1-3 John - 3rd John 1:9-10 Conflict in the Church

So would somebody want to read Third John, all the verses of Third John? I have 14 verses in Third John, some have 15. The old New American Standard and the updated has 15 and the original has... How about the King James? How many do they have? Forty. Forty. Okay. Anyway, the last verse is divided in some versions. Okay. Well, can I get a... Lonnie. Thank you.

The elder to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in truth. Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper in good health, just as your soul prospers. For I was very glad when brethren came and testified to your truth, that is, how you are walking in truth. I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in truth. Beloved, you are acting faithfully in whatever you accomplish for the brethren, and especially when they are strangers, and they have testified to your love before the church. You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God.

For they went out for the sake of the name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles. Therefore we ought to support such men, so that we may be fellow-workers with the truth. I wrote something to the Church, but Diocletius, who loves to be first among them, does not accept what we say. For this reason, if I come, I will call attention to his deeds, which he does, unjustly accusing us with wicked words, and not satisfied with this. He himself does not receive the brethren either, and he forbids those who desire to do so, and puts them out of the Church. Beloved, do not imitate what is evil, but what is good. The one who does good is of God. The one who does evil has not seen God.

Demetrius has received a good testimony from everyone, and from the truth itself, and we add our testimony. And you know that our testimony is true. I have many things to write to you, but I am not willing to write them to you with pen and ink. But I hope to see you shortly, and we will speak face to face. Peace be to you. The friends greet you. Greet the friends by name. Thanks, Fai.

Well, Third John is kind of interesting. And actually, some have looked at it as being more a personal epistle, a personal letter. I mean, we have all these epistles in the New Testament written to a church. And this is certainly written to a church. But this is all a little bit more on a personal level, it seems like.

It's written to the elder Degeus. And also, we see that there's three people involved in this letter. We have Gaius, we have Diotrephes, and we have Demetrius. The letter mentions all three, and then John of course is writing to this church. He's concerned about this church. So as we go through, we're going to see those three characters here, three people.

Let's see here. Okay. I'll just I'll just hold off for a second. Okay, so let's just go ahead to the first First chart here. Okay, so we have that Okay So basically it starts off I wrote something I wrote something to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first among them, does not accept what we say. So verses 9 and 10 are going to talk about this gentleman named Diotrephes.

He seems to be a person of influence in this church. He certainly had the power, as we're going to see, to put people out of the church. So he had power in the church and apparently people, they didn't like what he did, but apparently he could do it. So John was very concerned about this gentleman. And he talked about him, and then he's going to make some generalizations about his behaviors later on, I think.

So I wrote something to the church. It seems like that something is referring to maybe a letter that's not this letter that was written before, possibly something that some other communications. And actually, his name. is actually defined as being the one loving to be first.

If you look up Geographies in your Greek helps and things, his name is actually from the word Zeus and he's Zeus nursed or Zeus nourished. I'm not too good up on my Greek gods or whatever, but Zeus, he was a Greek god and so Diotrephes was identified with that Greek god. I did notice here in studying a lot of the names here, Diotrephes and Gaius and There's the other one, Demetrius. They're all Greek names.

And it seems like that it was a practice in the church at that time, when they became believers, they would change their names from their Greek name, which had some meaning to some Greek god, to a Christian name, from scripture possibly. But Diotrephes, he loved to be first. He loved to be preeminent. And actually, if you look at the word, loving to be first, it's a compound word. It has like the word filial love in there, and first, desiring to be first.

And I was thinking if you look in Colossians, and I'll just read, in Colossians 1.18 it says that in all things Christ may be preeminent. And it seems like it's kind of, it's interesting that Geography desired to be first, but Christ is to be first. As believers in the Lord Jesus, He is to be first, and to desire to be first, or have that, is kind of, working against the Lord. It's not a characteristic that a believer would have.

And actually, at least basically had, he translated as the one who is fond of being preeminent. He likes that position. He likes it. And we've seen people, maybe in the workplace, we've seen people who just love to be, they love the attention and they love to be in charge. So that was kind of his characteristic.

And it says he does not accept what we say. And basically, literally, that what we say, if you look on the original, that what we say is actually one word and it's a word for us. He literally doesn't. So John is saying he doesn't accept us. And that's interesting. He's in the church and he's not accepting The Apostle John, which it seems kind of strange that he would not be accepting the Apostle John. It seems contrary to what you'd expect. The Apostle John is concerned about this church and is maybe like their spiritual father, if you will. And this gentleman here is not accepting what John is saying.

