I wonder sometimes if the Church hasn’t become bored with Jesus. I mean, after all, there’s only so much we can know about Him; only so much praise, it seems, we can offer Him. And it’s tempting sometimes to create other messages, other goals, another focus besides this two thousand year old focus on the proclamation of the person of Jesus Christ. That’s what was happening in the Church during the time that John wrote this epistle. And it’s something that really hasn’t gone away. This belief (or teaching) that there must be something beyond Jesus, there must be something we can add to Him, in the first century that was called Gnosticism; a belief that Jesus was fine, but there was something beyond Him, a secret wisdom that I could teach you and that if you had this secret wisdom (and that’s what the word ’gnostic’ means – ’wisdom’ or ’gnosis’ – it means wisdom), if I could teach you this special, secret wisdom then you would be better off than you were just with the focus on Jesus. It’s kind of easy in our day too to get our focus off of the fundamental faith of and in Jesus Christ and instead to replace that old (and maybe we think somewhat worn out) truth with something new and fresh and alive – or so we think.
The book of 1 John is really a response to that heresy that came to be known as Gnosticism, the response to that misdirection or deviation from the path of Jesus onto some other thing. He responds in this book in a very positive way. He doesn’t talk that much about Gnosticism, only in kind of an oblique way in promoting and glorifying the centrality of Jesus Christ. In the process, he shows the shallowness of any truth that seeks to glorify something in addition to the truth revealed in Jesus.
Now these first four verses are very awkward in the Greek language. The main verb doesn’t really show up until verse 2 and actually in the NIV which I’m using they actually insert it here in verse 1, "This we proclaim concerning the word of life." That word ’proclaim’ really isn’t there. But the editors of the NIV put it there because it’s so awkward to leave it until further on. Some people can hardly make heads or tails of this, but one commentator I read called this language ’the language of ecstasy.’ John is so overwhelmed and taken with the person of Jesus Christ, who he’s talking about here without naming Him until verse three. He’s so taken with Him that he just kind of goes on and on. It is all one sentence in Greek from verse one to verse four, all one sentence. You know, of course, that the verses and the chapters weren’t added to the Bible for centuries after it was written. So, sometimes the verses kind of interfere or the "versification” interferes. In this case, it’s all one sentence. It’s somewhat like Paul did in Ephesians 1 when he’s so taken with the idea of being adopted by God through the person of Christ, and so he’s taken with the great riches, he goes on and on and on, verse after verse after verse, all one sentence in Greek.
So, how do we make heads or tails of this? You’ll notice the way John writes is different from the way Paul writes. Paul has a very logical, step by step approach. John is a little more random and he certainly is random in his language here in these first four verses. How do we understand them?
Well, one of the ways we make heads or tails is that there are three words that are repeating over and over and over again, and anyone who was a Hebrew, a Jew, and John certainly was; the way they would emphasize something was to repeat it over and over and over. They didn’t have a lot of superlatives like we do. They didn’t have a word for ’awesome’ or ’really cool’ or any of those kinds of phrases like we would use. They would just use the word again. John here in this passage is going to describe to us the great foundational majesty of the Lord Jesus Christ. This book telling us, "Don’t be fooled! Don’t be dragged in another direction. Focus on the reality of who you are because of who He is." There’s great security found in this book. There’s great joy. There’s great purpose, even found in these first four verses. Let’s look at them together and look at these three words that are so powerful.
The first word we want to look at is this word ’life.’ Jesus is Life. Jesus is presented here, in these first four verses, as life itself. It’s such a simple word, ’life.’ It’s easy to define, in terms of human beings. We see this on TV sometimes. If somebody thinks somebody is dead, he puts two fingers to the carotid artery. "I can feel the pulse. They’re alive." Or sometimes they go down to the wrist for the pulse or sometimes they put them on a machine to measure brain waves, some way to tell them if a person is alive. Life may seems simple but it’s an incredibly complex force. When you look at those TV shows or the news, when you find out a person has died, in spite of the best efforts on the part of doctors and technicians to keep that person alive, they died. With all of our technology, we cannot sustain life. The children of Ted Williams can remove his head from his body after he was dead and put his head into a cryonics lab up in Scottsdale hoping that someday they can cure his disease and reattach it, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea Taking a person’s head off is very serious. Life is an incredibly complex thing. Not only can we not sustain it, in spite of all our technology, but we can’t create it either.
