Clough Fellowship Chapel

1 John Lesson 1

We’ll make do with what we have here this morning; there is a little irony in the loss of power today, because the apostle John, one of his favorite themes is the darkness of this world, so maybe under the sovereignty of God we are given an environmental metaphor of the topic. If you’ll turn in your Bibles to 1 John 1 we’ll get started. For this six part series I urge you, encourage you, to bring your Bibles because we’re going to look at some details in the text here that John puts in and you’re going to be absolutely lost if you don’t have a text in front of you. A suggestion, if you like to mark up text and you don’t want to wreck your Bible, a trick I learned a long time ago is to Xerox the passage of Scripture and then you can color it and you can put notes in the text without messing up your Bible. Let’s open with a word or prayer asking for the Holy Spirit’s illumination to this apostolic writing.

Father, we thank You for the fact that You have preserved the text of Scripture down through the centuries of time, against all enemies, against those who would destroy it, against those who would pervert it, such that today we can hold in our lap the essential writings of the apostles just as it left their pens. We ask Your Holy Spirit to illuminate our hearts to what this apostle wants us to know about the Christian life, for we ask it in our Savior’s name, Amen.

This particular epistle should be dear to our hearts in Fellowship Chapel because 1 John 1:3 is the passage from which this chapel gets its name, Fellowship Chapel. And this epistle is really directed to the details of the Christian way of life. It was written by the apostle John who, church history says, probably lived into his… at least early 90s, in fact, we’ll give you little anecdotes as the series goes on of John’s life as we know it from the accounts in church history. In one account John was chasing after a young man who had defected from the faith and got involved in a criminal teenage gang, and he rode a horse, went across the country looking [for] him when he was 92. So this gives you a little idea of who this man was that wrote this epistle.

History tells us that, of course, he wrote the Gospel and then he wrote the epistle to follow up the Gospel, and Jerome, one of the church fathers, tells us a story that circulated in the early centuries of the Church as to why John wrote his Gospel. If you’ve read the Gospels, of course you know the fourth Gospel is a lot different from Matthew, Mark and Luke. Jesus appears to talk differently, there are events that are differently organized, so we’d like to know why did John, this last of the apostles, write his fourth Gospel.

Jerome says: “John wrote a Gospel at the request of the bishops of Asia.” John in his later years circulated it in Asia Minor, which is now Turkey, where, ironically, the seven churches are in the book of Revelation. That was his ministerial zone. And so “at the request of the bishops of Asia,” the pastors, “against Cerinthus and other heretics, and especially against the then growing dogma of the Ebionites who asserted that Jesus Christ did not exist before Mary,” that is, He was not divine. “But there is said to be yet another reason for this work, in that when he read Matthew, Mark and Luke, he declared that the things that they said were true, but that they had given the history of only one year, the one, that is, which follows the imprisonment of John the Baptist. So passing by this year he related the events of the earlier period before John was shut up in prison.”

In your bulletins there’s an insert; if you’ll turn to that insert, since we don’t have a power point slide here this morning, you’ll see the first table is sort of a brief chart of how John is distinctly different than the other Gospel writers. And we want to know that because when we come to interpreting this epistle we need to interpret it as John used these vocabulary words. So if you’ll look in the chart, there’s three columns, the left column is the characteristic, then there’s Matthew, Mark and Luke, and then there’s John in the right most column. I’m going to go through these characteristics now on the table so you can get a feel for this.

The word “repent” is used sixteen times in the other Gospels and is never used by John. That should attract our attention; here is the man who wrote the fourth Gospel, that you “might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that believing you might have life through His name,” why is it that he doesn’t use this word “repent?”

Another word, “believe,” now it’s the opposite with the second verb, it’s used thirty-four times, or about eleven times in a Gospel, in the three, but in John he uses the word and the word “believe” ninety-eight times. So obviously that tells you that John is placing great emphasis on trust.

Another peculiarity is that “the kingdom of God” expression that we find in the Gospels is used forty-seven times or more in those other three Gospels, but yet with John he only uses it three times. He does not discuss in detail “the kingdom of God” at all.

Then the contrast that the other synoptic writers use is the Jesus of the present versus Jesus coming again to set up His Kingdom, so there’s a time difference between the present situation and the future coming Kingdom. In John the contrast isn’t quite that one; it’s between darkness and light, both of which are in the present because John is writing out of the present church age.