And basically, to accept is to receive, to oneself, to admit. And we're going to see that earlier when Jim covered it, he covered the first part of the verse, that there was a real desire. Let's just look for a second in the first part of the 3rd John here. It talked about how this body of believers, this church that John was writing to in 3rd John, he commended them on some really excellent things that characterized that body of believers.

He said, back in verse 5 rather, he said, Beloved, you are acting faithfully in whatever you accomplish for the brethren, especially when they are strangers, and they bear witness to your love before the church, and you will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God. For they went out for the sake of the name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles. So this body was commended for helping fellow believers that were strangers to their body, Deocrates seemed to be the opposite of that. He seemed to be fighting against them. He didn't, for whatever reason, we're going to see some of the characteristics of Deocrates, but he had problems with them and he did things that really were very disturbing to the Apostle John.

So let's kind of get into those those issues there actually in. OK. All right. back? No, we're missing. Oh, they didn't realize it was back-to-back and she didn't realize it was back-to-back. I'm sorry. That's okay. All this rushing. Yeah, it's all back-to-back. She didn't realize it was back-to-back and didn't copy it back-to-back. Okay, we'll rectify that.

So in verse 10, it kind of explains more about, here are some of the Apostle John's issues. It says, for this reason, if I come, I will call attention to his deeds, which he does. So this actually is a, the if is a maybe yes, maybe no, called third class condition. Maybe yes, maybe no. We see that actually at the end of this epistle, we're going to see that his desire is to come and see them face to face. So he's desiring to come, but it's not a guarantee.

And he's going to call attention to his deeds, which he does. So he writes this warning. And the last part of this verse is going to tell us about some of the things he does. He unjustly accuses. He's not satisfied. He does so and so. He puts him out of the church. But if he comes to that body, he's not only going to, here he listed some of his issues, he's going to confront him face to face.

I'm going to call attention to what he does. Remind him, bring to the remembrance. And I was kind of thinking about when I shared the Lord's table last week, this is the same word that talks about remembering. It can be a very positive thing. Remembering our Savior. We take the cup and take the bread. The same word. Calling to attention. Call to remembrance.

But in this case it's a negative. He's going to call to attention all his issues that he has with him. And second Peter basically says, therefore, I will always be ready to remind you of these things. And both Timothy and Titus, they also had very similar things, but those are in a positive sense. This is in a negative sense. So let's get on to this gentleman's issues here.

OK, just without, I'm not sure you have five, but just looking through there, how many deeds or issues did theiographies have? Oh, you have five, good, okay. Don't look at five. I want you to look at the verse and this is supposed to be, how many issues did he have? How many do you see in there? It's a little bit hard to see unless you kind of go through it carefully. Four. Okay, four is a good number. Okay, so we're going to go through all four.

First off, he unjustly accuses us with wicked words. It's like a mouthful. Unjustly accusing is the idea of babbling, chattering, talking nonsense. I was thinking, isn't there a popular phrase now, talking trash? I don't know whether that exactly applies, but it kind of does. I was thinking, what's the modern way of thinking about it? That seems to be the current buzzword for that.

And he's doing that. He's talking nonsense. And he's doing it with wicked words. And that wicked words is the idea of causing pain, hurtful, injurious. So it's incredible. You think, where did this guy come from? Why is he in this body if he's doing this? So that's kind of the first part of that.

And I found some other verses that kind of, sometimes it's used in terms of gossiping, this word for unjustly gossiping about people. And actually I had a translation here, talking nonsense about us with injurious words, could be another translation for that phrase there.

And in addition to that, he himself does not receive the brethren. Remember how John commended Gaius about how they received these strangers, these traveling people that came into their midst. Well, he doesn't receive them. He doesn't welcome them. He doesn't show hospitality, as we saw in verses 5 and 6 there. And then basically, and then also, it's not bad enough that he doesn't receive them, He says, I don't want anybody else in this body to do that either. He forbids those who desire to do so to receive the brethren. So he's working against, John commended this body for doing this. He's working totally against that. He's saying, I don't want you to help those people out.

This is the explanation. This verse gives a total explanation of what we have about this guy. He's not mentioned in other parts of scripture, so we don't have a whole lot of other information. When he says brethren does he mean himself and other people or just any Christian?