In my lifetime, people have either said that they have created life or that they have found life somewhere else. Back in the fifties, there was some guy named Miller who said, "I created life in the lab." He got a bunch of stuff together and put electricity and stuff and sooner or later he thought he created life. But later on it was discovered that what he thought was life was just stuff that he had had there in the first place. A couple of years ago the Voyager went to Mars and picked up some rocks. They took pictures of these rocks and they looked like little worms in those rocks. They thought, "Oh, we’ve found life." Well, it was just something that looked like a little worm. Apparently one of the scientists wives saw the picture lying on their kitchen table and said, “That looks like a worm” It wasn’t life, never had been life. Such claims have always proven to be premature and ultimately false. Frankly, life is such an incredibly complex process that the honest scientists recognize that we cannot understand it, much less create it.
One man who is such a person like this… Michael Denton, who is an atheist, an evolutionist, wrote the book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis in which he says this, "Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive." (pp. 249-250) Life is more than taking someone in a Frankensteinesque manner, putting him on a table, sewing parts on him and plugging in the juice. Life is a lot more than that. Denton goes on to say, "Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on earth today, which is bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up all together of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world." (p250)
Life is tough. We can’t even understand how it works. The electron microscope has enabled us to see deeper into the machinery of life and find out that it wasn’t the simple air-filled ping pong ball that Darwin thought it was when he considered the cell, but an amazingly complex molecular machine. Life is beyond us, a riddle too complex to unravel and it had to start somewhere, had to have a cause. Nothing that complex happens by chance. Denton goes on, "Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which a functional protein or gene as complex beyond our creative capacities, a reality in which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of Man alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life? Even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy. We feel humbled as Neolithic man would have in the presence of twentieth century technology." (p342) Life is an amazingly complex creation. And you know what? The life that I’m talking about here that is so complex is nothing compared to the complexity of spiritual life. Physical life is the most basic. Physical life is the least complex. This physical life that we live, that we call life, is only the meager leftovers of the Fall. The real life, real life, God’s life, spiritual life – we died to that back when Adam and Eve thought they were smarter than God and took a bite of that fruit. We are doomed to die. We began a physical life here and this wonderfully complex molecular machinery is working and we’re doing things and we’re eating and we’re living. But the fact is is that it’s just a dance of death. And Satan has taken that and focused on it and focused on the physical parts of it and all of the focus and all of the attention given to satisfy physical life.
Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs said during the playoffs (They had a commercial on. All the Cubs were breaking our hearts yet again. And I have to imagine, even though I’ve said from this pulpit before that I’m no longer a Cubs fan, that I was delivered by the Diamondbacks, I was sucked back in for a brief moment, only to find once again….); Sammy Sosa in this commercial says, "I live for this!" I guess they made that commercial before they lost the National League Championship Series. "I live for this!" And other people would say, "I live for this! I live for making money. I live for driving a car. I live for sex. I live for money." You know what those things are? Those are the poor excuses and substitutes for life that Satan has created, taken the good gifts of God and twisting them and saying, "This is life. This is life." But the substitute, just like the failed experiments to create life, have always been proven to be wrong. They aren’t real. They have no lasting power. They aren’t eternal in nature. They’re just the stench of death with some Glade sprayed on them to make them smell better, lit up with all kinds of lights to make them appear to be life.
