Please turn with me in your Bibles to the first letter of John, beginning chapter 1, verse 1:
‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life. The life was made manifest, and we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.’
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaimed to you: that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
‘My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Father God, we thank you for all the messages that are found in your text of sacred scripture. We thank you that you will speak to us at times very plainly and clearly, telling us what your message is, proclaiming to us a message of good news, of hope, and salvation. Open our hearts to receive this message; help us to believe and to walk in your light. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So yes, we are now going to transition from the Old Testament Book of Judges to the three letters of John. While this may sound like a strange or an extreme shift in change, it is really not. The Book of Judges as a whole tells the story of God’s continuing love for his chosen people, despite their disobedience and their unwillingness to walk in the way that the Lord has prescribed.
It demonstrates his continuing works of providence to deliver his undeserving and ungrateful people because of his great love for us and not because of our deservedness or our righteousness. The Book of Judges also teaches us about the character of God: that he is faithful to his covenant promises, even when we are not; that he is righteous and just when he punishes the wicked for their sin; and that he is also merciful when he gives grace to those who ask because of their faith and trust in him.
The Johannan epistles tell much the same story, but rather than giving us a multitude of examples demonstrating how to not walk in obedience to God after they remind us of how the Lord has delivered us, they then encourage us in how we may now walk with God in faith, giving us practical and tangible examples and ways for us to follow.
Now the three letters of John are very different from the Pauline epistles, and they’re also very different from the two letters of Peter. They are different in both their content and their tone, but their purpose remains the same: to encourage and instruct Christians in the way we should live since we have been justified in Christ.
Both Paul and Peter wrote very precisely and directly, while John freely wrote using metaphor and analogy, which makes his words sometimes feel more relational and personal but also ambiguous or confusing. And while the Apostle Paul clearly was educated in the philosophical schools of Greece and is known to have interacted directly with professional philosophers and spoke in a similar rhetorical style, it’s evident that John converts and redeems some Platonic ideas, like using the concept of the Divine Logos to describe Jesus Christ and then incorporates them into our understanding of the faith.
He also offers arguments against false philosophies, like certain concepts that led to the Gnostic and Docetic heresies. Like the other epistles, John’s are occasional documents, having been written to a particular group for a particular purpose and to address a particular situation.
Yet first John lacks the literary format and construction of letters typical to the Roman period, while second and third John were more like common letters. Thus, first John is better understood as a written sermon or a religious tract. Suggestions have been made throughout church history that the three John epistles were not written by the same author as the Gospel of John, but the textual evidence of the used vocabulary, like the frequency of their common use of agape and cosmos, and their use of concepts of light and darkness, the use of logos, and the importance of the Christian’s designation as being children of God and cosmos strongly argues for a common authorship.
Therefore, we shall continue to accept, according to these evidences, that the author of the letters is the same as the author of the Gospel, whom we shall refer to as John. Lastly, it is unclear precisely when these letters or John’s Gospel was written. Most scholars suggest a date late in the first century, somewhere near to but before 90 A.D., but others argue for a date closer to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70.
But the question of which came first, the epistles or the Gospel, is impossible for us to answer. However, it seems more likely that the epistles were written with the assumption of the reader’s familiarity with the author’s Gospel, and the idea of them being an earlier composition written before his arguments were more fleshed out and expanded just doesn’t seem to make sense.
However, what matters most for us as we begin this study is to recognize the moments of intersection which help them to better interpret one another. Therefore, I suggest you put a bookmark at the Gospel and another one to mark your place here at the epistles because we will be looking back and forth.
So first, we need to remind ourselves of what we already know about the author John, so that we can see what this text adds to or confirms about our knowledge. The epithet ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ has been applied to John, the son of Zebedee and the younger brother of James, ever since the earliest Church tradition.
However, within John’s Gospel, the writer never names himself directly; yet he does state that the disciple whom Jesus loved is the book’s writer, and then he identifies himself as the beloved disciple by saying, ‘This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true.’ When Peter asked Jesus a question about him, saying to Jesus, ‘Lord, what about this man?’ Jesus said to Peter, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?’
