This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I delivered this message at Spring Creek Bible Church on February 9, 2020, as the opening message in our 1 John series. It differs from what I planned to say; for the prepared text, see the manuscript.
It’s good to be with you again and to share God’s Word with you. I’m thankful for the chances I get to teach here, and most of all for the way teaching forces me to study and dig deep into God’s Word. I’ve benefited greatly from studying 1 John, and I hope some of that will spill over and encourage you tonight.
1 John holds a special place among the books of the New Testament. Relative to its size, it’s one of the most-referenced books in the New Testament, and it’s well-loved for its simplicity, clarity, and practicality—traits it shares with James, often called the Proverbs of the New Testament. It has many well-known verses you could probably quote:
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). “Do not love the world or the things in the world” (2:15). “See what great love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God” (3:1). “We love because he first loved us” (4:19). “I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life” (5:13).
And there are many others you could add.
1 John has been a favorite of mine since college. When I took the second semester of Greek my sophomore year—once we had the basics of the language down—one of the first things they had us translate was 1 John. That was my first real taste of Greek, and I loved digging into it. God used it to open my eyes to what it means to be a child of God. I’d grown up in a church that leaned toward an easy-believism, “once prayed, always saved” kind of Christianity, and it was through reading 1 John that the beauty and simplicity of the Greek opened my eyes to the role of sanctification in the life of a true believer. I’ve loved the book ever since.
It’s arguably the most important and straightforward book in the New Testament on the assurance of salvation. Yet, as one author puts it, the simple style throughout masks a profundity of thought that is not always easy to interpret. That’s exactly what I found when translating it: I knew all the words, and the sentences were plain enough, but I was often left scratching my head over what John was actually getting at. There’s an irony in it—short, simple words and sentences, yet some deep and challenging things to grapple with. My hope is that over these five weeks we’ll understand this message better and grow in our love for this important letter.
Let’s pray and ask the Lord’s blessing on our time. Father, thank you for this precious, inspired book, and for the privilege of studying it together these five weeks. Please meet with us as we read it, study it, and consider its message. Teach us, convict us, comfort us, and encourage us in the ways each of our hearts needs. We long to hear from you, and our time is in vain if we don’t. Help us, we pray, in Jesus’ name, amen.
I drew the shortest chapter of 1 John—only ten verses, while everyone else has twenty-one to twenty-nine. So I thought, “Great, I’ll do an overview of the whole book and cover my ten verses in one message.” Earlier today I told Pastor Steve I felt like Paul’s companions on the ship, throwing cargo overboard before my message sank. It was way too long; I tossed a lot, but there’s still plenty here. I trust what I kept will be a blessing.
We’ll spend the first half looking at 1 John as a whole, laying the context for our study so we can rightly understand the individual verses we’ll examine later. There are many universal truths in 1 John—you can open it, read it, and have it speak to your heart in a way that’s true to the original intent. But there are also many things that can be misunderstood, or not understood as fully, if we don’t read them in their original first-century context.
So it helps to start with some questions. The Bible is a divine book, but it’s also a human book with human authors, and it’s worth asking the same basic questions you’d ask of any piece of writing. Imagine rummaging through old boxes at your grandparents’ house and finding an old envelope with a letter inside. To understand it, you’d instinctively start asking: What kind of writing is this? Who wrote it? When? To whom? What prompted it? Why was it written? What’s its message, and how is it organized? We do this intuitively with an email or a conversation, yet we often skip it with Scripture because it’s so familiar. Let’s walk through eight of these questions and lay a foundation for understanding this letter.
Genre: What Kind of Writing Is 1 John?
1 John is counted among the General, or Catholic, Epistles—“catholic” with a small c, meaning universal. These were understood to be written to the church more broadly, whereas Paul’s letters usually addressed a specific person or congregation. Some question whether we should even call 1 John a letter. Almost every New Testament letter clearly identifies its author and recipients, with an opening greeting and a closing—often with greetings from those with the author. 1 John notably lacks all of that: John doesn’t name himself and doesn’t greet anyone in particular. So some suggest it’s more of a tract or a sermon. But John is plainly writing to a group of people he knew well and loved deeply—a specific church with a specific situation in mind, not a treatise broadcast for anyone to read. So I think it’s best to treat it as a letter, even if it doesn’t follow all the conventions of the day.
Author: Who Wrote 1 John?
