I, II & III John Bible Study | Mike Mazzalongo | BibleTalk.tv
All right, we begin a new series. This morning I II III, John, the epistles of John for Beginners.
This is lesson number one.
This will be the introductory lesson in this series.
This class is a textual Bible study class, where we’re going to be looking at these epistles written by the Apostle, who also wrote the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelations, So quite a productive individual.
As far as the writing of the New Testament is concerned, Some people think that these letters, don’t have the weight of the gospel or Revelation rather long, a long book, but what they lack in length they make up in substance.
He’s got a lot to say in a very short amount of time.
John’s letters are a tremendous source of apologetic material, meaning the defense of the faith, type of material as well as information about true Christian living.
So let’s start our study by briefly examining the life of the author, the Apostle John himself.
We have a lot of information about John, the writer of these epistles from different parts of the Bible.
So you know I’ve grouped them. Top ten, so here are the top ten facts about John, if you wish he was one of the sons of Zebedee and Salome.
I learned about that in Matthew, 27 and Mark 15.
He was a partner in a fishing business.
Again, I loved the idea that the Bible talks about real people.
He was a business guy.
He was partners with others in a fishing business with his brother, James, and two other brothers, Andrew and Peter, and from this connection, was drawn into Jesus’circles of disciples.
Well, guess what they were: fishermen, where Jesus lived? How about that? What is that? What are the odds that they might have been drawn into His circle as early listeners, early disciples following? Was it an accident that Jesus said to Peter put your boat out for a while? Was He an absolute stranger to him who just walked up and after he had finished cleaning his nets for the night and had blanked out hadn’t caught any fish? He was dead, bone, tired, and didn’t make any profit.
Was it a stranger that came by and said? Let me use your boat.
I need to preach, Of course not it was Jesus, it was Him they knew each other, The gradual of their drawing.
After Jesus, because they knew Him John is the same, He was impetuous. We read John the Apostle of love always because he talks about love so much, but at the beginning, was he the Apostle of love? No man, let’s bring the thunder down on those people.
Is wiping them off the face of the earth that wasn’t? That was that John’s Zealous impetuous Jesus even gave him a nickname for him and his brother, the sons of thunder.
I believe that God laughs not just because I read it in some guys’, ‘devotion!’ book.
I believe, God laughs, because we laugh it’s, a component of human nature that is so healthy and so joyous and so wonderful laughter, doesn’t come from Satan.
It comes from God, and here’s, Jesus naming John and his brother.
There they go.
The sons of thunder you know rocket man, you know a little nickname and he called them that because they wanted to destroy some Samaritan, villages that would not receive Jesus.
They wouldn’t give Him any hospitality.
They were ready to wipe the village out with a thunderbolt.
This is the Apostle of love. In the beginning, We find out that John’s, mother, asked Jesus to choose, and positions in the kingdom for John and his brother, were not ambitious at all.
Was she Notice it? Wasn’t the dad that asked for that in that culture it was the mom that asked for that.
So I guess the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.
Did He sit next to Jesus after he and Peter prepared the room where they ate the Last Supper? John 13? 23, And we call him the Apostle of love.
He preached love.
A lot of love.
We’ll see that in his epistles, but he refers to himself always as the Apostle that Jesus loved There was just something about him that appealed to Jesus 39, not certainly divine nature can love everyone equally, but Jesus’human nature.
There were some that he loved somehow he had some sort of connection with and John was one of those people, and he expresses that in a very humble way.
He was one for whom the Lord had much affection.
We also find out. He was first at the tomb along with Peter he outran Peter to the tomb, but he let Peter go.
First And according to tradition, John made Jerusalem, his home until the death of Mary Jesus’s, earthly mother, who had been put in his care by the Lord Himself on the cross.
This is your son.
This is your mother.
That was a way of saying.
Take care of my mom and Mary lived in Jerusalem with him.
