1-3 John - Introduction to 1st John

Well, I have read through the first letter of John or the first epistle of John a number of times over the last month. And I spent about 20 hours working on a piece of software just for this class. And I hope to show it to you. It's a bit nerdy, but I hope it's actually fruitful and not just There are some charts on there that hopefully you'll see. I don't like Excel, so instead of using Excel for about an hour, I write my own piece of software for 20 hours. But I was off for the holidays, so at least I had the time. How many of you have pre-read First John just for this class. There's no disappointment. Nobody. All right. Good. Maybe Roger did. Or he's working on it. First John, we've been through before at Holly Hills as a series. It's been a couple of years. But it's been a while since that happened.

So as we go through this, we want to take a look at the various elements and the tensions that exist there, because there's a big difference between John's writing style and Paul's. We spend a lot of time at Holly Hills talking about Pauline doctrine, the things that Paul so clearly enunciates. And so when we look at John's epistles, we have to see the difference in the writing style. So let's take a look at some of the elements of the book. We're going to start with some nerdy bits, the who, when, and where of the text. The interesting thing about the book of 1 John is that there is not explicit authorship at the intro of the letter.

How many of you, like in Paul's letters, how does he start his letters? He says, Hi Paul, this is Paul and the people with me, grace to you and peace from God. He says grace and peace to you at the beginning of almost every single one of his letters. I think he says it at the beginning of every single one of his letters. First John is not started with John the Apostle, grace and peace to you, like Paul did.

So his writing style is a little different. But we do have authorship information that is clear enough so that we can confidently say first letter from John and not just say a letter from a guy and we think it might be John. The book of Hebrews is a letter from somebody who had inspiration from the Holy Spirit but we're not quite sure who it is. First John we have some good reasons to believe that it is from John. First of all, attribution. We have early Church Fathers that came after the Apostles and Disciples that did attribute the book to the Apostle John, the Disciple John.

So we have Araneus and Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Now I'm going to warn you, don't get all excited about Origen because the guy's theology was really scary. He believes there's six layers of interpretation and the weakest of which was the literal interpretation. So we will not credit too much to Origen but he did He was an originator, not so good a doctor.

That's right. But early within the first hundred years or two hundred years of the book being available, it was attributed to John. The other thing is that we have some internal witness that indicates it would have to be John or at least a very small cluster of people. The author claims to have been an eyewitness to the life of Christ. and we'll take a look at the first couple verses on a high level, and then I believe Roger has the luxury of teaching through the first four verses, which is really brilliant theology. So there's some internal witness. And the other thing is linguistically, with the languages, we're going to take a little bit deeper look at some of the linguistic stuff, hopefully, as we move into the later part of the lesson.

But the writing style, there's a simplicity of John's writing style in the Greek, and there's a vocabulary tendency that are part of what makes the Gospel of John and John 1, 2, and 3 a coherent work from the same author, including the book of Revelation. So we have internal witness and language and writing style that also point to John being the author. If I accidentally say Yohannin, that's terrible, but that's the word that apparently people have developed for attributing things to John. So if I say Yohannin, I'm not trying to speak in tongues, it's referencing John.

So we have authorship. Time frame of the epistle, this one is another question mark. There are estimates anywhere I could find between 60 and 90 AD. there seemed to be some consensus around 70 AD from various authors, but it is a bit unknown exactly. We don't have his name and he didn't date it either. He didn't have computers. He should have backed it up on a thumb drive. We'll move past that. The other thing is that we have an audience Okay, who is John writing to? And that is somewhat vague in the first letter of John.

But given what we believe we understand about John's location about this time, it was probably the modern Turkey area, the Western Asia area, and he could have been in Ephesus himself and been writing to the churches in that area. The book of Revelation He mentions churches from that area as primarily on his list of the seven churches, so it seems consistent that that was his target audience. The other thing is that they were primarily Jews from what we know in the language pattern that is there. How many of you have studied the Book of John, the Gospel of John, not 1 John, but the Gospel of John? How does he start off the Gospel of John? In the beginning, when he points back to Genesis.

