You can see in the outline the top part involves…we
finished the first, the preamble. We’re going to go now to the purpose of
the epistle; and we want to see how this plays together. So we don’t lose
the forest for the trees here, I wanted to review a little bit the flow.
Remember we started this series in 1 John, we said one of the vexing problems
with this epistle (and people have complained about this for centuries) is that
it appears not to be organized into an argument. Recent research on
realizing that these epistles, and this one in particular, were written not to
be read; but they were written to be read to a group of people who were
illiterate. Therefore it follows a rhetorical way that people in those
days had of doing these addresses to a group of people. So that’s why we’re
following that research in how we’ve outlined it. This is why at
the beginning we have the prologue, the first 4 verses. That’s sort of an
introduction. The title 1 John was never in there originally. That’s
the translators who put 1 John a label on it. The way these epistles were
known was by their first verse. So it’s that first verse that was original
title of this whole epistle.
Then we had the preamble. The preamble was
structured so that the basis would be laid for what’s coming. So the
preamble dealt with our fellowship. The whole theme here is fellowship. You see
in the first verse, and then you’ll follow on the handout - eternal life is the
subject here. Eternal life, in John’s way of viewing eternal life; it’s the
living personal relationship that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
had from all eternity. It’s a very lofty idea of eternal life. It’s
that eternal life. It’s a spiritual thing. It’s obviously not material.
So what we call physical biological life is a material analogue to the personal
relationship that was going on for all eternity with the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. That’s important because that sets Christianity apart from all
other religions. No other religion on the face of the planet can truly
claim to have a personal God. Now I know that Judaism and Islam say that;
but Judaism and Islam have a problem. The problem is you can’t have a
personal relationship if there’s only one person. That’s the dilemma of
solitary monotheism. Personal relationships involve people - people
plural. So you can’t have a personal relationship if you have only one
person. This is why you even have the drama in Genesis where God creates
Adam and then He deliberately to make a point says, “You’re alone.” He
wanted Adam to experience what solitary Robinson Crusoe existence looks
like. So the trinity instead of being something we have to be apologetic
about is the key to personality. You can’t have a personal God unless you
have a trinity going on. So that’s eternal life.
Then fellowship with God, and again following your
outline, there are nuances as we pass from 1:5 to 2:2, 2:3-8, 2:9-11 where he
follows the trinity. The fellowship with the Father focuses upon His holy
integrity.
NKJ 1 John 1:5 …that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.
How do we relate to that? We relate to that
because as sinners we do have darkness. We do have sin, and we have to
align ourselves – put ourselves in harmony with a holy, righteous
God. How do we do that? We can’t do it by good works so we do it by
confession. That’s why 1 John 1:9 is so important. It doesn’t mean
vowing. It doesn’t mean trying to offer sacrifices of some sort,
pledges. That doesn’t work. If that worked, we wouldn’t need a
crucifixion. So 1 John 1:9 is a very, very important thing.
Historically, of course, the church has spoken of confession. It just
that the confession that John’s talking about is between you personally and
God. It’s not talking about confessing to an intermediary. It’s
talking about God because He is the only one against whom we have sinned. So
then the fellowship with the Son focuses upon Him authoritative revelation.
NKJ 1 John 2:3 Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His
commandments.
So the idea there is that it centers on His
authority. Again following the outline, the point there is that Jesus has
given us verbal revelation. Remember what John always does. If you
want to understand John in this epistle you have to go back to the Upper Room
Discourse because this epistle is really his-years-later exposition of what
that Upper Room Discourse looks like.
In that Upper Room Discourse Jesus said, “Father I
thank you that You have given me the words to me and I have given those words
to them.”
So the words that Jesus spoke are the words of the
Father. There has to be an identity between Jesus and the Father in the
teachings and the verbal revelation. So there the issue with John
is - do we or do we not recognize that Jesus is the total incarnation of God
Himself?
