PREFACE
A Christian friend told me recently that he didn't spend a lot of time reading the Bible because he said it was difficult to understand the old archaic English language of the King James Authorized Version. I believe this to a certain extent, however, I also believe it takes time to not only understand the old English, but it also takes a lot of hard work to be able to appreciate the language. This can also be just a lazy excuse to depend on others to do the digging. If a Christian has the honest desire to read and understand the Bible he can and will understand it. This exposition on John's epistle is written with the desire that the readers, namely my children and grandchildren, will be encouraged to dig into the Word of God and experience what the Lord has prepared for them personally, and that they may be benefiting from my labors, for I certainly am.
I was also asked recently how many hours it took to write an exposition of this sort. I answered, forty years. I received a sarcastic, "yea, sure," until I explained that when I sit down at my computer and start typing away, I am drawing on all the years past that I have been studying God's Word. Everything we have ever seen, heard, read and experienced is recorded in our brains even more elaborately created than any personal computer. Not all of us have the ability to recall everything that has been supernaturally recorded in our brains, I certainly can't, and however, we would be surprised to know how much comes back to us as we seriously study the Word. Another note of encouragement is that one day every bit of this information, and even more, will be at our disposal, as we stand before our lord Jesus Christ, face to face, at our resurrection.
As I proceed with this exposition I will keep my thoughts easy to understand, as I have no one to impress, like some professor in college or seminary. I believe the Apostle John spoke very clearly to his beloved children, all the Christians of his day, as he wanted them to fully understand the doctrines the Lord had given him to pass on. Any direct quotes from an outside source I will be careful to give due credit, and I will add a bibliography at the end; if anyone has the inclination to go to a good library or Christian book store (see me before you purchase a book. Mail order is the only way to go, otherwise you will pay terrible prices) and do further study. As my children and grandchildren know the sources I recommend are conservative, so you can't miss. All the sources I use are men committed to the Grace of God. I believe that if you use the deductive line of reasoning as you study the Scriptures you can't miss, as long as your deduction is Grace. If what we are studying is based in the Grace of God, we can't miss. Simply put, "God is the active agent in the Word, and from Adam on we are all the recipients of this free Grace."
INTRODUCTION
The First Epistle of John was written between 90-95 A.D. John was very old when he wrote this Epistle and the tone of it is as a father to his little children, who was very interested in his family. I believe a lot of doctrine would not be misunderstood if it were presented as written to the family of God, the body and Bride of Christ.
"It is a family letter from the Father to His 'little children' who are in the world. The sin of a Christian is treated as a child's offence against his Father, and is dealt with as a family matter (1:9; 2:1). The moral government of the universe is not in question. The child's sin as an offense against the law has been met in the cross, and 'Jesus Christ the righteous' is now his 'advocate with the Father" (C.I. Scofield's Intro. Page 1342).
There were false teachers that had left the Church leaving behind them the damnable heretical teachings of Gnosticism. John is concerned with the corrupting influence the Gnostics left behind in the Church. We will see as we study this Epistle how John says, 'If they were of us, they would have remained with us.' A.T. Robertson in his 'Word Pictures in New Testament' very clearly describes Gnosticism:
"The Epistle is not polemic (controversial) primarily, but a letter for the edification of the readers in the truth and the life in Christ. And yet the errors of the Gnostics are constantly before John's mind. The leaders had gone out from among the true Christians, but there was an atmosphere of sympathy that constituted a subtle danger. There are only two passages 1) chapter 2:18, 'Little children, it is the last time; and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists, by which we know that it is the last time.' And 2) chapter 4:1-6, 'Beloved, believe not every spirit, but [test] the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone into the world. By this know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God; And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is that spirit of antichrist, of which ye have heard that it should come, and even now already is it in the world. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because greater is He that is in you, then he that is in the world. They are of the world; therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them. We are of God. He that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. By this know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error', in which the false teachers are specifically denounced, but 'this unethical intellectualism' (Robert Law) with its dash of Greek and Oriental mysticism and licentiousness gave a curious attraction for many who did not know how to think clearly. (I take this a step further by saying they would not think clearly. We cannot give unbelief an excuse.) John, like Paul in Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles, foresaw this dire peril to Christianity. In the second century it gave pure Christianity a gigantic struggle. 