If you were a Greek, that would be novel. Okay? It would be okay. It's obviously important. It's inspired by the Holy Spirit. But if you were from a Greek or a Gentile background, this Genesis reference would have been somewhat novel, but it would be okay. But if you were Jewish, this is significant. From a Jew's perspective, what are the most important books of the Bible?

The first five, you've got the law, because that's where you know where your life is, right? Or, actually, after studying Galatians, your death. But you have this importance of reference, and the thing is, and I won't get too deep into it for now, but John's letter, his first John, has a very similar mentality, if you will, or purpose in his writing when he first starts. Let's take a look at the first four verses, and Roger is going to teach into this more next week, so we won't look at it too much.

But he says, What was from the beginning what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands concerning the word of life? And we'll just actually look at that first verse. What was from the beginning? John is very concerned with beginnings. In the Gospel of John, he goes way back in the beginning, was the word. And in this first letter, way back in the beginning. So there's this interesting parallel there that ties back. John, as we look through 1 John, keep an eye out for references to concepts that are in the Old Testament and Genesis.

Because he doesn't make those references lightly. Those were things that the people who were the readers of his letter would be familiar with. So we need to just keep that in mind. Here's this author who grew up as at least a young man. By the time he wrote this he was maybe not so young anymore.

But as a young man he grew up in a Jewish household with the Old Testament and these things were familiar writing to people who did the same. And so the references to the Old Testament, primarily there's a lot of things that seem to harken back to Genesis that are valuable there.

Now I want to talk about some super nerdy bits. We just talked about some of the nerdy bits, but we want to talk about some super nerdy bits. And that is the thematic elements of 1 John. Since we're not going to dig into the teaching of the text this morning and just kind of have an overview of things, we need to look at some of the themes that are there. And this is what I spent most of my time looking at, so hopefully we can dig into this. Here's one visualization of 1 John. These are the top 10 words. So we have God, love, know, world, abides, son, father, children, brother, sin, sins, and hurt. Those are the top 12 words that are in the book of 1 John.

But the way this graph shows you is that the words that are used most often are larger and the software I used lowercased everything. Apologies for that. I don't mean any disrespect to our Heavenly Father or Jesus with the lowercase. But the idea with this here is that you want to kind of take a look at what is What are the themes? What is John writing about? What words is he using most often?

Because that's going to give you some ideas as you study through this and read through it yourself, hopefully at home, so that when we gather together during the time that we have on Sunday mornings, this stuff will be fresh in your mind and we'll be able to really discuss some of the details.

But one of the things that I think is important is that John, in his gospel, also mentions abiding. John 15 is a passage that, for me, was pretty revolutionary when someone finally said, hey, let's talk about this concept of abiding. What does abiding mean? Hang out. To hang out. To dwell or be together in a closeness, in an intimacy.

And then he uses, look at these other words, brother, children, father. Okay, those are all relational vocabulary. Those have something to do with age and relationship. And obviously, those kinds of concepts let us know, again, the idea that he's going to be speaking about these relationships.

One of the things I think is important as believers, as we take a look at the text here, is we ask ourselves, what are the different ways he uses those words and the relationships that he establishes, because he's talking to a group of believers and having application with those relationships. So keeping those things in mind as we dig through the text and look through it. Now on my list that I've got here, number 10 is sin and number 11 is sins, plural, and each one of those got used nine times. It's interesting that he talks about sin as a principle and sin as a list.

As we go through the text, looking at how does John address those topically. And then he uses the word herd. And herd is kind of fun because he's not talking about cows, right? He flocks his sheep, herds of cows. He's talking about things that you might have heard. And so it's important to keep those things in mind. Alright, so here's where I've worked on software and it's nerdy. I don't have a black and white handout.

