Centrality of Jesus (1 John 1:1-4)

This letter was written towards the end of the first century by the apostle John, who by this time was the only surviving member of the apostles, the others having been martyred. Although the others had died, he is writing as their representative, which explains his use of the word ‘we’ in these verses because we can see that he is describing the ministry of the apostles and others as the first witnesses to Jesus and the witnesses who possessed his authority.

At the time of writing the letter, various wrong ideas were circulating about Jesus, even in the church, and among them was the claim that his humanity was not real. Various reasons can be suggested for this spread. One is that people were listening to ideas from outside the church, opinions from non-Christians as to who Jesus is. Another is that some were not listening to true explanations of Jesus that were being given in the church. A third is that the devil would be actively encouraging wrong ideas about Jesus, because that would be a means of causing great confusion. When we think of those three causes, we can see that they are not limited to the close of the first century.

 

Of course, the wrong idea about Jesus need not be the same in every period. It is very unlikely that you will meet a person today who advocates the particular error that was being taught back then in Asia Minor. But there are wrong teachings about Jesus that surface in one way or another and we need to be informed about them. For example, some ask, ‘Could Jesus have sinned?’ They accept that he did not sin, but they speculate about whether he could have sinned. Some may respond and say that it does not make any difference to our worship if we are wrong in our opinion. But it must make a difference if it is wrong because that would mean that the Holy Spirit has been grieved.

 

We don’t need to be that complex with a question. If we ask people, ‘Who do you think Jesus is?’ we would receive a variety of answers, some positive, others negative, with many of the positive ones falling far short of the truth about him. Some may say that he was a great teacher, but if that is all that they mean, they have a false view of him.

 

It is obvious that John treated the wrong views about Jesus as very serious. In various places in his letter he refers to the matters of assurance and other aspects of knowing whether or not his readers were true Christians. He makes clear that adopting the wrong ideas would mean that such a person was not a true Christian. That possibility should be enough by itself to cause us to want to know if we have correct ideas about Jesus. 

 

The indispensability of the life of Jesus

What would be the consequences for us if the humanity of Jesus is not real, that he was not a real man? Here are five, and no doubt there are more that could be mentioned. First, it would mean that Jesus is not our example regarding how to live for God. On numerous occasions in the New Testament, we are told that Jesus is our pattern. He himself said that he was our example when he washed the feet of the disciples in the upper room. Peter reminds his readers that Jesus gave us an example so that we should follow in his steps. Paul called the Philippians to model the example of humility that Jesus showed when he became a man. The reason why we are to imitate him is because he is the best example, and one crucial feature of him being so is that he was a real human.

 

Second, if Jesus had not become a real man, how could he have died on the cross? It is only a person with a physical body who can die. The central doctrine of our faith is that Jesus died on the cross in order to pay the penalty of our sins. At Calvary, he was physically nailed to the cross. There, in a mystery we cannot understand, he was punished in our place by his Father. But he was punished in his human nature. His soul was made an offering for sin. On him the vials of divine wrath were poured out after he had carried our sins in his own body to the tree. It was as man that he became aware of the absence of the Father.

 

Third, if Jesus had not lived a human life, what would be our standing in the presence of God as far as our justification is concerned? We are familiar with our doctrine that we need more than the death of Jesus in order to be justified. His death paid the penalty for our sins, but his life provided the obedience that is also required from us in order to have a righteousness before God. We would have no hope of being clothed in his righteousness if he had not been a real man and worked out this righteousness throughout his life.

 

Fourth, if Jesus had not been a real human, then it is pointless to speak about him as having been raised from the dead three days after his crucifixion. In order for there to be a real resurrection, there had to be a real death. On the third day, he rose as a man and emerged from the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, revealing that not only had he paid the penalty for sin but that he had also defeated the power of death. The One who stood in triumph in that garden was a real man, one who had physical appearances, who could speak to other humans, who later would eat with his disciples. But, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, if there is no resurrection of Jesus, then we are of most people to be pitied because we will have been deluded. A Jesus who only seemed human could not be a Saviour. We needed One who could both pay the debt of sin that we owed and defeat the power of death so that we could enter into the benefits of his resurrection.