In concerning this beloved disciple, a saying spread among the brothers that this disciple was not to die. Since Church tradition and history confidently holds the opinion that John was the final Apostle to die and that he was the only Apostle to not die due to martyrdom, the tradition of the Gospel’s authorship is applied to him.
Most importantly for us, the beloved disciple claimed to have been an eyewitness of the events about Jesus, of his life, his death, and resurrection that he recorded here in his Gospel. So John, as an eyewitness to Jesus, should be and is a trustworthy and reliable source for information about Jesus, and is one of his twelve disciples. He really was the best authority on all of Jesus’s teaching.
So now, let’s go ahead and turn and start to look at first John. He begins: ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life.’
The life was made manifest, and we have seen it and testified to it and proclaimed to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you. That sounds very much like, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Here’s the beginning with God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
So here we begin with a clear sign of the theological unity between this epistle and John’s Gospel, as both this eternal life and the Word have been from the beginning and were with God and with the Father.
It is reasonable to interpret all things remaining through him as being made through the Word of life, and both this Word and this life became tangible and physical when they became flesh and dwelt among us, being made manifest to us.
So right away, John makes two very important points: first, that the life he is proclaiming is itself eternal and has been with the Father from before the beginning of all things; and also that this life has appeared, been revealed, and has been made accessible to mankind.
Secondly, that he, the writer, is an eyewitness to this eternal life, having seen it with his own eyes and touched it with his own hands, just the same as the Gospel writer. So John plainly tells us, ‘I have a message to declare to you—eternal life!’ And I proclaim this message because I know it is true from the evidence of my senses because I have seen it, heard it, and touched it.
Since the authority of John’s message comes from him being a personal witness to Jesus, we should believe him and trust his message. However, you might think that John’s word and testimony is not good enough because lots of people lie and make claims about things that are simply untrue. So why should we believe John’s claim?
But remember that John was born a Jew and was now a Jewish Christian, and so the Ten Commandments, the moral law, would have been his core principles for living. The ninth commandment reads, ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,’ a commandment prohibiting all lying and the intentional telling of falsehoods.
Secondly, John, along with all the other eyewitness Jesus followers, were known to have been persecuted for their beliefs about Jesus by both the Jews and the Romans, with none ever recanting. Third, a person willing to suffer so much—even martyrdom by death—for a known falsehood is irrational and goes against our human nature.
It was not until after the fourth century A.D. that being known as a Christian offered anyone much earthly benefit. Thus, there was no potential benefit for John to lie either about his message or the source of his testimony.
Then John continues: ‘This is the message we’ve heard from him and proclaimed to you.’ But before we get to his message, we need to finish connecting some dots so that we can see the picture more clearly.
This is the message we’ve heard from him, but who’s this message from? John’s message, he’s saying, comes from the eternal life that was made manifest, from the eternal life that was from the beginning and was with the Father— from the person who was with the Father, his Son, Jesus Christ, the Word in whom was life.
So Jesus’s message comes to us from the life that is eternal and comes from God through God’s Son, the man Jesus, statement purposefully declaring both Jesus’s divinity and his humanity as the God-man.
Then, before he tells us the message itself, John explains his purpose for writing and proclaiming this: ‘So that you too may have fellowship with us,’ and indeed, ‘Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ, and we’re writing these things so that our joy may be complete.’
Why does John write? For fellowship. So that we could have fellowship with him and the church, so that we could also be in fellowship with the Father and the Son, because the church is in fellowship with them.
What does he mean by fellowship? The Greek word is ‘koinonia,’ and it describes a close association between persons with a sense of willing generosity flowing between each other, a common sharing with one another and participation with one another in each other’s lives.
And it’s within this association, and between this participation, that we find the clearest and cleanest expression of love, of agape. So this koinonia is the very idea which underlies communion, the Lord’s Supper.
Because when we participate in it, when we partake, we are sharing and participating in the body and blood of Jesus Christ, God’s greatest gift for us, his greatest gift of love. We are sharing and participating both in his life and death, having the confident hope of our participation in his resurrection.