John 19, 26 27 John, later moved to Ephesus, which eventually became the geographic and numeric center of Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem.
When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, not only harmed the Jews that were there, but the Christians as well Paul established the church in Ephesus John eventually move there, and that was his basis of operation, in other words, Ephesus, which is Now, in southern Turkey, the country called Turkey was the Bible belt of the Roman Empire.
At the time it was the place you went to be trained to be sent out into the Empire, not Jerusalem, anymore, not Antioch, Ephesus, that’s where John was and that’s, where he trained many individuals, Number nine.
He wrote his gospel from there. The three epistles and after a period of exile on the island of Patmos, he returned to emphasis.
He wrote his final work, the book of Revelation.
It was from Ephesus that he trained many early church leaders that you hear about sometimes people.
They want some historical evidence about Christianity, not contained in the Bible but written about by individuals who lived at that time and who wrote about the church at that time.
So he was the one who trained many of those, what they call early church leaders or early church fathers, People like Polycarp and Papias and Ignatius, who would write about John himself and the early church and whose writings we still have today preserved in historical records.
We need a lot of information about the early church from these people, not inspired writings, but they’re historians.
They write about the time just like Josephus, a Jewish Pharisee who wrote about the times of Jesus during His life, not just about Jesus but about Jewish life in first-century Israel.
Well, in the same way, these writers wrote about the church in the 1st and 2nd centuries, So John is believed to have lived to a very old age and died in Ephesus where he lived and worked for many years.
So there’s a little bit of background on John, the Apostle John’s letter and all of his letters deal with the problem of Gnosticism, a response to gnostic teachings that were creeping into the church.
A little background about this as Gentiles entered the church, in other words, non-Jewish, culturally non-Jewish people, mostly Greeks. As Gentiles entered the church in greater numbers, they also brought much of their philosophical baggage with them and that’s nothing.
New people are assimilated into the church today and they bring the ideas that they had before into the church.
Sometimes they even bring their ideas about Christianity.
They come into a restorationist church like ours, we’re trying to restore biblical Christianity.
Only the Bible is our source and people come from different denominations and they like that idea.
They are drawn to the purity of that idea and they, you know do Bible things in Bible ways.
They confess Christ, they’re baptized.
They begin following the Lord.
Among us, but they still have ideas that come from their training back there Having grown up Catholic and having only been converted when I was in my 30s or early 30s.
I brought a lot of ideas from Catholicism into my converted experience as a New Testament Christian and it took time to kind of wait a minute. The Bible, didn’t say that when you celebrate Mary’s feast day and the preacher said what You know: Mary mother of God, you know yeah, we don’t call her that, oh okay, when do we celebrate her assumption into heaven? Yeah, we don’t.
We don’t celebrate that.
Why? Well because it’s not in the Bible anywhere, oh I see, Can I come for communion on Tuesday morning? No, Why Well, according to the New Testament, we take communion only on the Lord’s Day.
Oh, I was a believer.
I believe that Jesus was the Son of God.
I believed that my sins were forgiven when I was immersed in the water.
I believed all of that, but I also believed a lot of other stuff that had to be deprogrammed over time and just a personal aside.
My main emotion during that kind of relearning of my faith was anger.
I was angry: where did they get all this stuff? I taught school at the Montreal Catholic School Commission, I taught school, I taught catechism, and half of what I was teaching was not in the scriptures.
So imagine now, in the first century, these Greeks – they’re converted to Christ, but they’ve got a lot of Greek ideas that they bring with them, and one of these Greek ideas was Gnosticism. Gnosticism was an attempt by some in the church to fuse Greek philosophical ideas with Christian theology to make a Christian religion more palatable to educated Greeks, not the lower-end Greeks, but the educated ones.
Gnosticism said that the spirit was good and all matter was evil and the way to salvation was by escaping the realm of matter into the realm of the spirit.
This was the Greek idea of duality.
