closely related to the word charisma, which connotes a spiritual gift or a special bestowal of grace.
And that’s where the preposition APO comes in. As we noted earlier this month, APO describes a point of origin. Where did this krisma, this anointing, come from? John says it’s from the Holy One – that is, either God or God’s Spirit.
And what does the anointing provide? Let’s call it a baloney detector.
If you have given your heart to Christ, the Anointed One, then the Holy Spirit has gifted you with an anointing of your own – an inner capacity to help discern truth from error.
This shouldn’t lead us to think we can now do an end run around the hard work of discernment. Prayer and study and patience will always be required. But God has empowered us to do something that people in Europe couldn’t accomplish 400 years ago when they looked at maps of California. We have the tools to discover for ourselves – depending on God’s grace and power – the true nature of Reality.
APO is our reminder of the origin of this gift. Discernment does not come from our amazing IQ. Or from special DNA. Or from personal experience, a sixth sense, or a finely tuned intuition.
Our anointing is from God. That’s why we can trust it. And that’s why we can trust God himself.
Truth be told, there are a lot of “maps” out there that claim to represent the way things really are. But we’ve been given a spiritual baloney detector.
As another of the apostles reminds us, “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you” (James 1:5).
If you doubt that, perhaps you’d be interested in buying some prime oceanfront property in Nevada.