13 - The Purpose: Starting to Resist the Cosmos with Confidence in the Spirit’s Work

© Charles A. Clough 2013

Charles A. Clough
1 John Series

Lesson 13 – The Purpose: Starting to Resist the Cosmos with Confidence in the Spirit’s Work

08 Dec 2013
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org

You can see in the outline the top part involves … we finished the first, the preamble. We’re going to go now to the purpose of the epistle; and we want to see how this plays together.

So, we don’t lose the forest for the trees here, I wanted to review a little bit of the flow. Remember, we started this series in 1 John, we said one of the vexing problems with this epistle (and people have complained about this for centuries) is that it appears not to be organized into an argument. Recent research reveals that these epistles, and this one in particular, were written not to be read; but they were written to be read to a group of people who were illiterate. Therefore, it follows a rhetorical way that people in those days had of doing these addresses to a group of people.

So that’s why we’re following that research in how we’ve outlined it. This is why at the beginning we have the prologue, the first four verses. That’s sort of an introduction. The title 1 John was never in there originally. That’s the translators who put 1 John as a label on it. The way these epistles were known was by their first verse. So it’s that first verse that was the original title of this whole epistle.

Then we had the preamble. The preamble was structured so that the basis would be laid for what’s coming. The preamble dealt with our fellowship. The whole theme here is fellowship. You see in the first verse, and then you’ll follow on the handout—eternal life is the subject here. Eternal life, in John’s way of viewing eternal life; it’s the living personal relationship that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit had from all eternity. It’s a very lofty idea of eternal life. It’s that eternal life. It’s a spiritual thing. It’s obviously not material

So what we call physical biological life is a material analogue to the personal relationship that was going on for all eternity with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That’s important because that sets Christianity apart from all other religions. No other religion on the face of the planet can truly claim to have a personal God [Slide 2].

Now I know that Judaism and Islam say that; but Judaism and Islam have a problem. The problem is you can’t have a personal relationship if there’s only one person. That’s the dilemma of solitary monotheism. Personal relationships involve people—people plural. So you can’t have a personal relationship if you have only one person.

This is why you even have the drama in Genesis where God creates Adam and then He deliberately, to make a point, says, “You’re alone.” He wanted Adam to experience what solitary Robinson Crusoe existence looks like. So the Trinity, instead of being something we have to be apologetic about, is the key to personality. You can’t have a personal God unless you have a Trinity going on. So that’s eternal life.

Then fellowship with God, and again following your outline, there are nuances as we pass from 1 John 1:5 to 2:2, 2:3–8, 2:9–11 where he follows the Trinity. The fellowship with the Father focuses upon His holy integrity.

^NKJ 1 John 1:5, “… that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.”

How do we relate to that? We relate to that because as sinners we do have darkness. We do have sin, and we have to align ourselves—put ourselves in harmony with a holy, righteous God. How do we do that? We can’t do it by good works, so we do it by confession. That’s why 1 John 1:9 is so important.

It doesn’t mean vowing. It doesn’t mean trying to offer sacrifices of some sort, pledges. That doesn’t work. If that worked, we wouldn’t need a crucifixion. So, 1 John 1:9 is a very, very important thing. Historically, of course, the church has spoken of confession. It’s just that the confession that John’s talking about is between you personally and God. It’s not talking about confessing to an intermediary. It’s talking about God, because He is the only one against whom we have sinned. So, then the fellowship with the Son focuses upon His authoritative revelation.

^NKJ 1 John 2:3, “Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.”

The idea there is that it centers on His authority. Again, following the outline, the point there is that Jesus has given us verbal revelation. Remember what John always does. If you want to understand John in this epistle, you have to go back to the Upper Room Discourse because this epistle is really his years-later exposition of what that Upper Room Discourse looks like.

In that Upper Room Discourse Jesus said, “Father, I thank You that You have given Me the words and I have given those words to them.”