Two spheres, one is evil matter flesh.
One is a pure good spirit.
You wanted to be completely in the spirit you had to escape the flesh to become completely in the spirit Now.
The way that they taught the way to make this escape or transfer was through knowledge.
Gnosis.
The Greek word thus comes from the term gnostic, Not just knowledge but secret knowledge, not any knowledge, but only the special knowledge held in secret by guess who, the Gnostic teachers We got the secret.
They said we know the secret. We’ll share the secret with you.
Now you’ll ask where’s the conflict here.
Well, the conflict with the gospel and this teaching came in the form of questions concerning Jesus’identity.
The contradiction for the Gnostics was the idea that something good someone of God, someone who was God – could live or could come in the form of matter of humanity.
In other words, if the flesh is evil, how could God come in the flesh That was making their head explode? So the Gnostics, as I say, taught that matter was evil and the way to escape was usually an extreme form of self-denial or in this extreme form of hedonism.
In other words, the way to escape was to be extremely worldly.
Just eat touch taste and do everything you want or be extremely ascetic to touch.
Taste.
Nothing deny yourself everything.
Their teachings ran from one end to the other, But now Jesus, the Divine Son of God, comes in the form of the flesh of human matter and He practices neither form of extremism. He’s, not a hedonist, and He’s, not an ascetic.
Like John the Baptist, He’s, neither He comes eating and drinking, So He was not a self-indulgent sinner, but neither was he like John the Baptist, honey and locusts and lived out in the wilderness.
He sat He ate with people, He went to weddings.
He laughed, He was a man, So one way that the Gnostics resolved this problem was to teach that the Spirit of Christ only entered Him at baptism and left Him before He died on the cross, which would make Him at best a kind of a prophet.
The Spirit comes on Him for a time to do the miracles, to teach to do this and to do that and then just before He dies the Spirit leaves Him.
So He’s born an ordinary man.
He receives the empowerment, to remember our acts.
He receives the empowerment of the Spirit for a time in His life, and then it leaves Him.
Then He dies like an ordinary man.
That was one way to reconcile these two ideas. Another way to resolve their problem was to say that Jesus was, ‘t matter or human.
He only appeared to be human.
In other words, He was just the Spirit appearing in the form of a man.
He was a ghost, an apparition that’s.
All he was Now you can see some of the problems that’ll come up.
If somebody starts teaching this in the church by teaching these false ideas, they were able to preserve their main premise of total evil of flesh and total.
The goodness of the Spirit and the idea that one did not affect the other by what it did, That was another idea, whatever they taught whatever you did in the flesh did not affect your spirit and whatever you did in your spirit did not affect your flesh.
These were two separate dualities.
These were two separate things, so you could eat and drink and be sexually immoral.
You do anything you wanted it. Didn’t affect your spirit or you could deny everything and it didn’t affect your spirit.
So in Ephesus, a man named Sorenthis was the leader of this movement and he claimed to have special mystic experiences, as well as exalted knowledge which would elevate his students.
He taught that Jesus was Joseph’s.
Physical son and Jesus had God,’s, Spirit at baptism, and then it left him at the cross.
As I formerly explained So John writes three epistles three letters for a church that was facing new philosophies that were threatening to conquer Christianity and its basic doctrine.
And what is its basic doctrine? Well, its basic doctrine is that Christ was both equally and fully God and man simultaneously from birth to death.
He didn’t become the Divine Son of God at His circumcision eight days he was the Divine Son of God at conception, and He was the Divine Son of God on the cross when He gave up His Spirit.
Okay, that’s, the basic teaching of Christianity, that’s, the apostolic teaching against this perversion of the first century, the doctrine of Gnosticism All right, so the first epistle of John is keyed to his personal eyewitness experiences of the living breathing Jesus, not a spirit, not An apparition, I think that would be the logical place to start right.
These teachers, these Gnostic teachers, who, by the way, never met Jesus, never were in His presence.