Though John doesn’t name himself, the earliest history we have credits the letter to John—the beloved disciple, the brother of James, one of the sons of thunder, the disciple whom Jesus loved. I. Howard Marshall notes that by the end of the second century Irenaeus accepted the epistle as the work of John, the disciple of the Lord, a view shared by Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and the Muratorian Canon. Evangelical scholars today are almost unanimous that this is from John the apostle, who also wrote the Gospel and the other two letters. Even those who question it acknowledge that whoever wrote this letter also wrote the others and the Gospel—the vocabulary, style, theme, and structure are so similar that one hand wrote them all. I’m fully confident it’s John, the beloved disciple.
Date: When Was It Written?
John’s writings are generally regarded as among the latest in the New Testament. As one author summarizes: the period in the late first century, after the Gospel and before Revelation, is most likely; a date around AD 80–90 for the Gospel seems plausible, with Revelation around AD 95, which places 1 John around AD 90, a few years before Revelation. Keep in mind John was likely in his eighties by then—an elderly man who calls himself simply “the elder” in 2 and 3 John. Eusebius records that John lived many years in Ephesus, was exiled to Patmos (where he wrote Revelation), and then returned to Ephesus, where he died. If so, that puts him in Ephesus writing this letter around AD 90.
Audience: To Whom Did He Write?
John tells us often who he’s writing to, though not by name:
“My little children, I am writing these things to you.” “I am writing to you, fathers…I am writing to you, young men.” And more generally, “I write to you who believe in the name of the Son of God.”
So he’s writing to believers, and these affectionate terms—“beloved,” “dear friends,” “children,” “brothers”—show the intimacy of his relationship with them. Most think the audience was a mixed Jewish and Gentile congregation, perhaps with a larger Gentile population; 1 John 2:2 stresses that Christ’s atoning work is for the whole world, a typical Johannine emphasis on the inclusion of the Gentiles. According to tradition, these churches were in and around Ephesus—John writing from Ephesus to churches near Ephesus. We can’t be certain, but that’s what the earliest records suggest.
Occasion: What Prompted the Letter?
To understand 1 John rightly, we need to grasp what its readers were facing. Some New Testament letters, like 1 Corinthians, address problems inside the church; others, like Galatians, address threats from outside—and that seems to be the case here. A group had rejected the truth, recently left the church, and was now trying to deceive these believers into going “beyond” the teaching of Christ. This group is often called the secessionists—those who secede (think of the South seceding from the Union). Don’t confuse them with cessationists, who believe the miraculous gifts of the Spirit ceased with the apostolic age; that’s a completely different word. These secessionists had walked out of the church.
1 John 2:19 is the key text: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.”
All through 1 John we find references to this group, and once you start noticing them, you see how much of the letter is a direct response to them and to the pressure they were putting on John’s brothers and sisters. There’s a concept in interpretation called mirror reading—reading between the lines to reconstruct a situation we don’t have full details on. It can be pushed too far, so we have to distinguish what the text plainly says from what we’re speculating. But used cautiously it’s helpful. It’s a bit like overhearing one end of a phone call. I did that recently—I was sharing a hotel room with a friend when John Piper called him, and I could follow half the conversation and reconstruct a good bit of the rest, though I was fuzzy on some details. Reading a New Testament letter is like that: we don’t have all the background, but if we listen carefully we can piece a lot of it together—staying careful about where we stand on the Word and where we’re filling gaps.
So how does John describe these opponents? In chapter 1 (verses 6, 8, and 10) there are three “if we say” statements that seem to echo their claims: “if we say we have fellowship with him” while walking in darkness; “if we say we have no sin”; “if we say we have not sinned.” Chapter 2 adds three more “the one who says” statements. I can’t be dogmatic, but these look like false ideas the secessionists had introduced and that were circulating among some in the church, and John answers them throughout the letter.
In 2:18–19 John says, “Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard, antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come…They went out from us.”
The “they” points back to the antichrists—so John identifies these secessionists as antichrists, those against Christ. In 2:22 he calls them liars: “Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.” So they were denying who Christ truly is. In 2:26–27 we learn they were trying to deceive John’s dear ones, and John reassures the church: you have the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, who abides in you; you don’t need these men to teach you. They came with falsehood, trying to persuade believers to accept a lie about who Jesus really was.
2 John 9: “Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.”
This is a major theme in John’s letters: remaining in the truth rather than going beyond it, as the secessionists were doing—leaving it behind, imagining they had something better. In 1 John 4:1–6 John calls them false prophets who have gone out into the world; there’s a tight connection between these secessionists and “the world,” a dominant theme in the book. Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God—this is the spirit of antichrist—so they clearly held a faulty Christology.