"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched," and writing from the lips of the pen of John, that’s Jesus, "this we proclaim concerning the word of life." "That which was from the beginning…" Jesus was never given life. He had life. He is the source of life. And if we don’t have Jesus, we don’t have life. Jesus had life from the beginning. "The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life only to take it up again. No one takes it from Me." "My life is not something you can take," Jesus says, "But I lay it down on my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it up again. This command I have received from my Father." "I am life. And everything outside of Me may look like life, but it’s death." Jesus said, "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father [No one reconnects to the Life-source] except through Me." That’s the point that John is talking about here at the end of verse 1, "The word of life."
We may say, "Okay, we’ll pretend that everything else is life. All the things that we see, all the manifestations of life that we see around here, let’s agree with the world that those things are really life." Would that be a favor to the world, to agree? "Yeah, there’s something. There’s all kinds of things beyond Jesus. All kinds of ways to God. There’s all kinds of ways to experience life." We could say that, but we would be lying and giving people false hope in something that can never satisfy. Life is not found in the baubles of this world, as real as they may seem to be. There are days when that Mercedes Benz seems so much more real than Jesus, aren’t there? When that big number at the bottom of your bank statement seems so, when that house seems so much more real than Jesus, when that job seems so much more real, so much more here. But we have the word of men who heard Jesus, who saw Him with their eyes, who have examined Him and who have touched Him with their hands and they say He is life. Jesus is life. This is a fundamental statement of truth and what you do with that fundamental statement of truth will make the difference between living and dying, not only now but for eternity. A person who rejects the truth about Jesus Christ will spend eternity dying and wishing he could die, but he can’t.
Jesus is the life. Jesus is more than the life. Jesus is the authoritative Word, the Word. "This we proclaim concerning the word [the ’logos’] of life." That word ’logos’ is a very powerful word throughout Scripture. You find it in John 1:1, "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God." It means ’a divine revelation, an assertion, or a declaration.’ It is the official, authoritative word.
A couple of years ago Jan and I, by the grace of my parents, took a trip to Cancun. We were going to stay down there a week, and it was wonderful. We flew down on a charter. Have you ever flown on a charter plane? It can be a little more interesting, different than a regular commercial flight. And on the way back, that difference manifested itself. Apparently, we had a head wind, which they never talk about that on America West, "Oh, we’ve got a head wind." The captain half way through and says, "Folks, we have to land in Juarez for gas." Wow. Big jet. "We’re going to land in Juarez for gas." I don’t know if any of you have been in the airport at Juarez, but it’s a very interesting little airport. Probably one runway. So we landed in Juarez and they ran out the hose and filled up our tanks and away we went. Well, when we got to Phoenix and landed at Sky Harbor, we taxied over toward the terminal and we sat there and we sat there and we sat there and you know it was hot. And the air conditioning doesn’t work as well on the planes when they’re sitting on the ground. Have you noticed that? Maybe they have the windows closed or something. And it was getting hotter and hotter and Jan said, "I’m feeling kind of sick." And what are you going to do? There’s a lot of grumbling and rumbling going on aboard the plane and finally there’s those words you love to hear, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking." And you know, when you hear that don’t you feel better already? "We’re going down." No, he says, "This is the captain speaking." When you’re sitting there wondering what’s going on and you’ve been sitting there on the tarmac for forty-five minutes, an hour, "Why are we here? What’s going on?" And it’s nice to have the authoritative word from on high. The captain came on and said, "Folks, because we landed in Juarez for gas, they gave away our gate to somebody else who came in. So, we have to wait until there’s a gate available." And we sat there and we sat there. But at least we knew. Instead of just sitting there speculating with each other as to what was going on, we knew that we were going to be sitting there until there was a gate open for us." It’s nice to know.