Yeah, I wasn't sure. There's some yellow on there. I didn't know if the yellow... Yeah, the yellow is light. So, let me explain to you this software, okay? This is nerdy. I'm not so sure actually. It looks like a heat map. Let's see. Oh, that's Genesis. That's not going to do us any good. Well, this is a prototype, so I apologize. So here we go.

Let me see if I can zoom in on this and be useful with it. Let's take a look at this. Let me explain to you the three colors. So what I did is not only are the words a row here, but I wanted to kind of emphasize the density of those words. With a color chart here.

So red is a chapter that has more than five references to the word yellow is Three and less than that is green. Okay, so there's a little color here and people if you're listening on the internet, I'm sorry The new American Standard is copyrighted. You can't actually get access to the software online But but the idea in chapter one is that here we have God referenced in in two verses And then he mentions it in chapter 2 three times. But then we get into chapter 3 and he's very concerned that we understand who God is and what God is doing. And so what you see is that the density of the words kind of changes throughout. Here in chapter two, fathers is used more frequently.

And so these kinds of things are a bit nerdy I know, but let's take a look at them a little bit more soon. I like it. So your conclusion is God is an afterthought? No. He's building up to the climax of God. So we'll take a look at these one chapter at a time just because we can. Okay. The thing is that I wanted this to be more beautiful. I'm sorry it's blocky, but that's why there's grace. It's gorgeous. It's gorgeous.

The thing is that John is talking about things that you have heard. If you think about it and you're responding to ideas, you're going to start off by saying these are things you've heard. These are things you've heard. And the second chapter he gets He gets into, okay, and this is why I'm writing to you. This is why I'm writing to you. Three times he says that in chapter three, but we're jumping ahead. But he's going to emphasize who God is. He's going to talk about the Father and Son and their relationship and the heavenlies. And then he's going to talk about sin, sin, and sins. And then the things that you've heard.

The thing that I think is interesting with addressing this is that I talked through 1 John chapter one. about 10 years ago with a Sunday school class of high schoolers and I was not prepared for 1st John chapter 1. I thought I was because basically if you don't understand position and condition on some level and you don't understand what we're going to get into, the Semitic totality concept, this Hebrew understanding of what is truth and how do you respond to it, First John feels like a sledgehammer to grace, like somehow he's wrecking grace and destroying grace. Instead, as we take a look at how he says we address sin and sins in the latter half of chapter 1, you understand how this all fits together and I think that's an important detail. As we move into chapter 2, he's going to talk about things that we know. things that are important. And then he's going to draw out a concept of maturity and what does abiding look like in a maturing body. Not just one believer, but a maturing body and how those things fit together with the concept of fathers and sons and children and young men.

Young men wasn't frequently enough in the whole book to be in the density, see there's a problem in the software. I should have it just be per chapter. Bob? Yeah, Randy, just a question about No, is this always Gnoskon? Or is it other... Unfortunately, the way my software works, it's all English with the numeric and standard text.

But with the Greek, which I'm hoping to eventually be able to get into... Well, we'll get to it. We'll go through it individually to look at it as we go through it verse by verse. But that's an important question because in English we use know interchangeably with multiple meanings but in the Greek there's a specific vocabulary which makes some of the text more clear and the purpose of the author and their intent.

But John also mentions abiding, and it's yellow here, which is a little harder to read. I need to go to an orange color. That'll be a little easier to read in the future. But with the concept of abiding, and the thing is that you can kind of see that there is an idea of what the world is contrasting the concept of abiding. And so the good thing about the grid is you can see where, hey, this is important here, but let's contrast it. This is important here, but let's contrast this other space here. But that's 1 John chapter 2 in an analytical form. In chapter 3, you see a lot more red. In chapter 3, we see God, love, and things that we know with great intensity. In fact, you can see here in some of the verses, they all happen together or right next to one another.

