1 JOHN: Love and Truth

We’ve mentioned before that John moved to biblical Asia to help lead the growing church in the larger Greco-Roman world. Known as the “Pastor to Asia,” John was an expert (as we’ve seen in his gospel) in talking to the audience in Asia and Asia Minor. We have record in the writings of Polycarp (John’s disciple) that the churches in Asia are using this letter, which is being circulated among them.

It could be that this letter is written in order to combat a Gnostic heresy similar to what we studied in the book of Colossians. Known as “Docetism” — a belief that argued against the humanity of Jesus and claimed he never really came in the flesh — there are many statements in John’s first letter that would make sense if he’s arguing for a physical incarnation and a Jesus who took on flesh.

Nevertheless, my favorite part of the letter of 1 John is his insistence on loving each other. In 1, 2, and 3 John, one of the themes you can see running through these letters is the theme of love and truth, and it’s never stronger than in 1 John.

The letter starts with what sounds like an Essene teaching. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, we found references to teachings of the Essenes that taught about the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness.” To walk in obedience to God’s path and God’s way was to walk in the light; to oppose God’s ways was to be a “son of darkness.” We previously explored the strong connections to the Essenes that Jesus may have had, and it’s hard to miss the possibility here in the first chapter:

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

In continued Essene-like fashion, the letter goes on to speak about how one can discern between people who walk in the light and those who do not. Whoever claims to follow Jesus would live life the way Jesus lived life. This would make sense if we remember studying what it meant to follow a rabbi.

We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for God is truly made complete in them. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did.

This entire conversation raises a question of John: How did Jesus walk, and what is the defining characteristic of being true to the way of Jesus?

Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. Anyone who loves their brother and sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble. But anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them.

John seems to be very clear on the issue of what it means to be a son of light. To walk in the way of God, as seen in the life and teachings of Jesus, is to be a person who loves. If you do not love, you do not walk in the light. As if this couldn’t be more clear, John won’t let this idea go — the entire third chapter revolves around this argument. We continue to see this argument all the way into the fourth chapter:

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.We love because he first loved us.  

Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

It has often been said in the world I minister in that we have to maintain a balance between love and truth. We have to be loving, but we cannot give up on truth. John, I believe, would suggest we have that conversation entirely backwards. If you are not loving, then what you have is not true — period. Love is what makes it true. In a world that wants to demand we hold to truth in order to show the world what God is like, we simply need to read more of chapter 4:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

The way we can show the world an accurate, true picture of what God looks like, is to love. We can have all the theology and doctrine imaginable — truth stacked up in books — yet if we don’t have love, John says it’s a lie. This might sound a lot like Paul who claimed that if we have all knowledge, but don’t have love, we are nothing more than “a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”

Whoever claims to be in Him must walk as Jesus walked. Above all else, Jesus loved. May we strive to do the same.

1 THESSALONIANS: Parousia

Paul also pens two letters to the church in Thessalonica. There are plenty of commentaries that deal with the context of Thessalonica and, to be honest, I haven’t had the opportunity to study the context of Thessalonica as much as I would like. While I have heard different explanations for it, it would seem that the people of Thessalonica had a clear misunderstanding of the proper response to the “return” of Christ.

One thing that becomes abundantly clear (again, addressed in NT Wright’s work Surprised by Hope) is that the early believers had a definite understanding of Christ’s very close return. This may not be as far-fetched as it sounds to us from where we sit, but I’ll deal with that theology at some other point. At any rate, it is safe to say that early Christians in the Roman Empire believed they might see Christ’s return in their lifetime, or the lifetime of their children.

Apparently this had impacted the Thessalonian community in such a way that it led to their disengagement. If Christ was about to return and make the whole world right, why should we spend all of our time working? Paul addresses some of these misunderstandings by talking about the need for the believers in Thessalonica to work, for “the man who does not work, does not eat.” It is also to this world that Paul speaks of parousia.

