2 John 1:5 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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2 John 1:5

Comments

John beseeches her. What is the matter? Is this excellent lady deficient in some respect? Did she not greatly love her fellow Christians? It sounds like a hint of reproof. Some think it is that and they may be right, but it is not necessarily the case. It may simply be that John feels the need to stress the importance of this. It is an inspired letter, and it is for everyone, not just this lady. We note that in the First Letter of John on the three different occasions in that letter where the apostle John exhorts to mutual love between believers, fellowship love, he does not just repeat himself. You look at each one carefully and you soon notice that there is something quite different about mutual love that he says each time. And so it is this time. If you were to put the first and second letters of John together, you would say this is a fourth time he has visited this subject. Is there something fresh here? Yes, there is; it is the element of protective love. Verse 7 tells us that the exhortation to fellowship love is being said in the context of many deceivers being in the world. You need fellowship love because it is of great protective power for keeping out deception and false doctrine. That is why verse 7 starts with the word ‘for’. Love is appreciation and affection but it includes watching over, watching out for. If you love your children, you protect them. Most of your parental worries come from this – you are trying to protect your children in some respect. Perhaps they are falling into bad company; perhaps they are making the wrong friends. Perhaps they are being influenced by the wrong things or people and parental strategy at once comes into play. How can I help with this? Love protects. But sometimes among God’s people this element is omitted and protection is not worried about so much, as we can see in church history. Holiness and the commandments of God are the basis of true love.

Application

From the 1880s a movement for higher criticism for Holy Scripture came in, into the world of scholarship first of all: the critical approach. The Scriptures were no longer inspired. You could make up your mind what was divine and what was not. You could debate this and that. You could make all kinds of theories, many of them you will know about, proposing that umpteen people wrote this book and that book, belonging to different schools of thought, so that the Bible is all of human composition. This kind of cynicism and scholarship began to undermine the churches, and so it gave birth to a new form of liberalism in which the Scriptures were not entirely inspired. So you got whole denominations where they said things like – the Scriptures contain the Word of God. They no longer said the Scriptures are the Word of God. Now the element of protection in love seemed to disappear from many pulpits and many churches, and elders and deacons no longer worried about the protection of their people. The conversation would be: ‘Oh this minister, that scholar, they are good people’, and you over looked the fact that they were no longer believing in the inspiration and authority of Scripture. There is for instance the Baptist body, of which we loosely are part. And from the 1880s it embarked on gradual collapse as unbelief penetrated. In this country, in the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, probably less than 5% of the churches are truly evangelical anymore and the bulk of Baptist churches that still hold firmly for the Scriptures and for the faith have long since left that Union and are quite independent of it. How did it happen? How over a period of hundred years did a whole denomination collapse into unbelief? A lack of love. Not just love for the truth, but protective love for the people: the pulpit defending the faith, the churches defending the faith. I can remember as a youngster in the church in which I was saved, the deacons would be happily talking about our beloved denomination, when it was 95% rotten and in unbelief. We were not being warned, we were not being protected. Love protects and that is the great theme of this second epistle of John.

Questions

Some expositors are very puzzled by this word ‘for’; it does not make sense, it does not connect with what John has just said. So they say, clearly what John means to do is to connect verse seven with verse eight, but grammatically both in the Greek and in the English that makes even less sense. No, we should love one another because many deceivers are entered into the world.

Outline

Purpose

Introduction

2 John 1:5 Commentary and Bible Study