He doesn’t deal with many details of Jesus’ birth, but he deals with a lot of details of His baptism. He doesn’t deal with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, even though John is the one who says we beheld the glory of God through Jesus. As we said in the discipleship discovery time this morning, it’s interesting because John apparently is saying I didn’t need a Mount of Transfiguration experience to witness the glory of God in Jesus; it was my daily association with Jesus where I saw the glory of the Father.

Then Jesus’ Olivet Discourse that is so detailed in the three synoptic gospels he doesn’t report but on the other hand he has an extensive discussion of Jesus’ upper room discourse in John 13, 14, 15 and 16. If you’d like to kind of have some background reading for this epistle, I recommend very highly that you read through John 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17, those chapters, because 1 John, we’re going to find, actually comes out of that upper room. John, as the closest disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ reports the intimate discussion, the close-knit discussion, that happened in that upper room. Early on in John 13 Judas Iscariot leaves, and so there’s no presence of unbelievers there, and the rest of the upper room discourse is devoted to briefing the disciples on the Christian life and life in the church age.

Then John, on eternal life, it’s used nine times in the Synoptics, and it’s always used of a future attainment in the future Kingdom. But in John’s Gospel the eternal life is a present experience, it’s something we have now, and that’s almost a revolutionary thing and a very unique thing for this apostle.

Finally, he uses the word egw eimi, [ego-eimi], that expression in the Greek means “I AM.” And usually the subject is not emphasized, usually in the Greek, if you want to say I say something you never use the word egw, you use it when you’re trying to put an emphasis in it, and so the other Gospel writers tend to use it but more in normal conversation. John uses it twenty-four times, twenty-one of which Jesus is referring to Himself as the God of the Old Testament, with all due apologies to the cults who say that the deity of Jesus Christ is never implied or stated in the Gospels; the very idea that Jesus is using egw eimi, which is an expression of Yahweh, means that Jesus is declaring His deity.

In fact that was the thing that I felt Mel Gibson, in his movie, The Passion, he could have really put the zing in that movie if the script writer had done just one simple thing at the beginning of the film. Remember, those of you who went to see that, remember it starts out in the Garden of Gethsemane and there’s smoke, and there’s fog, and he has a very symbolic presentation of Jesus in the garden. But what he could have done, and following up with the emphasis on Jesus’ physical sufferings, what he should have done at that scene was to depict the scene of when the temple police and the soldiers come up, as Mike was going through Luke, what did Jesus say? egw eimi and these guys fell down, the whole armed security force fell down. Now these guys don’t fall down without somebody really pushing. So all of a sudden there was a blast of His deity and all He said was two words: you’re looking for me, “I AM.” And then boom, they all fell down. Now if Gibson had brought that into the screen play at the front end of the movie all the rest of the movie you’d be wondering, as you saw Jesus endure all these sufferings, you know, hey, all He has to say is egw eimi and it’d be all over, and it would depict that tension and the obedience of the Son to go to the cross, even though He could have stopped it in an instant of time, because He had that power as the Son of God.

Well, finally we come to John’s characteristics and I want to just comment a little bit before we get to the second diagram in your bulletin, and that is the frustrating nature of this epistle. Commentator after commentator have struggled with this epistle over the centuries of time. In fact, one commentator who has done a lot of translating work from the manuscripts wrote this: Having translated both the Gospel of John and the epistle of John, I found the first relatively simple, while the obscurity of the second was absolutely infuriating. Scholars are divided over the grammar and meaning of almost every single verse in this epistle. Another man writes: The most helpful suggestion regarding the structure of 1 John begins by setting down the fact that John does not develop a careful scheme of logical reasoning. John’s thought processes resembles those of a woman more than those of a man.

Now I don’t have a power point slide with me, but my good friend Ron Merryman showed this at a pastor’s conference and I couldn’t restrain myself from getting this. He drew a map of a shopping mall and he said now here’s a man going to a store, and the guy goes down the mall, boom, he goes to the store, he’s done. Now the woman goes into the mall and she goes all the way down here, goes up here, goes around, and comes out two hours later. Now that’s not to demean the woman because what they’re doing is they’re doing a very careful recon, when that lady gets through she can tell you the price of every sale going on in the store in the mall; she becomes a catalogue because she has done a tremendous recon mission. That’s the difference.