They’re saying He was a. He was a ghost or He only had part of the Spirit.
So what do you think John’s going to begin? Well, he’s going, to begin with, his personal experiences, all right So like the Gospel of John, like his gospel, this letter emphasizes the reality of Jesus, but in philosophical terms, in philosophical terms, in other words, their philosophy, people their philosophers.
They’re, not theologians.
All right, They’re, trying to bring in Greek philosophy and merge it with Christian theology.
John is not a philosopher, he’s a theologian, but he speaks to them with words that philosophers can understand.
So John is fighting a false philosophical system that uses imagery and concepts to explain itself and convince other people, and so John responds by presenting the case for an actual living and divine being in philosophical and conceptual terms.
In other words, he uses terms.
Like light and love, okay, That you often wonder why is he always using that? Why he’s just this, you know speaking ordinary language while he’s, speaking in philosophical language, using philosophical terms.
This is why this epistle uses these ideas, light and love all the way through.
So John takes these abstract ideas and practically presents them so that the readers can apply the abstract concepts given to them by the real Jesus and apply them to their everyday lives. In other words, he’s not just responding to the false teachers by setting forth correct ideas and teachings about Christianity.
He’s also ministering to his flock, with words of encouragement about and from their faith.
They need to be encouraged because they’re getting a little confused here with these guys Now, the heretics’ effect on the church was to cause doubt about Jesus’existence, as well as their possibility of salvation through Jesus alone.
In other words, these teachers were saying you need something more yeah, yeah yeah, you’ve got.
Jesus will tell you who this Jesus is.
He was a ghost.
Orhe only had the Spirit for a time, but you’re missing something.
You need something more.
You need the secret knowledge of the Gnostic teachers Instead of simple faith in Jesus expressed in repentance and baptism.
Oh no, that wasn’t enough. Now you had to have something more.
You had to have the quote: you had to have the secret knowledge to assure yourself of your salvation.
Well, here’s, the problem with that type of thing.
If you latch on to that type of thinking, there’s never any end to what you need to feel saved, because every generation is going to come along with some new knowledge, some new secret, When we were studying the book of Acts, what was the secret? What was the new thing? What was the thing they needed to have circumcision? Remember the circumcision party.
Well, it’s not enough that you’re.
You know you’re, a Christian, you believe, do you repent and you were about and that’s not enough.
You also need to be circumcised because Jesus wasn’t you need to become a Jew.
You need to be circumcised, then you can be baptized.
It’s always the same game more stuff, So these teachers simply wanted spiritual power over the souls of the saints We sometimes can.’t understand that idea.
We can understand somebody who’s greedy or somebody who’s ruthless, who go in and rob a bank or we can understand somebody who’s ruthless for power and will you know, rise militarily and topple the government because they want to be in Charge we understand that we see that in our societies in our world, we need to understand. Some people desire to have power over the spirit of people they don’t care if they’re millionaires, they don’t care if you know, but they want very badly to be able to have power over others.
Spiritually that’s their evil desire – And this is what was going on here So with their teachings – they were seducing Christians and others who are turning to Christianity without their special teaching.
You couldn’t be saved, Let’s face it.
If I’ve got the secret ingredient that gets you saved.
What does that make me Well that makes me very important?
It makes me much more important than you.
Why do you think that in restoration, churches and Churches of Christ, why do you think the ministers are just our ministers? Why do you think we don’t wear robes or long things or we don’t have our hats or we don’t have collars? Why do you think none of you ever refer to us as Reverend or Most Reverend you for wondering why? That is the only title that I’ve ever been addressed to? That is a formal title and it’s usually by black brethren, is the title brother.
When I’m with my friends or black brethren that I know many of and all parts of the world when they say this is brother Mike they don’t mean I’m a brother in the Lord, they mean I’m a preacher.
That’s the only title that I’ve ever responded to Anyway.