'The great Gnostics were the first Christian philosophers' (Robert law, The Tests of Life, page 27) and threatened to undermine the Gospel message by 'deifying the devil' (ib., page 31) along with dethroning Christ. (I am sure he is using Christian Philosophy in a nominal sense) There were two kinds of Gnostics, both agreeing in the essential evil matter. Both had trouble with the person of Christ. The Docetic Gnostics denied the actual humanity of Christ, the Cerinthus Gnostics distinguished between the man Jesus and the aeon Christ that came on Him at His baptism and left Him on the Cross. Some practiced asceticism, some licentiousness. John opposes both classes in his Epistles. They claimed superior knowledge (gnosis) and so were called Gnostics (Gnostiko). Nine times John gives tests for knowing the truth and uses the verb 'ginosko' (know) each time (2:3, 5; 3:16, 19, 24; 4:2, 6, 13; 5:2). Some of the leaders he calls antichrists. There are stories about John's dread of Cerinthus and his unwillingness to be seen in the same public bath with him. The Apostle of love, as he is, is a real 'son of thunder' when Gnosticism shows its head. Westcott thinks that the Fourth Gospel was written to prove the deity of Christ, assuming His humanity, while I John was written to prove the humanity of Christ, assuming His deity. Certainly both ideas appear in both books". (A.T.Robertson WPNT)
Because of the importance of Cerinthus to this Epistle I feel it important to give a little historical background on his life. Philip Schaff gives a very concise and interesting account of Cerinthus in Volume 2 of his Church History page 465-466:
"Cerinthus appeared towards the close of the first century in Asia Minor, and came in conflict with the aged Apostle John, who is supposed by Irenaeus to have opposed his Gnostic ideas in the Gospel and Epistles. The story that John left a public bath when he saw Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, fearing that the bath might fall in, and the similar story of Polycarp meeting Marcion and calling him 'the first born of Satan,' reveal the intense abhorrence with which the orthodox churchmen of those days looked upon heresy.
Cerinthus was an Egyptian and a Jew either by birth or conversion, studied in the school of Philo in Alexandria, was one of the false apostles who opposed Paul and demanded circumcision (Gal. 2:4; 2 Cor. 11:13 - read these verses), claimed to have received angelic revelations, traveled through Palestine and Galatia, and once came to Ephesus. The time of his death is unknown.
His views, as far as they can be ascertained from confused accounts, assign him a position between Judaism and Gnosticism proper. He rejected all the Gospels except a mutilated Mathew, taught the validity of the Mosaic Law and the millennial kingdom. He was so far strongly Judaistic, and may be counted among the Ebionites; but in true Gnostic style he distinguished the world-maker from God, and represented the former as a subordinate power, as an intermediate, though not exactly hostile, being. In his Christology he separates the earthly man Jesus, who was a son of Joseph and Mary, from the heavenly Christ, who descended upon the man Jesus in the form of a dove at the baptism in the Jordan, imparted to Him the genuine knowledge of God and the power of miracles, but forsook Him in the passion, to rejoin Him only at the coming of the Messianic kingdom of glory. The school of Valentine made more clearly the same distinction between the Jesus of the Jews and the divine Savior, or the lower and the higher Christ - a crude anticipation of the modern distinction between the Christ of history and the Christ of faith. The millennium has its center in Jerusalem, and will be followed by the restoration of all things. [The chiliastic (a belief in a millennium) eschatology of Cerinthus is omitted by Irenaeus, who was himself a chiliast, though of a higher spiritual order, but it is described by Caius, Dionysus, Theodoret, and Augustin.]
The Alogi, an obscure anti-Trinitarian and anti-chiliastic sect of the second century, regarded Cerinthus as the author of the Apocalypse of John on account of the chiliasm taught in it. They ascribed to him also the fourth Gospel, although it is the best possible refutation of all false Gnosticism from the highest experimental Gnosis of faith.
Simon Magus, the Nicolaitans, and Cerinthus belong to the second half of the first century. We now proceed to the more developed systems of Gnosticism, which belong to the first half of the second century, and continued to flourish till the middle of the third.
The most important and influential of these systems bear the names of Basilides, Valentinus, and Marcion. They deserve, therefore, a fuller consideration. They were nearly contemporaneous, and matured during the reigns of Hadrian and Antonius Pius. Basilides flourished in Alexandria A.D. 125; Valentine came to Rome in 140; Marcion taught in Rome between 140 and 150."
In this exposition, every verse will be from the KJV, unless otherwise noted. I will also give the translation from the UBS Greek New Testament. In doing this I am attempting to translate what I believe the readers of John's epistle understood. Of course, as usual, I will use the context as the final court of appeal. The Greek translation was used in my second year at Chafer Seminary, with a few changes, compiled by the Greek professor, John Geise. The letters LGT introduce the literal Greek translation.
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