The Rest of the Letter

Mitchell, Brody, Shannon, and Shelby,

Regarding the enemies of Christ, John doesn't say much about what exactly characterized them, so unfortunately we have to deal with one half of the conversation.  Here's what we can gather, though, after putting together the pieces:

1. Because the end is near (2:18), enemies of God's Word have appeared.  Enemies of God's Word have existed from the very beginning, as the Israelites surely knew, so what I'm wondering is whether or not these are an entirely new kind of enemy that could only have existed after Christ's incarnation and resurrection.
2. These enemies were superficially part of the fellowship, but made left on their own accord (2:19).
3. The enemies of Christ say that Jesus is not the Messiah (2:22).  Naturally, if he rejects the Son, he also rejects the Father.  He doesn't say that they reject the Holy Spirit, but even so, they don't have it.  Question, though: How exactly is John defining "Messiah?", and is it possible that the enemies of Christ still used the term "Messiah" only to distort its original meaning?

Whatever the case is, John makes sure to encourage his to keep the original message close to their heart.  This message, he says, is from the beginning.  Does that mean that they are to follow the old commandments, or by "the beginning" is he referring to the original news of the Gospel as told by direct eyewitnesses such as himself?

Interestingly enough, John also says that the people he is writing to are incapable of being deceived because they have the Spirit in them (2:20,27).  In fact, they don't even need teachers --- so why is he even writing this letter?

After reading this several times through, I still haven't articulated a solid explanation for that.

In the next chapter, John speaks something of our position with God.  The opening to that chapter is quite inspirational and comforting, with a bit of eschatology thrown in for good measure.  That eschatological language causes for interesting topics of conversation, such as:

1. What does it mean that the world doesn't know children of God (3:1)?
2. What shall we become (3:2)?  Why is it not clear to us?  What are we now?  Why do we yet need to become something?
3. When Christ appears, we shall be like Him (future tense)?  What is the difference between the Christlike image we have now and the Christlike image we do not have yet?
4. If we have not seen Him as he really is, how have we seen Him now?  Did John see Christ as He really was, since he met Him in the flesh?  To what extent do we know Him?

So anyway, 3:3 says that if we have hope, we are pure.  For better or worse, I associate the word "pure" with words like "sanctified," "justified," "bought and payed for," "forgiven," which are adjectives describing what it means to be saved by grace and forgiveness.  I feel that this helps support the summary I gave in my last entry.

Anyway, legalism again.  3:4-15 is a treasure chest for someone who wants to play the judge and discern who's "in" and "out" with regards to this faith.  The thing is, it sounds so good, because who's going to sit there and argue against love?  Only the most bitter of cynics reject love.  They will call it a tired cliche, and groan when the moral of a movie amounts to no more than "the power of love!"  As for anyone who believes that God is love, of course any commands to love sound remarkable and graceful.

Yet, they are conditional.  Love, or else.  Sure, the we say that we are saved by faith in Christ's sacrifice, by Grace.  That is the explicit definition of salvation.  But then we add things on to it, and contradict it with an implicit definition: that we are not saved if we are not perfectly loving.  Then, because it's implicit, we'll claim that at the core we're still really only preaching simple Grace and not compromising on that principle.

My great hope in this lies in the clause in 3:16.

16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.

Something about this adjusts all the other demands made throughout the chapter into something more Christological.  A more radical interpretation of 3:16 follows that Christ's sacrifice for us is not just an act of love, but love itself.  Love is only possible once we have accepted this definition, and only follows if we accept what we already have in Christ.  Somehow, our position in Christ seems less conditional after that statement.

Nevertheless, I encourage you all to love!  Definitely!  Learn it with all your heart!  But first and foremost, I will always stress that your ultimate joy is what you already have in Christ, an that your position in Him is not conditional.

And what are His commands?  Believe in Him and love on another, in that order (3:23).  The first command, the one that sets the groundwork from which everything else logically flows, comes from our sincere faith in His Grace.  His command to love is, more specifically, a command to love without worrying how our work measures up and whether or not that love is good enough for Him.

1 John 4:10-11, Good News Translation:

10 This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven. 11 Dear friends, if this is how God loved us, then we should love one another.

I put emphasis on the "then" in that last clause, because it's important to see the transition here that divides the two ideas.  Love and salvation is, first and foremost, in Christ.  I know I get redundant saying that, but we need the redundancy.  We can focus a lot on the implications of that salvation, but it must always be understood that those applications of Grace flow from Grace.  Grace is not its applications; Grace is Grace.

John acknowledges certain other implications.  One is evangelism (4:14), another important value in Christianity.  I just started reading a book today, Building a Contageous Church by Mark Mittelberg.  Some of the ideas it puts out are pretty good, such as overcommunicating the mission statement in order to make sure that people know it by heart, but the book's first principle is that evangelism is the main point of the church, and that it should be the most important and foremost item in its mission statement.  I do not think that it works that way.  In fact, I know that it doesn't work that way.  No one's identity rightfully comes from his mission in life because his mission stems first from his identity.  Therefore, the mission statement of all churches is to know, personally, the Grace of Christ.  This must be at the top, and only then can all other priorities find their proper context.  And then, ironically, do they find their proper power.

So even though John's emphasis can be misleading, I hold it as reasonably suspect that he's only illustrating how being forgiven transforms someone, how they act more genuinely when they're no longer worried about whether or not they keep the Law well enough to please God.  These vivid illustrations of just how uncompromisingly loving a Christian might just be meant to get the recipients thinking "Where does this love come from?"

John 4: 18-19 says 

18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.19 We love because he first loved us.

First, I want to point out something.  Perfect love drives out fear.  This is God's work in us.  Because of God's sacrifice, we're without reason for fear.  I refer back to 1 John 4:10.  And then when he says that fear comes from the possibility of punishment.  John Lynch, author of The Cure, came to Dordt and quoted from his books, saying "What if I told them that I will never use the word 'punish' with regards to them?"  he said that to God it wasn't a risk in the slightest, letting us completely off the hook, but to us it feels that way.  Yet amazingly, that giant risk transforms us, even though logically we no longer have any reason to be loving.

Furthermore, John changes his way of speaking about love for a moment.  Instead of saying that we who love are without fear, he changes the word "love" from an active verb into the subject of a prepositional phrase.  In order to be without wear, we must be in love.  Earlier in 1 John, he uses the same preposition when describing our positional relationship with the light.

The rest of the letter follows suit.  Amid the constant commands for love, he reassures us that God has given us (past tense) eternal life through His Son.  From then on, he no longer describes love as a condition of salvation, but a natural outworking of it.

I more or less didn't highlight a single thing after that, since I feel that my thoughts on the letter's overall message have been summed up, albeit somewhat haphazardously.

However, I will return to this tomorrow, because certain things slipped through the cracks, questions that I had with the letter that don't fit in with the rest of the narrative.  They're the kind of questions that are out-there enough that I suppose that I might just be acting as a jerk by bringing them up.  "You think you know everything?  Nope!  Answer these.  And I will enjoy watching you tilt your head sideways."

But as to what I have said so far, do you think I'm being fair?  Is this a proper assessment of 1 John in light of the many conditional statements it repeatedly puts forth?

Sincerely,
John Hooyer