But why do you think that is That we’ve done away with all of that in restoration churches Because it doesn’t matter that’s? Why? The only thing that matters is this and everybody:’s got one of these who are sitting out there and as I speak, you’re, thumbing through your listening and you’re saying: yeah. Okay, he’s right about that.
I, like his tie.
He’s right about it.
Oh, I’m, not sure about that.
I think I’m going to ask him.
I’m going to talk to brother Mike you said in verse 17.
Could you clarify that, for me, I’m only as good as the study that I put in, and everybody here has equal opportunity, both men and women, young and old, to challenge or to question or to share what it is that I’ve shared With you, the only right that I have to teach or that others Marty has to teach or others who have been given responsibilities?
Teach is because the elders have appointed us to that task.
I didn’t appoint myself.
That is one way that we guard against people who, have special authority, the only local authority in the church is the elders and the authority that they have is given to them by God, as a group and not as individuals. I’m a little off-text here, but the Spirit of this thing was there and still lives today.
We need to be able to recognize it So after demonstrating that Jesus was both man and God excuse me.
Let me go back here.
This technique has been used throughout history by various false teachers that’s, where I got off here and I’m sure Hal will fix that later.
No, he won’t fix it later: okay, for example, Roman Catholicism, set up a layer of the clergy, priests, bishops, and Pope between God and the believer.
I gave you this example a little more personal here in the Church of Christ just a moment ago, or modern sects, Java witnesses, or Mormons or Adventists, who insist on adherence to a particular doctrine or leader to be saved.
If you don’t buy into the Sabbath Day, you can’t be a Sabbatarian.
If you don’t buy into the doctrines of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, you’re, not one of them and you can’t be saved.
You’ve got to buy into their special doctrine, So cultism always adds a person, a doctrine, or a ritual to the gospel to make it effective.
Remember that anytime somebody says: oh, we need to add this over here. So John, as I was saying so John’s first epistle emphasizes once and for all that we receive salvation through Jesus Christ and only through Him, and we can be certain of it That’s going to be his contention here.
So after demonstrating that Jesus was both man and God John will go on to explain the three ways that we can be certain of our salvation and none of them have anything to do with secret knowledge or special teachers.
It’s available for everybody, So that’s what he’s going to do.
If you’re saying what is this epistle going to be about, This epistle is about being certain of your salvation that’s what this epistle is about. Okay, So the outline gives you that he’ll start by talking about the historical Jesus, the Jesus, the real person, as seen by John He’s going to talk about the Jesus that I know the Jesus that I experienced.
He’s, going to start.
There, The second part of the epistle, the certainty of salvation chapters 1, 5, all the way to chapter 5 12, And he says you can be certain in three different ways of your salvation.
The first way is by examining, if you are walking in the light or not that’s, one way to be certain that you are a saved person and under that first certainty he’ll describe or he’ll say you’ll recognize the impact Of grace on your behavior because it’ll motivate you to acknowledge sin without fear, So I’m getting a bit of ahead of myself here, but in that section John, there’s a rhetorical question that he’ll ask.
How do you know You can be certain that you’re saved if you’re walking in the light, and then he’ll ask another question: how do you know that you’re walking in the light? Well, first of all, you’ll be able to recognize that you’re a sinner and you need Christ without fear.
Secondly, the proof of your salvation will be demonstrated by the way you love the brethren.
Thirdly, the proof of your salvation will be seen by the way that you separate yourself from the world not separate yourself from your own body. And fourthly, the certainty of your salvation will be recognized in the fact that you’re walking in the light, and walking in the light will be demonstrated by the way that you adhere to the truth.
So the first way you can be certain is by examining the four different ways you walk in the light.
The second way that you can be certain is by how you are abiding in love, so he switches, remember, I said metaphysical terms, philosophical terms, so he starts with light and talks about light.
Now he’s going to talk about love which he equates to morality and the treatment of others and so on.