Then we come to the third one, the fellowship of the
Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit there isn’t even mentioned. Those verses
we went through last Sunday are talking about loving the brethren or hating the
brethren. And so obviously what’s that about? Well, that’s about the brethren
are people the Holy Spirit regenerated and in whom the Holy Spirit
dwells. We deduce that in verses 9, 10, 11 the thrust there is on the
Holy Spirit, not magnifying the Holy Spirit Himself; but looking and being
sensitive to His work in our midst. So that’s the preamble. Now
that, all that, to say that is what John is going to mean now as he moves
through this epistle by fellowship.
The problem we’re getting into the section today is -
this is the first of a whole chunk of text. You’ll see if you look in the box
there I’ve added a new thing from last week and that is purpose. The
purpose from verses 12 to 27 is a call to resist the doomed world system and
its Christ denying teachers.
Right now we’re put into a combat situation and the
fact is in this section John is dealing with a war, a cosmic war in
battle. So now we begin to say, “Okay. What’s the relationship of that
previous section on fellowship to this next section on cosmic conflict.”
The point that John is going to make here is that the
cosmic dangers of living in a real world, the danger here is that it destroys
fellowship with God. So he wants us to understand what fellowship
is. Now we’re dealing with a threat. The threat is to the
fellowship. So you’ll see how that argument unfolds here. So let’s have a
word of prayer and ask for the Holy Spirit to help us out as we try to see
these truths for our personal living.
(Opening prayer)
So now we come to II on the outline, the purpose of
this epistle. The situation is fellowship with God is being
threatened. Now we’re going to look at verses 12 through 14. I put
the structure up here 12 through 14 - actually this is 12 through 13.
We’re going to look at that structure and see what we observe in it and see
what kind of truths are in this. Remember again when you read John, he
writes simply; but the apparently simple sentences that he uses encase very
deep truths. He’s a subtle writer when he does this. I don’t know
when he read this or pastors read this whether they used their vocal intonation
as they read it to try to get these points across or not. All we do is we
observe that there are subtleties here. Apparently when they read it out loud
they must have in their voice communicated these subtleties somehow. But
they’re there. They’re objectively there in the text.
So there are 3 things we want to understand about this
section before we look at the observation of the details. The first one
is that these verses 12, 13, and 14 presuppose that we understand fellowship.
I’ve already said why – because the preamble - he spent time defining
what fellowship is. So that’s all assumed now. We leave that
behind. We’ve learned that and now we move into this next section.
The second thing to understand is that this part of
the epistle, if the other part didn’t this one surely does, shows you that this
epistle was written to believers. How else could they be if he’s talking
about hating your brother? He wouldn’t be a brother if the person wasn’t a
believer. Here very clearly he’s talking about believers. So there
shouldn’t be a problem and people, commentators tests of whether you are saved
or not. These are tests whether you’re saved; these are tests of in
fellowship and the dangers to that. So that’s the second thing to
know. It’s written to believers. Salvation of the readers of this
epistle is never once questioned in the whole entire epistle.
The third point is it is intended to affirm the
listeners to be confident in what God has already done in their
lives. In other words, we are to operate from a position of
strength. Apparently, and we can only guess at this – apparently
the false teachers were doing what educators do in our society, the college
professors professing themselves to have some sort of intellectual elitism,
that everybody else has to be subordinate to these superior elite people.
What John is getting at right here and he’s addressing all believers.
He says, “Every one of you as a believer should have
confidence in what the Holy Spirit has done you. You don’t need an elite
to tell you the obvious.”
The thrust of all this because this is addressed to
all the listeners, not an elite group, all listeners. All believers share
this. Obviously by emphasizing everyone what John must be doing is he’s
building up confidence. We need the confidence to be protected in our mental
attitude against thinking that somehow the Word of God is insufficient.
Somehow we need to be told by some super intelligent elitist person what we
should believe, and John doesn’t want us to do that. He wants us to have
confidence that as a believer you have sufficient assets given to you by
God. You just have to know how to use it.
Let’s look now at some of the things, at verse 11, 12
and 13. Follow that with me. I’m reading the New King James.
