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Studiocam
• Introduction
• Authorship
1, 2 & 3 John hang together as a credible body of writing created to deal with a particular situation that had arisen in the early church.
1 John is anonymous but 2 & 3 John are written by someone called ‘the elder’.
The language and style of the three letters are pretty much identical to one another AND to John’s gospel.
Well the author of 2 & 3 John is referred to as ‘the Elder’.
Most scholars therefore conclude that they were all written by the person that John’s Gospel refers to as ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ (John 21:20-24), who could be either John, brother of James and son of Zebedee (one of the Twelve) or it could be another John who was amongst the earliest of Jesus’s disciples referred to as ‘John the Elder’.
For my money this is 50-50 ball, because the author of 2 & 3 John is referred to as ‘John the Elder’ but the opening passage in 1 John 1 claims the author was part of the very closest eyewitness testimony to Jesus and the account in John’s Gospel of the close-up and personal life of Jesus seems to support that too.
Whoever it is, he was pretty close to Jesus in any event but is now in old age, and he's overseeing a group of house churches that are very likely based around the city of Ephesus.
So what's the occasion for his writing, then?
• Occasion
These letters seem to have arisen in response to a crisis in the church where some people had gone off in a splinter movement, abandoning the obedience to God, the rule of love and the sound doctrine which genuine adherence to the Gospel is characterised by.
Remember the acronym ‘O.L.D.’, because that sums up the message of these three books.
Obedience to God, love and sound doctrine.
This break away group no longer acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, neither do they view Him as the Son of God (1 John 2:18-23 & 1 John 4: 1-3) … which tends to suggest to some commentators that these letters are dealing with a reversion towards Judaism on the part of people of Jewish ethnicity.
Be that as it may, it looks (1 John 3:4-10) as if they are stirring up hostility amongst those who have stayed in the authentic Christian faith and are doing authentic Christian church.
Now. Let’s be clear about these folks who have gone and lost the plot because … the fact is … the problem is they have departed from the faith that formed the fellowship, but not from the fellowship of the faithful.
2 & 3 John CLEARLY address this … they've splintered from the church but are still clinging around the congregations.
• The relationship with 2 & 3 John
2 John is addressed to a specific house church where some of these ‘gone but not gone away’ people are causing John particular concern:
““For many deceivers have gone out into the world, people who do not confess Jesus as Christ coming in the flesh. This person is the deceiver and the antichrist!”
2 John 1:7 NET
https://bible.com/bible/107/2jn.1.7.NET
Here’s the reason 2 John was written.
These people have departed - as it were - spiritually, but are retaining contact or ‘fellowship’ where that no longer Biblically exists due to their moving away from the genuine faith in both their teaching and behaviour, and John is warning about their coming back to look for support.
So 2 John is saying, ‘Don’t offer them support as they have left not your presence but your faith’!
Then 3 John is written to a member of one of these house churches, a guy called Gaius, and John is asking Gaius to welcome legitimate missionaries who are going to arrive there soon.
Why does he need to do this?
It’s because the leader of that house church community - Diotrephes - looks like being part of the problem group and is rejecting anyone associated with John the Elder.
Let's come to the purpose of 1 John, then.
• Purpose
So first John is written against this background as a form of ‘damage control’.
John is reassuring those in these house churches who haven’t wandered from Biblical faith and practise as to the true nature of authentic Biblical Christianity and sets out the three tests of this authentic Biblical Christianity.
· One of those concerns the way we relate to God in Obedience.
· One of those concerns the Love we demonstrate to one another and to te world around us.
· Only one of those concerns sound doctrine … but sound doctrine in Scripture is what gives rise to the other two (which is why Romans 12 follows Romans 1-11, Ephesians 4 follows Ephesians 1-3, etc.)
In Scripture, it is truth that bears spiritual fruit, and 1 John is utterly consistent with that in what it teaches.
Sound doctrine gives rise to sound living.
1 John is totally consistent with that principle in all that it teaches.
What you believe gives rise to what you become, and part of that is love and part of it is obedience to God … personal sanctification.
