Eyes on the Prize
1 John 2:15-27
(Two brief things before today’s post. A reminder that there may be reduced posts over Dec-Jan, and secondly if you thought the Let’s Eat Together shirts were a bit pricey, stay tuned because we have an update coming)
Part 4 of our series in 1 John:
2:15 Do not prize the World; don’t prize things in the World. If someone prizes the World, prizing the Father is not in them: 16 because, every thing that is in the world – what the flesh desires, what the eye craves, and the swagger of one’s worldly possessions – is not from the Father but from the World. 17 and the World is passing by, its desire too elapses; but the person performing God’s will, remains forever.
18 Children – it’s the last hour. And, just like you’ve heard that a Christ-opposer is coming, even now many Christ-opposers have turned up – which is how we know that it’s the last hour. 19 They came ‘from us’ but they were not ‘of us’: if they had been ‘of us’, they would have remained with us; but this happened to make clear that not all are ‘of us’. 20 You also have an ‘anointing’ from the Holy One and know all things. 21 I didn’t write to you because you don’t know the Truth, but because you do know it, and because every false thing is not from the Truth. 22 Who is the false one, if not the one denying, saying that Jesus is not the Christ? This person is the Christ-opposer, the one denying the Father and the Son. 23 Each person that denies the Son, also does not have the Father; the person confessing the Son, has the Father also.
24 You all: let that which you heard from the start, remain in you. If what you heard from the start remains in you, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father. 25 And this is the promise which he himself promised us: Life Eternal.
26 I wrote you these things about those deceiving you. 27 And you – the anointing which you got from him, remains in you, and you have no need that someone should instruct you; but as his anointing instructs you about all things, and is true, and is not false, and just as it instructed you, remain in him.1
The World v the Father (15-17)
I think one of the things that helps to understand John’s writing is to just recognise that he tends to seize upon certain key words and concepts, and then uses them repeatedly to lay out a group of thoughts. So, whereas earlier in this chapter it’s love v hate2, in these three verses it’s Father v World.
The other thing that I think is helpful to keep in mind is the way that John uses some of his of/from language. It’s a little hard to maintain it in English, and it’s sometimes a little ambiguous in the Greek, but for example when John says something is ‘from the Father/World’, he is saying something like, ‘this its origin and so also it is characterised by that origin.’
So, our opening dichotomy here is simple – you cannot prize3 the Father and the World. It’s one or the other. It’s John’s version of Jesus’ you cannot serve two masters. And the World means also the things ‘in the World’. In particular, we get this lovely threefold expression – what the flesh desires, what the eye craves, and the braggadocio of one’s worldly possessions – which sums up the rat race in so many words. Working backwards, this is the swagger of looking at your bank balance, your real estate, your trophy spouse, your hot bod, your swish clothes, your designer watches, your overseas holidays, your connections to the rich and famous, all those things are vain and empty boasting, and if you brag about these, if you prize these, these are worldly, not divine. So too when we don’t boast in these things, but we crave them, looking with greedy, lustful, capacious eyes to gain all such things, and feeling the same want in our bodies.
For John, whenever he uses ‘World’ he means something like ‘humanity taken as a whole, in opposition to God’, but he also means ‘this universe as it is’. That overlap helps to understand that the World is transient. It’s passing by and passing away. To quote Colin Buchanan, “it’s all gonna fade away”. What remains? What lasts? The person that does God’s will. What is that will? We’ve already heard it – to love one another as Christ loved us, as the expression of repentance and faith in Jesus Messiah.
Christ Opposers (18-23)
We don’t really know who John is writing to in this letter, or exactly their situation and who these people mentioned here are, and so we can only go so far in piecing together a picture of the situation. Some people construct elaborate (and confident!) accounts of what they think is happening, but I am a more cautious reader.
What seems clear enough is that a group of people have ‘left’ – either spatially or figuratively – and in doing so they’ve violated the unity they had with John and his community. But more than that, these people actually aren’t “from” John at all (even, perhaps, if they claim that they are?). How do we know this? John tells us – they deny that Jesus is the Christ. To deny Jesus the Son is to deny God the Father. (which is pretty much what John 5.23 says)
John has a greater confidence about his addressees. They have an ‘anointing’, that seems to mean here a spiritual gift, which is from the Holy (Spirit?), and they know the Truth. So, John both assumes and appeals at the same time, they should be able to discern this false teaching (more on which, later in the letter).
Stick to what you heard (24-27)
The thing that strikes me most in these verses is the ‘remain’ language, so reminiscent of John 15 and recurring in the subsequent chapters. There’s no vine language here, but the call to remain here is a call to remain in the original message, the confession of the gospel. Remaining in that is the means by which one remains in communion with the Father and Son (see John 16 and 17). It is also the way to safeguard against this false-teaching.
If the first half of this chapter spoke in stark terms of the necessity of moral transformation as a fruit of the gospel in believers’ lives, this second half speaks with confident conviction of the need to remain in “doctrinal pristinity”, adhering to the gospel which we first heard, which the apostles first preached as eye-witnesses, of the death and resurrection of the Son of God. Discern truth, reject falsehood, remain in God.
Or “it”.
And I haven’t forgotten my promise to come back and discuss hate.
This is another way to translate ‘love’, and I like it because it brings out something that’s easy to get washed away in always using ‘love’.