So the words that Jesus spoke are the words of the Father. There has to be an identity between Jesus and the Father in the teachings and the verbal revelation. So there the issue with John is—do we or do we not recognize that Jesus is the total incarnation of God Himself?

Then we come to the third one, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit there isn’t even mentioned. Those verses we went through last Sunday are talking about loving the brethren or hating the brethren. And so obviously what’s that about? Well, that’s about the brethren, who are people the Holy Spirit regenerated and in whom the Holy Spirit dwells.

We deduce that in 1 John 2:9–11. The thrust there is on the Holy Spirit, not magnifying the Holy Spirit Himself; but looking and being sensitive to His work in our midst. So that’s the preamble. Now that, all that, to say that is what John is going to mean, now as he moves through this epistle, by fellowship.

The problem we’re getting with the section today is—this is the first of a whole chunk of text. You’ll see if you look in the box there [in Section I. Review & Introduction]. I’ve added a new thing from last week and that is purpose. The purpose from 1 John 2:12–27 is a call to resist the doomed world system and its Christ-denying teachers.

Right now we’re put into a combat situation and the fact is in this section John is dealing with a war, a cosmic war in battle. So now we begin to say, “Okay. What’s the relationship of that previous section on fellowship to this next section on cosmic conflict?”

The point that John is going to make here is that the cosmic dangers of living in a real world, the danger here is that it destroys fellowship with God. So he wants us to understand what fellowship is. Now we’re dealing with a threat. The threat is to the fellowship. You’ll see how that argument unfolds here.

Let’s have a word of prayer and ask for the Holy Spirit to help us out as we try to see these truths for our personal living.

(Opening prayer)

So now we come to II. Purpose of this epistle (2:12–27) on the outline. This is the purpose of this epistle. The situation is fellowship with God is being threatened. Now we’re going to look at 1 John 2:12–14. I put the structure up here 12 through 13 [Slide 3]. We’re going to look at that structure and see what we observe in it and see what kind of truths are in this.

Remember, again, when you read John, he writes simply; but the apparently simple sentences that he uses encase very deep truths. He’s a subtle writer when he does this. I don’t know when he read this, or pastors read this, whether they used their vocal intonation as they read it to try to get these points across or not. All we do is we observe that there are subtleties here. Apparently when they read it out loud, they must have in their voice communicated these subtleties somehow. But they’re there. They’re objectively there in the text.

So there are three things we want to understand about this section before we look at the observation of the details. The first one is that 1 John 2:12–14 presuppose that we understand fellowship. I’ve already said why—because the preamble—he spent time defining what fellowship is. So that’s all assumed now. We leave that behind. We’ve learned that and now we move into this next section.

The second thing to understand is that this part of the epistle, if the other part didn’t, this one surely does, shows you that this epistle was written to believers. What else could they be, if he’s talking about hating your brother? He wouldn’t be a brother if the person wasn’t a believer. Here very clearly he’s talking about believers.

So there shouldn’t be a problem. Often people, commentators, who try to make this epistle be tests of whether you are saved or not. These aren’t tests of whether you’re saved or not; these are tests of whether you’re in fellowship and the dangers to that. So that’s the second thing to know. It’s written to believers. Salvation of the readers of this epistle is never once questioned in the whole entire epistle.

The third point is it is intended to affirm the listeners to be confident in what God has already done in their lives. In other words, we are to operate from a position of strength. Apparently—and we can only guess at this—apparently the false teachers were doing what educators do in our society, the college professors professing themselves to have some sort of intellectual elitism, that everybody else has to be subordinate to these superior elite people. What John is getting at right here, he’s addressing to all believers.

He says, “Every one of you as a believer should have confidence in what the Holy Spirit has done in you. You don’t need an elite to tell you the obvious.”

