1 John 1:1-4 (3)

John wants his readers to know these things, as we see in the start of verse 3. ‘that which we have seen and heard we proclaim to you’. This is why I love John. I think Luke is probably my favourite Biblical author just because of the way he organises his material, but John comes a close second. He is so keen, desperate even, for his readers to know the truth about Jesus that he makes his point again. There is evidence to slam to Gnostic heresy, there is evidence to back up the claims about the incarnation. They are that John, once again, has seen and heard Jesus. Now it’s time to do something about it. John proclaims these things to be true. And why? Look at the rest of verse three with me ‘so that you too may have fellowship with us; indeed our fellowship is with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ.’

Fellowship is an interesting word in Christian circles. We tend to do the same things with Christians as we do with non Christians and call it fellowship. We have fellowship talking about football before church starts, but when we’re talking about the same things with our non Christian friends we call it something different. We can sit on the sofas and Mondial with our Christians friends and its fine because it’s fellowship, but if we find ourselves with non Christians we need some other reason to justify it. Is that what John means here? No. Fellowship in the Biblical sense means people with a common goal with a purpose. It is a community of interest and feeling. People bound by a purpose and a partnership. When I drive to football matches with my friends, we’re in fellowship with one another. John is proclaiming for partnership.

This partnership is with each other but also with Father and Son. Isn’t that amazing? That through faith in the Biblical Gospel we can have fellowship with God. This is surely what John 17:3 means when it says: ‘and this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’ Eternal life isn’t simply about getting into Heaven, the apex of eternal life is fellowship with God. There’s much much more I want to say about this, but if I start, I may never stop!

Now, the reason the Holy Spirit is missing from this equation is that John’s opponents were focussed on denying the Godhood of the Son, and thereby forfeiting the Father. Notice how Father and Son are placed side by side here. One commentator has remarked that this sentence shows us the distinction and equality between Father and Son. It’s certainly no coincidence that John brings them together like this.

So what is being proclaimed is to increase fellowship with each other. A fellowship that exists only though faith in the Son, which brings us to fellowship with the Father, which is eternal life itself.

But why? Is it just so John has more people in his club than the Gnostics? Do we just have mission weeks and run lunch bars so that we can have the biggest society on campus? So that we have more people on our team? I guess that’s often how it looks to non Christians. Well look at verse four with me ‘and we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete’ Some translations say ‘your joy’ instead of ‘our joy’ but it makes little difference to the meaning of the verse. Fellowship under and in the Godhead completes Christian joy. That’s why John writes all he’s about to write. So that his joy may be complete as this church grows in the truth of the Gospel, and so that their joy may also be complete as that happens.

This joy is inseparable from the salvation found in the Son. It’s a gift of the Father as the Son is a gift of the Father. And in the Son, in Jesus, our joy will eventually be complete. We’ll only see an echo of it now, as we learn from John 16:22-24 ‘now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.’

This letter exists for the joy of the Christian reader. This final verse sums up nicely the whole paragraph and sets up the rest of his letter well as we see the links between the strands: Johns proclamation was the historical manifestation of that which is from the beginning, the purpose of this manifestation was salvation leading to fellowship with one another, based of the fellowship with the Father and Son which leads to fullness of joy.

So no, it’s not about getting more people in our club. It’s about declaring the Kingship of Christ for the joy of people everywhere. Did you know that’s what evangelism and proclaiming the Gospel is in essence…Spreading joy? The great English pastor theologian John Stott says that we are cruel to ourselves if we go through life without knowing God. And I guess we’re cruel to our friends if we go through their life not helping them to know God. We can only do that because God has manifested Himself to us in the flesh in the man Jesus Christ. These are the things we must hold onto about the Christian faith, the things that mustn’t be obscured by exams and lazy summer afternoons. That Jesus Christ is God. That He came in the flesh. That these things are eternally important. That people must know about this for our joy and for theirs.

1 John 1:1-4 (2)

Let’s look at verses two and three together. ‘which we have heard, which have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life-this life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us’. Its in these verses that we hit the crux of John’s argument in this prologue, and where he starts to strike the death knell for Gnosticism.

The Apostle claims that he has heard, seen, looked upon and touched that which was from the beginning. He is of course talking about what Christians call the incarnation, the truth that the man Jesus of Nazareth is in fact the eternal Son of God. Notice how in each of the clauses about Johns witness he ups the ante slightly. He has heard and seen that which was from the beginning. Well good, but Moses could say that, so could Isaiah, there’s nothing special or new about what John is talking about yet. Then he says he has looked upon Jesus. The phrase looked upon here has more weight in the original Greek than it does in English. Looked upon means something like to have thoughtfully observed or spent time looking at. It means to have visually examined something like an investigator at a crime scene rather than to have simply glanced at something. He’s not just seen Jesus. He’s looked at him, and he believed in him. There is weight to what John is saying about Jesus.