So what we have to cope with is what is the structure of this epistle, because you’re lost, there are subtleties as you go from verse to verse here and you lose it unless you come to grips with the structure. So in recent years… Zane Hodges at Dallas Seminary taught this epistle for twenty-five years in Greek class and I know of no one, commentator or otherwise, who was more familiar with this text than Mr. Hodges, and he noticed something over the years of teaching this epistle; I think it’s striking. And that is that in the first century, unrelated to the Bible, in the first century it was considered a protocol of rhetoric; if you were going to give a speech to do the structure that you see in that second chart in your bulletin; it’s called a deliberative orator structure, and it’s pretty simple. I mean, it’s what people would learn today in speech class, but what they would do is they would have a preface where they would introduce what they were going to say, then they would have the thesis where they would state what they were going to say, and then they would have a large section of supporting material that they would group related to that one central thesis. And finally, in the epilogue they would review the argument and closing motivation for the audience. It’s pretty obvious what they did.

But Hodges found, in his commentary he said you know, it’s interesting, if you try to see the analogy you see that indeed, 1 John shows that analogy, shows that structure. And that’s not surprising because unlike the other epistles, if you are looking at your text in 1 John you find it’s not addressed to a particular church; it’s not addressed to the Romans, it’s not addressed to the church at Ephesus, it’s not addressed to the Galatians, there’s no address here. Well, what does that mean? It means probably that this epistle was meant to be read in many different churches; it was circulated, and a lot of the people were illiterate, meaning not that they couldn’t think, it’s just that they couldn’t read printed pages. And besides, they didn’t have a printing press so this stuff was hand written on papyri. So here is this piece of paper from John the apostle that would be carried by horseback or courier from church to church, and someone, the elders, would get up and they would read this. So it wouldn’t be far out to think of the fact that when John structured his epistle he would structure it to be read and it would sound like he was there talking, giving a standard speech.

So when you do this you come out on the right side of that chart, you’ll see where the text of 1 John can be broken down into these parts. There’s the prologue, the first four verses; the preamble, which expands the prologue so you can consider all of that material basically introductory. In 1 John 2:12-14 you see the thesis; in 2:28 all the way to 5:17 are his arguments to support that thesis and structure. And then finally the epilogue where he reviews it.

Today, in our time that we have, what I’m going to try to do is deal with both the prologue and the epilogue, and here’s why I’m trying to do that. I want to start with how he introduces things because he’s got to deal with where the people are, and then we’re going to skip all the way to the end, to the epilogue, where he concludes and he gives three great fundamental truths. We’re not going to spend time in the epilogue because some of these are very controversial and we need to explore how John gets from point A to point B, and that’s the whole innards of the epistle. So structurally here’s what we’re going to do; we’re going to start with 1 John 1:1-4, we’ll go in depth for those four verses, that’s the prologue; then we’ll go to the epilogue and by that time we’ll be done today.

So let’s turn to the text itself in 1 John 1:4. If you follow me, I’m reading from the New King James; you may have another translation. It won’t matter in most places, although there’s one verse here, verse 4, that is different, in manuscript evidence it’s slightly different. Verses 1-4, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life, [2] The life was manifested, we have seen and bear witness and we declare to you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested to us, [3] That which we have seen and that which we have heard we declare to you, in order that you may also have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ. [4] And these things we write to you, that your joy may be full.” Verse 3, that little word “fellowship,” that’s historically where this church got it’s name; that’s the fellowship in Fellowship Chapel.

So this is appropriate for us to know what is going on here. Let’s look at the first clause. We’re going to start taking it apart clause by clause; you want to pay particular attention to this. This requires some concentration on the text and this is an exercise that many of us in our society are unable to do; we’re used to computer screens, we’re used to flashing images, and our ability to read and comprehend is not increasing in our society, and one of the after effects of this is we have an inability to think through issues. We react, we react with hostility and anger or we have little snippets with a video, or something else.

I was pleased to hear this week that one of our young people, who attends Patrick Henry College down in Virginia, that college was just given an award for their group that they simulate a U.N. discussion and they’re going up against the big boys; I mean, we’re talking about Ivy League competitors here, and here’s this little school, three hundred kids, and they go up against the big guys. This is David and Goliath, people, and they go up there and they win it. And do you know why they won, these Christian students, why they won against all the big boys? Because one of the judges said, you know, what impressed us about this group of people, these young people from this college, was that they demonstrated courtesy and respect for people. They weren’t trying to shout people down, they weren’t trying to be cute in some rhetorical way, they discussed the issue and they showed respect for the other side, with whom they disagreed profoundly but they were able to get together and work together, and I think that’s an eloquent testimony to Asriel and her college, Patrick Henry.