See, when I said the first slide, I said this is a book about truth. The word truth is not used with great repetition in the book of John. But he's very concerned with truth and how we interact with that truth and how that truth applies to our lives.

And so I think that's an important element of that. And of course, the aspect of love. We usually think when we think of love, 1 Corinthians 13, right? That's the love book. But also John, in chapter 4, he's going to continue on with the theme of love. Again, you see that abiding is repeated. We see children and brother in sin repeated in sins. So he's going to address how those things interact with one another. And then, chapter 4, again, we see God and love are repeated, and I have an algorithm problem, but we're going to ignore that.

It's hard for my brain to do that, but we'll ignore there's an offset problem here. You can see that there's a little leaking in of no being read. We'll get over that, or I will. It's off by one on the index. Apologies, I was going to let go of it and I didn't. So then we see that the world, he's going to contrast the world and how the world comes into play in Chapter 4.

How many of you remember a song out of 1 John Chapter 4? Maybe? I didn't bring my guitar, I figured I would spare you that. But, 1 John 4 continues on the theme of love and how do we interact within the body with love. Now, as some of you who have been in my Sunday School classes before, where I get to teach, I almost always like to bring up intimacy. This is going to be one of those books where you're not going to escape that pattern. Because love necessitates that we understand the principle of intimacy within the body.

Chapter 5, he continues on again, mentioning God and who He is, but he talks about the Son. And here you can see that God and the Son are paralleled. He's going to talk about those things together and bring those thoughts out. And then he's going to talk about knowing God in the last few verses.

So, that's enough of my analytical chart. I spent a lot of time working on it, but you can see there's some errors in there, but we'll pass that and move on. I mentioned earlier the problem of seeing contrast with 1 John and the Johannine epistles in contrast to the Pauline theology.

And so I wanted to circle back to this concept of the Semitic totality concept. Have you heard my dad use that phrase before in church? You guys remember that from the service? The Semitic totality concept is one that is very important. In the Semitic mind, if it is true, you do it.

So when Paul is writing, who is he the apostle to? Gentiles. Okay. The Apostle to the Gentiles. So we have to ask ourselves, what's the difference between somebody who's Middle Eastern and somebody who's Gentile in their way of thinking? Okay. What do we know about the Greeks? How many of you have taken philosophy in high school or college or afterwards for some? The problem with Western philosophy is that we, and this is true in the United States, just because something is true doesn't mean you have to do anything with it. How many of you can remember a time in your life where maybe a world leader or a politician or even a church leader was teaching about one thing or saying one thing and then behind closed doors doing something else?

Yeah, that's not a shock. You go, oh, well that's normal, right? For the Jew, that was crazy. Now, if you grew up in a legalistic, law-based system, what would you do in the Old Testament if somebody wasn't living out the truth? Well, maybe. Tom just gave you the kill sign. You might earn death under the Old Testament law. It's that severe. So if it's true, you do it. Because if it's not true and you do it, then they might kill you. And that's a problem, if you want to live.

So you have this issue with the Jewish or Middle Eastern mindset where, for example, if we can look at our modern world, how many of you have been over to the Doyle's house? Hopefully everybody's been at some point in time over to the Doyle's house. If you go to the Doyle's house, they have a lot of Jews in their neighborhood, that they have chosen that neighborhood because they can comply with certain restrictions of the law and get down to the synagogue. I always want to call it a temple, but that's wrong. They can get down to the synagogue and walk there.

And the funny thing is that we'll be driving to the Doyle's house for Bible study on Wednesday night and sometimes see people with the yarmulkes on and they're going about, they're living out the law as strictly and rigidly as they think they can, although they are really missing the sacrificial system. Using the CHARP software was really cool to go through the Old Testament books and see Some of the other keywords, we can look at that later on when we're not in Sunday school class.

But when you look at the law, the concept of sacrifice is over and over and over again. When you destroy the temple, which the Lord made sure took place, the sacrifice system could no longer take place. And so, here's the interesting thing, is the Jews have to depart from the Semitic totality concept when the temple is destroyed.