The thrust of all this, because this is addressed to all the listeners, not an elite group, all listeners. All believers share this. Obviously, by emphasizing everyone, what John must be doing is he’s building up confidence. We need the confidence to be protected in our mental attitude against thinking that somehow the Word of God is insufficient. Somehow, we need to be told by some super intelligent elitist person what we should believe, and John doesn’t want us to do that. He wants us to have confidence that as a believer you have sufficient assets given to you by God. You just have to know how to use it.

Let’s look now at some of the things, 1 John 2:11–13. Follow that with me. I’m reading the New King James.

^NKJ 1 John 2:12, “I write to you, little children, Because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake.

¹³ “I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, Because you have overcome the wicked one …”

Then there’s a question about the end of verse 13, which if we have time we’ll get to this week.

Let’s look at what we’ve got here [Slide 3], Notice in the red I’ve outlined the three addressees; three classes of people are addressed here. That introduces a problem. These classes—does he intend to refer to stages of maturity or something else? It’s very easy to at first conclude that he’s referring to stages of maturity. Obviously you think of fathers as the older believers and the little children as younger believers.

The problem is look at verse 1 of this very same chapter. What is the addressee of 1 John 2:1? Teknia, little children. Then if you look at verse 28, same chapter, who does he address there? Teknia, little children. So clearly the word teknia is being used for all believers.

That leads us to say maybe these aren’t stages of maturity. Maybe these are referring to something else. That’s what we’re going to conclude is that these are viewpoints of your relationship with God. See how multifaceted fellowship is. That we can relate to God as little children. We can relate to Him as a father who is experienced with Him. We can relate to Him as young men.

The other problem, by the way, in thinking of these three classes as stages of maturity is why are they in that order? It starts out with little children and goes to fathers and then comes back to young men. That’s strange if that’s the case of stages of maturity. So we want to take a little bit more careful look at how he talks about each one of these.

When we first look at this, we want to always look at the verbs. What do you notice about the verbs in all these cases? It’s not clear, by the way, in the NKJ translation, the first verb. In the New King James it says:

^NKJ 1 John 2:12, “I write to you, little children, Because your sins are forgiven …”

That’s not the Greek. The Greek is a perfect tense. “Your sins have been forgiven.”

Then he talks to the fathers.

“Because you have known Him …”

Perfect tense again.

Come down to the young men.

“Because you have overcome the wicked one …”

Perfect tense.

All the verbs line up tense-wise. So now we say, well now if that’s the case, then this must be true of all three of these people or this way of looking at things. Has anybody—look at your translations because I know you have different translations. Does anyone have in verse 12 any translation that does not have “your” for “your sins”, the personal relative pronoun? Do all your translations have that? Does anybody have a translation of verse 12 that says “because sins” without the personal pronoun?

That’s interesting because it’s missing in the Greek. So all the translations try to help us out by putting the relative pronoun in there. Let’s think about why the translators do that. If you saw a text and it said this:

I write to you little children because the sins forgiven on account of His name.

Clearly, he’s talking about the children’s sins. Nothing is wrong with the relative pronoun. But, does anyone pick up a nuance of why possibly the apostle didn’t put the relative pronoun in front of the noun sins?

(Comment)

Good, Nate picked it up. By omitting the relative pronoun, you make it more general, because now it’s not talking about your sins, little children. It’s talking about sins. It’s a generalized principle that applies all across the board.

So here we have now the children who have this experience of having sins being forgiven. This experience of sins having been forgiven—notice it’s a perfect tense so he’s talking about experience, your experience of having your sins forgiven. That denotes a child-like relationship with the Lord.

“Daddy forgives me.”

This is mentally what he’s doing here. He’s cultivating a picture of a family. The Bible does this. Do you know why he does it? Because families aren’t social constructs. Families are designed social features from Creation. Families are social structures of God’s design. They are not conveniences that slowly evolve into social constructs that can be changed by the legislature.

So right here you see when you start getting into the Word of God, you realize how different the Word of God is from our whole paganizing culture. We bump up against it more and more the deeper we get into the Word of God. That’s not condemning the Word of God. It’s condemning the culture. It shows you how screwed up it is.