NKJ 1 John 2:12 I write to you, little children, Because your sins are
forgiven you for His name's sake.
13 I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I write to
you, young men, Because you have overcome the wicked one…
Then there’s a question about the end of verse 13
which if we have time we’ll get to this week.
Let’s look at what we’ve got here. Notice in the
red I’ve outlined the three addressees; three classes of people are addressed
here. That introduces a problem. Are these classes – does he
intend to refer to stages of maturity or something else? It’s very easy
to at first conclude that he’s referring to stages of maturity. Obviously
you think of fathers as the older believers and the little children as younger
believers. The problem is look at verse 1 of this very same
chapter. What is the addressee of 2:1? Teknia, little children. Then if you look at verse 28, same
chapter, who does he address there? Teknia,
little children. So clearly the word teknia
is being used for all believers . That leads us to say maybe these aren’t
stages of maturity. Maybe these are referring to something else. That’s
what we’re going to conclude is that these are viewpoints of your relationship
with God. See how multifaceted fellowship is. That we can relate to
God as little children. We can relate to him as a father who is
experienced with Him. We can relate to Him as young men. The other
problem by the way in thinking of these three classes as stages of maturity is
why are they in that order? It starts out with little children and goes
to fathers and then comes back to young men. That’s strange if that’s the
case of stages of maturity. So we want to take a little bit more careful
look at how he talks about each one of these.
When we first look at this we always want to always
look at the verbs. What do you notice about the verbs in all these
cases? It’s not clear by the way in the NKJ translation the first
verb. In the New King James it says:
NKJ 1 John 2:12 I write to you, little children, Because your sins are
forgiven
That’s not the Greek. The Greek is a perfect
tense. “Your sins have been forgiven.”
Then he talks to the fathers.
Because you have known Him
Perfect tense again.
Come down to the young men.
Because you have overcome the wicked
one…
Perfect tense.
So all the verbs line up tense-wise. So now we
say, well now if that’s the case then this must be true of all 3 of these
people or this way of looking at things. Has anybody - look at your
translations because I know you have different translations. Does anyone
have in verse 12 any translation that does not have “your” for your sins, the
personal relative pronoun? Do all your translation have that? Does
anybody have a translation of verse 12 that says “because sins” without the
personal pronoun? That’s interesting because it’s missing in the Greek.
So all the translations try to help us out by putting the relative pronoun in
there. Let’s think about why the translators do that. If you saw a
text and it said this:
I write to you little children because the sins forgiven on account of
His name.
Clearly he’s talking about the children’s sins.
Nothing is wrong with the relative pronoun. But, does anyone pick up a
nuance of why possibly the apostle didn’t put the relative pronoun in front of
the noun sins.
(Comment)
Good, Nate picked it up. By omitting the
relative pronoun, you make it more general because now it’s not talking about
your sins, little children. It’s talking about sins. It’s a generalized
principle that applies all across the board. So here we have now the
children who have this experience of having sins being forgiven. John
then - this experience of sins having been forgiven notice it’s perfect tense
so he’s talking about experience, your experience of having your sins
forgiven. That denotes a child-like relationship with the Lord.
“Daddy forgives me.”
So this is mentally what he’s doing here he’s
cultivating a picture of a family. The Bible does this. Do you know
why he does it? Because families aren’t social constructs. Families
are designed social features from creation. Families are social
structures of God’s design. They are not conveniences that slowly evolve
into social constructs that can be changed by the legislature. So right
here you see when you start getting into the Word of God you realize how
different the Word of God is from our whole paganizing culture. We bump
up against it more and more the deeper we get into the Word of God. That’s
not condemning the Word of God. It’s condemning the culture. It
shows you how screwed up it is. So here we have this feature of daddy and
child. Daddy forgives. So John says think of the fact that as
children, little children, you are all believers. We are all little
children and we have to have daddy forgive us our sins. It’s a comforting
family picture here. John is a very loving writer, a very serious
writer. He’s a very gentle writer in many ways.