And what’s more they have touched it with their hands. Again a closer meaning of this phrase would be something like to have examined closely, to have investigated with your hands rather than simply to have touched. These last two clauses seem to refer to a time when the disciples would have had the time to gaze thoughtfully at Jesus and to handle Him in their seeking of the truth about Him. This time could well be post resurrection, and certainly the idea of Jesus being physically investigated reminds us of Thomas touching His wounds and believing at the end of the Gospel accounts.

These things concern the word of life. These things concern Christ. The Gospel announces and offers life in Christ. And this offer of life is only available because it was made manifest to us. That’s how John could say that he has seen and heard and handled the Christ…because He was made manifest to him and to the rest of the disciples.

This is a very important point. Hebrews 1:1 tells us ‘Long ago…God spoke to our fathers by the prophets but in these last days he has spoken to us by His Son’. This God who we could never have imagined has made Himself manifest to us though His eternal, divine Son Jesus Christ. And Jesus was not a man who became God, or attained divine attributes at some point during His life. He was not half man and half God, there wasn’t some constant inner turmoil between the divine and the temporal. Jesus was, and is, the God-man. This is a huge problem for Christianity, but when we grasp it, a huge answer to many problems.

In summing up the incarnation the German Reformer Martin Luther says ‘we should point to the whole man Jesus and say ‘that is God’. We’ve become blasé about this as Christians but just for a moment look at the person nest to you. And imagine that instead of sitting next to matt, or Mandy or Ellie, you’re sitting next to God in all His fullness. But at the same time He’s a thirty something carpenter. It is amazing. Jim Packer says ‘the really staggering claim is that Jesus Christ was God made man… The more you think about it the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is as staggering as the truth of the incarnation.’

The life was made manifest, John says in verse two. And how? Though a baby born in the middle of nowhere who grew up and lived a desperately normal life while he worked as a carpenter for thirty years. It’s crazy isn’t it? No wonder so many people have tried to deal with it by separating the two, as was going on in this church. But the clear Biblical teaching is that Jesus was everything a man should be and everything God is in one man. And, just as an aside, he almost certainly did not look like a woman with a beard as so many contemporary portraits make him out to be.

This is how God has revealed Himself to us. And we must work under this truth. So many of our friends questions are misguided away from this point. If you believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the God-man, then suddenly it becomes less of a problem to believe that He walked on water, healed the sick, fed the five thousand, died for our sins on the cross and rose again on the third day. If we can convince our friends of this then all their questions will fall into place. In Jesus the spiritual realm and the physical realm met. This is Christianity biggest problem, but its most glorious, life giving reality. Christ is Himself the life that John talks about in verse 2. This is the central confession of the Christian faith. And it’s wonderful.

What was John’s response to that in the rest of verse 2? The life that has been seen and testified to must be proclaimed. Jesus must be made known. He must be made known to combat heresy in the church, as here, and He must be made known to unbelievers, which we’ll come back to. The point that John makes in verse 1 is so important that he takes the time to restate it here, much like in the first two verses of his Gospel. The eternal life that has been with the Father since the beginning has can be testified to because it has been manifested in the historical life of Jesus.

1 John 1:1-4 (1)

This is the first part of my script from my talk at RUCU last night:

We’re going to be looking at 1 John in the main CU team meetings this term. And I’m excited for you. 1 John is a book that can be disturbing for Christians to read, especially with it’s very clear view on sin in the Christian life in chapters 2 and 3. That’s not why John wrote it though as it’s main aim is reassurance of great Christian truths. The author is the same John wrote the fourth Gospel, 2nd and 3rd John and Revelation, John the apostle.

John Stott has written that ‘John’s Gospel contains signs to evoke faith, Johns letters tests by which to judge it’. These tests are brotherly love, a righteous life and faith in Jesus as God Incarnate. These are the three poles around which John’s first letter is written. Though this letter is meant to strengthen the church and has much to say to help strengthen Christians, it’s also written against a background of heresy. That heresy was called Gnosticism and taught that the material, the fleshly was bad, and only the spiritual was good. This obviously causes problems for anyone who believes that Christ came in the flesh and that He was good! This is why John focuses so much on the incarnation of Jesus. Gnosticism was probably the biggest heresy to threaten the church in the first four centuries AD until the rise of liberalism in the 18th Century.

So let’s turn to the first part of the first verse and see how John turns his guns against the heresy of the time. ‘That which was from the beginning’ he starts off. Immediately we are reminded of the beginning of John’s Gospel, ‘in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God’ and of the beginning of the Bible itself in Genesis ‘in the beginning God…’. John is turning the minds of his readers to what they already know about Jesus in an attempt to help them walk through the Gnostic mire.