By the late first century, some of the Christological heresies we know were already on the horizon. Docetism held that Jesus only appeared to have a physical body—a spirit being who merely seemed human, who didn’t truly take on flesh or die on the cross; that was an early form of Gnosticism, which taught salvation through secret knowledge. These ideas appear in seed form among those challenging the church in Ephesus, and this group in particular was rejecting Jesus’ humanity. That’s why John opens the letter with such a strong statement about Jesus’ humanity—“every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (4:2); “…they do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” (2 John 7). There’s also a strong theme of love and hatred for one another, which ties back to these secessionists. In chapter 3 John connects hating your brother with seeing him in need and refusing to help; it may be that some of these secessionists were better off financially and showed no compassion to those in need.
So here’s my summary of the secessionists: a group of false teachers who went out from the church; who held a heretical Christology denying Jesus’ true humanity; who were influenced by ascetic and proto-Gnostic ideas; who may have claimed to be without sin; who were trying to deceive and persuade the Christians; who failed to love others in need; and who left many confused and doubting whether they were truly believers. That’s the setting into which John writes.
Purpose: Why Did John Write?
The verse we most associate with this question is 5:13:
“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.”
Some take that as referring only to what immediately precedes it, but most see it as a statement for the whole letter, and I agree. This is the main thing John wants to accomplish: to stabilize these people in the truth and assure them that they—unlike the secessionists who left—truly know the Lord and can be secure in their assurance of eternal life. He gives other reasons too: that they might have fellowship, that their joy might be complete, that they might not sin; and he keeps reinforcing that they know the truth, they know him who is from the beginning, they have overcome the evil one. If I boil it all down: John wrote 1 John to stabilize these Christians in their joyful fellowship in the truth and to assure them of eternal life.
Message: What Did He Write?
If the purpose is why John wrote, the message is what he wrote—and the two overlap a lot. John himself tells us: he’s writing “a new commandment” that is also an old one (we’ll leave that puzzle to whoever teaches chapter 2), and he’s writing about “those who are trying to lead you astray.” One good summary of the message: you can know you are Christians because you believe Jesus is the Christ, you recognize your sin, and you love fellow Christians. I think 3:23 captures the theme well:
“And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.”
Belief—truth—is the doctrinal element; love is the practical outworking. Those are the two things John brings together to describe what true Christianity looks like. There are many other themes I won’t dwell on, but if you remember only one thing, remember the three L’s: life, light, and love—each with its contrast: life versus death, light versus darkness, love versus hate. If you want to dig further, truth is a dominant theme (with sub-themes of commandments, testimony, and message), along with knowing, the Spirit, and remaining (versus going out or going beyond), plus all those active verbs of obedience—doing, believing, walking, keeping. The world and sin get heavy treatment, as does the familial language of father, son, children, and brothers, which ties into the theme of fellowship. And words like hearing, seeing, beholding, and appearing run throughout, stressing the reality of Jesus’ humanity and the apostles’ role as eyewitnesses.
Outline: How Is It Organized?
John’s letter is notoriously hard to outline. He says many of the same things over and over, and it’s more of a pastoral appeal than a tightly argued, logical letter like you’d expect from Paul—so it wanders a bit. The best structure I’ve found is simple: a prologue and an epilogue that bookend the letter, both centered on Jesus as eternal life; and in between, two parts—“this is the message: God is light” and “this is the message: love one another”—focused on God is light and God is love. Attempts to go much deeper than that don’t prove very helpful, so I’ll keep it high level.
1 John 1: The Word of Life and Walking in the Light
The first thing you notice in chapter 1 is how much it echoes John 1—let your eyes bounce between them and you’ll see the similarities. The chapter falls into two parts. Verses 1–4 focus on Jesus, who he is, and the historical events of the gospel—the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the eternal Son of God who became the God-man—and how we can have life, fellowship, and joy through him. Verses 5–10 turn to what it looks like for sinners to enter that life and live in ongoing fellowship with God: how his holiness meets our sinfulness in the ongoing battle with evil within and without. Every good outline has three points; mine has only two, so it’s not a good outline, but here it is: eternal life is in the Word of life, and you must walk in the light.
Eternal Life Is in the Word of Life (vv. 1–4)
I’ve always found John’s introduction a bit puzzling. He doesn’t come right out and name his subject; he backs his way in, in a somewhat cryptic way. It reminds me of how Paul Tripp opens many of his New Morning Mercies devotionals. Here’s one: “We all do it in our own way. Seldom does a day go by without doing it again. We even do it in the middle of worship services, but it is a dangerous thing to do…We don’t like it when other people do it, but we fail to recognize how much we do it ourselves.” And then the reveal: “We all work to convince ourselves that we’re better off than we are.” John does something like that here. He doesn’t even use a masculine pronoun—not “he who was from the beginning,” but “that which,” the neuter—very generic and cryptic, backing his way in to pique our curiosity.