Let’s look at John because this does demand a focus on the text and a careful understanding. Let’s look at the first verse. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life. “That could be considered the title of the whole epistle; there’s a dash in some of your translations, you’ll see it. Some of the translators put verse 2 in a parenthesis, don’t worry about that, forget the parenthesis. Consider verse 1 as a title; that’s John’s thing. There wasn’t a title, “1 John,” it wasn’t known as 1 John in church history, it was known by that first verse. So that’s the title, and that tells us something about what John wants to focus on, what he wants us to look at and think about.

Let’s look at the first major noun, “beginning.” If you know John’s Gospel, the word “beginning” there, arch, [arche] means the beginning of the world; he’s talking about God prior to creation. And the term arch, that Greek term was used for centuries prior to the Christian church by the Greek philosophers; arch meant the origin of the cosmos; that was the heavy term that that meant. So in John’s Gospel that’s how he uses it. But that’s not how he uses it here; he uses it several ways. In verse 1 he’s using it for the beginning of their meeting Jesus. For John the beginning was with John the Baptist and that’s where he was introduced to this Nazarite, Jesus Christ. So “from the beginning” is not the beginning of history, it’s the beginning of exposure to Jesus Christ.

Now structurally he does something here that we have to think about and back up a minute. He’s going to use this word “beginning,” one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times in this epistle. When a guy uses it eight times in an epistle you might way well wait a minute, what is the deal with John; why does he keep talking about arch? Beginning, the beginning of this, the beginning of your Christian experience, the beginning of the teachings and so forth and so on. This introduces a struggle that many of us here will have in our heads, in our hearts. We grow up in a society that has bought into the enlightenment way of thinking, that truth changes with time; sort of like the Neo-Darwinian thing, truth is different on Wednesday than it was on Monday, that there’s nothing abiding. But John is going to argue over and over, he says you listen to that which you have heard from the beginning and don’t you revise apostolic teaching. “That which is from the beginning,” he over and over emphasizes this. So one of the features, right away, first verse, title of the book, we come across an idea of truth that is absolutely contrary to the way our world thinks today. In “the beginning” means that truth, once given, remains unchanged; truth is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That’s what we mean by truth. That’s why it’s useful to learn truth because it’s going to be true tomorrow, it’s not going to change. So, “That which was from the beginning.”

Now the second thing that John does in this thing, he talks about something he has heard, and then do you notice what he says about the second verb, “that which we have heard, and that which we have seen,” and in order to emphasize “that which we have seen” what does he do? He adds a little phrase, “which we have seen with our eyes.” What does that make him in terms of a court witness? An eyewitness, and he’s emphasizing this, and we’ll see this is thematic with John. He is always presenting himself as though he’s in a courtroom. He’s presenting himself as the testifier, “I am” he says, “the eyewitness” of this, at ninety years old.

“We have heard, we have seen, and we have looked upon, and our hands have handled,” we’ve touched it. This isn’t a vision, this isn’t a ghost, it’s John, you remember, that tells us about that little dialogue with doubting Thomas; remember Jesus shows up in the room and everybody freaks out because they think He’s a ghost. What does Jesus do? Remember? To knock out the idea that this is an illusion? Come here, reach in here and touch My side, for spirits do not have flesh and bones like I do. So clearly John remembers this, and that’s behind this little phrase, “our hands touched.” We did not only see it, we saw it with our own eyes and our hands reached out and touched this.

Now he says “we have heard…we have seen… we have looked upon…our hands have handled.” In other words, this is sensory data; this is not a dream, people, this is not a speculation. This is not the rantings of a man going senile at ninety. This is eyewitness historical public revelation.

Now, I want to pause here and make two important points about truth because even the lawyers in the courts in Dover, Pennsylvania, when that incident went through the court system up here two or three years ago, I watched the court decision. That was the one, you remember, where they were going to get creation out of the schools, not even creation, it was just intelligent design, they didn’t want that either. And in reading the judges thinking, and how the judge was seduced, basically, by the ACLU, Anti-Christian Liberties Union, the judge argued that there’s no conflict between evolution and religion because science is in the here and the now, and the tangible and the empirical but religion is off here in your thought life, it’s off in the values where everybody has their own values; this is private opinion but this is fact, public science, observable things. This dichotomy goes back to Immanuel Kant, one of the early philosophers on the continent of Europe, and it has come unfolded throughout the whole enlightenment. You can’t get an education today without basically thinking in terms of Kantian truth, that there’s the empirical and then there’s this religious private experience.

