Certainties of the Word of Life, Pt 1

1 John 1:1

Now let's open our Bibles to 1 John chapter 1, 1 John chapter 1.  And we're going to be just sort of introducing the book starting with a look at verse 1.  John begins this epistle in a very straightforward way. There are no introductory statements.  There is no identification of the author.  There are no greetings.  It's very unlike the letters of Paul and even Peter and even James, for that matter, it just jumps immediately into the issue.  John writes: "What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld, or looked upon, and our hands handled concerning the Word of Life."

This is a book about the Word of Life.  And John says, "I am writing this from personal experience.  I have heard it.  I have seen it.  I have looked deeply into it.  I have handled it with my own hands.  And so John is writing as an eyewitness.  At the time that he writes it's the last decade of the first century, he is the last Apostle alive who still has a vital, vibrant ministry of preaching and teaching and leading the church and writing.   And when he writes, his subject is the Word of Life...the Word of Life.  The Word of Life which he heard and saw and looked intently into and his hands handled.  The Word of Life that was, according to verse 2, manifest, what we have seen and bear witness and proclaim to you, that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us.  What we have seen and heard we proclaim to you.  Three times he affirms that this is firsthand, eyewitness truth concerning the Word of Life, the Word of Life that was once with the Father, the Word of Life which was incarnate, the Word of Life which brought eternal life. 

This then is a message about God's revelation in Christ and God's revelation concerning Christ.  That is to say the true revelation of God in the incarnate Word, in the true revelation of God in the written Word.  The Word of Life embodies Christ and the gospel of Christ.  They are inseparable. 

So John starts out by saying, "I'm going to be writing to you the truth about the Word of Life, incarnate and written.  I'm going to tell you the truth."  This is important because the churches to whom he writes in Asia Minor have been subjected to error.  And as a sort of an apostolic duty and responsibility, John knows he has to confront that error with the truth.  We could title these first few verses, "Certainties concerning the Word of Life....Certainties concerning the Word of Life." 

Now just a very important starting point as we begin to look into this amazing letter, to remind you that the greatest reality the world possesses is divine truth.  The greatest reality the Word possesses is divine truth. (The first time John said world, the second time he said word.)  That is the testimony of Scripture all the way through the Old and the New Testament.  Nothing is as important, nothing is as valuable as divine truth.  The purest, the most powerful, the most necessary, the most valuable reality in existence is God's truth, the Word from God.  It alone provides eternal life and eternal life is the most necessary thing that exists. 

Since that is inarguably true, since the greatest reality the world possesses is divine truth, the greatest threat in the world is any idea contrary to that truth.  Any high idea invented by men or demons raised up against the Word of God constitutes the greatest threat in existence.  Now this draws the bottom line in a crystal-clear fashion.  The greatest gift the world has, divine truth.  The greatest threat is anything that assaults that truth, any form of error.  Therefore, all faithful servants of God throughout all of redemptive history, all of human history, all faithful servants of God have been given the responsibility to proclaim the truth and point out the error.  The Apostle Paul put it this way, "We have a ministry of teaching but we also have parallel to it a ministry of warning."  We are engaged then in this which is essentially the real spiritual warfare.  It is a war between the truth and error.  And it rages on today as it has through all of human history way back to Genesis chapter 3 where Satan told Eve that God didn't say something God did say.  It's always been that way...the truth of God against the lies of demons and men. 

It is then the first responsibility and in a sense the singular responsibility of the servant of God to proclaim that truth and to point out anything that threatens that truth.  In the first century of the church we would certainly like to believe that at least for the duration of the first century the church would have stayed pure doctrinally and pure behaviorally, but it didn't, as we well know.  In the first century of the church after the Savior's work on earth was done and He had ascended back into heaven at the end of the first third of that century, He sent the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, and the purpose of the Holy Spirit was to inspire the Apostles to teach them the truth, to speak to them concerning Himself so that they could write down and those who were with them the record of the New Testament which is the record of the life of Jesus Christ and the ministry of Jesus Christ and the redemption of Jesus Christ and the full explanation of its meaning.  They were to write that down to establish the truth.  Having written that down they were to tell all of those who proclaimed that truth that they had that responsibility to preach the Word in season and out of season and to reprove and rebuke anyone who attacked that Word.

Well, by the end of the first century, just 50, 60 years after the church was established, the truth was under a massive assault.  The first assault on the truth came from Jewish legalism and that is the primary assault that you see the Apostle Paul battling in writing the book of Romans and writing the book of Galatians, battling the issue of legalism which wanted to encroach itself upon the church.  You find that was the issue in the Jerusalem Council, that is the issue that is battled through the book of Acts as the Apostle Paul in particular goes into Jewish synagogues and confronts their damning legalism and points to grace and salvation in Jesus Christ and Him alone.  That is, of course, the great truth that Paul shed the light in his own heart which he writes about in Philippians chapter 3 when he saw the glory of the truth of salvation in Christ alone, apart from any works.  He said he considered every work he had ever done to gain any favor with God as dung.  So the first great warfare, the first great battle that Christianity fought had to do primarily with legalism.  The second great battle that Christianity fought is one which John is here engaged at the end of the first century and it is...it is a danger that is still with us, legalism is still with us also.  They don't go away, they come and stay and just sort of reform themselves through all of history.  But John is going to take us into a battle that engages the second greatest threat to the church and it's, as you'll see in a little while, still with us today.

So the Apostle John as he writes this letter is, on the one hand, engaging in a positive ministry of affirming the congregation in life-changing truth, the truth that sanctifies.  But at the same time he is equipping them to be able to discern the things that threaten the truth, the assaults and the attacks of the evil one in his systems of error.  You remember, of course, that all of the Apostles who engaged in preaching the gospel and in confronting error were rejected and eventually lost their lives, the great majority of them as martyrs.  The Apostle Paul who was a sort of later Apostle, the last of the Apostles, a special and unique Apostle, was a martyr to the cause of the truth.  They killed him for the truth.  And here John, the last of them alive, is about to be exiled to the isle of Patmos because of the preaching of Jesus Christ because of the truth.

Now when he writes this epistle, he's an old man...he's an old man.  He writes the gospel and the epistles somewhere in that last decade of the first century, then around 96 A.D. he received the Revelation.  Surely he's got to be in his eighties by now.  The only man now alive with a personal, intimate association with the Son of God all through His ministry, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven, an eyewitness to the incarnation, an eyewitness to the life and ministry of Jesus to which he refers in the verses I just read.  Many of the early church fathers in the next century, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexander, and Eusebius tell us that John was at this time living and ministering in Ephesus which was the intellectual center of Asia Minor.  He was there overseeing the church in Ephesus, pastoring the church in Ephesus but overseeing the other six churches in the other six well-known cities of Asia Minor to which the seven letters were addressed in the book of Revelation.  They tell us John was preaching and John was teaching and he was leading and he was evangelizing and we know, of course, that he was also writing.

The church in Ephesus was founded by the Apostle Paul.  He spent three years there.  He prophesied, remember, I read you last time in Acts chapter 20 that false teachers would come and they did and they would infect the church with their lies and there would be men within the church and rise up and teach heresy and that heresy would have to be dealt with.  John is now having to face what Paul said would happen.  And he writes to deal with the heresies to protect the truth as well as to edify the saints.