In this series we offer brief introductions to the books of the Bible, including background, authorship, content, and application to the lives of today’s Christians.
The Apostle John’s contributions to the New Testament came late, probably written between A.D. 90-100. By this time, he was in Ephesus, part of what is now southwestern Turkey. Later he moved to Patmos. The first epistle of John is simultaneously one of the warmest of the New Testament works (love appears twenty-six times, more than in any other New Testament letter), and yet as polemical as, say, Paul’s letter to the Galatians (but with more honey, and less vinegar). In both cases, John and Paul recognized a serious, destructive error taking root among a flock they deeply loved, and they acted to inform, warn, and counsel the Christians in those places.
At the heart of John’s concern was the appearance, within the church (“they went out from us” 2:19), of an emerging error that attacked the Gospel near the close of the first century A.D. It was broadly called “Gnosticism” (from the Greek gnosis, which means “knowledge”), which, in simplest terms, saw the human in dualistic terms: the spirit versus the body. The body was seen as a limiting, corrupt container that the spirit was best to be rid of (it was that sort of thinking that turned off many of the Athenians when Paul started talking about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Acts 17:37). As it crept into the church, the thinking had two corrosive effects. One was Christological: Gnostics rejected the incarnation, the truth that God was dwelling in a man. According to Martin Franzman, at least some of these Gnostics asserted that the Holy Spirit came to live in Jesus only at His baptism, and departed before Jesus’ execution on the cross. The goal of true believers, Gnostics asserted, was to achieve intellectual communion with God, despite their life in the body.
That false teaching, in turn, fostered the notion that one could have communion with God and yet indulge one’s fleshly impulses without danger to the soul. The Halley Pocket Bible Handbook explains that for them, a “lofty mental mystical piety was entirely consistent with [a] voluptuous sensual life.”
Understanding that background, First John’s opening verses take on a helpful clarity. Those verses speak of what John and his fellow apostles had “seen with our eyes” and “what our hands have handled, concerning the word of life.” (1:1 NKJV) God’s gift of true righteousness came bodily, in Jesus. Because of that, sin cannot stand alongside godliness; God came in Christ to deliver us from unrighteousness, by the incarnation of Christ: “the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” (1:7) That this is what John had “seen” and “handled” gave him the authority of an eyewitness, and the certainty that the incarnation is the central truth of the Christian faith.
True faith, as the rest of the epistle demonstrates, is not a mere mental exercise; it is the daily restoration and renewal of the sinner through the Gospel message. As John writes: “everyone who has this hope in Him [the Father] purifies himself, as he is pure.” (3:3) Perhaps to underscore this transformation of life through faith, John presents ideas in antithetical manner: light versus darkness (1:5; 2:8, 9), truth versus lie (1:6, 10; 2:4; 4:20), Christ versus antichrist (4.3), God versus devil (3:8). Nor is this a dualist, yin-yang sort of philosophy. These realities are oppositional: such contradictions cannot stand in the life of Christian faith.
John’s letter is relevant even today. As John then urged his “children” to be ready to “test the spirits, whether they are of God” (4:1 NKJV), so we need to do today. All Christian truth pivots on this marvelous act: God became flesh. In this way His love was “manifested among us.” (4:9) Therefore, “beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (4:11 NKJV) The mark of a life lived in God is not a sterile, bare “faith”; it is God’s love, directed toward one another.
True faith, as the rest of the epistle demonstrates, is not a mere mental exercise; it is the daily restoration and renewal of the sinner through the Gospel message.
is a former pastor who now teaches English at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. He makes his home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.