On one level or another they can no longer say it's true therefore we do it. The law is true. Go kill an animal. Sacrifice the animal at the temple. We don't have a temple anymore. So then you see a departure in the Jewish world as time moves forward from the Semitic totality concept within Judaism because they can no longer do that which is true. Now Islam doesn't have that problem.

We've seen that. But that's a rabbit trail. But I wanted to go over the Semitic totality concept because I think as we as we look at this we can't just say interpret this through the eyes of Pauline theology because it's John who's the author to an audience that is not primarily Gentile. Now this doesn't mean we ignore Pauline theology, it just means that we can't just say I know this is tough, we're just going to skip over it because we know Paulian theology. That's what I mean to draw out with this content. So the Temple was last existent when? 70 AD. So maybe that's why Paul spent so much time dealing with the Judaizers, because the Temple was still in place at that time.

Yeah, and the chronology is an important element to see how those things build up. But what's interesting is that you still see John is battling these same concepts through his letters and then also into Revelation. There's still hints that some of this rigidity is a problem. Yeah, Revelation for sure. that maybe John was written around 70 A.D. then rather than later.

Some people say 90 to 95. That makes more sense. That was really difficult. The worst part about teaching the intro is I knew I was going to have to cover the date stuff. It's up in the air, but here are some things. But the Semitic totality concept is one that I think is important because the things that I wrestled with, that I said 10 years ago I was teaching, the things that I wrestled with were things that actually I was wrestling with unnecessarily, but I didn't understand the Jewish mind.

If you understand the way that historically the Jewish mind works, Then suddenly, the fact that he's writing with such bold, absolute, pure, false kinds of statements fits in. You go, oh, okay, well, if you're a Jew, of course you'd think of it this way. Rather than, oh no, he's being legalistic. Oh no, no, he's just speaking to them in their language. And that's just important to understand that concept.

So, even though we looked at it in a chart format, we're going to take a quick overview of the outline of the five chapters, and then if you have any questions, we can do that. Otherwise, we might be done even a few minutes early. So I have a relatively detailed outline. There's three slides, but you've got it on two pages or one page even. No, it spreads over two.

But the prologue, the introduction, we looked at verse 1, but 1 through 4 is John emphasizing the things that are true that they experienced and witnessed firsthand. And then we have an introduction to some basic principles. Basic principles of fellowship with God and basic principles of knowing God. In that we're also going to see how God deals with sin. If we say we have no sin, then we're lying. But then how does God deal with sin? We have Christ the Advocate. So we're going to see some basic principles of fellowship with God there.

Then in chapter 2, three times he emphasizes, I'm writing this to you because... I'm writing this to you because... and he's got three reasons. In light of the reader's spiritual condition, In light of the world's allurement, I'm writing to you this because I don't want you to be sucked into the world.

One of the top words in that chart was world in the first blue chart. So, in light of the world's allurements, in light of the deception of the last hour. One of my recollections of high school English is somebody brought up the Bible, I can't remember who, it was too long ago, And they said, the Bible's wrong because they say the end times and they've been saying that for 2,000 years.

And the thing is, I actually remember I got up in front of the class. I said, now I have permission to speak to my teacher. He was the football coach, so he pretty much didn't have any class preparation anyways. And I don't mean that to be insinuating anything about all football coaches, but in this case, he was more concerned about the football than he was. Anyways, English was a lower priority. Sorry, I apologize if that came across as a stereotype. That wasn't my intent.

But when you talk about end times in the last hour, instead of feeling despair, how many of you, when the end of the year comes, you're like, oh, another year's gone. Or the end of the year comes and you're like, oh boy, we get to either wait, the Lord's going to return in 2011, or maybe 2012. But I look forward with hope. These end times, are things that are there.