Then we come down to the fathers. Oh! By the
way, notice what is the basis of sins being forgiven? He wants us to see
that. The only basis for sins being forgiven is the authority of Jesus
Christ. See what he’s doing? False teacher are going to deny this
by the way. That’s coming up. This gets back to exclusivity. One of
the most offensive things about the Christian faith in our relativistic culture
is the claim there is only one way of salvation. That’s because God has a
character and there is only one way to approach Him. You shouldn’t have a
problem with this. Everywhere we go we have to have passwords. Why
should it seem unusual that we have to have a password to have fellowship and
relationship with God? The password is we acknowledge our sins. We
acknowledge that Jesus is the substitutionary atonement for all of our sins
– period. There is no other password available. He’s the one
that assigns the password. So here’s the childlike.
Now we come to the father. Now look at
this.
NKJ 1 John 2:13 I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.
We want to… Who’s the “Him” here do you suppose?
At first you might think he’s talking about Him as the Father. But is
he? What is the rule that we do when we want to understand John? We
go back to other things John has written, in particular the Upper Room
Discourse. I’ve taken those two verses. Look at the Gospel of
John. Look at the first two verses.
NKJ John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God.
2 He was in the beginning with God.
So who is it that is from the beginning? The
Father or the Son? Of course they both are from the beginning.
Which one is John focusing on? Jesus, because this is the way he writes
about it in the first two verses of his gospel.
“In the beginning He was with God.”
Then he says in 2:3 here… Before we get to that.
Let’s just keep here for a moment because what we’re looking at is we’re trying
to identify who is from the beginning It’s very important with John that we see
that Jesus’ words are the same as the Father’s words. Jesus is God
incarnate. He’s adamant about this. If you read the gospels that’s
why he talks about:
the Word was with God, and the Word
was God.
He’s distinguishing the Word from God. He’s
distinguishing the Son from the Father because he wants us to understand that
this Jewish man Jesus is fully God incarnate. He won’t let go of
this. This is the center of his entire writing whether it’s the gospel or
the epistle. He can’t leave it alone, the incarnation. So now if that’s
true:
NKJ 1 John 2:13 I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.
Now we get this other verb here - known. Where
has John used that before? He’s used it back up in 2:3. Remember
that? Look up in 2:3. This is that section we were talking about
where he’s talking about the Son.
NKJ 1 John 2:3 Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His
commandments.
There’s that “knowing.” It’s knowing in a
context where he’s talking about knowing the Son.
“We know that we know Him because we keep His
commandments.”
Here in verse 13 he’s talking about:
NKJ 1 John 2:13 I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him
who is from the beginning.
Now this is interesting. Do you notice
something? Look at what he’s saying about the little children. Look
at what he’s saying about the father. Does anybody see a parallelism
between the structure here and the structure in the preamble? Look at the
outline, the box up at the top of the handout. When we went over the
preamble, the preamble was divided into three parts. The first part dealt
with the Father and our relationship to His holiness. He talked about
confessing sins. The second one is talking about knowing Christ.
Anybody see a parallel in the structure? This is one of these subtleties
of John; but it’s there. Look carefully – verse 12 he’s talking
about little children, talking about forgiving sins. Now in 13a he’s
talking about fathers because you have known Him who was from the
beginning. Do you see the parallel between these two and the first two
parts of the preamble? Anybody? Got it? The first part of the
preamble dealt with the Father’s nature and how do we respond to the Father’s
nature? What has to happen? 1 John 1:9 What’s 1 John talking about?
Forgiving of sins. Well, wait a minute! Isn’t that the same subject he’s
brought up again with little children?
Now look at the second part of the preamble. The
second part of the preamble said to know Him. You’re going to know
Him. Now what’s he talking about with the fathers? Same verb -
know. Now does anybody see the parallel? The first part of the
preamble seems to be concentrating the same areas as first same part of the
structure. The second part of the preamble seems to parallel the
second part of the structure. Now this is what I mean by there is
structure in this epistle. John isn’t just writing this all over the
place. Whether he was conscious even of it we don’t know. Maybe
it’s just the Holy Spirit working through this man as he was writing.