Parousia is the Greek word we often translate as “second coming.” While this is actually a very accurate translation, the term is loaded with historical context we usually miss. These details can be found by studying NT Wright, Ethelbert Stauffer, the early church commentaries by Roland Worth, and others.

Parousia referred to the second coming of an emperor. In a Roman world that had experienced the havoc of multiple earthquakes (as we mentioned before), the emperor would make a visit to the city (you could think of how a modern-day leader might visit a disaster zone). After surveying the extent of the damage, the emperor would leave behind a large sum of money that the people of the city were to use to rebuild. Everyone knew the emperor would return one day and you would have to give an account for what you did with his deposit.

This return was called a parousia, and we know Thessalonica experienced at least two of them in the first century. According to historical record, there appear to be common themes experienced in any given Roman parousia.

The emperor would arrive to the sound of a loud trumpet. As soon as the lookout saw the emperor’s entourage (more like a small army) arriving in the distance, the call would go out. The city would not want to be caught with Caesar banging on their front door.

When the emperor arrived at the city, he would pay the obligatory respects to the dead. In the ruins of ancient Greco-Roman cities, I have always seen the graveyard just outside the main entrance to the city. It was their way of honoring the dead and those who had gone before them.

After the emperor had paid his respects, the people of the city would go out to meet him. This meeting was referred to in the Greek as eis apantesien. The goal is to go out from the city, meet the emperor with joy, and take him by the hand to show him the city and the great work that had been done — in his honor, of course.

Consider the context of the church in Thessalonica and the following words from 1 Thessalonians 4:

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Paul describes the second coming of Jesus like the parousia of the emperor. To a church that is having a hard time understanding the need to engage in the work of the Kingdom (or physical labor, for that matter), Paul describes the second coming as aparousia, communicating to the people of Thessalonica that they have work to do, because God left them with a deposit and expected them to use it to restore and reconcile, heal and rebuild. In Paul’s picture, there is a trumpet sound, the dead in Christ rise first, and we are caught up to “eis apantesis” Jesus in the air.

The irony runs thick here, for the theology that loves to quote this verse as backing for the idea of the “rapture” is the same theology that commits the sin of the Thessalonians. Far too much Christian theology espouses an idea that we are all going to leave this place someday. If this is true, then our goal is to have as many people “on our team” as possible before “some glad morning, when this life is over…”

But this is the exact idea Paul is teaching against. Paul is not arguing for a disengaged theology; he is arguing for a theology of complete and urgent engagement. Jesus is going to come back. He left us with the deposit of the Holy Spirit, and we’re going to have to show him what we did with the place.

You see, we are caught up to meet Jesus in the air as he is “coming down from heaven” for his parousia.

To quote one of my favorite teachers, “I get worried that too many Christians are going to be on their way up and out of here as Jesus is coming down, and they’re going to pass in the air!”

This is not a theology of disembodied evacuation; it’s a theology of physical participation. 

May God remind us that we have work to do here — today. May He remind us that Jesus taught us to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” May we look forward to the day when the trumpet might sound and we might go out (or up) to meet Jesus on his way down, in order to joyfully take him by the hand and show him around at the things we were able to accomplish with His help.

And when He shows up, I pray we might have something to show Him.

COLOSSIANS: Gnostic Heresy

Paul also pens a letter to the church in Colossae, a small city off the main road that runs through Hierapolis and Laodicea. I’ve always found the conversation that surrounds Colossae moving, because this church is the recipient of one of Paul’s letters, and yet the entire city doesn’t survive but a few decades after the establishment of the church. We have mentioned before the many earthquakes that decimated cities throughout the Roman empire. Many of these cities would be central to Roman infrastructure; unfortunately for the people of Colossae, their city did not make the list. The earthquakes of the AD 60s leveled the city, and it was never rebuilt. To this day, the tel of Colossae — a small hill in the Turkish countryside — sits unexcavated, if not nearly forgotten.