Important for understanding this book (and you might have noticed I’m carefully not calling it a letter) is what we might call this book's literary style.
• Style
We’ve learned, certainly in the last thirty or forty years, in Biblical exegesis to take great care to pay attention to what’s called ‘literary genre’ or what others might call the style or type of writing we’re looking at.
Now, this is really important with 1 John.
If you read it as a letter … which most people seem to limit it to being … it’s a pretty poor letter!
John makes very clear that he is not in the business of communicating new information in this book … which is what you’d use a letter to do.
In fact, most of what John writes here comes straight our of the Lord’s Farewell Discourse in John 13-17.
It would very simply be a very disorderly, poorly structured, rambling sort of letter if a letter’s what it is.
But actually it is shaped much more like the sort of almost poetic sermon that brings truth at you in repeating waves washing up on to the beach of your mind, re-iterating, stressing the point again and (this is crucial) moving your will via the emotional impact this repetition and elucidation brings.
John uses a lot of hyperbole … exaggerating to paint his point in bright colours.
He uses concrete, stark language and contrasts like light and darkness to move their feelings and emotions.
So he contrasts …
· Love & hate.
· Good & evil.
It is tonal language, but it is not delicately nuanced.
It is strong and stark, but it is MOVING.
John is seeking to remind these believers, to MOVE their hearts and PERSUADE them to remain true to what they already say they believe.
Think of it as a poetic, emotional, heart-moving sermon.
You can cope with that.
This is Wales!
You’ll get the idea.
But please notice that all this affects the structure of the book.
• Structure
It is because THIS is his purpose and his modus operandi, John does not develop his ideas in a linear-analytical sort of way.
He is aiming, in the jargon, at delivering affective not cognitive learning.
I’m given to understand that John uses a well-know technique of first century rhetoric to move people called ‘amplification’.
( see https://www.jstor.org/stable/4477584)
‘Amplification’
Amplification is a rhetorical term for all the ways that an argument, explanation, or description can be expanded and enriched.
We live in a very literate culture with lots of books and reading so we might see this as a bit … wind-bagg-y … but it comes across as a natural virtue in an oral culture.
The technique we know as amplification provides "redundancy of information, ceremonial amplitude, and scope for a memorable syntax and diction" (Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 1991).
In The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), Thomas Wilson (who regarded amplification as a method of rhetoric) emphasized the value of this strategy: "Among all the figures of rhetoric, there is no one that helpeth forward an oration and beautifieth the same with such delightful ornaments as doth amplification."
Incidentally I remember discovering a copy of this book from the sixteenth century in the Bodleian library as an undergraduate and spent a few evenings wrestling with the ideas on its faded and slightly distressed pages!
In both speech and writing, amplification tends to accentuate the importance of a topic and to produce an emotional response (pathos) in the audience.
I’ve recently been reading a collection of addresses delivered over a number of years by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and I’ve been really struck by the way that he – speaking in the middle of the last century - takes a limited range of ideas in any one address and amplifies, engaging the emotions with that limited range of good ideas, working them into the minds and building them into the consciousness of his hearers whilst motivating their will to act accordingly.
Now, I've got to warn you about this and it is relevant to 1 John ... there is such a thing as Rhetorical Exhaustion and over-amplification can certainly achieve that (check https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S8755461520300293 to see how modern authoritarian regimes have used that as a technique to serve their own purposes and perpetrate injustice, switching people off so they're not bothered about what is going on).
Certainly our culture is more likely to get frustrated and impatient with this rhetorical technique than the mid 20th century, and much more likely to do so than John’s first century readers and hearers.
Now 1 John is obviously pretty short as a book … and what I’m suggesting is that the style of the communication may well be the reason for that, so 1 John keeps it short to avoid Rhetorical Exhaustion..
Cyclical structure
But - look - this rhetorical style explains the rather cyclical recurrence of the three main themes of the book … obedience to God’s revealed will, reflecting the love His Gospel shows us in the way we conduct our lives together and embracing sound doctrine.