This koinonia, this fellowship, is the result of our union with Christ Jesus. But what koinonia is not is coffee hour, congregational meals, ice cream socials, or study groups. Although events like those are consequences of this koinonia of our union with one another, koinonia is found and experienced when our lives are shared together.
Secondly, he writes so that our joy may be complete—so that the Father’s joy and the Son’s joy and the church’s joy and John’s joy and the joy of every member of God’s elect would be complete.
So that each and every one of us will experience the fullness of joy that can come only from our complete and total union with the Lord Jesus Christ. The purpose of this message about eternal life, which John is about to proclaim, is to bring us into a more complete union with our Lord and God, so both he and we may all experience joy.
Jesus gave John his message for us so that we will become united to Jesus and so that we will all share in this divine joy together. What a beautiful message! What a positive message! What a message of hope for hopeless people!
It’s a message to lift up the downtrodden and the depressed. How could we not want to respond in the affirmative? Who would not want to experience and enjoy everlasting joy with God?
So now we can get into the message that brings us into fellowship with God and gives us such great joy. This is the message we’ve heard from him and proclaimed to you: that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
John’s message is about God and God’s triumph and a message that came from God himself, God the Son, Jesus Christ. And again, the connection with John 1:4-9 is very easy to see, especially verse 5, where the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
And here we encounter John’s first metaphor of his letter: God is light. I mean this must be a metaphor because in the beginning, God said, ‘Let there be light,’ so naturally God must pre-exist the creation of light and cannot himself actually be light.
But what does this metaphor teach us about God or about God and the universe? First, it describes a binary system of light and darkness, but binary does not automatically mean or imply that these two things are in fact equal and opposite; that would be dualism.
What John effectively describes is God’s difference from and his superiority over all things. This metaphor may also be applied to a whole series of related and interconnected binary systems in relation to the Lord: Creator and creation, good and evil, white and black, righteousness and wickedness, holy and unholy, truth and lies, justice and injustice, sinfulness and sinlessness, life and death, and many others besides.
Secondly, we know that there can be no darkness in the light; no part of the creation can be a part of the Creator. He’s transcendent over all creation.
The metaphor further teaches us that God does not, cannot, and will not compromise with Satan. In this binary system, everything is either of God or not of God. Those are the only two choices; there are no half-measures.
There can be no shades of gray. A person who tries to excuse doing evil for the sake of doing good, or doing something morally questionable because they think their motives are pure, deludes themselves because despite their intention, they are still doing evil and doing wrong.
Just as when mixing black paint into white, it becomes darker—you cannot add darkness to light and have it remain light. Whenever you turn on a light at night, the darkness is driven away; light and dark cannot mix.
But unlike oil and water, just by the mere effort of trying, the stronger light will always destroy the weaker darkness. The visual evidence proves that light will always overcome darkness.
If you don’t believe me, take a flashlight into a pitch-dark room at midnight, and then turn it on, and then I’m sure that you will see darkness can have no part in light.
And that is what John means when he says, ‘If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.’ If we choose to remain in darkness, then there is no light within us. If there is no light within us, then we are lying, and we add to our darkness, making it even deeper and darker.
Yet, if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. But the light of Christ is within us, and if we have koinonia with God, then we will walk in the light, as his blood cleanses us of our sins.
The sin darkness, which has stained our souls, just as a person lighting a small candle flame within a darkened room will banish the darkness away and cleanse it of shadows. You cannot be walking in shadows if you’re in the noonday sun.
So, walking in light is his next metaphor, and it builds off of the first. Since John first asserted that God is light, by walking in the light he means that a person is walking in the ways of God by keeping his commandments and following the example of Jesus, and that they’re walking in fellowship with God. Therefore, they have been, are being, and will be cleansed by the power of God.
This cleansing of our sin is the natural consequence of our being brought into fellowship with God; it’s also the means by which we’re brought into that fellowship. We are purified, we are being purified, and we have been purified, and we will be purified.
Grammatically and actually, the blood of Jesus is the active agent of our purification, while we are just passive recipients of it. Our cleansing is a continuous and ongoing activity; that is the power which Jesus’ blood has against sin. It’s the ultimate stain remover and stain blocker—it removes the old and prevents new sin stains from setting in.