Here we have this feature of daddy and child. Daddy forgives. So John says, think of the fact that as children, little children, you are all believers. We are all little children and we have to have Daddy forgive us our sins. It’s a comforting family picture here. John is a very loving writer, a very serious writer. He’s a very gentle writer in many ways.

Then we come down to the fathers. Oh! By the way, notice what is the basis of sins being forgiven? He wants us to see that. The only basis for sins being forgiven is the authority of Jesus Christ. See what he’s doing? False teachers are going to deny this, by the way. That’s coming up. This gets back to exclusivity.

One of the most offensive things about the Christian faith in our relativistic culture is the claim there is only one way of salvation. That’s because God has a character and there is only one way to approach Him. You shouldn’t have a problem with this. Everywhere we go we have to have passwords. Why should it seem unusual that we have to have a “password” to have fellowship and relationship with God? The “password” is we acknowledge our sins. We acknowledge that Jesus is the substitutionary atonement for all of our sins—period. There is no other password available. He’s the One that assigns the password.

Now we come to the Father. Now look at this.

^NKJ 1 John 2:13, “I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.”

Who’s the “Him” here do you suppose? At first you might think he’s talking about Him as the Father. But is he? What is the rule that we do when we want to understand John? We go back to other things John has written, in particular the Upper Room Discourse. I’ve taken those two verses. Look at the Gospel of John. Look at the first two verses.

^NKJ John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

 ² “He was in the beginning with God.”

So who is it that is from the beginning? The Father or the Son? Of course, they both are from the beginning. Which one is John focusing on? Jesus, because this is the way he writes about it in the first two verses of his Gospel.

“In the beginning He was with God.”

Then he says in 1 John 2:3 here … Before we get to that. Let’s just keep here for a moment because what we’re looking at is we’re trying to identify who is from the beginning. It’s very important with John that we see that Jesus’ words are the same as the Father’s words. Jesus is God incarnate. He’s adamant about this. If you read the Gospels that’s why he talks about:

“the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

He’s distinguishing the Word from God. He’s distinguishing the Son from the Father because he wants us to understand that this Jewish man, Jesus, is fully God incarnate. He won’t let go of this. This is the center of his entire writing, whether it’s the Gospel or the epistle. He can’t leave it alone, the incarnation. So now if that’s true:

^NKJ 1 John 2:13, “I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.”

Now we get this other verb here—known. Where has John used that before? He’s used it back up in 1 John 2:3. Remember that? Look up in 1 John 2:3. This is that section we were talking about where he’s talking about the Son.

^NKJ 1 John 2:3, “Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.”

There’s that “knowing.” It’s knowing in a context where he’s talking about knowing the Son.

“We know that we know Him because we keep His commandments.”

Here in verse 13 he’s talking about:

^NKJ 1 John 2:13, “I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.”

Now this is interesting. Do you notice something? Look at what he’s saying about the little children. Look at what he’s saying about the Father. Does anybody see a parallelism between the structure here and the structure in the preamble?

Look at the outline, the box up at the top of the handout. When we went over the preamble, the preamble was divided into three parts. The first part dealt with the Father and our relationship to His holiness. He talked about confessing sins.

The second one is talking about knowing Christ. Anybody see a parallel in the structure? This is one of these subtleties of John; but it’s there. Look carefully—1 John 2:12 he’s talking about little children, talking about forgiving sins.

Now in 1 John 2:13a he’s talking about fathers because you have known Him who was from the beginning. Do you see the parallel between these two and the first two parts of the preamble? Anybody? Got it? The first part of the preamble dealt with the Father’s nature and how do we respond to the Father’s nature? What has to happen? 1 John 1:9. What’s 1 John talking about? Forgiving of sins. Well, wait a minute! Isn’t that the same subject he’s brought up again with little children?

