The letters of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. 1st John is actually anonymous, but 2nd and 3rd John are written by someone who is called the Elder. Now the language and style of all three of these works are identical to each other and to John's Gospel.
And so most people think that all of them come from the disciple that Jesus loved. Now that could be John the son of Zebedee, one of the twelve apostles, or it could be another John among Jesus'earliest disciples known as John the Elder. Whichever John it was, He is now in his old age and he is overseeing a network of house church communities that are likely around the city of ancient Ephesus.
Now from clues within the gospel and from these letters, it seems that these communities were made up mostly of Jewish followers of Jesus and that they had recently gone through a crisis that motivated John to write these letters. He mentions that a group of people have broken off from these churches. These people no longer acknowledge Jesus as Israel's Messiah or as the Son of God. and they are stirring up hostility among those who stayed faithful to the churches. In fact, 2 and 3 John clearly address this conflict.
2 John is a warning to a specific house church. There are people who deny Jesus. John calls them deceivers. They are probably going to come looking for validation or support, and this church community is not to offer any.
3 John is actually written to a member of one of these house churches, a man named Gaius. and the elder asks him to welcome legitimate missionaries who are going to arrive soon. He has to tell him to do this because the leader of that church community, Diotrephes, is acting like a jerk and he is rejecting anybody associated with John the Elder.
And so these letters give us a window into the tension and conflict that John faced in these churches and 1 John was written as a response to all of this as a form of damage control. The elder assures those who still believe in the Messiah, Jesus, that God is with them as they adhere to the truth. And so all of this helps us understand the uniqueness of 1 John, which is actually not a letter at all. It reads more like a poetic sermon sent to these churches. John says that he's not communicating new information.
In fact, almost all of the key ideas and words in 1 John come right out of Jesus'teachings in the Gospel of John. And so John's goal is to remind them and persuade these Christians to stay true to what they already say they believe. The poetic quality of John's sermon is really cool.
He doesn't develop his ideas in a linear or logical way. Rather, he uses a well-known technique of ancient rhetoric called amplification. So John has just a few core ideas he wants to communicate about life and truth and love. And he is going to cycle around these ideas repeatedly, each time offering a little bit different of an angle or emphasis. He uses a lot of hyperbole, he uses very stark contrasts with simple images of light and dark and love and hate and good and evil.
But don't let the simplicity of 1 John fool you, this work is deeply profound. There is a clear introduction to 1 John and then a clear conclusion. And the flowing cycles of the sermon in between these two don't follow any kind of rigid literary design.
But there do seem to be two larger sections. Each one is marked off by the introductory phrase, This is the message. And then each is followed by a repetition of images about how God is first light, and then how God is love. And all of the ideas in these two parts flow out of and cycle back into these two core ideas.
So the introduction is very similar to the prologue of the Gospel. of John. It has echoes of Genesis chapter 1 and Proverbs chapter 8. John speaks of the word of life that was with God in the beginning.
For John, the word God refers to both the Father and the Son who came to bring life into the world. And so those who saw and heard and touched the Son are called we. John's referring to himself and the Apostles who were eyewitnesses of Jesus. And so now we have a message for you.
the next generation of Jesus'followers. So when the apostles share the word of life with others, these others are also brought into fellowship with the Father and the Son through the apostles. The word fellowship here is koinonia in Greek.
It means a participation or sharing. When people hear the message about Jesus through the apostles, that message brings them into a real relationship with Jesus himself and into a real participation in God's own love and life. And so this flows right into the first main section.
This is the message. God is light. This is the message of the apostles that the God revealed in Jesus is light. And so...
If people want to participate in God's own life through Jesus, they need to keep walking in the light, which is a really cool image, but what does it mean? It means for John to keep Jesus'commands. And that's hard, so when you fail, Jesus'atoning death will cover for your sins.
And then once again, you're called to get up and obey Jesus'teachings. But which one of his teachings? John reminds the churches of Jesus'old-slash-new command given to the disciples at the Last Supper.
that they love one another as he loved them. Doing this is walking in the light. Now, if God's light is now shining through Jesus, then that means the world's darkness is passing away, which also means that God's children already in this moment have victory over the sin and evil and death that reigns in the world. And so that leads John to challenge the churches, don't love the world because it's passing away too.
He's referring here specifically to pride and sexual corruption, likely these are problems connected to the conflict that was happening in the churches. And so this leads John to warn the churches about these people who have left the communities and who deny Jesus as the Messiah. John calls them the anti-messiahs and deceivers, but he's confident that those who still know the truth about Jesus are in fact the true children of God and they are loved by the Father.
They show that they are part of God's family when they do righteousness and when they love one another unlike the deceivers who are generating anger, strife, and division. This transitions into the second main section of the sermon. This is the message of the apostles, John says, that God is love.
God's children should love one another and avoid hatred. Don't be like Cain from Genesis chapter 4, John says. His hatred led him to murder his brother.
But for Christians, Love is defined by giving up one's life as a sacrifice for the well-being of others. That's what Jesus did. And when God's children trust in that love for them, it changes them.
And so John warns once again of the deceivers. This time he calls them false prophets. When they deny Jesus is the Messiah, they apparently claim to speak for God.
But John says to test the spirits. If anyone claims to speak on God's behalf, but doesn't focus on Jesus as the crucified Son of God, they do not speak for God, John says. God's true children will center their whole lives on the crucified and risen Jesus because that's where we see God's true heart revealed. We see on the cross that God is a being of total self-giving love and that love is what compels Jesus'followers to love others in the same way. And when people meet this God of love, it does away with fear.
and angst forever, which is part of what John means by having victory over the world. When you realize that God so loves you, that he is crazy about you despite your deepest flaws and failures, that love becomes the thing that grounds your entire life. This love is what comes through trusting in the crucified Jesus. It comes through trusting God's testimony about Jesus given by the Spirit, and it's trusting in the message from the apostles about Jesus.
And when God's love gets a hold of you, it opens up eternal life. It's a life permeated with God's own presence and life and love, and it begins now carrying on into eternity. And so this leads John to the climactic conclusion of his sermon.
He says, We know the Son of God has come, and so we can know the one who is true. And we are in the one who is true, in his Son, Jesus the Messiah. This is the truth.
is the true God and eternal life. Now, if your head's kind of spinning after hearing that sentence and you're wondering, wait, who is the one who is true? Who is the one who gives true life?
Is it Jesus or is it God? And John's answer is, of course, yes. John doesn't know any God apart from Jesus. And when he and the other apostles encountered Jesus, they discovered the God who loves us so deeply that he has chosen not to exist without us despite our failures.
And this God is so surprising, so unexpected, that John's final words call us to keep away from idols. That is, to resist any temptation to remake the surprising God in our own image. To know Jesus is to know the God of creative, life-giving, others-centered love.
This, John says, is the one true God. And that's what the letters of John are all about.