Let me walk through the text and break it apart so we can see how it hangs together. Verse 1, reworded a little, is essentially: I’m writing to you about the Word of life. He is the one who was from the beginning, the one we have heard, seen with our eyes, and beheld, and whom our hands have touched.
I love those expressions—“seen with our eyes.” My wife and I tell our kids all the time, “Look with your eyes.” People laugh—“Well, how else would you look?”—but they haven’t met our kids. They look with their hands, and when they’re little, with their mouths. You have to be clear. John is being clear here too, because seeing and hearing can be used spiritually in the New Testament—God opens someone’s eyes, or their heart. John wants to be unmistakable: we put our hands on the flesh and bones of the Savior; we saw him with our own eyes; our hands touched him. He and the other apostles were eyewitnesses. And he uses “we” throughout, because he doesn’t want his testimony to stand alone—this was him along with all the other apostles who touched Jesus.
Verse 2: the life appeared; we beheld it; we testify and proclaim this eternal life, which was with the Father and appeared to us. Verses 3–4 tell why he proclaims it: we proclaim the one we have seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us—and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ—and we write these things so that our joy may be full. I don’t think he means only the apostles; I take that as an inclusive “our”—John, the other apostles, the people he’s writing to, and the Father and Son together.
Look at it another way. Whom is John writing about? The Word of life, the eternal life, the Son. What does he tell us about him? That he is God—from the beginning, with the Father, appearing (implying his pre-existence)—and that he is man: they heard, saw, observed, and touched him. And why is John telling them this? Not to bring them into a fellowship they’re outside of—this is a fellowship they already live in. He wants to stabilize them in it, help them see its boundaries, give them fullness of joy, settle them in knowing they have eternal life, and help them experience the full life found in knowing Jesus.
What is fellowship? We use the word a lot as a church, and sometimes a bit shallowly—more about an activity we do than the deep reality of who we are. Fellowship is first and foremost a noun: a deep, objective, theological reality. “Common” is the root behind koinonia, and fellowship is what we have in common with God in Christ and with other believers. We’ve been invited into God’s family; we’re sharers and participants; Peter says we share in the divine nature. Given our union with Christ, we’ve been brought into the family of God—that is fellowship, that is koinonia. It’s also a verb—something we do because of that reality: being together and living out our oneness in Christ, delighting in it, talking about it. That can happen while watching the Super Bowl, but the deepest fellowship happens when we’re worshiping, singing, and praying together. Again, John isn’t inviting them into this fellowship; he’s confident they’re already in it, and he’s protecting and stabilizing them. So fellowship is less about what you do and more about who you are and what you have—an objective reality first, with a subjective outworking as we live life together. It’s closely tied to union with Christ and to our common faith, hope, privileges, and way of thinking.
What is eternal life? Notice that John introduces Jesus not as the one who gives eternal life but as eternal life itself. We usually think of eternal life as a gift—an extension of our life in a good place. But eternal life is first and foremost a person, and his name is Jesus. When we’re given eternal life, we’re given a relationship with Jesus and with the Father in him. It’s a quality of life that begins now, that we enjoy today, and that extends into eternity. John comes back to this at the end: “God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son” (5:11); “we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life” (5:20). So think about this treasure of eternal life in a more personal way—it’s about the intimate relationship we have with Jesus.
You Must Walk in the Light (vv. 5–10)
The second part of our text is about walking in the light. Verse 5 opens: this is what we heard from Jesus—“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Interestingly, if you go looking for that exact quote in the Gospels, you won’t find it. You’ll find plenty about light, but always Jesus being the light—“I am the light of the world; I have come as light into the world.” John may be using “God” here to refer to Jesus—of all the New Testament writers he’s the most comfortable calling Jesus God—but since he mentions “his Son” a few verses later, this is probably a reference to the Father. Either way, John ties God being light and Jesus being light together in a way that strengthens Jesus’ identity. Just as eternal life is a person, so light is a person: God is light.
Throughout Scripture, light and darkness picture two domains. God saves us out of darkness into light, from the power of Satan to God. We were once darkness; now we are light—so walk as children of light. We’ve been brought over from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom, a holy people in the kingdom of light—children of the day rather than of the night. I’d encourage you to do a little study on those passages.