But John's going to point out the deceptions that are in the last hours. As long as we understand those deceptions, and he's going to go into the details of the deceptions throughout the book, it's a good thing. So he's writing about the deceptions. He's also writing in light of the reader's responsibility to abide. Abiding, again, an important thing.

What does Paul write in 2 Corinthians 3.18? Yeah, he says we need to be beholding the Lord. Okay, so abiding, how I put it, abiding is that of the child, beholding is that of the mature believer, and then ceasing to even worry about that, and just walking in relationship, the ABCs. So I thought that's a good, ABC is a good easy thing to remember, abide, behold, and then cease to strive. It sounds easy to say, it's not easy to do. But we keep going on the outline.

Then we get into the body of the epistle in chapters 228 through 419. He's going to state his theme in 228. He's going to talk about discerning the children of God. One of the things he talks about is people going out from the church. They went out of us because they were not true. So it's important that we understand who are the true children of God. In our culture, Do we have that same problem, discerning the true children of God? Denominationalism. Well, you have denominations.

I mean, this last two weekends, I spent at a Baptist church in Kalama, Washington, and the guy was teaching God's Word. And I didn't think, I wonder if he's a believer. I wish he had emphasized position and condition more, but that was less of a concern for me in this context. But there are times when somebody says, I'm a Christian, then my immediate reaction is to say, okay, let's talk about God's word then, because then I'm going to know what you know, and let's talk about the gospel, because then I know that you know what the gospel is and you actually believe. But John's going to go into discerning who's a true child. Discerning love for the brethren. What love is not, what love is, and what love does for believers. I'm always excited to teach. I don't know if I'm going to get to teach on 3-19-23. I haven't scheduled that yet. Yeah, we haven't scheduled that.

What love does for believers. I get excited talking with you and hopefully you maybe get excited talking with me. about the power of love in the body. I got to teach through Ephesians 3, 19 through 21, I believe was the passage, where Paul says we get to, as a body, explore the height, the depth, the breadth, and width of God's love together. And I just think that's really cool. So John's gonna go over that a little bit, not in those terms, but he's gonna talk about love in the body.

Discerning the indwelling God, discerning the spirit of truth and discerning the God of love. The thing that's interesting is that in this culture, a lot of the things that Paul wrote against, like with the Corinthians and the spiritual gifts, the pagan culture had spiritual gifts and phenomena. Just like what was seen here, what was being seen in the New Testament times, they were just different sources with different purposes.

There were mystery religions where you would go into a room and you'd empty yourself of all thoughts. Does that sound familiar? New agey a bit. And you empty yourself of all thoughts and then people would start having these ecstatic utterances. And then the guru would tell you what you were saying. Does that sound familiar? Maybe, just a little bit to this tongues phenomenon. But they were claiming a deity doing those things through them.

So John wants to emphasize that, hey, just in case you're being snookered by these Ephesian charlatans, let's discern the indwelling of God. Let's discern the spirit of truth and who is the God of love. 417-19 is the realization of the theme, a concluding thought on that. And then he goes in 420-517, he talks about love, again clarifying it, the empowerment of love, the practice of love, and then he closes the letter with the epilogue there, 518-21. And let's read that. We read 1 John 1. That feels oddly appropriate for the beginning of January of 2011 for some reason, all those 1's in there.

5.18-21 he says, We know that no one who is born of God sins, but he who is born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him. We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know Him who is true, and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God in eternal life. Little children, guard yourselves from idols.

So that's the epilogue and of course we didn't read any of the in-between stuff so you have to wait to hear what goes after the starting and what comes at the end there. When we started I said this is a book about truth. In the epilogue he draws that all in. He says, hey all these things we talked about, we knew it was true, we saw it, we felt it, we touched it, we heard it, it was true. We're testifying to these things to you. He's going to go into the testimony through the body of the letter and then he closes and says it's true and if you believe in him, you're in that truth as well.

