1 John Bible Study
The secessionists’ insistence that they had a special anointing of the Spirit (which had led them to go beyond the primitive Christian gospel) made those remaining in the author’s community wonder whether they lacked that anointing (2:20, 27) and therefore also lacked the spiritual insight which the secessionists claimed to have.
They believed that the divine sperma had descended upon the human Jesus at his baptism, but in such a way that the human Jesus was to be distinguished from the divine Christ. Hence they could deny that Jesus was the Christ come in the flesh. They believed that through their baptismal initiation they, too, had received the divine sperma and been born of God, thus sharing the divine nature and enjoying immunity from sin.
What was important for them was their own experience of God, or their koinōnia with him, and human relationships were deemed less significant. ‘Love’ for God, not love for one another, was the crucial matter. It was these people who in the end seceded from the author’s community
1:1 This ‘Word of life’ is described first of all as that which was from the beginning (ho ēn ap’ archēs). Modern-day readers of the NT can hardly avoid seeing here an allusion to teaching found in the prologue of the Fourth Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (en archē ēn ho logos). In the context of the prologue of John’s Gospel ‘the beginning’ means the time before the creation of the world. However, in the context of the opening verses of 1 John, ‘the beginning’ has a different meaning. The expression ‘that which was from the beginning’ functions as one of a series of relative clauses descriptive of the ‘the Word of life’, which the passage, as it unfolds, makes quite clear refers to the Word of life incarnate in Jesus Christ.
It is clear from the foregoing that when the author says, we proclaim concerning the Word of life, he has in mind something much more than a spoken message. He proclaims the Word of life which he has heard, seen, and touched. As will become clear in what follows, he proclaims a message that has been embodied in a person—the person of Jesus Christ.
What the author is saying in this verse is that to have fellowship with him is to have fellowship with God (which also involves fellowship with his Son) and to share in the work of God. As will become apparent in v. 6, the secessionists also claimed to have fellowship with God, but this is a claim which the author rejects.
The author recognises that his own joy in Christ cannot be complete if fellow believers for whom he feels some responsibility are in danger of departing from the truth by becoming involved in another koinōnia, one which he will soon prove to be bogus because it does not really involve koinōnia with the Father and the Son
And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God. (John 3:19–21, NRSV)
The first consequence is, we have fellowship with one another. As people walk in the light with God, they have fellowship with one another. This statement comes as something of a surprise. We might expect the consequence to be that people who walk in the light would have fellowship with God.
Or, to put it another way, there is no real fellowship with God which is not expressed in fellowship with other believers.
One lesson that may be learned from this second consequence is that walking in the light does not mean that those who do so never sin, but that they do not seek to hide that fact from God. They ‘walk in the light’ with him, and the result of their doing so is that the blood of his Son Jesus purifies them from their sins.
to claim to be without sin involves lying to oneself (1:8)
He portrays authentic Christian living as involving honest and ongoing acknowledgement of one’s sins.
Confession of sin is not a theme that is found often in the NT. It is found in only four other places. It occurs in the Synoptic accounts of the ministry of John the Baptist when people came confessing their sins to be baptised by him (Matt 3:6; Mark 1:15). It is also found in James 5:16, where, in the context of praying for the sick, people are urged to confess their sins and pray for each other that they may be healed. People in Ephesus confessed their ‘evil deeds’ and burned their magical books during the ministry of Paul in that city (Acts 19:18). In each of these cases confession of sin was public, not private (i.e., not just between the individual and God). It may then be the case that here in 1:9 the author also has in mind public confession of sin.
In the NT there are only three places where God is said to be faithful in doing something or other. These are 1 Corinthians 1:9; 10:13 and 2 Corinthians 1:18. In each case God’s faithfulness is expressed in providing for his people in various ways (presenting believers blameless on the Day of our Lord Jesus; providing a means of escape from temptation; and remaining true to his word by fulfilling his promises). It would seem reasonable, then, to infer from these references that God’s faithfulness is his trustworthiness in fulfilling the commitments he has made to his people. A similar meaning would be entirely appropriate here also: God is faithful to believers in that he is carrying through on his commitment to forgive and purify those who confess their sins, something which necessitated the giving of his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for their sins (4:9–10, 14).
From the author’s use of dikaios elsewhere in this letter, it is clear that to be righteous means to act in a righteous way. So when he says that God is righteous when he forgives sin and purifies sinners, he means that in doing so God is acting righteously. What seems to lie behind this is the problem of how God can be said to be righteous when he forgives the guilty. It is a problem which the apostle Paul had to deal with when explaining his gospel in Romans 3:21–26, and his resolution of the problem was that God can be both just and the justifier of sinners because he set forth Christ as the atoning sacrifice (hilastērion) for their sins.
John’s thought might be paraphrased, “If we confess our sins, he … will forgive the sins we confess and moreover will even cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Naturally, only God knows at any moment the full extent of a person’s unrighteousness. Each Christian, however, is responsible to acknowledge (the meaning of “confess,” homologomen; compare 2:23; 4:3) whatever the light makes him aware of, and when he does so, a complete and perfect cleansing is granted him. There is thus no need to agonize over sins of which one is unaware (Zane C. Hodges, The Bible Knowledge Commentary, New Testament, 886).
In v. 8 the author said that the claim to be without sin involved the claimant in self-deception; here in v. 10 he adds that the claim to have not sinned involves making God a liar. He does not say why this is so, but it may be safely assumed that this is the case because God declares the human race to have sinned (something that may be inferred from the author’s statement in 4:10 that God ‘sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins’). If God, then, may be said to regard all people as having sinned, to deny this makes him a liar