And John orbits around those themes like a moon around three suns … pushed and pulled by their interacting magnetic fields in an apparently random but actually quite purposeful orbit … and with each pass John approaches from a slightly different angle and leaves a slightly different emphasis.
But moves the heart tr influence the will on the basis of the doctrine he delivers.
That was quite a long introduction, but a necessary one to aid our understanding of what goes on in the book itself.
• The Introduction
This prologue to 1 John has real similarities to the prologue to John’s Gospel in John 1:1-18
It also has echoes of Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8.
So, it speaks of ‘the Word of Life’, which was with God in the beginning.
Now, for John (given His Christology and unlike the splinter group off the churches this book is written for) God is both the Father and the Son.
Very noticeably, John calls those who have seen and heard and touched the Son ‘we’, and 'we' have seen and heard and touched ...
By ‘we’, John seems to mean the Apostles and eye-witnesses of Jesus.
And John refers to ‘we’ having a message for ‘you’ … that is, you, the NEXT generation of Jesus’s followers.
When the Apostles share the Word of life about the Jesus they have been in fellowship with amongst the next generation, they also are brought into fellowship with the Father and the Son through the apostles preaching.
This creates koinonia and brings people into ‘fellowship’ with the Lord Himself and creates participation in God’s own love and life to them, in THEIR experience.
This flows right into the first main section which proclaims that God is Light and in Him there is no darkness at all.
So, if people want to keep on participating in God’s own life through Jesus, as it's been passed on to them, they need to keep on walking (says John) IN the Light.
Between this introduction and the conclusion you get a central panel in the book, which comes in two parts.
• The ‘body’ in between
• This is the message (1), 1:5 - 3:10 ‘God is light’
The key idea in this first central panel is that God is Light.
So to keep walking with God through Jesus you need to keep walking in the Light … sounds great, ‘walking in the light’, but what John means by walking in the Light with God is that you need to keep God’s commands.
It’s about OBEDIENCE.
Now, as we all know, that is HARD, so John makes it quickly clear that when you fail as a Jesus-focused believer, Jesus’s atoning death will cover for your sins, and then the way of repentance leads you to get up from where you’ve fallen to start walking with Him again … following Jesus’s teachings.
Which teachings?
Well, John refers to central Christian matters not peripheral issues.
John reminds his readers of the new commandment Jesus gave His disciples at the Last Supper, to love one another as He loved them.
Doing this, John indicates, is walking in the Light.
John goes on to argue that if God’s Light IS now shining in Jesus, then the world’s darkness is passing away.
And that means, then, that God’s children already have victory over evil and sin and death that remains in the world.
Now, that leads John to challenge the churches to not love the world because the world is passing away.
John refers specifically to pride and sexual corruption as the visible symptoms of loving the world rather than loving Jesus ... and it looks as if these were somehow connected to the division and conflict in the congregations that arose around these false brothers.
So John warns against these false brothers who have rejected Jesus as God and Messiah and have ended up behaving as they are.
And John doesn’t mince his words.
He calls these people the ‘false prophets’, ‘anti-Messiahs’ and ‘deceivers’.
But he then – by way of sharp contrast - shows his confidence that those who stand by and focus on the truth about Jesus are true believers and that they are LOVED by the Father … and these believers show that they are God’s children when they DO righteousness (obey) and when they love one another, in contrast to the ‘deceivers’ who are generating strife and anger and division.
And that’s the point where John moves into the second main section of the sermon.
God is light up to 3:10, and then ...
• This is the message (2), 3:11 - 5:17 – God is love
The Key idea in this second central panel is that God is Love, and that has implications for His followers.
God’s people should therefore love and step away from the hatred that is so common in the world … ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ here's another example of John using stark contrasts to make his point powerfully.
And while he’s on this point, John brings in another stark example - the example of Cain whose hatred led him to murder his brother … a reference back to Genesis 4.
So John, by way of contrast with Cain, what is this love about, of which you speak?
Well, he says, this love is the giving up of one’s own life as a sacrifice for the well-being of others … the way the Lord Jesus did.