We are a fallen race, living in the middle of ignorance, and ignorance breeds speculation, trying to figure out, "What are we going to do? What’s going on? What’s our condition? What can we do about it? What are the answers?" And people, of course, propose all kinds of answers for the human dilemma. Maybe it’s communism. Maybe it’s socialism. Maybe it’s a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage and two TVs in every bedroom. We come up with all kinds of things. Maybe it’s better health care. Maybe if we could only solve the AIDS epidemic. Maybe if we could deal with all the discrimination that’s going on. We could come up with something to solve our problem. And into this mass of ignorance, verse 2, "The life appeared." Now that word ’appeared’ is an interesting one because it’s not just ’showed up.’ The word means, ’the revelation of someone’s true character.’ "Ah, now I really know who you are. I’ve seen something,. something that manifested to me and I really understand you now."
If you go into a courtroom for a criminal trial or you watch a criminal trial on TV, you notice that there’s two people in the courtroom seeking to manifest something about the Defendant. There’s a defense lawyer who has dressed up his client in a nice suit and a tie, got a haircut, shaved him, washed his face. They don’t show up for trial in pink underwear that Sheriff Joe would have them come, maybe, and that jumpsuit that says “Maricopa County Inmate” across their back. They come looking nice. And then the defense attorney, during the trial, tries to manifest his client as a law-abiding, peace-loving, gentle person. On the opposite side is, of course, the prosecutor. And his purpose is to remind the people who are on the jury what he believes to be the nature, what the evidence says about the nature of this person. He’s trying to manifest his true character while the defense attorney seeks to manifest what he wants people to believe is the true character of that man or woman.
Jesus came, was manifested and in flesh and blood was the authoritative declaration of God’s plan, purpose and nature. He came as one who was capable of propitiating the wrath of God. Propitiating means ’to satisfy an angered deity.’ Jesus came as one who was capable of propitiating God, something no one else could do, by offering His life in the place of ours. Jesus Christ came as one who is capable of reconciling us to our offended Father through the complete identification with us, "became a man, tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin." And He was capable of giving us life through His own powerful resurrection. Here’s the Word from God who is the Word of God. And verses 1 and 2 make it clear that He was more than an idea, but was a living, breathing, bleeding, visible reality, touched and seen and heard by tens of thousands of people. And so powerfully life-changing, so much that He had life within Himself, that those He contacted and those who were transformed by relationship with Him through faith became people who were willing to bear disgrace, dispersion and even death to testify concerning who He was. He was the Word. And they went to their deaths claiming that He was the authoritative word from the cockpit, that He was the statement of God and not just another foolish speculation of man. And in comparison to that authoritative word, the world will continually throw at us better ways, improvements. But there is no improvement on Jesus.
Some people ask us to exchange the message of Jesus Christ for a popular message that is more acceptable to the masses, but to do so would be to doom the masses, to continue death. Only Jesus holds the key to life because He is life. He died to give us life.
Finally, Jesus is the only Reconciler. Jesus is the Life, Jesus is the authoritative Word, and Jesus is the only reconciler of men to God. It’s an interesting word. It shows up here in verse 3. "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that [and that’s for the purpose] that you may have fellowship with us." That word ’fellowship’ is the Greek word ’koinonia’ which is more than just ’let’s get together and have a burger.’ It’s used in some Greek, not in the Bible, but in other Greek documents to define marriage. It is a powerful, close communion and fellowship with a great deal in common.
Now it seems funny in verse 3, "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us." Now, big deal! Why do we want to have fellowship with John. I mean, good grief, the guy’s been dead for almost two thousand years. But there’s something beyond that. Look at the rest of verse 3, "And our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ." Something has changed. Something has changed dramatically because if John says he and the Apostles have fellowship with God and with Jesus and he tells us the Gospel so that we might have fellowship with John and the Apostles, what does that mean? That means we have the same fellowship with God that the Apostles do. The appearing of the Word of Life has caused a fundamental transformation among those who believe and now proclaim the truth.
Let’s go back to this idea of life for just a minute. When we are dead we are separated from what we call life, right? I mean, a person dies and we use phrases like, "Well, they’re gone. They’re not coming back. They’ve passed away." And on TV sometimes there’ll be a guy who comes up and says, "I can talk to them still. I can still talk to your father, your mother, your brother." He presents himself as some kind of a medium and even that, in the middle of all that fakery and trickery that they do to try to promote this idea, they’re still saying, they’re still admitting that there’s this great canyon, chasm that exists between the living and the dead that you need them to be a channel so a person can get across that. Even then, they admit that there’s a great distance between those too.