Now we come to the last part of verse 13.
NKJ 1 John 2:13 …I write to you, young men, Because you have overcome
the wicked one.
Now this is interesting. If this were stages of
maturity, why does he skip back to teenagers. Does anyone – can
anyone see something different about the way he’s talking about young men and
the way he’s talked about children and fathers?
(Comment)
Yeah. Young men, we’re talking about combat,
athletics, contests. So now he’s focusing on the battle. This
is the first time in the epistle he’s spoken of Satan and it’s in context with
young men, in context with the warrior class. Notice what he’s doing
now. He says that:
NKJ 1 John 2:13 …Because you have overcome
Perfect tense
Now the word overcome if you trace that out in a
concordance how John uses it… Well, just hold the place here and turn to
5:4. Here’s an example of how he’s using it. Look at verse 4.
NKJ 1 John 5:4 For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And
this is the victory that has overcome the world -- our faith.
How would you describe what he means by
overcome? In fact he defines it here. Anyone? What? You
resist the world by faith. Look at 5:19.
NKJ 1 John 5:19 We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies
under the sway of the wicked one.
What does he say about the world? It’s under the
sway of the evil one. We’re going to get more into how he views the world
later. Do you get a sense now of the seriousness of this section of the
epistle? We are living in a high threat environment.
I have a friend who was...he’s retired colonel
in the army. He has a Christian ministry at Fort Benning. Back when
he was a captain he was leading a group of soldiers in Vietnam. Those of
you old enough to remember the Vietnam thing, he had a group of civilians
trying to tell the military how to run a war and as usual didn’t know what they
were talking about. And we had a guy by the name of McNamara (Secretary
of Defense) and he had this odd idea that you fight wars by body
counts. He was a guy that was known for the Edsel in the auto
manufacturing company. In the Air Force he was known for the F1-11 that
was neither a bomber nor a fighter. In the Vietnam War he came out with
the fact we’re going to statistically measure fighting unit success by body
counts. My friend who is Captain Bier was a strong trainer of
soldiers. He had a very aggressive group of guys. They found out
that his unit had very low body counts. The reason they had low body
counts is the Viet Cong wouldn’t challenge him. So he had to
generate high body count numbers to be successful according to the Secretary of
Defense. So the way he would do it is he would project an image of
weakness to draw the Viet Cong to attack him and then they’d kill them.
That’s how he got the high body counts. He said it was interesting
because the strong units had the least body counts of the enemy because the enemy
stayed away from them. The enemy’s not stupid. So he had
these two…to this day he ends all his emails with these two slogans. I
just love these two slogans.
One of them is:
Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice
until they can’t get it wrong.
Very neat!
Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice
until they can’t get it wrong.
Big difference.
Then he has another one he got from Heroclites talking
about a 100-man unit of soldiers.
Of every
one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there. Eighty are nothing but
targets. Nine are real fighters. We’re lucky to have them. They make the
battle. Ah, but the one – one of them is a warrior and he brings
the others back.
That could describe a local church. It’s very,
very interesting to see that men who have been through this experience have
this view of reality that it’s nasty out there and you have to deal with
it. This is this image now we have of young men.
“I write to you young men because you have already
done this. By coming to Jesus Christ you have already denied the
principalities and powers who have tried to distort the Gospel.”
So if you look at these three views here that you see,
you see the childlike relationship parallel to the first part of the preamble
with the father. Then you have the fathers who have known Him who
was from the beginning. They have that expert seasoned evaluation of who Jesus
is. Then finally you have the young men down here who have overcome the
evil one. That may be parallel to the third part of the preamble.
Okay. Now let’s look at the end of … in most of
your translations you’ll notice that at the end of verse 13 it starts the three
over again and then verse 14. So if you’ll look at your Bibles and follow
me in verse 13:
NKJ 1 John 2:13 I write to you, little children,
There are the little children again.