So I warn you, you will not understand the apostle, and you will not understand the Bible unless you flush that toxic way of thinking out of your head. The Bible presents truth as that which is public. Jesus Christ could be seen. If you had a video camera you could have taped Him, videoed Him and had a sound track. That’s what we mean by revelation. The judge hadn’t got a clue of this but that’s typical; educated people today do not understand the Christian faith, period. Ann Coulter in her book, Godless, points out a very interesting incident that happened to Jerry Falwell; he was called by Newsweek Magazine because Newsweek got upset that the Liberty University Debate team had beaten all the Ivy League colleges, sort of like Patrick Henry just did with their thing. So this reporter, he’s really concerned that these students, these right wing students are getting so powerful they can take on Ivy League debate teams and win, horrible, a horrible thing! So he asked Jerry Falwell on the phone, he says, what’s all this about. So Jerry, thinking in terms of the Christian metaphor, he says we’re just training these young men and women to have a salt effect on society, a salt ministry. So what does Newsweek report the next week: An assault ministry, a-s-s-a-u-l-t. The reporter just didn’t get it. So a week later Newsweek had to apologize and say oh, excuse me, we didn’t mean “assault ministry,” we meant “a salt ministry.” But these aren’t stupid people; these are people graduated from leading universities and they do not understand these basic truths.

And this is the problem with all of us, in our families, with our children, we have to go back to these fundamentals. That’s why we’re spending a little time here to point out to you, you cannot share the gospel with somebody who thinks that way unless you straighten out the idea of truth, because it is not going to communicate. What you’re going to communicate is ooh, I’ve got my religious feelings, a sort of psychological thing that can psyche you up but isn’t real truth; I mean, after all, if it’s truth, gosh, it would apply to everybody. Yeah, you got it, that’s what it does.

So that’s behind this attitude that people have well, I don’t believe that Christianity is the only way. Well, isn’t it funny that two plus two is four in every other area except religion, and then two plus two is whatever sincere people believe it to be. Why do we have that difference? Because of this Kantian enlightenment way of thinking.

So John crosses that; he says what I’m going to tell you is “we have heard it, we have seen it, we have gazed upon it, and our hands have handled it.” Now another thing about this that we need to look at with John’s writings, there’s something strange about this first verse. You would normally think of Jesus; wouldn’t you?” That which we touched, certainly that was Jesus. Well then, a little question about the grammar. Why is it neuter pronouns and not masculine pronouns? Why are these impersonal, “which.” He doesn’t say “that” who was from the beginning, “That” whom we have heard, whom we have seen with our eyes. Rather, it’s “what” we have seen. So that warns us that he is not quite talking about the incarnation of Jesus here in the sense that he’s going to talk literally about Jesus. There’s something about Jesus that he’s going to talk about, so he’s going to distinguish something about Jesus Christ and then he’s going to carry on, and that something is eternal life, the theme of verse 2.

So verse 2 is a profound verse that tells us a lot about John’s thinking. This is the first verse of the epistle, really, if you take verse 1 to be the title. Let’s look at it: “The life was manifested, we have seen, we bear witness, we declare unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested to us,” so let’s unpack verse 2 a little bit. Let’s go through verse 2 carefully.

“The life was manifested,” now that’s another verb that John uses over and over and over again, “manifest.” It means show up, it means that it wasn’t present at one time in history, and we saw that it was present in Jesus. So, “it was manifested,” the life. And then he makes another statement; he says that life came into historical visibility, “we saw it, we bore witness,” and we tell you about it, and now for the first time he prefixes with the adjective “the eternal life.” So now this tells us, because always the first term, when somebody introduces a vocabulary term, that is the place, that’s the signal to watch this one, because here’s where the concept comes; “the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us.”

What he declares here, and we’ll see this clearer as we go through the epistle, he is arguing for the most profound content in the term “eternal life” that you can imagine. When John, this ninety year old apostle, was talking about eternal life, what he was talking about was something that prior to Jesus’ incarnation was going on inside the Trinity. A hint about how he saw this is in John 17; John, in his Gospel, recounts the prayer. By the way, the other authors did not recount the prayer, so where he got this, whether it was from Jesus or whatever, John got hold of this thing and he said do you know what Jesus said? When I was listening to the Father, Jesus said that Father, let them have the unity with us that I have with You. Now could that be deity? He’s not sharing deity with us, is He? So whatever the unity is it can’t be His deity, we rule that out. That’s heterodoxy, that’s heresy.