It doesn’t matter what new thing they think they’ve come up with…what do you know about Jesus? You know that He is ‘from the beginning’. You know that there was never a time when Christ was not, and of course by implication, never a time when God was not. How ever far back you go, there is Father, Son and Holy Spirit loving each other with perfect love. That’s who God is. Isn’t that brilliantly reassuring? For an eternity past, forever and ever and ever and ever past there was God. And there was Christ out Saviour. There is nothing…NOTHING beyond or behind Him. He is the ultimate cause; He is the effect of nothing. There was no explosion that started Him. He is from the beginning. And he will be until the end. Now innate in this we see the supremacy of the Gospel over any other world view. Christ is from the beginning…is post modernism? No. Is Gnosticism? No. There’s no reason to trust these things. I’m sure that the reason for so many sins and struggles in my own life is due to a deficient view of the sheer vastness God.

Did you know your heart was made for greatness? It wasn’t made to be satisfied by sexual impurity, or entertainment or leisure. It was made for greatness. That’s why we are thrilled by snow topped mountains, or the Grand Canyon or beautiful art or a great friendship. Because they echo something of the greatness that the heart was made for. It’s only in knowing, and getting to know Christ better, that we will know boundless satisfaction.

And that’s not the only, or even really the main reason why those three words are important in this context. We’ve already touched on it briefly but the pre existence of Christ starts to shatter the Gnostic heresy that was being proclaimed at this time. Christ’s eternality indicates inherent superiority. This is the first gun against Gnosticism.

The lost paragraph

My brain is a messy place. The following was in my script for my talk at RUCU tomorrow on 1 John 1:1-4, about fellowship with the Father and the Son. Following advice to 'say less and say it slower' i took it out and rewrote it. Anyway, here it is sslightly more broken down and readable, an insight into my head:

And look at what this fellowship of believers looks like from a different perspective.

Those who believe the apostolic proclamation share in their fellowship with the Father and the Son. This is the fulfilment of John 17:3 ‘and this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’

You see, Christian fellowship is impossible except on the basis of fellowship between and with the Father and with the Son. There can be no deep, real Christian fellowship apart from belief in the apostolic Gospel. Because it’s faith in God through the God-man Jesus, that secures Christian community

It’s because, importantly in the context of the letter, that the Father and Son exist in eternal fellowship that we can have fellowship with each other at all. We have fellowship with God through our shared purposes borne by belief in the Son and expressed in prayer and enjoyment of Jesus. This is a staggering thing for John to be able to say, but it’s true. Faith in the Biblical Gospel brings us into fellowship with God the Father, and with His Son and with the Holy Spirit.

Us! This is amazing. Salvation isn’t mainly about forgiveness of sins or God’s wrath being propitiated, those things are infinitely necessary but they are not ultimate. Eternal fellowship with God, that is what salvation brings us.

In other news, Latin Link who own the building that we have our office in are having their selection day today. All morning a steady flow of young potential missionaries have been walking across the carpark. it's pretty thrilling stuff!

Hebrews questions

One of the best things about working in an office full of Christians is the oppotunity to spend time kicking around questions. We were talking about Hebrews 6 and assurance yesterday afternoon. I was too busy peeling tape off a freshly painted wall to think about it properly, but this would have been my answer otherwise!

I'm sometimes slow to answer questions about scripture from scripture, which is a bit silly really since the best way to understand the Bible is under its own terms. I guess it also fails to understand that the Bible is a harmony, not 66 different songs.

I guess the key to the Hebrews 6:4-6 question is: 'what does it mean to crucify again the Son of God, what does it mean to hold Him up to contempt. The writer to the Hebrews is dealing with old Jewish laws which must now be done away with. These have a link to the problem of 6:8 (hence the 'for at the start of v4, but you can read, so you know that!). So perhaps in that context crucifying the son of God again means to go back to elementry Jewish practice. From there it is not possible to come again to repentance. Why? I guess because hearts become lazy, complacent and hardened, and sinful indulgence will always win over against a life of self denial. Our spiritual senses get so dimmed that even the thought of repentance is far from our minds.

What about 1 John 3:6? No one who abides in Him keeps on sinning. This might be the key. To keep on sinning could very well mean the same as crucifying the Son of God again, since it was for our sins He died. i take it that keep on sinning means habitual non repented of sin. So if we continue to sin our hope is gone, and Christs advocacy over us is lost. This is God giving us up to our sins.

He will not be mocked. He did not have His Son killed on the cross that people might sin their lives away, but that we might know Him. If we see Christs death on our behalf as just a reason to keep sinning we may well be 'crucifying the Son of God again'. If we heed the Hebrews 6 warnings and flee to Christ with repentance, He will receive us forever.