Now look at verses 6–10. There are three pairs of conditional statements—“if this, then this.” In each pair, the first is a false claim, probably reflecting what the false teachers were saying, and John corrects it with a true statement. First: if we say we have fellowship with him while walking in darkness, we lie and don’t 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. Second: if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves—but if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Third: if we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar—but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
To confess means to agree with God—that our sin is horrible, evil, robbing him of his glory. I find “righteous to forgive” striking. We usually think of forgiveness as an act of God’s grace and mercy—and it absolutely is—but here John says it’s also an act of God’s righteousness, his justice. It’s like Paul in Romans 3, where God is both just and the justifier. Because God gave Christ as our propitiation (which we’ll see in chapter 2), our sin was poured out on Jesus and God’s wrath was satisfied. It is right for God to forgive us, because we are in Christ and our sin has been dealt with at the cross.
What does it mean to walk in the light? Walking is a metaphor for living, and light is a metaphor for holiness and truth—so to walk in the light is to live in God’s truth and righteousness. But it’s also to live in the presence of the one who is light. As R. C. Sproul loved to put it, it’s living coram Deo—“before the face of God.” We live in God’s presence through the Word, in prayer, in gathering with brothers and sisters, in private and corporate worship, as we sit under the preaching of the Word. John’s parallel expressions in 2 and 3 John—walking in the truth, walking in love, walking according to his commandments—shed light (no pun intended) on what this means.
Is there sin in the light? Your first reaction might be, “Of course not—God is light, God is holy, he cannot look on sin.” But that’s not how John talks about it. He links walking in the light with the presence of sin, not its absence. It’s those who say “we have no sin” who are in the darkness; it’s those who admit “I have lots of sin” who are walking in the light—as long as they’re agreeing with God about it, being cleansed of it, experiencing the forgiveness that comes through our advocate and propitiation, Jesus the righteous. So the sin-deniers are in the darkness, and the sin-admitters are in the light. To live in the light doesn’t mean we have no sin; it means we let the light expose our sin rather than running to hide and deny it. Is there sin in the light? Yes—but it’s exposed, confessed, repented of, grieved over, hated, forgiven, and purified.
It’s really important to keep this teaching about sin, confession, forgiveness, and cleansing in mind as we move through the rest of the book. What John describes here is the normal Christian experience. As he goes on, he’ll sometimes speak in a way that seems to set the bar higher than we can reach, and many Christians read the rest of 1 John and walk away wondering, “Am I even a Christian?” That’s the opposite of what John intended. He wrote so that you would walk away confident that you’re God’s child and have eternal life. If you’re believing in Jesus and the truth and agreeing with God about your sin, but reading 1 John in a way that makes you doubt, you’re misreading it. Keep that in mind as we go.
A few concluding applications. First, assurance of eternal life belongs to those who believe in the Life and repent in the light. Do you believe, love, and embrace the biblical doctrines of Christ, God, and salvation? Are you acknowledging your sin and walking in repentance—agreeing with God about it, experiencing the cleansing and forgiveness made possible by Christ? Assurance is not so much about reaching a certain level of sanctification—as much as we should always strive for greater holiness—as it is about embracing the apostolic message of the person and work of Jesus, walking in the presence of God and in the cleansing blood of Jesus. If that’s you tonight, take comfort, and may God wash over your soul with a deep and abiding assurance that empowers you to live for him.
Second, we must study, know, love, and walk in the truth. Doctrine matters—a lot. What you believe about God and about Christ matters; it’s the difference between light and darkness, life and death, love and hate, heaven and hell. Some of us are wired to think doctrinally and others more practically, but all of us are called to pursue both. Don’t underestimate the power of doctrine to fuel your living—and don’t deceive yourself if you have right doctrine that makes no difference in how you live.
Third, doctrinal deviation and moral downfall are inextricably linked. John ties them together: when your doctrine goes, your lifestyle follows.
And finally, we must not move beyond the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. The last two thousand years of church history are full of clever new ideas that distort the truth and lead people into darkness and death. Some people are wired to be innovative, and much of the Christian academy runs on novelty. There’s a place for speaking of the living Word in fresh ways, but we must guard against anything that, instead of maintaining and clarifying the central truths of the faith, goes beyond them to something supposedly new and better. Beware of those who claim the church has gotten it wrong and needs some new revelation that wasn’t handed from Jesus to the apostles to the church. Don’t let your heart and mind become enamored with clever ideas. Anchor your soul to the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this rich and glorious message about Jesus, the eternal life. Thank you for this amazing, undeserved grace to walk in your presence with boldness and confidence—with sin that we confess and hate and turn from, yet are cleansed of, thanks to Jesus, our advocate and propitiation. Apply these truths to our hearts and minds tonight; encourage, convict, assure, and save, for your glory and our good. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.