What is the anointing believers have in 1 John?

"You have an anointing from the Holy One" (1 Jn 2:20). For John's original readers, that phrase carried a word they would have recognized from their Greek Scriptures — and what it pointed to was startling.

The word John chose. The Greek noun is G5545 chrisma — "anointing." It appears thirteen times across eleven verses in all of Greek Scripture. Six of those occurrences are in the Greek translation of Exodus (the Septuagint), where chrisma is the specific word chosen to render the Hebrew mishchah (H4888), the technical term for Israel's holy anointing oil. The Septuagint uses it twice in one verse at Exodus 30:25 alone — elaion chrisma hagion, "an oil, a holy chrisma" — matching the Hebrew's own emphatic doubling of the phrase. John's audience would have heard the tabernacle register immediately.

What that oil was. The holy anointing oil of Exodus 30 was a precisely measured blend of four spices in olive oil (Exo 30:23-25), compounded by a guild perfumer, used to consecrate the tabernacle and its priests. It was YHWH's own: "this holy anointing oil shall be mine throughout your generations" (Exo 30:31). And it was unreplicable by command — anyone who made another like it, or poured it on an unauthorized person, was to be cut off from the community (ve-nikhrat me-ammav, Exo 30:33). It was sealed, reserved, incommunicable.

What John says believers now have. The prohibition is simply gone. John writes to ordinary people — not priests, not tabernacle officers — and tells them: kai humeis chrisma echete apo tou hagiou, "and you yourselves have a chrisma from the Holy One" (1 Jn 2:20). And in verse 27: "the chrisma you received from him abides in you (menei en humin)… his own chrisma teaches you." The word for the unreplicable Mosaic formula is now the word for the Spirit's universal endowment. No restriction. No penalty. In fact, the three NT uses of chrisma are all in these two verses of 1 John — no other NT book uses it. When John reaches for the word for the Spirit's indwelling, he takes the LXX's word for the sacred oil.

How that became possible. The Septuagint of Daniel 9:26 uses chrisma one more time — at the moment the Anointed One is cut off: apostathēsetai chrisma, "the chrisma will be removed and will not be." The oil-word names the person at the point of his death. And the cutting-off he undergoes (karat, H3772) is the same penalty-word Exodus 30:33 had prescribed for the one who profaned the anointing formula. The logic runs like this: the formula was sealed; the one the formula was for underwent the sealed formula's own penalty; and his death is precisely what opened the sealed formula to everyone who belongs to him.

καὶ ὑμεῖς χρῖσμα ἔχετε ἀπὸ τοῦ ἁγίου — kai humeis chrisma echete apo tou hagiou — "and you yourselves have an anointing from the Holy One" (1 Jn 2:20).

The same logic that guarded it still holds. What John does not say is that the anointing is now unguarded. The trajectory runs from the sealed oil of Sinai to the Spirit of the Anointed One — but the Spirit still cannot be bought or manufactured. When Simon of Samaria offers money for the power to confer the Spirit, Peter answers with destruction language (Act 8:20) — the same register the Greek of Exodus 30:38 used for profaning the holy compound. The incommunicable formula has become communicable through the Anointed One's death; it has not become cheap. Paul makes the same point positively: "it is God who anointed us" — chrisas hēmas, from the same chriō verb that the LXX used for the sacred act (2 Co 1:21). The anointing is from God, it abides, it teaches — and it comes through the one who was himself cut off.

The full study on Exodus 30:22-38 traces the whole word family — mishchah, mashiach, chrisma, Christos — from the perfumer's bowl in the wilderness to the Spirit resting on everyone who belongs to Christ.