So what is it that he’s talking about then? What is the Son doing with the Father right at that moment? Talking. The First and Second Persons of the Trinity are communicating by language with each other. They’re having a relationship through language, which, by the way, refutes everything you learn in literature class today because literature is seen as language developing out of socio economic milieus and language itself started after we gave up bananas and fell out of the trees and became people, and then we evolved from grunting to speaking and that’s all language is, it’s just a higher form of animal signaling. That’s not the view of language of Scripture. The high view of language of Scripture is that the Father was talking to the Son for all eternity. Language began inside the Trinity. That’s the high view of language. That’s why, when God created the cosmos in Genesis 1 what did He do? Use hammer and nails? What did He use? Speech, He spoke the universe into existence. Language is behind the whole of existence, that’s why we can understand and know Him through it.

So we have a high view of language here, and the “eternal life, which was with the Father,” all through time it was “with the Father.” Even in the Old Testament it was “with the Father,” but now it’s “manifested,” because now, for the first time in human history people could sit with a tape recorder and record the inter-Trinity communication, personal relationship. A powerful idea.

Now he says in verse 3, “That which we have seen and heard,” do you notice there are only two verbs in verse 3; there are four verbs in verse 1. Now this introduces… I want to illustrate this, not because we want to get into minutia here but I want to show you that John is not a rambling person; he’s not going through the mall and doing an inventory here. He’s not rambling; he is very precise in his vocabulary.

Those two verbs in verse 1, the first two, “heard” and “seen” are in the perfect tense in the Greek. That means that the results he’s thinking of right now, I heard it and I still remember this; I saw it and I can still visualize it. That’s the perfect tense. But then, the third and fourth verses, “that which we gazed upon and our hands have handled” are in the aorist tense, meaning it happened. It’s almost as though it’s something different.

Now why do you suppose he drops verbs three and four when he talks in verse 3. Verb number 3 and verb number four are purged from the text, and in verse 3 when he speaks to people who are his readers he only uses the first two verbs. Why? Because the readers, which include us, cannot share in verb number three or verb number four in verse 1, can we? Can we gaze upon the incarnate Jesus? No. No, He’s in absentia, He’s ascended. So we can’t gaze upon Him. Can we touch Him? We can’t do that either, can we? Jesus is in absentia. This epistle presupposes that the incarnate Christ is gone from history for now. That introduces his emphasis, by the way, on the Holy Spirit. But the incarnate Jesus is no longer physically present; He ascended from that little ridge just east of the temple in Jerusalem, that mount of ascension. So he says, “that which we have seen and heard,” that we can share with you; we “declare that to you, that ye may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father and the Son.

Now for those of you who have come out of a liturgical church or a denominational church, particularly if you’ve been a high Episcopalian or you’ve been in the Roman Catholic Church, this is one of their verses to camp on, in that you cannot have salvation apart from mother church, you’ve got to come through the church in order to get to Christ. And that’s part of their theology, but is that what this verse is teaching? What the verse is teaching is that in order to come to know Jesus you’ve got to come into contact with the revelation of Jesus. Where do you go to get revelation about Jesus? You can’t light a candle and contemplate your navel in a dark room, even today with the power out, and get revelation of Jesus. The only place we have revelation of Jesus and get information is through the apostolic writings. That’s why we go back to the text of Scripture. So that’s why he says first your fellowship has to be with us apostles, we have to know Jesus through the text. That’s why I urge you to look at this text and soak in it.

He says that fellowship that we have, that we share with you, was the fellowship “with the Father and with His Son.” Notice the First and Second Persons of the Trinity are highlighted here. And John does a peculiar thing, we’ll see this in a minute, “with the Father and the Son,” he treats them as so close at times He’s going to use pronoun, we can’t tell whether he’s talking about the Father, we can’t tell whether he’s talking about the Son. To him the Father and the Son, it’s almost like they’re merged but somehow they can also be distinguished, a very balanced view of the Trinity.

And finally he says, in the prologue, in verse 4, “These things we write to you, that your joy may be full.” Before I get there, let me cycle around one more time with eternal life here. Here’s what eternal life isn’t: eternal life is not eternal existence. That’s not what’s meant by eternal life. Eternal existence is true of the angels; they don’t have eternal life. People who reject the Lord Jesus are said to be excluded from the presence of God for ever and ever… for ever and ever, that means eternal existence; that’s not eternal life. So the content of eternal life is not mere everlasting existence. What is it? It is sharing the personal relationship of the Trinity itself.