Okay, you come to a really interesting point. Okay, Tom? Let her come to the interesting point and we'll leave this one alone. Okay, Tom, may you call onto that too. And then lastly, he puts them out of the church. And this is a compound word. This is one One of the words I've become a favorite Greek word, and Vern kind of really explains it well. This is a word, it comes from the word balo. Does anybody remember what the word balo means? It kind of tells us what it's meaning in the name. Thomas is going like this, right? Throwing. It has a little preposition ek, ek balo. Toss them out. So he was going to toss those guys out of the church. So this guy wouldn't win the welcoming award. He wouldn't be in the welcome wagon for this church. Anyway, let's see here. And what's interesting is the same word the Lord Jesus used when he drove out the money changers. He ex-bottled them out. He drove them out. So that was kind of interesting.

So in that sense, that was a righteous sense. Here it is, the negative of that. So now we're going to come to the question. Sorry. same word, he did not receive me, for John's... Exactly, exactly. And that's interesting, he didn't, back earlier, he didn't receive John, he didn't want to receive the brethren who were, you know, that's good, that's good. Okay, so let's go on here.

Now we're going to get to, so Bonnie asked, Beloved, who is being spoken of here? And we kind of have to go back and look at the, if you have all of 3rd John here, look at the very first verse in 1st John. Actually, I didn't notice this until Jim mentioned it last week and I saw it again when I started looking at it.

The very first, in verse 1, it says, the elder to the beloved Gaius. Actually, in the Greek it reads, to the elder Gaius, I'm sorry, the elder to Gaius, comma, the beloved. So it seems like in this case, Whenever we see Beloved in this short little letter, he's referring to Gaius. And that's why people call this a personal letter. And it seems a little strange. I'm not super duper on my Greek here, so it seems correct from what I've read and from the helps I have.

So I think he's referring to Gaius here. So when you read, and actually he says beloved four times. He says it in verse 1, verse 2, verse 5, and then in verse 11, right here. So it's like he's speaking directly to Gaius. He's saying, Gaius, and he's going to talk about evil. And it's interesting. We kind of saw the evil that was happening as a result of diatrophies.

And now he's going to say, don't go there, in popular vernacular. Don't imitate that. Don't be any part of that. So Tom, is that what you were asking about or pointing out? So he says, do not imitate what is evil. And imitate here is to mimic. in a good sense, to imitate. Follow it as an example. It says, do not imitate what is evil, but imitate, in the context, but imitate what is good. So I was going to ask, in light of that, how does this fit into grace? It's kind of a little bit of a trick question. He's saying, OK, I want you to imitate. Don't imitate evil, imitate good. So is that on our shopping list? And we just say, OK, today I'm going to imitate good, not evil. You guys all know this.

What's the mechanism here that's to be in play? If we take it just from what it says there plainly, it says, well, I'm just going to, you know, what would Jesus do, right? And we come back to that, which I severely struggle with. I wouldn't go there. Is there a principle underlying this when he says, imitate what is good? And the question, how do we accomplish that? I think that's where the key comes.

Well, Roger, I mean, this book is laced with truth. And we've talked about this before. And John doesn't beat around the bush about what truth is all about. It is the Lord Jesus Christ. founded and Paul makes John interpretable. That's what it's all about.

We're not imitators, goodness gracious, I'm walking in his footsteps. Christianity is a life, is what it is. That's the truth of the gospel. Actually, I found a related verse in Hebrews talking about imitating their faith. Since a Christian life is totally built on faith, that's a good statement. If we see a brother exercising faith, that's encouragement for us to exercise faith.

So in that sense, I kind of handle it. But you could go down a wrong path here. I think you made a good point there. You have to look at the whole context of scripture. And John presents facts as black and white, good and bad, good and evil. He's always doing that. We're going to see another example here shortly about that. He just says, it's either this or it's that. Paul, in all his epistles, and we're going to go to one in the next year here, in all of Paul's epistles he establishes on a platform of position and grace in the first half of his epistles.

By the way, the second half looks like a bunch of works. So unless you're established in position, vibrates through faith, Ultimately, the second half, then, is what the walk looks like. And what the walk looks like is what John assumes, black and white. This is what white is. And this is what we're asking you to respond by faith to.

Excellent. Excellent. Well said. That's great. That's great. All right. So I had a couple of verses. I mentioned the Hebrews verse. Basically talking about the word imitate is used in those verses. In the context of scripture, it is the life of the word Jesus being lived out.

So now we come to one of these black and whites, which we've been through before. This is familiar territory. OK, here we go. He's going to say, this is black and white. He says, the one who does good, or actually it's a prepositional phrase, the one doing good, that's actually the subject. Is is a verb, is of God, present tense. So I've asked these questions in the past and we've had interesting discussions here. So who's this talking about? Who's this one? And this is the easy one. I've said this before.