The unexcavated tel of Colossae

From a literary perspective, Colossians mirrors the structure of Ephesians point by point. Most scholars believe they were penned together. While Paul didn’t have the ability to use the “copy and paste” function, he definitely uses the same literary technique in the two letters. Here’s what I mean.

Ephesians is six chapters long and Colossians is a little shorter at four chapters. If you look at the first half of both letters, you will notice that Paul talks theology, or what I like to call ‘orthodoxy’ (removed form it’s cultural usage, the etymology of the term refers to “right belief”). The last half of each letter speaks very deliberately of ‘orthopraxy’ (“right practice or behavior”). If you compare Ephesians 4–6 to Colossians 3–4, you will see an identical pattern. Paul speaks about household behavior as it relates to husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and servants.

It’s the first half of the letters that differ in content. This is because of the context of the recipients. I say that based on assumption because there is so much we don’t know about Colossae (since it lies unexcavated). What we do know comes from the few finds that were scattered along the fields of the local farmers and other things like currency. However, one of the things that seems apparent is the struggle in Colossae with the dangerous teachings of Gnosticism.

Now, the moment you begin talking about Gnosticism, you have entered into tricky waters, because the word can refer to so much and a student of philosophy and Greek belief has many strong opinions about the topic. I’m no expert, so I’ll quote one of my favorite excerpts on the issue from NT Wright. In Surprised by Hope (p. 88), Wright describes Gnosticism as it relates to biblical theology:

For Plato, the present world of space, time, and matter is a world of illusion, of flickering shadows in a cave, and the most appropriate human task is to get in touch with the true reality, which is beyond space, time, and matter. For Plato, this was the reality of eternal Forms.

To oversimplify once more, we may say that Plato’s picture was based on a rejection of the phenomena of matter and transience. The mess and muddle of the space-time-matter world was an offense to the tidy, clean, philosophical mind, which dwelt upon eternal realities. […]

The Platonic strain entered Christian thinking early on, not least with the phenomenon known as Gnosticism. Since the Gnostics have been making something of a comeback recently, a word about them is appropriate. The Gnostics believed, like Plato, that the material world was an inferior and dark place, evil in its very existence, but that within this world could be found certain people who were meant for something else. […] The Gnostic myth often suggests that the way out of our mess is to return to our primeval state, before the creation of the world. In this view creation itself is the fall, producing matter, which is the real evil. I hope it is clear both how closely this view parodies some aspects of Christianity and how deeply and thoroughly it diverges from it.

Wright will go on to explain how some Bible students will go to great lengths to show how some elements of this thought are preserved in the New Testament, but he will spend the rest of the chapter showing how dangerous this way of thinking is to biblical theology.

Paul seems to agree. His first half of the letter to the Colossians talks very directly about this false idea propped up by Gnosticism. Consider the following passage:

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Notice the tense of the statement. Paul says not that God will deliver us, but that He has. The next verses continue even further into this.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Paul makes sure to use the most inclusive language possible for the incarnation and reconciliation of all things. He speaks of all things and makes sure to clarify that these are from heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. He speaks of how all these things were created through him. He speaks of how all of creation is held together in him. And, for good measure, adds that the complete fullness of God dwelt in the Christ.

Paul will go to play with this idea in the second chapter, at times very tongue-in-cheek.

It certainly behooves the Church today to consider the words of Wright above, that these Gnostic ideas “deeply and thoroughly diverges from” the teachings of the Apostles. The truth is that far too much Gnosticism has crept into Christian theology. The idea that we are spirits trapped in prisons of flesh, walking in a world that is doomed to destruction, just waiting for “some glad morning,” is not the mission God called us to and is not congruent with the teachings of Jesus, let alone Paul and the New Testament.

The Kingdom of God is here — deeply engaged with this world of flesh and blood, soil and spirit.