 

Fifth, if Jesus is not a real man, there will not be a Day of Judgement at the end of history as we know it. Paul reminded the philosophers in Athens that God has appointed a day when the judgement of all will take place, and he also reminded them that the judge would not only be a divine being. He would also be human, and the proof of that reality was the resurrection. The judge on that great day will know what it is like to be a man when all humans stand before him waiting for his verdict. And we know that he can only pass one of two verdicts on all who will be gathered before him. It will be either forgiven or unforgiven.  

 

Those five reasons – his example, his dying, his providing a life of obedience, his resurrection from the dead and his role as Judge on the last day – inform us of the importance of affirming and defending the real humanity of Jesus. The heresy that John mentions would not have entered into the church if the people involved had refused to depart from what the apostles had taught about the person and work of Christ.

 

​The impression that Jesus made on the apostles

We have all met people who left their mark on our lives. Maybe they were famous people, or perhaps they were known only to a few. The impression was deepened when we discovered more about them, their origins, their family, their purpose in life. Six decades previously, John and the other apostles had met one who did all that to them and left them with the intense desire to tell others about him, even to the extent of spending the rest of their lives telling people all over the world about who he was, what he had said, and what he had done. What did they discover about him?

 

First, they discovered that Jesus was from the beginning (v. 1). Inevitably, we will ask, ‘beginning of what.’ John uses this phrase several times in his letter and they don’t all refer to the same moment. John uses a similar title at the commencement of his gospel, and it is likely that he has in mind the same idea of Jesus being there at the beginning of the universe. When that beginning commenced, Jesus was there. How do we describe someone who was there at the beginning? We use words like pre-existent to explain what we mean. John says that if we take the oldest matter that we can think about – the universe – we are not thinking about the oldest. Before all things, there is Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God. 

 

Second, they discovered that the Son of God was not alone in that existence he enjoyed before anything appeared as a result of the work of creation. Of course, they received that information from Jesus himself who told them that he had been with the Father eternally. It is not just that Jesus is older than the universe, it is that he never had a beginning. He is God, and since he is God, he is not only eternal, but possesses all other divine attributes.

 

Third, as just mentioned, they discovered that God is not a solitary person. Instead, they were told that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. John does not mention the Spirit here, but he does elsewhere. Here he refers to the Father and the Son, revealing an eternal relationship. They also discovered what was the possession of the Son – he had eternal life. The Father also had this life. How can we understand this possession of eternal life? Robert Candlish explained it in these words: ‘These names and descriptions of the Son undoubtedly refer, in the first instance, to his eternal relation to the Father; of whose nature he is the image, of whose will he is the expression, of whose life he is the partner and communicator.’ Yet, says John, we saw him walking beside us in Galilee, speaking to us in a variety of locations, eating with us at meals, and sharing our lives to such an extent that he and we spent nights together in a garden. 

 

How astonishing all this must have been to the apostles. We can try and imagine it by wondering what it would be like if a very important person came to live with us, who did not mind us observing him every moment of the day, who was totally transparent about himself as we shared life together, who was humble throughout it all without ever giving the slightest impression that he had for a moment forgotten who he was. Indeed on the most surprising of occasions he would remind them that he was the Son of God. Three of them had occasions when they saw him perform an astonishing miracle when raising a young girl from the dead, saw him shine as the sun on the Mount of Transfiguration, and saw him rolling about in agony on the ground in the Garden of Gethsemane. They had also seen him after he was risen from the dead and they saw him ascend into heaven. The apostles lived with Jesus day after day and we are not surprised at the way they took the message about him throughout the world.