The thing is that when that love of the Lord Jesus comes into a person’s life it changes them and they give out that which is modelled by it.
But the ‘deceivers’ aren’t demonstrating evidence that they have been changed by the truth about Jesus, so John again goes back to the doctrinal roots of wrong behaviour and exposes the errors of the ‘deceivers’ again.
He says that when someone doesn’t focus on Jesus as the crucified Son of God they do not speak for God.
It is that cruciform love of God which we see exemplified on the Cross and when you BELIEVE that and FOCUS on that, it forms you into a person that reflects that, and loves in the same way.
• Conclusion
This leads into John’s climactic conclusion.
“We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them.
19 We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.
20 We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.
And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ.
He is the true God and eternal life.
21 Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.”
1 John 5:18-21
Just get the nub of this passage because your head might be spinning with all those big ideas rushing at you suddenly …
“We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.
And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ.
He is the true God and eternal life.”
The fascinating thing here is this: Who exactly is ‘the true God and eternal life’?
Well, the first predicate which follows ‘This one’ in 5:20, the true God, is a description of God the Father used by Jesus in John 17:3, and was used in the preceding clause of the present verse to refer to God the Father (Him who is true).
But the second predicate of ‘This one’ in 5:20, eternal life, appears to refer to Jesus because although the Father possesses “life” (John 5:26; 6:57) just as Jesus does (John 1:4; 6:57, 1 John 5:11), “life” is never predicated of the Father elsewhere, while it is predicated of Jesus in John 11:25 and 14:6 (a self-predication by Jesus).
If ‘This one’ in 5:20 is understood as referring to Jesus, it forms an inclusion with the prologue, which introduced the reader to “the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us.”
So it really does appear best to understand the pronoun ‘This one’ in 5:20 as a reference to Jesus Christ.
The Christological affirmation which results is striking, but certainly not beyond the capabilities of the author (see John 1:1 and 20:28): This One [Jesus Christ] is the true God and eternal life.
We will find it hard to escape the conclusion that John doesn’t know any God apart from Jesus.
There’s John’s conclusion … so what is our conclusion?
What are to conclude from this?
• Conclusion
It was when John and the Apostles met Jesus that they met God and discovered the God Who has loved us and saved us from the uttermost caverns of darkness of soul to the uttermost heights of His fellowship in Glory.
No wonder, then, that John’s last words to his hearers, who he’s been urging and exhorting to cling to and centre their lives on the Lord, are to urge them to ‘keep away from idols’.
When you realise who John sees Jesus as being, then you realise that making Jesus less than that in your estimation so that you can live more comfortably is actually making an idol - a false Jesus you're more comfortable with.
Not God as He is but something made up - which amounts to idolatry.
But there’s more to this book than simply this.
The point of doing an initial overview of a book like this is to make sure that when we get down to the nitty-gritty of passage-by-passage exposition, we don’t lose the wood for the trees and that we keep the general picture, the theme of the book, very much in view.
So let’s make sure we’ve got hold of this.
The big picture is that John wrote this book to assure believers of the certainty of their faith and to refute heretical doctrines teaching that Jesus was not fully human and fully divine.
Heretical teachings like this bear fruit in all sorts of evidence of the departure from authentic Christianity that had actually become evident amongst the visible churches John addresses, because heresy becomes visible in the sort of behaviours that it leads on to.
Idolatries.
Worshipping created (or imagined) things rather than the Creator God Whop is above all, forever praised.
So what is our analysis of the message of 1 John for us today.
Well, we see what was happening in those house churches John served happening again today as, over time, words get stripped of their original meaning and applied to something else entirely.
This stunt of changing the established meaning of language is not new.
Even at the close of the first century, words were being twisted and drained of their original meanings.
Remember, when the John wrote this letter, the Christian faith was perhaps 50 or 60 years old.
A generation had grown up in Christian homes, and a distinct church subculture was already in place.
People had the lingo - they had the language.