So 1 John is going to be exciting. I can't wait. We're going to dig into this and it's going to be a challenge as we look at some of the stuff that comes across as legalistic, but it's going to be exciting as we get to go through it and find the life of Christ. beaming through 2,000 years, well 1900 years later. It's exciting stuff. Any questions on this overview? Any thoughts? Curiosity? Disagreements?

Tom? little league batting clinic because you're just basically new to the game and you're trying to find out, well, how does this whole thing work? I mean, I just barely graduated from first grade recess and here what you've done with this stuff. Yeah.

Are you talking about the intro to John or are you talking about the book of John? You know, the funny thing is, I think Roger and Bob and I have talked it. at different times, and we've said it would be fun at one opportunity to teach through a book two times in a row with the same class. Not because you guys need to hear it over and over again, but more that sometimes when you get through to the end of the book, the stuff that was in the beginning of the book has so much more light, so it almost feels like it would be good to just turn back and go through those things again and dig deeper on some of those topics that come out. So yes, the intro is like batting practice. You know, you're getting started and we're all swinging and warming up and then hopefully as we dig in, there'll be a lot more depth. I would encourage you, it's not a long book, it's only five chapters, to take some time this week, even if it's one chapter a day. You can take a break even, because there's seven days a week, right?

Read a chapter and just look at it. Observe it. I use software because maybe I'm lazy. I could spend 20 hours writing software or 20 hours marking in my Bible or taking notes somewhere else. But start looking at the word patterns. Start looking at the vocabulary and the language. There's only 181 English words in 1 John. I'm so nerdy, I apologize. But the thing is, look at how those words are used. Look at the constructs of those things. And that way, when we come together and we dig in, it'll be familiar. Bob? You know, Randy, congratulations. You just did a fantastic job.

So the thing that I think is important for us to remember is this Semitic totality concept is one that we have to reconcile with Pauline theology, right? And you know, this is my opinion. It is, hopefully shared by many, is that the book of 1st John is at the end of the New Testament because of the order of the epistles is appropriate for the growing believer, right? So I think, you know, Roger, you and I need to continually you know, marry and catalyze the relationship between what John is saying and what Paul has already said. Absolutely.

And so having this, you know, acknowledgement of Semitic theology in terms of what John's appeal may have been has to be ultimately merged and emulsified with what Paul has already said. What I was trying to say when I got to that subject is not that we ignore Pauline theology, it's that we don't ignore John's theology because we know Paul's theology.

This is hard if you look at it from a Pauline lens. If you try to read John through a lens of Paul, you will find yourself either frustrated or confused, or both, or thinking that they're contradicting one another. And instead, if we look at them in their cultural biases, and I'm going to use that word in a positive way, there are cultural biases side by side, we're going to see that marriage. We're going to see the wedding of the same doctrine presented to a Jewish mind. How would a Jewish mind understand Pauline doctrine?

Because I guarantee you when they hit Paul's stuff, it was confusing. That's why Peter writes in his letter, some of the stuff that Paul writes is hard. If you were a Jew and Paul showed up speaking in a Greek way and you didn't understand the Greek mind, that's going to be rough. And so what we go through looking at John's letters, the Jews went through looking at Paul's letters going the other direction. They had to understand the Greek mind.

And if you're a Jew, that's offensive. Those Gentiles are dirty. But yeah, there's going to be a marriage of those doctrines. We just need to look at them in their respective lights. But I don't think we can forget that Paul wrote to the Jew to a large extent also. He did. We claim that he wrote to the Gentiles, but we just finished the book of Galatians, right? targeted to another gospel.

That's true. When John ends saying we know that whoever is born of God doesn't sin, what do you do with that? I mean, if you're steeped in identification truth, that verse becomes interpretable. Absolutely. Without that you throw your hands up. Without that you do what I did and you say, I don't understand this book.

We talk about a life filled with sin. There's some sort of a threshold where if I've had bad thoughts too many times, that's a life filled with... You start getting into works even though John is speaking against works. But that's where, again, an understanding of Semitic theology merged with the grace principle that Paul's brought forth, reconciles those, quote, extreme differences.