We are angered in the election when we find out that in Cook County, Illinois dead people vote. And they vote sometimes many times. Now they used to when Mayor Daly Sr. was the mayor. Or we’re puzzled when we find out that someone has kept their spouse in a freezer up in Prescott for eight years because we think the living and the dead are in two separate realms, and they are.
The fact that we have fellowship with God means something. It means we’re no longer dead. It means what we used to be – living in death – is no longer the reality. The reality is that we have now fellowship with God. Something has changed. Something dramatic has changed that no other force or person in the world can even come close to achieving. That is, we have been resurrected. We have gone from death to life. And that’s a miracle. And only the Creator and Source of life can do that. That was one of the characteristic things about Jesus’ ministry. He was One who could bring the dead back to life. John says about Jesus in 1 John 5:12, "This is the testimony: God has given us eternal life and this life is in His Son." And then these powerful words, "He who has the Son has life. He who does not have the Son, does not have life." You can’t say it any more plainly than that. If you are connected to Jesus Christ by faith and have now have that wonderful fellowship, that koinonia with Him, that reconciled relationship, you are alive. The life of Christ, which used to stop at your doorstep, has now come in and changed you. But the opposite is also true. That if you have held Jesus away by disbelief, by refusal, by rejection, you may think you’re living, but you’re dying. "Does not have life." You may have something that looks like life. You may have something that everybody would like to have, it looks so cool – money and power and fame and clothes and a good physique and all those kinds of things, but that’s not life. It’s just a coat of white wash. As Jesus said to the Pharisees, "You’re white-washed sepulchers, full of dead men’s bones." It’s a very powerful statement that John makes.
This life-changing relationship goes beyond just us and God. The fellowship is with the Apostles and with every person who has put their faith and trust in Christ and who is now partaking of life. Every one of those people have taken on this new identity and are now living, and there is a great joy in this fellowship of the living. But it’s not just for us. Look what John writes here in verse four, "We write this to make our joy complete." In other words, it’s not enough just to say, "I’ve got life. Isn’t it wonderful?" But the believer is compelled, now that he has that life in him, to go and share that life with other people. If we had a cure for cancer, would we be as silent about it as we are about the cure for eternal death? If we had the cure for cancer and we kept it a secret, we would be vilified and justly so, worse than the guy who interfered with the foul pop-up in game six of the National League Championship Series who’ve we’ve all heard about. And yet we do have the cure. And John says, "I’m writing this to make my joy complete" It’s incomplete to receive the life of God and say, "Great. Now I’ve got life. I’m going to heaven. I’m done. I’m just going to sit here and have a joy party, a life party all to myself. Or maybe I’ll share that joy with others who also have it." John’s joy wasn’t complete until he testified the full witness to the truth of Jesus Christ. John was a proclaimer of truth of Jesus Christ, one who pointed the way to real life so that the fellowship of the believers would grow. He was rescuing people from death because he had the cure, or at least he knew who had the cure and could point people to Him.
1 John is a very black and white book. The passage that we looked at from 1 John 5, "He who has the Son has life. He who does not have the Son does not have life," is very characteristic of John and his writing. But what he’s describing is really the difference between life and death, between darkness and light. There really is no grey in John because there is no grey. You’re either dead or you’re alive. You’re either dead or you’re alive. We have a great message. We have a great message and it’s easy in our day and age to look and to destroy the message with a focus on other things. The message that will change peoples lives, that will give people life, the authoritative Word is that Jesus is the only reconciler. Don’t be fooled by a substitute, even if that substitute looks good. Maybe it’s good works. Maybe it’s church attendance. There’s no substitute for the reality of life found in the Lord Jesus Christ.
