The Book of 1 John: Stay the Love Course Together
A study in five weeks
Given in September and October 2021
LESSON Four: God is love
INTRODUCTION
Thanks to each of you who is joining us in this study of John’s writing which is labelled 1 John. For those on YouTube, if you haven’t yet read this chapter of the book, please pause your playback, read chapter 4, and then re-join us. Thanks.
We are titling this series, “Stay the Love Course Together” because there are two major themes I see coming out of this Bible sermon book. One is the confrontation John has with the false teachings, and I guess by implication the false teachers, who are rejecting some authorized aspects of the question, “Who is Yeshua?” The other major theme I see in anything John writes is the love of God. The true and real God is known as love, his desire for us as his followers is love from a pure heart and a sincere faith. The course laid out for us by the Messiah is to love one another. Anything less than that, …is less than that.
What is love?
Oliver, in the Broadway show Oliver, and of course in the movie that followed it, sang “Where is love?” He was an orphan, abandoned by life, and you might have read his story by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. He sings this aching song of longing when all around him is failing. Another such aching song is sung by Nancy, the street worker, a pub’s mistress, a sad and lonely woman who was longing for something more. Her man Bill Sykes beat her, and she couldn’t find what she was looking for. Oliver sings, “Where is love,” and Nancy sings, “As long as he needs me”, but “Where is love?” could have been what she cried as well.
Maybe you’ve had some down-and-out times when you looked up to the silent heavens and asked even begged to know the answer to that haunting question. Where is love? They would sing, “does it fall from skies above? Is it underneath the willow tree that I’ve been dreaming of?”
I wonder if the apostle John might have been asking that same question one day decades earlier when he and his older brother were out fishing. Their father Zebedee ran the little fishing boat business in which they were engaged, and John was out on the boat. The Sea of Galilee provided a beautiful scene of nature, with the escarpment around on the west into modern Tiberias, or over the north and east to neighbouring modern Jordan. So much to see. And as John pondered the power of nature, as he had certainly experienced some rough seas, he might have wondered about love as well. According to the historians, John was a late teenager when he and his brother James encountered the Messiah Yeshua. John began following and saw it all.
Here he is, the author of this epistle, this little letter that got sent over to Ephesus and then sent around to others, until now it’s been read by millions, probably billions of people worldwide the last 1900 years or so.
One man. One line of thought. One life. And he’s asking today as I read the chapter… Where is love?
John’s been talking around this subject for three previous chapters. He starts verse one of chapter four by calling us ‘beloved.’ John has used this identifying word three times so far in this letter, and in this chapter uses it three more times. His tenderness to his flock is showing. He cares for them. In his advisory, in his correcting, in his teaching, he is reminding them of his reason, of his relationship to them. They are not only students in a classroom who have paid their tuition. They are tender and loved like the first shoots of a spring flower.
The Beatles sang “Love is all you need.” And as I age, reaching 70 next month, I ponder this often. What is my life? What have I accomplished? What will remain when I’m gone?
Seriously, if you get this lesson, 1 John 4, you get it all. This summarises the interests, the philosophy, the totality of the Apostle of Love’s greatest concern. All you need is love. John and Paul were right. Oh, I meant the Beatles, not only the apostles.
And don’t be confused. Love is not blind acceptance of everyone and their shtick. It’s not about tolerance and acceptance of any and all in their misbehaviour. It’s not about allowing evil to triumph. Love is not mushy; love is patient and kind, yes, but it does have to be engineered by the Author of Life, the God of love, in fact, look at verse 8. “The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Again in verse 16 ‘God is love.” Earlier, John shouted using his placard “God is light.” In the realm of feelings and didache, in the life He ordains for us, God’s light which brings heat and warmth, it brings information and knowledge; it brings peace and comfort… that Light lights our path and gives us real hope.
Light, if you will, is a help in our directions of life. And the direction we are going has a destination. That destination is the Lord of life himself, what John says is love. For God is love. This is the 2nd of the 2 great shouts of John in this epistle. Get this, and you get it all. God is love.
Want to know about covid and vaccination? What would love have us do? Want to know about stealing from the boss? What would love have you do? Want to experience true and godly religion—what’s love got to do with it? ( With apologies to Tina Turner, love’s got everything to do with it! She said, “Oh-oh, what's love got to do, got to do with it? What's love but a second-hand emotion?” But that’s not the love I’m talking about.)
For those of us who know Yeshua, the Saviour of the World who died for our sins and rose from the dead, we read verse 10, “in this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loves us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
This flies directly into the face of the false teachers. Look at verse 1. “DO NOT BELIEVE” is a warning phrase. Love is not totally accepting of every idea and philosophy that is out there. There are railings. There are boundaries.
The false teaching that John addresses is the gnostic idea of levels of deity and deification. Let me explain.
Gnostic is a word that comes from the Greek word for knowledge. G-knowing. One of their major errors was that the physical world was dark and evil, and the divine was light and good. Jesus, as being godly, could not have been born in a woman, could not have had a normal earthy experience. He could not have died, as that ending is part of the ‘body’ of humanity, not of the ‘spirit’ of the divine. Jesus didn’t die, they would say. Jesus didn’t come in the flesh, they would say. John says, in verse 2, ‘by this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist.”