However, John next confronts us with the hard truth about ourselves: ‘If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’ He confronts us with our sinfulness, with our sinful nature, our total depravity. He knows just as we know that every human person sins because every human person is a sinner. It is who and what we are, thanks to Adam, therefore he tells us that if we say that we do not sin, knowing that everyone sins by nature, then we are sinning by lying and prove that truth is not in our nature.
By denying our sinfulness, we confirm our sinfulness. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we’re honest with ourselves and honest with him about our sins and our sinfulness, and if we acknowledge our falling condition and our need for someone to cleanse us, then Jesus Christ will purify us.
But why would he do that? Because he is faithful and just to forgive us if and when we confess and repent. He is faithful and just to do so because that is what he has explicitly promised to do over and over in his word.
In the divinely inspired scriptures, the Lord makes his promises freely, and he keeps them. He must, otherwise he would be a liar, and he could not be God. So if we acknowledge our wickedness before a righteous God, then he will remove our wickedness, declare us righteous, and bring us into fellowship with himself.
Our active duty is to respond by confessing our sins. When we are brought into the light of koinonia with God, then if we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
If we lie and say that we do not sin, that there is no sin within us because we think that we have never sinned, then what John is not saying is that we transform God into being a liar; it’s that we’re calling the Lord a liar, demonstrating that his truth—the knowledge and understanding of his word—has not penetrated our hearts or minds.
Because if we deny the sinfulness of humanity and the sinfulness of every human person, especially our own, we are calling God a liar, because scripture plainly and clearly declares and demonstrates that truth over and over again: ‘Genesis 6:5, ‘The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’ Genesis 8:21, ‘For the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth.’ Jeremiah 17:9, ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
So you see, whenever we deny our sinfulness, we condemn ourselves against the testimony of scripture.
And next, after John tears us down from that high opinion of ourselves, he brings us back to the good news of why he wrote this note: ‘My little children, I’m writing these things to you so that you may not sin.’
He writes these things to warn us away from sin and to encourage us in the obedience of faith. But note, however, that John is also a realist, and he knows that no human person is perfect or sinless. And because even a regenerate person will still sin, he reminds us of our only hope in this life: Jesus Christ.
‘But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.’
Whenever we sin, because while we live we remain sinners—even sinners redeemed by grace—Jesus Christ stands between us and our heavenly Father as our advocate. He defends us before our Father, he commends us to our Father, he stands between us and the just judgment which we all deserve because he is the propitiation for our sins.
He has made the sacrifice; he is the sacrifice which reconciles us to a right relationship with the Lord our Father through the shedding of his blood on our behalf. He turns and brings the Father’s favor toward us by turning aside our Father’s righteous wrath against us and taking it upon himself.
Then we come to an expression which is very troubling and confusing for us in English, but which was quite clear to them in the Greek: ‘And not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.’
Although you might think this sounds like it, this is not talking about universal salvation or universal atonement, and we don’t have to do extreme interpretive gymnastics to avoid that heresy. Just have a knowledge of the original language.
See, John uses the word ‘cosmos’ 73 times across his gospel and these three epistles, while it’s used 73 times across all the other books of the New Testament by the other writers. He uses it more frequently, and he uses it in a very specific and consistent way.
Whenever John wrote the word ‘cosmos,’ we almost always translate it as ‘world,’ but the idea of ‘world,’ which he conveys, is the universe being God’s created order. During the first century, within Hellenized Judaism, ‘cosmos’ commonly replaced the expression of heaven and earth because it incorporated both.
So, even though John is talking about Jesus atoning for the sins of the universe, he doesn’t mean it in a universal sense since he adds the qualifier ‘whole.’ The Greek word ‘halas,’ which is frequently translated into English using ‘whole’ or ‘entire,’ actually conveys the understanding of a complete unit and is not necessarily indicative of every individual part.
So what John here means by the sins of the whole world is all of the sins from all those in the world for which he is the propitiation, and not the sins of everyone in the whole world. Jesus is not the propitiation of sin for just John and his contemporaries, but for the sins of everyone who is brought into fellowship with Christ and cleansed.