Now look at the second part of the preamble. The second part of the preamble said to know Him. You’re going to know Him. Now what’s he talking about with the fathers? Same verb—know. Now does anybody see the parallel?

The first part of the preamble seems to be concentrating the same areas as the first part of the structure. The second part of the preamble seems to parallel the second part of the structure. Now this is what I mean by there is structure in this epistle. John isn’t just writing this all over the place. Whether he was even conscious of it, we don’t know. Maybe it’s just the Holy Spirit working through this man as he was writing.

Now we come to the last part of 1 John 2:13.

^NKJ 1 John 2:13, “… I write to you, young men, Because you have overcome the wicked one.”

Now this is interesting. If this were stages of maturity, why does he skip back to teenagers. Can anyone see something different about the way he’s talking about young men and the way he’s talked about children and fathers?

(Comment)

Yes. Young men, we’re talking about combat, athletics, contests. So now he’s focusing on the battle. This is the first time in the epistle he’s spoken of Satan and it’s in context with young men, in context with the warrior class. Notice what he’s doing now. He says that:

^NKJ 1 John 2:13, “… Because you have overcome”

Perfect tense

Now the word overcome, if you trace that out in a concordance how John uses it … Well, just hold the place here and turn to 1 John 5:4. Here’s an example of how he’s using it. Look at verse 4.

^NKJ 1 John 5:4, “For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.”

How would you describe what he means by overcome? In fact, he defines it here. Anyone? You resist the world by faith. Look at 1 John 5:19.

^NKJ 1 John 5:19, “We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.”

What does he say about the world? It’s under the sway of the evil one. We’re going to get more into how he views the world later. Do you get a sense now of the seriousness of this section of the epistle? We are living in a high-threat environment.

[Slide 4] I have a friend who is a retired colonel in the army. He has a Christian ministry at Fort Benning. Back when he was a captain, he was leading a group of soldiers in Vietnam. Those of you old enough to remember the Vietnam thing, he had a group of civilians trying to tell the military how to run a war and as usual didn’t know what they were talking about.

We had a guy by the name of McNamara (Secretary of Defense) and he had this odd idea that you fight wars by body counts. He was a guy that was known for the Edsel in the auto manufacturing company. In the Air Force he was known for the F1-11 that was neither a bomber nor a fighter. In the Vietnam War he came out with the fact we’re going to statistically measure fighting unit success by body counts.

My friend who is Captain Beer was a strong trainer of soldiers. He had a very aggressive group of guys. They found out that his unit had very low body counts. The reason they had low body counts is the Viet Cong wouldn’t challenge him. So, he had to generate high body count numbers to be successful according to the Secretary of Defense. So the way he would do it is he would project an image of weakness to draw the Viet Cong to attack him and then they’d kill them.

That’s how he got the high body counts. He said it was interesting because the strong units had the least body counts of the enemy because the enemy stayed away from them. The enemy’s not stupid. So he had these two … to this day he ends all his emails with these two slogans. I just love these two slogans.

One of them is:

Amateurs practice until they get it right, professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.

Very neat!

Amateurs practice until they get it right, professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.

Big difference.

Then he has another one he got from Heraclitus talking about a 100-man unit of soldiers.

Of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are nothing but targets, nine are real fighters ... We’re lucky to have them. They make the battle. Ah, but the one, one of them is a warrior … and he will bring the others back.

That could describe a local church. It’s very, very interesting to see that men who have been through this experience have this view of reality that it’s nasty out there and you have to deal with it. This is this image now we have of young men.

“I write to you young men because you have already done this. By coming to Jesus Christ you have already denied the principalities and powers who have tried to distort the gospel.”

So if you look at these three views here that you see [Slide 3], you see the childlike relationship parallel to the first part of the preamble with the Father. Then you have the fathers who have known Him who was from the beginning. They have that expert seasoned evaluation of who Jesus is. Then finally you have the young men down here who have overcome the evil one. That may be parallel to the third part of the preamble.

