Reading: 1 John 1-2, Psalm 36
What do you do when someone you once respected starts telling lies? When a hero stands revealed as less than perfect? When cracks appear in even the most inspirational of saints? It is tempting to excuse it with a pithy saying. “Nobody’s perfect.” But the reality is, it hurts. Disappointment is real, and it has real effects. There is perhaps nothing so tragic than the fall of a friend. The early church was full of such falls, and it has not changed much today. Grace remains for the fallen, and that they may repent and have life in the name of Jesus. The story of Peter’s denial and restoration in the gospel of John makes this clear. But not everyone who denies the Lord Jesus Christ is restored, for not everyone turns back and says to him, Yes Lord, you know that I love you.
The letters of John read very similarly to the gospel account. The first letter is almost a commentary on John 14-17, encouraging the believers to remain faithful to what they have believed, which will bring them together with both one another and with God. John’s epistles are not addressed, and are generally assumed to have been written for the church at large, rather than to a specific situation or location. While the content tends to mirror that of his gospel, he clearly has some bad ideas he wishes to address and shoot down.
The first bad idea that John targets has to do with the nature of God: God is light, in him is no darkness at all; and humans: If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. One of the earliest challenges to orthodox Christian belief was a kind of proto-Gnosticism. This early heresy was systematically debunked by Irenaeus of Lyon in his book Against Heresies around a century after this letter was written. Irenaeus reportedly came to faith in Christ after hearing the preaching of a very elderly apostle John. This belief stated that there were light gods and dark gods. An extreme form of this was Marcionism, which said that the god of the Hebrew Scriptures was evil and dark, and that the god who appeared in Jesus Christ was good and light. John utterly rejects this distinction. There is only one God. He is altogether good, by definition. The other issue at hand is the nature of humans. Another aspect of early challenges to the faith was the idea that given sufficient knowledge, humans could sluff off their imperfections and become gods themselves. John has nothing good to say about this either, decrying the idea as a lie in which there is no truth.
John’s next target is the division of Jesus from God the Father. This is another swipe at some kind of pre-Marcionism, in which some people were taking sides, as it were, for the Father or the Son. John corrects this by putting the two together: We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. Jesus and the Father are not two gods at odds. They are God working salvation for his people through his own righteous actions.
Third he takes on licentiousness. We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. John is on the same train as James when it comes to the Great Commandment. Loving your neighbor as yourself is not optional. It is obedience to your King, and is the evidence of allegiance to him. Whoever says he is in the light but hates his brother is still in darkness. Allegiance to Jesus means to obey him, and he does not command moral evil. There is grace for failures, but there is no license for wickedness.
Finally John turns to the tragedy of people who fall away from the faith. The word antichrist has accumulated a great deal of baggage in the last couple hundred years, but I think John is simply talking about people who were once trustworthy teachers who began teaching the things he just attacked. He encourages the believers to remain true to what they have been taught and learned in the Scriptures. Those who deny the authority of the Son or the Father are simply wrong. That is not the gospel. It does not save anyone.