1 John Chapter 1

It's a bit of a cop out to do 1 John, since I wrote a fair bit on it in my first year of college, but I want to do 2 and 3 John, so it would be silly not to start here.

vs 1

John doesn't bandy about with the normal niceties of letter writing. He jumps straight in. He's writing about the Word of life. He's seen it, he's heard it, he's touched it.

vs 2

You can see just how much John ties Jesus up in our eternal life. He is life. When Jesus manifested, that was our eternal life manifested. Without Jesus, there is no eternal life. And he's seen it and testifies to it.

vs 3

And once again he proclaims that he's seen it. See a pattern here? Perhaps John was getting doddery, but also remember there's no CAPS, underlining or italics in John's time, so if you want to highlight an idea, you just repeat it over and over.

John also says that he wants the readers to have fellowship with him, and this his fellowship includes God and Jesus Christ.

vs 4

You'd think a small verse like this would be simple. He probably means that in their fulfilment of this letter, their faith will be complete, and so his joy at seeing that will be too. Or perhaps that in reading it, the reader's joy will be complete.

vs 5

It always seems that John was listening to Jesus when no-one else was. Compare the synoptic gospels to John's gospel and you'll know what I mean. This statement is so profound, and yet so simple. You can almost imagine Jesus saying it to the disciples, and them staring blankly back saying "Wha?"

Why is God depicted as light? Because of it's purity? Because of it's power over darkness? Because light brings life? Because you can see the truth in the light? Because you can find your way by light? Is God actually shining in light? In some sense probably all of these are true. But as we turn the pages of 1 John, we will come to see that he is focused particularly on light and darkness as defining our moral character.

vs 6

You cannot be in fellowship with God and yet still be in darkness. After all - God is light. "do not live by the truth" literally means "you are not doing the truth". Do we often think of truth as an action? That's the sort of truth God is and Jesus is.

vs 7

Fellowship with John is fellowship with Christ. We tend to think of fellowship physically - spending time together. But fellowship is more like banding together as one - and you can do that without actually being together physically, but by standing up for each other. If we walk in the light of Jesus, we are in fellowship in Christ - our common bond. Not only that, but his blood purifies us from all sin - another thing we can share.

vs 8

This verse is vital to understanding this book. Every time you read about sin in this book, come back to 1:8. John is nuts about being against sin, and without this firm foothold, and the understanding of 1:7 about being purified from sin, it is impossible to accurately understand 1 John.

No one is without sin. The idea itself we all know because we've all got Romans 3:10-12 memorised. But anyone who claims a victory over sin is foolish, and they don't have the truth of Christ. They are only fooling themselves.

vs 9

This is the answer for John, and for everyone. Yes, we have sin. But if we ask forgiveness, God will forgive them because of his faithfulness, and his righteousness (it says justice, but the greek is righteous). Now what's that? We would normally want to read "grace" or "mercy" there. But God is always in the right. He cannot make a promise to forgive us our sins and then not keep it. He is able to cleanse us from our sins. Different from stripping sinfulness from us (which he is also able to do, but that doesn't come yet).

vs 10

Because if we try and foist onto God that we don't sin, we are making him out to be liar. He didn't send Jesus to die on the off chance we might sin. If you're ever calling God a liar, then something tells me that Christianity is not for you. It's just not who God is.