It's a believer, yes. I believe that's a believer. Is not doing good because he's doing good because Christ's life is being lived. He's of God. God is the source out of God Okay, so now he's not that's it. That's the white and here's the black The one who does evil has not seen God perfect tense And we've this is very similar to what we covered in in chapter 3 very similar kind of phraseology and the question is who is this Who is the person in this case?

And I think there's two possible answers. One, you could argue, and some have argued, that this is a believer, out of fellowship, possibly. But the problem I have with that, or the other case is, this is a non-believer. This could be, in this context, I wonder if this isn't like referring to Diocrates. Diocrates was, quote, he was even a leader. professing believer, but his actions were way off the target. So you say, I don't know. So I don't know.

And the perfect tense is what I really have to look at here carefully. So this is a chart that Berne had, a chart like this, and Berne kind of redid it a little bit. So I kind of highlighted the perfect tense here. Now, perfect tense is perfect indicative. Completed action in past time with ongoing results. Action in the past with present and future results. And he gives an example verse there.

So what I struggle with, let's go back to the previous. What I struggle with here is it says, the one who does evil has not seen God. He didn't see him in the past, present, or in the future. Boy, I say, that doesn't sound like a believer I'll talk to in a week. That sounds like a person You never came to know the Lord Jesus.

And we had a very similar, we had a, I know Roy talked to me about that one night. And a very similar, in 1 John chapter 3, a very similar kind of phraseology. Tom? It's kind of like somebody who jumped on the bandwagon but never really got behind the scenes and found out what true Christianity is. Simply what?

Back to 1 John and all the issues that came up back in 1 John, where we really, I think, and the Lord really worked for you to clarify this issue. It says that he who is born of God does not commit sin, right? How's everybody doing in this room here? So again, boy, it's tough to take a single statement out of context and really Isn't this an unsafe person?

I see it that way. And that's how I see it. You know, because he presents his case for geographies. And then he states a principle. He says, don't go there. This guy, you know, if it wasn't the perfect chance, I guess I would have a different opinion. But I don't see how that can be interpreted differently.

But again, this is laced with truth. And John never lets us forget that he's a man of truth. He's not going to put up with any error. There's not going to be one particle of untruth. And I think the person who's not founded with the fact that God sees us entirely in his Son. Before him, we're sinless. Even though we're consciously aware of how far we fall short. putting metrics to good and evil.

This is the black and white of John. If anybody ever contested this little short of thistle, this verse right here says, this is John. This is exactly what we talk about in chapter 3. Exactly that. And the contrast is that would be doing evil, the one doing evil. And the one doing good is what he commended them for. Just looking at the context of this black and white issue puts it in that perspective. And the person receiving and acknowledging who people are is going to recognize God in them. recognize God and is not seeing God.

That's good. I like that, that's good. And actually this word for seeing or seeing, this is the word that, it's the one that you stare, it's the theater, I like to say this is theatering, you're intensely looking at something, so this, he says he doesn't have that, he's not intensely looking at our Savior, I mean, God. So I think it's not just this blepo. It's the one that's kind of just casual. This is the one for a scaring gaze. It's a negative of that. So that person's a blepo. No, that's good. OK.

Now here's the third member. This seems to be Demetrius. This seems to be the person that possibly was carrying the letter. And John's introducing him to Gaius here. So Demetrius has received a good testimony from everyone. And from the truth itself, and we add our testimony, and you know that our testimony is true. And what's interesting here is kind of a real contrast. Here we have a gentleman, Demetrius, has received good testimony. Perfectentian, past, present, future. And what's really cool here, he doesn't.

In this verse, how many people testified about Demetrius in that verse? Okay? Amen. Keep going. Anything else in there? We talked about different people testifying or things. What's the number below? The truth and also John. Exactly. Amen. Literally from everyone. All.

We have Diocretes, and then we have Demetrius. His testimony was not just from the church. His testimony was outside the church, from everyone. And what's cool is, when you took the truth and you line it upside Diocretes, they matched. That's really powerful, I think. The truth itself testified to it, not Diocretes. I'm sorry. Demetrius. How do you know that it's outside the church? Well, I don't know.

That's an assumption. Let's read it here. It says, Demetrius has received good testimony from everyone. And then he goes on to say, in our testimony, so that's John and his followers. So I don't know. I'm not sure about that. It could be, you could say, the larger body of believers, possibly. But it does have the use of words for all. OK.

And then he finally says, you know our testimony is true. And John has said this many times before. And basically, that know is oida, complete or full knowledge. You know absolutely that our testimony is true. John is standing absolutely on the authority of who God is and what he's done. So when he says something, it's pretty powerful. All right.