 

Fourth, they discovered what the Possessors of life wanted to do with it. After all, the Father and the Son possess life to an infinite degree. The astonishing feature of their possession of life was that they wanted to give life to creatures. We see this taking place at the beginning when in the Garden of Eden God breathed life into Adam. But we know that we lost the possession of that life when Adam sinned after being tempted by the devil. For years, John and the other apostles had looked ahead and wondered when their lives would end. Everyone thinks about that at some stage in their lives. Yet they had met a man who told them that if they believed in him their lives would never end. He did not mean that their bodies would not die, but he did tell them that he was the resurrection and the life, and that if they believed in him they would have everlasting life. It all sounded so extraordinary. But they listened to him speaking about how he and the Father had planned this from eternity, that they in the mystery of their eternal interactions had purposed not only to have creatures with that level of life but also to have forgiven sinners possessing the gift of eternal life as a permanent gift.

 

It is not possible for us to include here references to the variety of ways by which Jesus indicated people could enjoy eternal life. John tells us here how the apostles experienced it – they listened to him, they watched him, they touched him. Their senses took in the incredible reality of who had come their way. The eternal Son had come into the world to speak to them about his life, to reveal his life, and to enable them to partake of his life even for evermore.

 

The intention of Jesus through the apostles (v. 3)

Jesus, in the Great Commission, had sent out his apostles to pass on his teaching to the disciples that they would make. He had been training them for this role for over three years. No doubt, there are many different ways of describing the purpose or the goal of all that teaching, all that discipleship that at times would have been puzzling to them. We know that a person receives training to order to fulfil a career. Sometimes the training involves issues that the learner cannot fully grasp when he begins. We can imagine a trainee lawyer or doctor looking at a shelf of books and being told that they need to know the contents in order to function as qualified persons. Their training should bring that about. What is the goal of Christian discipleship? What is the desired outcome for disciples? The answer is straightforward – it is fellowship.

 

In the Christian life, there are two levels of fellowship. One is horizontal, the other is vertical. The horizontal is the level between Christians and the vertical is the level between Christians and God. Although there are two levels, it does not mean that there are two different types. The reason why they will be the same type is that both are achieved by the work of the Holy Spirit who brings Christians together and who also enables Christians and God to be together. It is possible for Christians to meet and not have the kind of fellowship that John describes here. In order to know whether we have or not, all we have to do is ask if the Holy Spirit had anything to do with the topics we were sharing together.

 

John tells us that the fellowship his readers could have with him and his friends is fellowship that involved contact with the Father and the Son. The contact with the Father and the Son is distinct – we can see that from the way the preposition ‘with’ is used. The apostles had fellowship with the Father and with the Son. Although the Father and the Son are distinct, they need not be separate for fellowship to happen. At a basic level, we can have fellowship with both when we say to the Father, ‘Thank you, Father, for sending Jesus,’ and when we say to the Son, ‘Thank you, Jesus, that you came.’ We can have fellowship with the Father and with the Son about the doctrine of justification; we can think of the Father as justifying his people and we can think of Jesus as the righteousness of his people. We can have fellowship with the Father as we experience his chastisement and have fellowship with the Son knowing that it will yet contribute to our Christlikeness. And we can extend that dual contact into numerous areas of the Christian life.

 

The point is, of course, to have this twofold fellowship as often as is possible. It is possible to talk about fellowship rather than to talk to them about it. The way, I suppose, whereby we ensure their involvement is by prayer, to express our wishes and desires for contact through petitions to the Father and to the Son. For example, going back to the previous example of saying to the Father, ‘Thank you, Father, for sending Jesus,’ we could pray to the Father to enable us to appreciate in a deeper way that he sent his Son because he loved us. We can also pray to Jesus and ask him to help us understand that it was out of love that he came to our rescue. This is the goal of discipleship, to know the Father and the Son. It also happens to be the meaning of eternal life, as Jesus indicated in John 17.

 

The inevitable outcome (v. 4)

John informs his readers that he wanted something to come to him as a result of his letter. The something that he anticipated was joy. In one way, we can say that joy is usually the outcome of Christian activity. Obviously, there would be joy if the readers were prevented from being affected by wrong teaching. And there would be joy from shared fellowship because no doubt John and his readers would meet again and meet together with the Father and the Son. If we follow their example, we too will know the joy of the Lord in our hearts.