Now let me pause for a moment here. The difference between Christianity with the Trinity and all other religions is that only in Christianity with the Trinity can you have a truly personal God. Why is that? Doesn’t Islam, with even one God? Aren’t they monotheist? Yes. Isn’t classical post-Christian Judaism monotheist? Don’t they believe in God? Yes, but that God is a solitary being, and would have to, in order to have any personal relationship with any entity outside of Himself, would have to create and therefore become dependent upon a creation, and therefore cannot be either truly personal, or if He is personal He’s dependent on some sub divine entity in order to express his personality. That’s not true in Christianity. In Christianity the Father and Son had perfect time, perfect fellowship for all eternity. They didn’t need us around; they didn’t need the universe around. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit had a grand time for billions of years; they did not have to create the universe because they had some need. They created the universe because they chose to do so. Why? We’re not told all the reasons why.

But the point is, eternal life is that all of a sudden we share this. Here’s what it is if we could paraphrase this elderly apostle; he would say “come little children, into the circle of fellowship that we apostles share with the Triune God.” I repeat that: “Come little children, into the circle of fellowship that we share with the Triune God.” Nothing less than that is what he means by eternal life. Now that’s the prologue… oh, I haven’t done verse 4 so let me spin through verse 4 a minute.

It says, “These things we write to you that your joy may be full,” and this is where I would disagree with the manuscript evidence here. There’s strong manuscript evidence that supports it that that would read this way: “These things we write unto you that our joy may be full,” the apostolic joy. If you look, for example, in 2 and 3 John that’s exactly what he’s talking about and that’s a little phrase, and that concerns something that we want to understand and appreciate about our pastor. What he’s saying here in verse 4 is “These things we write … that our joy may be full,” the implication is that a person with a pastor’s heart gets joy from seeing his flock grow. A pastor can get very frustrated; even people who are on church boards do not have a clue, sometimes, about the crises and the struggles that a pastor goes through. In the course of one week a disaster happens in at least one home in his flock, and he’s got to deal with that and he carries that burden upon him. And that’s why his joy is full when his flock is growing. And John was also a pastor, he knows this.

So there’s the introduction; that’s the prologue, that’s how he starts his whole epistle. Now to conclude, let’s go to the end of the epistle and we’re going to look at the epilogue; verses 18-21, we’re going to do this very hastily because there’s no use spending time on the details because the details have to be worked out in the arguments to get here, but I do want to expose you to the epilogue because this tells you how we’re going to do the rest of the epistle. We’ve got to go from the prologue to the epilogue in a logical fashion. So whatever arguments we run into with John he’s going to have to prove his point.

Look quickly at 1 John 5:18-21, what do you notice the main verb to be? It’s repeated three times. [Someone answers: know] Exactly; verse 18 begins, “We know;” verse 19 begins, “we know;” verse 20 begins “we know.” Do you suppose John wanted to communicate something that we know? Three times he’s talking about this, and he uses the Greek verb oida [oida] here which means… when he uses that verb he’s talking about something you propositionally know, doctrinal knowledge. “We know,” so we’re going to look at these three things. These are three major truths that John wants to emphasize.

Number one, verse 18, “We know that whosoever is born of God does not sin,” that we have to deal with; that’s one of the hard controversies of this epistle; he’s going to teach that. He teaches that but you’ll see that it’s not teaching infallible living; there’s something else going on here, but the something else takes a little time to dig into. “We know that whosoever is born of God does not sin, but he who has been born of God keeps himself, and the wicked one does not grab him.” Those words are meant to encourage us; John is going to talk about life in this world, this fallen world, is hard; it’s difficult, we have tests, we have trials, we have setbacks, we have disasters, we have suffering, we have death. This is not heaven on earth and life is tough. And so he has to give a word of encouragement, so whatever we learn in this epistle it’s going to substantiate verse 18.

Verse 18 says that we are “born of God,” every believer is “born of God,” we can protect ourselves because the word “keep” means guard or protect; “the wicked one does not grab,” that’s the word that is used in… one of the ladies after the resurrection she comes up to Jesus and she’s going to grab Him, and He says don’t grab Me. Well, that’s what is meant, and it’s that Satan cannot grab us, whatever that means; we’ll get to that. But this is an encouragement in verse 18 that if you are here today and you have trusted in Jesus Christ, those three things belong to you.