Because you have known the Father.
NKJ 1 John 2:14 I have written to you, fathers, Because you have known
Him who is from the beginning. I have written to you, young men, Because you
are strong, and the word of God abides in you, And you have overcome the wicked
one.
That was those quotes I was telling you about.
Now this is structured differently. If you
notice in verses 12 through 13 we have three. Then in verse 13 the end
and verse 14 we have apparently the triad reoccurs. But when you look at
your English text, what do you notice different about the children, the
fathers, and the young men in verse 13 and verse 14 that’s different from
before? Look at the verb. Go back to the verbs, the action parts of the
sentences. I write; I write, I write. Present or past tense?
Present. Now he says and he has a present here; but then these verbs - I
have written, I have written. past tense. So why does John repeat the
three again? Obviously he’s doing it. And obviously there is
something strange going on with the first one because in your English translations
it keeps hooking it to verse 13 and not verse 14. The reason for this is
the translators – they’ve responded to the Greek flow. Remember in
the Greek there are no verses. It’s all run together so they’re having to
do something here to alert us. The translators had to make a decision
whether to put this first part little children in with verse 14 so that you
have the triad again – little children, fathers, and young men or put it
back over here verses 12 and 13 because of the verb tense. They chose to
hook it up into verse 13 to maintain the continuity of verb tense. I
don’t think that’s helpful. I think there is obviously a triadic
structure her,e and I prefer to see the little children in verse 14. But
then I have to explain why it’s a present tense and not past. One of the
things is because the noun for little children here is now different.
This little noun here is piedia.
Over here it was teknion.
Now he’s shifted the word. So piedia
can also be used of an infant. Now what the nuances here between teknion and piedia are is up for grabs. It’s hard to pin down these
because you look at the word use it goes back and forth. So this is
another fond term he has. Piedia is
often used of a baby just born. If you look here, I write. He apparently
is keeping the tense the same because he’s introduced a new term piedia. He hasn’t written this
before so therefore he uses a present tense. I’m writing about piedia now. I’m not writing about teknion. But he addresses all
believers as little children.
And then he says, you’ll notice in verse 13:
Because you have known Him
Again it’s the childlike relationship to daddy.
Because you have known Him
See he wants confidence. They don’t have to listen an
outside elite false teacher cadre. You don’t need further enlightenment.
You already have the enlightenment as believers in Jesus Christ. It’s a
very important maneuver that he’s doing here. So we’ve gotten piedia.
Because you have known Him
It’s childlike again. Then he comes here
to the next one.
NKJ 1 John 2:14 I have written to you, fathers,
It’s identical to this sentence except for the verb
shift, past tense. We have to answer why that happens in a little
bit.
Then we come to the third one. Now the third one is
expanded over the first one. Past tense. Look at the three things
he says about the young men here. He used to say, the first swing
through, is that “you’ve overcome the wicked one.” But it looks like he’s
beefing up things in verse 14 because now he says:
NKJ 1 John 2:14 … Because you are strong, and the word of God abides in
you, And you have overcome the wicked one.
Now if you’ll hold the place and turn to John
15:7. Go back over to the gospels and if someone will read John
15:7. Remember what we’re doing again – tool of Bible
study. We’re going back to the same author’s words so we can understand
how he used this. 1 John is an amplification of the Upper Room
Discourse. So we’re going back to the Upper Room Discourse. We’re trying
to find out when he says to these young men, “The Word of God abides in you,”
why does he use that terminology? Anyone want to read verse 7?