So you can be certain of your salvation by abiding in love the ethical proof of love, good conduct, the social proof of love, good deeds, theological proof of love, faith in Jesus, as God, the emotional proof of love, no fear, no fear and love of the brethren.
Thirdly, a third way you can be certain he’ll talk about chapters 5, 1, and 12, is a certainty by exercising faith, not by secret knowledge.
You know you’re saved because you’re a person who walks by faith you don’t need to be reassured.
Every single day by God that you’re okay, you know you’re, okay.
Why? Because he says it right here.
Every time I doubt a sin in the past is coming back to haunt me to accuse me that’s. What Satan does you know? He reaches it back in your life, he’ll pick something you know or that he knows that you’re vulnerable, for because I could be forgiven for a hundred sins, but there’s, usually one back there, that oh man, I just I wish I Could be sure I was okay with that one and Satan goes back to that one.
He’ll pick that one and he’ll throw it at you and it makes no rhyme or reason.
Intellectually.
You know you start asking yourself.
Am I? Okay? Am I really okay, The man, the woman of faith, will rely on this here to be sure that they’re okay, My way, November 1977.
I said I believe that Jesus is at home, God, Jim Metter immerse me in the waters of baptism for the forgiveness of all my sins.
I remember that date and I remember Acts 2 38, where Peter says, if you repent, if you believe in Jesus, you repent and you’re baptized, you’ll be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins, all of your sins, every one of them, even that one there that you know you’re, not sure if I reassure myself with the word that’s walking by faith And then in the end, his concluding remarks and so on.
So John’s gospel told the story of the transformation and the work of the cross.
His gospel did that his first epistle encourages his readers to continue believing that knowledge that they originally received from Christ and the Apostles doesn’t go with this new knowledge.
The secret knowledge hangs onto the old knowledge that you’ve got. There is no secret knowledge.
The truth has been revealed once and for all and for everyone to see that Jesus is the Christ and that everlasting life is through Him and Him only that’s the truth.
So this kind of knowledge that comes from the gospel transforms us from lost to saved, from condemned to forgiven, from sinners to saints from the kingdom of darkness, to the kingdom of light from slavery to freedom, slavery to sin rather than slavery, to freedom from empty spiritually to Filled with the Holy Spirit from temporal to eternal, these are all theological philosophical concepts, but they are real concepts that describe what has taken place in us through us by the power of Jesus Christ, the Divine Son of God, from birth to death through a resurrection.
So John’s writings tell us that we will one day leave our flesh, but we won’t leave our flesh through secret knowledge.
We’ll leave our flesh through faith in Jesus Christ, based on the knowledge of him in the gospel that’s.
How we leave the power of the flesh and then one day, thankfully, we will leave this flesh and be equipped with a new body that will be able to exist in harmony and the presence of God Himself.
What’s the end game of Christianity, Some people say going to heaven: yeah yeah.
What happens there? No, the end game of Christianity is that we die this fleshly body, which is falling apart.
Anyways is finally released from us and our spirit is now equipped with a new body, a new covering that we’re not quite sure what it’s like.
We know it’s like the angels and the reason we need a new body is that we need to be able to survive and exist in the same sphere. Where God is Moses, asked God can I look at your face? And God said no, you can’t because if you look at me you’ll die instantly, My own opinion and it’s.
Only an opinion is that if we were to see the face of God, we would see perfection and in seeing perfection we would see the chasm, the so great difference between Him and us.
We would simply shrivel up and die.
We’d melt, look at it that way, And so we need a new body to be able to be in his presence, comfortably joyfully forever And the gospel is.
What brings us eventually to that new body, All right, so the reading assignment is not very long.
One read first John: I will go through the text itself, but it’s always better for you.
If you’ve read it ahead of time and if there are things that you’re thinking about, you’ll be paying attention when I finally get them That’s.
Our first lesson in I John thank you very much.
.
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