Verse 19, the second truth, “We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the wicked one.” Now he uses an interesting vocabulary here. “We know that we are of God, and the whole world,” up to now he’s just used cosmos, the world, but this emphasizes, with this adjective he’s saying “the whole world.” And then the verb is strange, it’s a passive type of verb, it’s lying down, it’s like the whole world is lying down in the sphere of Satan, “the wicked one” here is the devil himself and it’s a warning that we are in a cosmic conflict. This is not… this is not a casual thing with John. Remember, this guy is ninety, he’s seen some of his colleague apostles get beheaded, get crucified, suffer, he’s seen Rome come in on the local churches, he’s seen all the way up to Caesar himself, perverted forms of government, totally out of control. He’s viewed all these things; he’s seen many of his friends die, because John was probably the youngest of all of them. And so he’s lived through that. This is the words of a ninety year old man saying “the whole world lies” passively in the zone and under the sphere of the devil. That is an indictment of our entire environment and he warns us about that.

Truth number three, and truth number three is connected with the second truth because in the Greek there’s this connective in part of verse 20 that connects it. In other words, after, you might say the discouragement of verse 19 he says “But we know,” encouragement, you see, he’s always trying to encourage, “But we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us an understanding,” the word “understanding” there is a way of thinking; it’s sort of like those of you who play with computers, it’s not the program, it’s the operating system, you know, whether you’re a Mac person or whether you’re an O.S. person or whatever, he’s talking about the undercurrent of our thinking.

Isn’t this remarkable, that when the whole world lies passively, sucking up to Satan, the whole world, “the Son of God has come and has given each one of us an understanding, in order that,” purpose clause, “we may come to know,” talking about growth here, a different word for “know,” “we may come to know Him who is the true One,” the implication being there are false ones and one has to distinguish between the true One and the false one. He has come to give us… I mean, we need that, if all the world is lying under the zone of Satan, then we need an understanding, and John says yes, we all have the understanding, “that we may know Him that is the true one; we are in Him who is true, and in His Son Jesus Christ.” There’s no “and” in there, and that’s one of those things if you have time to read it later you’ll notice if you read that you can’t tell whether the true One is Jesus or the Father; try reading it and try to distinguish that in that verse. You’ll see that’s where he meshes the two together.

Then he says, and this is the most powerful declaration, one of the most powerful in the entire New Testament for the claims that the Bible does claim that Jesus is God. “This is the true God, and eternal life.” See what a high exalted profound assertion this is.

And then finally he concludes with this little strange warning that seems so disconnected from these magnificent truths; he almost introduces verse 21 as a casual P.S. on the letter, but it isn’t. He says: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” “… keep yourselves from idols!” John, when he uses this word for “idols,” in the context, he’s probably talking about Christian men who are at work, and women who are in business because many of the crafts in that day, the craft unions, the people that sold goods worshiped deity; that was the problem of 1 Corinthians 8, 1 Corinthians 10 also talks about idols and Christians in their normal lifestyle were caught up in how far do I participate with these pagan craftsmen. It wasn’t like if you just shut the door and exclude them from your life, you couldn’t; you had to deal with this. And this affected the way you thought, the way you thought about your business, the way you thought about your life, the way you thought about your family, the way you thought about education, the way you thought about truth.

And so he’s saying, “Little children, keep yourself from idols.” See, it contrasts with verse 20 because what has he just got done saying? He says we’ve been given an understanding that we may know “Him who is the true one,” so keep yourself away from the false ones. And one’s view of God determines everything else. This is why idolatry, not some immorality, but idolatry is the number one sin in the Bible. And you say what? We don’t have idols; how do we have idols today? Here’s where we have idols; idols are reengineered versions of God.

Why do we all have a tendency to reinvent the nature of God? It’s very simple and it goes back to the garden; because we want an environment where we can do what we want to do, how we want to do it, without consequences, and we will design our universe, that is the perversity of sin, and we, in our brilliance, and we can be very brilliant at this, even if we don’t have a PhD we can be very brilliant at reinventing reality so we can get away with whatever we want to and there are no consequences. We’ve just seen it in the whole financial class; we had businessmen, we had people in government, that wanted to play a game and didn’t think that every choice has a consequence; you’re free to choose whatever choice you want. Young people have to learn that, pay attention to your parents. You know, the only difference between a parent and a child is we parents have banged our heads fifty-five times on the wall and made all kinds of mistake, and we’re just trying to pass on to you, hey, that hurt, this hurts, when we chose that way this happened, this was a disaster, learn from us so we don’t have to sit there and watch you do the same stupid thing we did. That’s idolatry, a reengineered view of reality.

Well, this is the prologue and the epilogue of this great epistle, this grand epistle of the apostle John.