In most of your translations you’ll notice that at the end of 1 John 2:13 it starts the three over again and then 1 John 2:14. So if you’ll look at your Bibles and follow me in verse 13:

^NKJ 1 John 2:13, “I write to you, little children,”

There are the little children again.

“Because you have known the Father.”

^NKJ 1 John 2:14, “I have written to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I have written to you, young men, Because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, And you have overcome the wicked one.”

That was those quotes I was telling you about.

Now this is structured differently. If you notice in 1 John 2:12–13 we have three [Slide 5]. Then in 1 John 2:13 at the end and verse 14 we apparently the triad reoccurs. But when you look at your English text, what do you notice different about the children, the fathers, and the young men in verse 13 and verse 14 that’s different from before? Look at the verb. Go back to the verbs, the action parts of the sentences. I write, I write, I write. Present or past tense? Present.

Now he says and he has a present here; but then these verbs—I have written, I have written—past tense. So why does John repeat the three again? Obviously, he’s doing it. And obviously there is something strange going on with the first one because in your English translations it keeps hooking it to verse 13 and not verse 14.

The reason for this is the translators—they’ve responded to the Greek flow. Remember in the Greek there are no verses. It’s all run together, so they’re having to do something here to alert us. The translators had to make a decision whether to put this first part, little children, in with verse 14 so that you have the triad again—little children, fathers, and young men, or put it back over here with verses 12 and 13 because of the verb tense. They chose to hook it up into verse 13 to maintain the continuity of verb tense. I don’t think that’s helpful.

I think there is obviously a triadic structure here, and I prefer to see the little children in verse 14. But then I have to explain why it’s a present tense and not past. One of the things is because the noun for little children here is now different. This little noun here is paidia. Over here it was teknia. Now he’s shifted the word. So paidia can also be used of an infant.

What the nuances here between teknia and paidia are is up for grabs. It’s hard to pin down these because you look at the word use it goes back and forth. So this is another fond term he has. Paidia is often used of a baby just born.

If you look here, “I write”. He apparently is keeping the tense the same because he’s introduced a new term paidia. He hasn’t written this before so therefore he uses a present tense. I’m writing about paidia now. I’m not writing about teknia. But he addresses all believers as little children.

And then he says, if you’ll notice in verse 13:

“Because you have known Him …”

Again it’s the childlike relationship to daddy.

“Because you have known Him …”

See, he wants confidence. They don’t have to listen to an outside elite false teacher cadre. You don’t need further enlightenment. You already have the enlightenment as believers in Jesus Christ. It’s a very important maneuver that he’s doing here. So we’ve gotten paidia.

“Because you have known Him …”

It’s childlike again. Then he comes here to the next one.

^NKJ 1 John 2:14, “I have written to you, fathers,”

It’s identical to this sentence except for the verb shift, past tense. We have to answer why that happens in a little bit.

Then we come to the third one. Now the third one is expanded over the first one. Past tense. Look at the three things he says about the young men here. He used to say, the first swing through, is that “you’ve overcome the wicked one.” But it looks like he’s beefing up things in verse 14 because now he says:

^NKJ 1 John 2:14, “… Because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, And you have overcome the wicked one.”

Now if you’ll hold the place and turn to John 15:7. Go back over to the Gospels and if someone will read John 15:7. Remember what we’re doing again—tool of Bible study. We’re going back to the same author’s words so we can understand how he used this. 1 John is an amplification of the Upper Room Discourse. So we’re going back to the Upper Room Discourse. We’re trying to find out when he says to these young men, “The Word of God abides in you,” why does he use that terminology?

^NKJ John 15:7, “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you”

All right. When Jesus used this very same term (the Word of God abide in you), what was the activity He was talking about? Praying. What do suppose John is going to use as the tool against the cosmos? Prayer. What makes the young men warriors is the fact that the Word of God abides in them such that they are great prayers because praying is one of the tools that we use.