The atonement of Christ is limited by the work of God the Holy Spirit, who draws the elect into the light and applies the blood of Christ to them. We do not define or determine that limit; it’s limited only by the sovereign will of God.
We might not like the sound of it, but we know that God does not save everyone in his mercy because the evidence that we can see from the world around us is clear that not everyone is saved.
We know the sad fact is true, and we cannot deny it, even though God is capable of saving everyone. If he did, then he would not be just, and then he would not be God. Remember, God does not condemn us to hell; we condemn ourselves with our sinfulness. Hell is what we deserve because of our wickedness before the Lord, and the great mystery of salvation is not ‘why does God not save all?’ but ‘why does God save any?’
And it’s never really a good idea to ask the question ‘why God’ about anything, but we’re fortunate because here John does answer the ‘why’ question of salvation. It’s the very purpose of this letter: ‘So that you too may have fellowship with us, and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ, and we’re writing these things so that our joy may be complete.’
God saves because God wants us to be in koinonia with him, because he loves us and he wants to take joy in us and share his joy with us. Jesus saves, so some of the elect may be brought into koinonia with him and so that his joy and our joy will be filled to the fullest and thereby be made complete. God chose to save some for the very same reason he created Adam and Eve in the beginning: because he wanted to have a loving relationship with us and for us to have a loving relationship with him.
God created us for koinonia and for joy. During his work of creation, do you remember what the one thing was that God said was not good? That the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’ Adam needed someone to be in koinonia with so that he would not be alone.
And after God made Eve and gave her to Adam, what did Adam say? ‘The man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.’ Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.’ Adam described the koinonia of their marriage covenant, united together so they would never need to be alone.
Shortly after Adam and Eve sinned by disobeying God and by eating the forbidden fruit, they heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day. The Lord came to them to enjoy his koinonia with them, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
They tried to flee and remove themselves from his presence because their sin had shattered this koinonia. They had added the corruption of sin to their nature, extinguishing the light of their souls. They clothed themselves in darkness and shadow and made themselves unable to stand or walk in God’s light.
Once he chose to step into that darkness, Adam made it impossible for us, his descendants, to choose to enter the light again. Our souls took on their first shade of gray—the first dark shadow—and then we began adding more and more darkness until it became blacker than midnight.
It required an act of God to bring us back into the light—the shedding of Jesus’s blood, which cleanses us of all our sin. The Lord God the Father and Jesus Christ, God the Son, did all of this because of their love for us, because of their love for you. And they did all of this because they want to take joy in us and for us to take joy in them.
Every person will experience happiness in this life at one time or another, and everyone will experience sadness in this life at one time or another. But happiness is not joy, and not everyone will experience God’s joy in life. Joy is something beyond happiness because you can still experience God’s joy even in the midst of sorrow and loss.
You can experience it and still feel okay about feeling it, even when you think you should be feeling absolutely wretched. God’s joy sustains us even when we’re at our lowest. Joy fills the Christian’s heart and flows out into everything that we touch. God’s joy is infectious, leading us to share it with everyone we meet because we want them to enjoy joy along with us. Truly, that is the joy of the Lord.
So where and how do we find God’s joy? True joy is found only in union with Christ, in koinonia with God. How do we increase the fullness of our joy? The same way, or at least in a way similar to John. He wrote these things so that our joy may be complete, and we must do the same.
Therefore, we must share the love of Christ and the knowledge of Christ and what he has done for us with everyone that we can. If we believe that this is good news for us, then we must believe that it’s good news for others. Sharing this promise and hope with others is the most loving thing that we may ever do for someone, because to do otherwise and not share it is the most hateful thing that we can do.
So if you have heard and received the Word of Life, Jesus Christ, then join with John and every other believer, and every time, and in every place, to testify and proclaim this message of eternal life that can only be received by fellowship with God in koinonia.
Share this good news with everyone you know, so that they too may be cleansed by the power of Jesus’s blood, cleaned of their sin so that they may walk in the light of God and so that our joy may be complete indeed.
Amen.