NKJ John 15:7 "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you
desire, and it shall be done for you
All right. When Jesus used this very same term
(the Word of God abide in you), what was the activity he was talking
about? Praying. What do suppose John is going to use as the tool is
against the cosmos? Prayer What makes the young men warriors is the fact
that the Word of God abides in them such that they are great prayers because
praying is one of the tools that we use. We’re fighting an invisible
enemy. We’re fighting a doxological forensic debate in the very halls of
heaven itself. We can’t see heaven. We can’t detect it on any
measurement device we have; but our life is not in a materialistic universe
with a capsule around it. We’re living in a universe that has both
visible and invisible components. When we deal with these things we have to understand
if we can visualize it spatially – what’s going on up there? And
ask ourselves, what is going on up there? We don’t know a lot about
what’s going on. We know very little; but we do know this that when we
pray there is a reaction between what’s going on up there and what’s going on
down here. That’s the only way we know. It’s the only link we have
other than Jesus coming back is the link. It’s the prayer link.
It’s demeaned by many of us.
But people who have suffered, people who have gone
through trials of life, you will inevitably find have a well-developed prayer
life because they’ve had to. In desperation they’ve been thrown into
this. So when he says in the young men…remember these are all addressed
to believers here. All believers are referred to as fathers. All
believers are piedia. All
believers are young men. It’s just different aspects of Christian life.
In one sense we are like little children coming to daddy for forgiveness.
In other sense we’re like the fathers of a family that has deep roots and
stable roots because we know Him who is from the beginning. That’s the
idea of having your feet in the concrete of the Word of God such that you
cannot be moved. The young men, they’re the ones out there in the front
lines and we all have times in our Christian life when we are operating as
young warriors because we’re involved in this combat situation.
NKJ John 15:7 "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you
desire, and it shall be done for you
John is going to repeat that later in the
epistle. But for now we are looking at this section that we’ve looked at
today, 12-14. This is why if you go back to the outline on the top of the
handout you’ll see hopefully now the flow. These are not randomly
distributed texts. They’re organized as he moves through this.
So let’s think now the big picture. Let’s
zoom out and look at the flow. So now we’re looking at the forest.
We’re not looking at any individual trees. Look at that outline. He starts
with the prologue. In that prologue he has already dealt with a
tremendous theological issue. He’s saying that the word of life has come
into history. That we now have with Jesus’ entry into history; we now have a
glimpse of the kind of life and fellowship going on between the Father and the
Son. We don’t know whether he was out there taking notes when Jesus was
praying. But you read chapter 17 of his gospel, and it’s a whole
depiction of Jesus talking to the Father. John must have seen this
several times. So it impressed him.
“I am listening. When I am listening to Jesus
praying to His Father I am actually listening to a communication within the
Godhead itself.”
This so impressed him that he can’t let this
incarnation issue go away. Then he comes to the preamble. Remember
what he said back in chapter 1? He says, “I am writing to you and I’m
sharing this that you may have fellowship with us and truly our fellowship is
with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.”
So the whole objective here is fellowship with
God. That’s the preamble.
Then we come now to the purpose in verses 2-27. The
purpose seems to be here that we are in a hostile high threat environment and
we have to live accordingly because if we don’t we lose fellowship with God.
John says that’s very precious. We wilt like branches on the vine.
We wilt unless we stay in fellowship. We can’t go by autopilot through the
Christian life. It doesn’t work that way. We deal with an ingenious
enemy, tremendously brilliant opposition. In one sense they have a
tremendous advantage over you and me. They have the advantage that
they’re invisible. They can see us; but we can’t see them. So how
do we see them? How do we see the evil one? We can only see him by
what he does and the ideas that he projects into our minds. Remember
Satan has total access to every one of our minds. All of us here can be
touched with a satanic idea at any time.
Remember Peter?
Peter says, “Oh Lord, I am with You.”
When Jesus rebukes him He says:
NKJ Matthew 16:23 But He turned and said to Peter, "Get behind Me,
Satan!
I’m sure Peter was hurt by that kind of a remark, but
that kind of remark shows that we don’t any security in our cerebral
computers. We say that Satan can hack in at any time. The only way….we
don’t have any anti-virus software. The only anti-virus software we have is the
Word of God. We’re vulnerable. That’s what John wants us to
understand. We are highly vulnerable in a high threat environment.
So now he’s going to deal next time we’ll come to the major section of the
epistle.
(Closing prayer)