We’re fighting an invisible enemy. We’re fighting a doxological forensic debate in the very halls of Heaven itself. We can’t see Heaven. We can’t detect it on any measurement device we have; but our life is not in a materialistic universe with a capsule around it. We’re living in a universe that has both visible and invisible components.

When we deal with these things we have to understand if we can visualize it spatially—what’s going on up there? And ask ourselves, what is going on up there? We don’t know a lot about what’s going on. We know very little; but we do know this, that when we pray there is a reaction between what’s going on up there and what’s going on down here. That’s the only way we know. It’s the only link we have other than Jesus coming back is the link. It’s the prayer link. It’s demeaned by many of us.

But people who have suffered, people who have gone through trials of life, you will inevitably find have a well-developed prayer life because they’ve had to. In desperation they’ve been thrown into this.

So when he says in the young men … remember these are all addressed to believers here. All believers are referred to as fathers. All believers are paidia. All believers are young men. It’s just different aspects of Christian life. In one sense we are like little children coming to Daddy for forgiveness. In other sense, we’re like the fathers of a family that has deep roots and stable roots because we know Him who is from the beginning. That’s the idea of having your feet in the concrete of the Word of God such that you cannot be moved. The young men, they’re the ones out there in the front lines and we all have times in our Christian life when we are operating as young warriors because we’re involved in this combat situation.

^NKJ John 15:7, "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you”

John is going to repeat that later in the epistle. But for now, we are looking at this section that we’ve looked at today, 1 John 2:12–14. This is why, if you go back to the outline on the top of the handout, you’ll see hopefully now the flow. These are not randomly distributed texts. They’re organized as he moves through this.

Let’s think now about the big picture. Let’s zoom out and look at the flow. Now we’re looking at the forest. We’re not looking at any individual trees. Look at that outline.

He starts with the prologue. In that prologue he has already dealt with a tremendous theological issue. He’s saying that the word of life has come into history. That we now have with Jesus’ entry into history; we now have a glimpse of the kind of life and fellowship going on between the Father and the Son. We don’t know whether he was out there taking notes when Jesus was praying. But you read John 17 of his Gospel, and it’s a whole depiction of Jesus talking to the Father. John must have seen this several times. So it impressed him.

“I am listening. When I am listening to Jesus praying to His Father, I am actually listening to a communication within the Godhead itself.”

This so impressed him that he can’t let this incarnation issue go away. Then he comes to the preamble. Remember what he said back in 1 Peter 1? He says, “I am writing to you and I’m sharing this that you may have fellowship with us and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.”

So the whole objective here is fellowship with God. That’s the preamble.

Then we come now to the purpose in verses 1 John 2:12–27. The purpose seems to be here that we are in a hostile, high-threat environment and we have to live accordingly because if we don’t, we lose fellowship with God. John says that’s very precious. We wilt like branches on the vine. We wilt unless we stay in fellowship. We can’t go by autopilot through the Christian life. It doesn’t work that way. We deal with an ingenious enemy, tremendously brilliant opposition.

In one sense they have a tremendous advantage over you and me. They have the advantage that they’re invisible. They can see us; but we can’t see them. So how do we see them? How do we see the evil one? We can only see him by what he does and the ideas that he projects into our minds. Remember, Satan has total access to every one of our minds. All of us here can be touched with a satanic idea at any time.

Remember Peter? Peter says, “Oh Lord, I am with You.”

When Jesus rebukes him He says:

^NKJ Matthew 16:23, “But He turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind Me, Satan!’ ”

I’m sure Peter was hurt by that kind of a remark, but that kind of remark shows that we don’t have any security in our cerebral computers. We say that Satan can hack in at any time. We don’t have any anti-virus software. The only anti-virus software we have is the Word of God. We’re vulnerable. That’s what John wants us to understand. We are highly vulnerable in a high-threat environment. Next time we’ll come to the major section of the epistle.

(Closing prayer)