Now, Bob pointed out, when we were in 2 John, that these two verses in 3 John 13 and 14, there were some critics out there that said, boy, this is just copycat kind of stuff. So I was kind of interested. I said, well, I'm kind of curious. So I looked at the Greek, and I kind of compared it. Let's compare that with what Bob taught here back in 2 John.

So they're very similar, but they're just a few words that are different. I'm thinking, if you write a letter, these days email, so you get the same exact copy to 100 friends. But in the old days, now you write a letter, and you might write the closing. It's a little bit different. But if you look here, it said, I, back in this one, it said, I had many things to write to you. This says, I had many things to write to you. It's about the same. They have and they have a little different tenses.

I'm not writing to them with pen and ink. I'm sorry. I'm not willing to write to them with pen and ink. And then down here it says, I do not want to do so with paper and ink. And then it says later on, it says, I hope to see you shortly. I hope to come to you and speak face to face.

So it's just enough difference that it would be just, you know, you don't exactly write exactly word for word. But it's the same idea. It's a closing that you might typically to someone, but it's not word to word. I thought, well, that speaks of the character of these letters. They're real letters, and they're slightly different. And that's wonderful. So I think it kind of puts down the critics that say, well, we're just copycatting that from one. We just kind of roll out scripture here, and we think, that part, put it over here. No, it's just a closing to this letter.

So that kind of gave me, by doing that, kind of gave me I like the face-to-face is literally mouth-to-mouth. It's pretty close. Eyeball-to-eyeball, mouth-to-mouth. And then at the very end it says, peace be to you. And Peter had a closing like that in 1 Peter 5. Let me finish reading that. Very similar. A typical closing to a New Testament letter. And it says in 1 Peter 5, verse 14, it says, greet one another with a kiss of love, peace be to you all who are in Christ. So a very, very typical closing.

And it says, the friends of ours greet you. And you might say, I just want to give you a letter to, you know, so-and-so says hi, hi, Sally says hi, John says hi. And greet our friends by name. What I like is, It's literally name by name and person by person. Haven't you had people say, tell them I said hi, I love them, how's it going? You know, you ask them to tell, that you told him to tell them. You pass it along.

And you might say, oh, you know, John called the other day and he said say hi, so and so and so. It's a letter. And I thought it was just kind of cool. It's kind of the original. So graphically, name by name, person by person. So we've. Thank you. You did it.

Next week, I have a daunting task. Next week, three questions, please. I'm going to take the questions that we had. I'm going to do most of the questions and just look at all the questions that we developed over the last of the last five chapters and just pick out some of the more important ones that we see and talk about that for next week.

Phenomenal. Two week. I hate this. We started looking at boxes. He's been kind enough to do that. Why am I going to go off and rest? I thought you were taking a break. April. December. Any last thoughts? I think it's been great. I mean, it's really been challenging. I mean, I think we've all been challenged by it. And in a way, that's really good.

Because you go back and you look at scripture and you say, this has got to hang together. It just cannot diverge because we have one God and one revealed Lord. And it can't be divergent. It's got to be together. And so it's challenged us to say, how does this fit together? How does John's black and white fit with Paul's kind of? And it does fit together. So I think it's been a neat year. Wow.

I think we can reflect back on, maybe I'll just speak for myself, but I was very critical of Christianity for many, many years because I thought you could if anyone has ever read that book about Sergei Korokov the former communist torturer and worked for the KGB trying to persecute Christians and then he became a believer that was kind of like he was starting to reach out when he came to know the Lord and all he could seem to detect at the very moment's beginning was that We knew there was something there. It was like a fog. But it was not imaginary. And that's the way, I guess, baby believers are.

Yeah, that's what's got to be about Demetrius. Just such a contrast. The Atreides has all these things, and all of a sudden you have Demetrius, and look at everyone, and the truth of God's Word testifying. I thought that was just outstanding. Just a contrast from that short war letter between two different men. And John's talking about both of them and how they're so divergent.

And the other one has a testimony outside the body. That's what they all are. Outside the body. And that's what it's all about. We're all out there testifying to our Savior. Now thanks for, actually one more time. I want to say thanks to the whole group. Thanks for all your support. It makes it great. I'll just throw a question out and you guys answer it. I try to figure it out, too. Okay.

Dear Father, we thank you so much, Lord. Thank you for the marvelous grace we have. Thank you for a time in 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, Lord. Just pray for a good review next week. And thank you for the marvelous grace we've been given. Just some marvelous truths.