It’s a matter of recognition of the two natures of Jesus. He was human and he was divine. And the errors you will find, in conversations with people in 2021 and beyond, are usually related to a dismissal of either one or the other. There are people who say like the anti-messiahs of the time of John that God is spirit and thus Yeshua cannot be the messiah and human and die and such. He was spirit. “We believe he was of another nature. He didn’t die. He and the Father are one in spirit. They are above us and if we learn his ways, we are elevated to his realm, the realm of the spirit. And that’s the nirvana to which we are climbing. We are not of this world, not really. We are to ascend to the levels of the great masters, like Jesus and Buddha. God is spiritual and we should leave this darkened world behind, as nothing in the world is actually real.”
Do you hear people who talk like this? That’s one of the two errors of Gnosticism and certainly evident in the time of John.
The other error that shows today is the error of the humanity of Jesus but divine? Puh-lease. God is spirit and Jesus was born, probably of the rape of Miriam by a Roman soldier. He was as divine as you and I are. We are human. God didn’t have a son. God cannot have a son. We are all just people and we try our best to live a religious and loving life on earth. The messiah will only be a human and not divine. There is a great divide between God and man, and no one bridges that gap. No one can. But we try our best. Jesus cannot be divine; we only have one God.”
Did you hear people talk like this? That’s the other error.
John and the early fathers of the movement sorted this out early on. Yeshua is ever God and he is ever human. For those in theology school this is the argument of the substantial nature of Yeshua.
Homoousios, in Christianity, the key term of the Christological doctrine formulated at the first ecumenical council, held at Nicaea in 325, to affirm that God the Son and God the Father are of the same substance. ... The council condemned Arianism, which taught that Jesus was more than human but not fully divine.
Getting him right is getting our life right. False teachers teaching false doctrine lead us away from the love of God. Those false teachings lead us to fear. Fear is not of God in this regard. Look at verse 18, “There is no fear in God, because perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.”
The doctrines of the anti-messiahs involved fear of failure, fear of living not as well as we should, fear of judgment. God has condemned sin in the flesh, in his own flesh. Jesus died to take away sin and we know that we have an advocate, a lawyer who pleads for us, who accomplished eternal salvation for us, and as such we love him. We don’t try to earn our life; we receive our life.
Look at the examples of the Beaconsfield Tasmanian miners from a decade ago, or the 13 boys and coach in Thailand in 2018. 12 boys went exploring in Thailand's Chiang Rai province with their football coach - and ended up trapped deep inside a cave underneath a mountain.
Anyone who has been rescued knows that it’s not their doing that causes their rescue. It is entirely the rescue team and its operation that saves them. We who have been rescued by the Messiah know we earned nothing, we cannot earn anything, we owe everything including our joy and our thanks to the One who alone died on Calvary, spilled his human blood as a kipporah for us, and we lean into him like the Prodigal Son leaned into the outstretched arms of the Prodigal Father (Luke 15 story), we owe everything, we can pay back nothing, but our thanksgiving is our sacrifice for all he has done for us.
Fascinating that the idea of spirit vs flesh is characterised by half of the Gnostic wrong out there. Listen how many times in this chapter alone, John uses the word ‘spirit.’ (verse 1, 2, 3, 6, 13). The Spirit is testifying that Yeshua is the Son of God and he died and rose again. Spirit and corporeal reality are merged. Where? In the person and the willing sacrifice of Yeshua for us.
Look at verse 4: “Greater is he, Yeshua, who is in us, than he who is in the world.” All the wrongs that are out there, the false teachings, the false messiahs, the errors of Cain who killed his own brother, the wrong lessons of misbehaviours… they are less than the power and the person and the anointing of the Messiah. God by his spirit has anointed Yeshua, gave him enough to get through his life and his death and his resurrection, and now he is in us. We have nothing to fear.
We have nothing to hide. We have only love to pass on to each other. We are not afraid. We have been delivered from our desperate need for approval from others, as we have been given God’s light and God’s love, so what can we share with each other? LOVE! Look at verse 7. “Let us love one another, for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” Again in verse 11, “if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another”
Again a reminder about the term ‘confession.’ (See this in verse 2, and 3, and 15) Confess means to agree with. We are not making Jesus Lord by our confession. We are agreeing together with God that Jesus is Lord. We confess that he came in the flesh. That doesn’t mean we made it happen; it means we are in agreement with God that this information is true and Yeshua is all he was intended to be, flesh and spirit.
In case you miss the whole point, that we who have come to know Messiah should love one another, then read the last verse, verse 21. That summary is where I want to live today. Within the realm of the love of God, with each of you, with those inside and outside …. Let us love in word and deed, until Yeshua returns.
So God wants us to stay the love course together with one another until Messiah returns. Will you join us? Will you be confident in the Lord? God’s promise is eternal life (Chapter 2: 25). Let’s live in that today.
INVITATION
Dear friends, if you’d like to have the forgiveness and the fellowship about which I spoke, you can do so today. Just now you can pray and find that the God of love extends his life to you in giving you pardon for all your sins. That forgiveness will usher you into the freedoms of knowing the God of love. Isn’t that a wonderful idea?
If you’d like that, please pray and ask God to forgive you your sins and to make you born again.
Then let us know you have done this, won’t you? Write to us (admin@jewsforjesus.org.au) and tell us you have prayed for the first time. We want to send you some literature and welcome you to the family.
And if you have any questions, use that same address, ok?
And join us next week as I conclude the 5-part series from the first letter of John.
Until then, Shabbat shalom.
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Bibliography
Smalley, Stephen, 1 John, Word Biblical Commentary Series, Thomas Nelson, Grand Rapids, 1973.
Weirsbe, Warren, Be Real, Victor Books, David C. Cook, Colorado Springs, 1972.
Also, to see the whole book in one short graphic and wonderful summary, watch this video:
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/course/1-john-introduction/#overview
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