The First Epistle of John the Apostle: Expository Commentary by Bible Notes

Bible Commentary on The First Epistle of John

by Bible Notes

God has given us in this first epistle of John a letter full of fatherly affection for the people of God, and overflowing with guardian care towards the saints in their common struggle for the faith. John provides us with clear doctrinal instruction, but he cannot do this in an emotionally detached way, and his deep love for the people of God comes across and forms an essential part of the message of this brief letter.

Even to refer to 1 John as a letter may give the impression that it contains some personal communication from John to his readers like other New Testament epistles, but it has no greeting, it conveys no news, it makes no reference to any named individual, it mentions no place or event, but simply contains divine truth set out in logical form. Certainly his readers are known to the apostle and he is known to them, but what he has sent them is nearer to a theological treatise. However that description would also be misleading for John writes with a sense of the immense value of God’s children, and with strong personal concern that goes far beyond any formal theological writing.

The letter opens with an outpouring of wonder at the coming of the Son of God into our world and the privileged position given to the apostles as witnesses of the incarnation, but immediately John wants to share such wonderful insights with all God’s people. It is his appreciation of God’s revelation to the church that makes him jealous for believers and determined that no one should abuse God’s gift or take away what has been given to them. John writes with deep affection for the people of God, and his feelings are equally strong in relation to those who teach error. His letter views mankind as sharply divided into those who belong to God and those who do not, with no grey area between. He knows the spiritual war waged against the church by the powers of darkness and his letter is therefore full of energy in exposing the malicious strategies of these spiritual enemies. Though he is gentle and fatherly towards believers, he is implacable and unyielding in his opposition to error, and fights against it with resolute firmness knowing that the souls of God’s people are at stake.

1 John is said by some to have been written to defend against Gnosticism, particularly that form of it called Docetism which taught that Christ only seemed to be God manifest in the flesh. This heresy insisted that it was not possible that Christ, a pure spiritual being, could literally have suffered as a man on the cross; therefore his humanity was in reality only an appearance, an illusion. Some are quite happy to focus entirely on this historical question, because they do not wish to admit that similar heresies exist in our own day. No doubt John’s letter provided an answer to this particular error, but it is written for God’s people in all ages and contains many other helps, corrections, and warnings. It defends against a multitude of heresies which the church has faced and will continue to face, especially those which encourage Christians to live in a way that is inconsistent with the truth of the gospel.

In our own day the same deception has surfaced again. Some attempt to assure God’s people that he finds it acceptable for them to hold on to the precious doctrines of the faith and to glory in these, while at the same time retaining large elements of their pre-conversion lives – their entertainments, choice of music, and general lifestyle. Indeed they face the deceitful suggestion that they have a Biblical mandate to engage with the world and to try to influence it through culture, as well as through the gospel. Instead of withdrawing from involvement with unbelievers in their sinful pastimes, believers are told they may join with them, and the inevitable result is that the message of repentance is soft peddled in an attempt to entice the world into the church. But John commands us not to love the world, neither the things that are in the world, and warns in the plainest possible language that we cannot love Jesus Christ and the world at the same time.

John writes in a style closer to that of his Lord than any other penmen of Scripture. The disciple should be like his master, and John’s love for his Master and his word has fashioned his own thinking and expression to reflect that of Jesus Christ. The letter is heavenly in character, beginning abruptly, and dealing with sublime and lofty subjects from the start, with no introduction to allow the reader to adjust to this. To the superficial reader the apostle might appear to meander through his subjects in a haphazard way, but the reality is that his statements are strongly connected together, and yet, because it is not necessarily the connection we expect, we may find his reasoning obscure. John is getting us to think like him and to follow his reasoning processes. Sometimes his argument seems inconclusive, but this is only because we have not brought with us all the assumptions that he expects us to bring as those who believe in God. The connection between his statements is a further mine of instruction from which we are to learn.

It is difficult to divide up the letter into clearly defined sections. Some have described it as having a spiral structure, that is, it returns to the same subject several times, climbing higher at each turn. John introduces a subject and then leaves it again to consider something else, before returning to it so that he can develop it further. It is characteristic of his style that he repeats himself and adds further teaching each time he revisits his subject; the same approach is seen in the Book of Revelation. Perhaps the reason for this is that he is teaching us in the way we naturally learn. We make progress in one area and then come across a related issue which needs to be resolved before we can go any further. Attention must be given to this related matter and then having grasped it we return to what we were studying before with the advantage of having a more solid understanding on which to build. An example of this is the way he leaves the subject of love at the end of chapter 3 and spends six verses at the start of chapter 4 considering the discernment of spirits before returning to develop the subject of love from a new perspective: God’s love as an example to us.

There are few clear divisions in the letter and John does not highlight the start of new sections as some writers do. One subject merges into the next and a verse that ends his thinking on one matter often has a thought tagged onto it, which introduces the subject which follows. As well as this, there are constant back references to topics that have been dealt with before, and John often picks up the thread of a related previous thought and weaves it back into his thinking so as to show the interrelatedness of Biblical doctrines. By doing this he emphasises the close relation of the doctrines of the faith to one another, and also how practical they are, for he invariably draws a concrete application from each doctrine he handles.

Another feature of the letter is the apostle’s habit of switching sides constantly from believer to unbeliever, from righteousness to sin, from truth to error, from light to darkness, from God’s side to the devil’s. In some parts of the letter it is the exception rather than the rule that two consecutive verses continue to consider the same side, and sometimes the switch comes mid verse. By presenting these two sides as the only alternatives and by including all without exception, John presents a very stark view of reality. Nevertheless this is the way God regards the world and this is how we also ought to regard it. The difference between the children of the world and the children of God is so vast that there can be no real fellowship between them: they have different beliefs, different masters, different loyalties, different lifestyles, and different eternal destinies.

John is also the great simplifier. He reduces complex matters to their most basic form and sums them up in statements which possess childlike simplicity. By doing this he sets aside the distractions thrown up by sinful human ingenuity in its efforts to evade the plain truth of God. An example of this is the apostle’s statement in chapter 3:9, ‘Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.’ We may ask ourselves how this can be true and whether John has not gone too far in his simplification of truth: surely the one who is born of God can and does sin. However the child of God must come reverently to God’s word, knowing that it is without error, and ask God to teach him from its depths. The reader needs to take care not to mistake this simplicity for lack of profundity, for the two things are not the same. It is possible to express deep truths in simple terms as our Lord Jesus Christ often did.