Yeah, exactly, and hopefully we'll bring those things out. Roy? Just two things that I can think of, just to mention. Sure. Number one, it strikes me that we haven't really mentioned, maybe you did and I missed it, that this is two believers. Yes, it is two believers. interpreters out there today teaching say that part of it's to believers and part of it's to unbelievers, and there's a contrast between the two. This is, in my perspective of it, totally for believers. And identifying those who are not believers, yes, but it's for believers to have that ability to identify in the process. And secondly, help me out here, but is it really to Jews. No, it's a primarily Jewish audience. Why do we say that? I'm not saying I know, I don't know.

John writes in a way from the eternity past their minds around. And that's what he begins both of his gospel and his epistle here with. I'm not sure I understand that. I'm looking at this from the standpoint of John wrote late, and I'm sure there were many Gentile believers that he was writing to, as well as Jewish believers, and they would be thinking along these lines of God himself has become the visible revelation of God. And that's the word. That's what the Greek mind would immediately identify with when he uses that word.

Yeah. The construct of this book doesn't pull some of that out quite as strong as some of the other, like the book of John versus 1 John. the ideas are presented a little differently. I won't disagree with you as much as it's the emphasis of this particular book tends... and I'm using broad terms so please don't... there are going to be some exceptions because there were probably... I don't have a head count... but there were probably some Gentile or Greek believers in the church by this time, but it's one of those things where his writing style tends towards a Jewish writing style compared to the Greek mindset. Well, there's no doubt he was a Jew. Yeah. No doubt that he wrote in a Jewish style. Yeah. That's all I was trying to bring out. I don't want to make absolute statements about there were only Jews that read his book until later. So if that came across, I apologize.

To build on what Roy said just a little bit, the Gospel of John is distinctly different from the first three Gospel accounts. It is. In fact, the theology in John the Gospel is much more church-oriented. It's very rich. It's looking back, drawing out the theology that the other books didn't draw out. I love the Gospel of John. It's like the Sistine Chapel of the Gospels in my mind, just because you paint this wonderful picture of who God is.

Anyway, I don't know if that helps or not, it's just some thoughts. No, it's good. It's always good to have interactions and thoughts on there. Any other thoughts before we close in prayer? But I think we're challenged by what Paul has reminded us of, and that's rightly dividing the work of Christ. As teachers and as a class, and as believers in general, we're all really mandated to rightly divide the work of Christ. I think even with the Pauline position, condition, grace, all that, it is challenging.

When it comes to these verses, it is challenging to say, because he says it black and white, and you say, well, Lord, it's your word. It says black and white. What does that mean in life? Grace, truth, position, condition, all the things I know, what does that mean? And that's a challenge. In some places, I'm like you, you say, Lord, I don't know. At some point you say, I apply all those parameters and I'm not sure. Roger, the last thing the Lord would have us do, I think, is fall under legal tense. Exactly. We just can't dismiss grace for all it's worth. But it's challenging to harmonize that.

It's going to be a good study. There might be challenges in it, but awesome. The teachers learn more than the class. Going from Romans to Ephesians was not that big of a shift for me as a teacher. going from Ephesians to Galatians was a substantial challenge to teach through and I expect that this will be yet another growing opportunity. So I'm looking forward to it. And then back to Romans.

Let's go ahead and go before the Lord and we'll close. Actually, if we have a few moments, I'd like to go over some of the other things that that charting software brought out because I thought it was so cool. So anyways, Heavenly Father, we come before you and we ask that you would continue to draw the truths of 1 John out in our lives as we study this year. We pray for the return of your son so we don't even make it through 1 John, but if that doesn't happen, we thank you that we have this opportunity to study. We ask that you would allow there to be a unity of spirit and mind as we go through this, and we just thank you for this time in Jesus' name. Amen.