Some people were using familiar phrases such as “knowing God,” “walk in the light,” and “born of God,” but investing well-known terms and phrases with new, distorted meanings to suit their fancy.
John – in 1 John - opens fire on that.
He sets us an example in how to deal with this doctrinal then spiritual declension by properly opening fire on it.
Then, as now, there would be no shortage of people to tell you that you were being unkind, or divisive, or ignorant, or ungracious.
1 John’s message is that letting false teaching and the behaviour it causes into God’s church is what divides it … because the church is a body of people that rallies to sound doctrine and all those who climb up by another way are thieves and robbers … to quote the Lord Himself in John 10:1.
So the thing is this.
In the words of Dr. Lloyd-Jones as he addressed the IVF conference at Swanwick in 1952: “The apostolic doctrine comes before fellowship … if there is uncertainty in such matters there cannot be real fellowship.”
That word ‘uncertainty’ is very significant.
As he writes, John knows that a confused, subtle distortion of truth is harder to counter than the sort of frontal attack you get when there is open denial of the truth.
John is working to re-establish clarity and certainty where those have been fudged, fuddled and possibly even frowned on.
So in this book, John chooses key words (light, sin, Christ, love, faith), dusts them down, and re-asserts their original meaning … and he does so alongside frequent references both to the Old Testament (Genesis and Proverbs 8 in particular) and to the teaching the Lord gave to His disciples in the farewell discourse in John 13-17.
John is bringing CLARITY … insisting on these words’ proper Biblical meanings … and contrasting boldly with their opposites which are to be uncovered, shunned and rejected.
Interestingly enough, John makes a fair bit of the importance of a lifestyle of obedience to God and love to one another that holding to sound doctrine brings about.
Repeatedly he begins with the phrase “If we claim ...” and then he proceeds to show what actions must result if we claim to live in the true light and to know God.
So, we are not to try to re-make or ‘revise’ so amazing a God as our God is.
We are not trying to re-model Him in our own image, to keep Him within OUR comfort zone, to accommodate Him to the sensitivities or sensibilities of 'the cool gang', or the revised morality of any era we may live in.
John is adamant and crystal clear … and so must we also be in our time and our generation:
· He is the One True God.
· His is the One True Way.
· And His is the only true and right worship, which doesn’t merely consist in singing the latest cool tunes to a fantastic band on Sundays but also consists in living lives moulded by His revealed truth and consistent with our calling.
And you shrink back, and of course you do.
This won’t make you outstandingly popular with folks who don’t love Him.
Much MORE painfully, it might not make you popular with genuine brothers and sisters in Christ who are currently sitting like frogs in a slowly warming saucepan, soothed by the incremental increase in heat and the false security of their current immediate surroundings … such people really need our prayerful help and confidence-building encouragement to get OUT of there.
But this is 100% what makes you popular with He Who is the lover of your life and your eternal hope of Glory.
That’s the contrast it comes down to for us.
Whose pleasure in you is most important to you?
How much does being a Christ-centred person matter to you?
There’s what it comes down to.
And you get to choose.
We’re living in times of increasing confusion over Christian truth and conduct.
I this week listened in disciplined and deliberate fashion to a recording of an address given earlier this week in St. Woolos Cathedral in Newport by the Dean.
It could have been any denomination but this was dealing with a decision made in the previous week by the Church in Wales to bless same sex partnerships in their denomination.
The Dean was saying that opposing the blessing of same sex relationships doesn't result from studying the Bible but from not studying it cleverly enough, with the level of understanding of people who understood these things.
It is a quite appalling discrediting of Scripture and if you fee strong enough you can watch from about 15 minutes in on this link.
Now look, we are living in times of INCREASING confusion over what is CHRISTIAN truth and conduct.
We MUST choose.
We ARE choosing now … possibly sub-consciously.
We must choose CONSCIOUSLY, and we must choose well.
As John says, do not settle for contemporary dilutions of what constitutes Biblical, Christian, truth and conduct.
How does he put it?
He says: 'little children, keep yourselves from idols'.
He couldn't have put that, could he, any more plainly?
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