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    1, 2 & 3 John
    1, 2 & 3 John
    1, 2 & 3 John
    Ebook155 pages2 hours

    1, 2 & 3 John

    By The Navigators

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    About this ebook

    Over 3 million LifeChange studies sold

    See Who God Is and What Love Is
    Who is God? What is love? People have asked these questions for thousands of years, and they were asking them in John’s day too. Christians like John believed the answers were found in Jesus, but some so-called believers were leading people astray, questioning Jesus’ very identity. John wrote these letters to the churches he loved in order to keep them straight. With conviction, confidence, and clarity, John presents a compelling picture of Jesus—so we see clearly who God is and what love is.

    LifeChange
    LifeChange Bible studies will help you grow in Christlikeness through a life-changing encounter with God’s Word. Filled with a wealth of ideas for going deeper so you can return to this study again and again.

    Features
    • Cover the books of 1, 2 & 3 John in 14 lessons
    • Equip yourself to lead a Bible study
    • Imagine the Bible’s historical world
    • Study word origins and definitions
    • Explore thoughtful questions on key themes
    • Go deeper with optional projects
    • Add your notes with extra space and wide margins
    • Find the flexibility to fit the time you have
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTyndale House Publishers
    Release dateJun 5, 2018
    ISBN9781641580427
    1, 2 & 3 John

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      Book preview

      1, 2 & 3 John - The Navigators

      INTRODUCTION

      Map of the Roman Empire

      Map showing the area around the Mediterranean Sea. The map indicates Rome in the northwest and Jerusalem in the southeast. The nation of Syria is north of Jerusalem. Smyrna and Ephesus are cities near the western coast of modern day Turkey. Further inland in a line from northwest to southeast are the cities Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea, and Colosse.

      The other apostles were dead, but John remained—the last living intimate friend of Jesus. The aged apostle was living in Ephesus, a port city Paul first evangelized four decades earlier. John regarded the Christians in every town within a hundred miles as his personal responsibility, and now a clique of pseudo-Christian teachers was wreaking confusion in John’s flock. His response was a letter sent to each church in the province of Asia, the letter we call 1 John.

      Timeline of John’s Ministry

      (All dates are approximate)

      John

      On page 9 is a likely reconstruction of what prompted the writing of 1 John.[1] John probably wrote this epistle around

      AD

      90, sixty years after Jesus’ crucifixion and perhaps twenty-five after Paul’s and Peter’s deaths.

      During Jesus’ lifetime, John was one of the three disciples closest to Him (see Luke 8:51; 9:28). When Jesus died, He entrusted His mother to John’s care (see John 19:26-27). In his gospel, John called himself the disciple whom Jesus loved (John 13:23).

      Popular mythology has sometimes painted John as a kindly old saint, like Santa Claus. Kind he may have been to his flock, but he had another face. Mark tells us that John and his brother James were known as the sons of thunder (Mark 3:17). They once offered to call down fire from heaven upon some Samaritans who snubbed Jesus (see Luke 9:51-56). Jesus rebuked this zeal, but we can sense a sanctified son of thunder behind many passages of 1 John (see 1:6; 2:4,22; 3:9,18; 4:5-6,20; 5:10).

      When Paul visited Jerusalem around

      AD

      50, John was still living there (see Galatians 2:9). But in

      AD

      70 the Roman armies demolished Jerusalem after crushing a Jewish revolt. The Christians fled. John went to Ephesus, where he became the thriving church’s most venerable elder. By the time he wrote the fourth gospel and his epistles, John was renowned throughout Asia, for he apparently traveled and preached frequently.[2]

      In the

      AD

      70s and 80s, persecution of Christians was a small-scale affair—a brawl here, a little job discrimination there, and malicious gossip nearly everywhere. But about

      AD

      95, Emperor Domitian took a dislike to Christianity, which many Romans considered a pernicious superstition. As one of its founders, John was exiled to the island of Patmos, where he beheld the visions recorded in the book of Revelation. When Domitian died in

      AD

      96, John returned to Ephesus and apparently died peacefully around

      AD

      100. He probably wrote his gospel and epistles five or ten years before his Patmos sojourn.[3]

      Syncretism

      If persecution was only a minor irritant for the churches of Asia in

      AD

      90, heresy was a major threat. The Roman province of Asia, part of what is now called Asia Minor or Turkey (see the map on page 9), was a cultural melting pot. Greek conquerors had brought their language, philosophy, art, and religion from the west, while immigrants from Egypt, Persia, and Syria were carrying their customs from the east and mixing them with whatever ancient ways still lingered in Asia. Few people judged it necessary to hold one school of thought rigorously. There were many roads to truth, and a man took what he liked from each—a pinch of Plato, a dash of Persian dualism, and one’s ancestral cult for tradition’s sake. Modern scholars call this mixing of Greek and Oriental culture syncretism; it was pluralism taken to extremes.

      In this environment, Jews and Christians were considered narrow-minded and impious for paying homage to just one God. Most people acknowledged hundreds and favored several deities. Some hedged their bets by joining one or more mystery cults—groups with secret rites of initiation that promised encounters with the divine and bliss in the afterlife. There were sects that mixed Judaism with Plato or astrology or secret revelation. Thus, it was inevitable that someone would try to add Christianity to a Greek-Persian-occult casserole and challenge the apostles’ gospel.

      Fifty years after John’s death these semi-Christian hybrids were as common and various as roses, but the seeds were planted in John’s lifetime. Many of the full-blown systems of the second century

      AD

      are grouped under the label Gnosticism (from the Greek gnosis, meaning knowledge) because they all offered some secret knowledge by which a person could be saved. This knowledge was not available through study, but only through revelation from a higher plane.[4] Gnosticism is a religion of saving knowledge, and the knowledge is essentially self-knowledge, recognition of the divine element which constitutes the true self.[5]

      Gnostics believe that matter is evil and spirit is good. Therefore, the world and the human body are also evil. They were created not by the Absolute (who is perfect), but by a lesser, malevolent spirit. We humans were all originally sublime spirit beings, but through no fault of our own we became imprisoned in physical bodies in this material world, ignorant of our lost bliss. Our only hope is for someone to redeem us by bringing that forgotten knowledge of our true natures. When a person learns what he was, what he is, and what he can be, "that knowledge in itself becomes his

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