I John Sermon Series
ELITIST CHRISTIANITY
Introduction and I John 1:1-4
Pastor Dean Johnson, Lake Pointe Bible Church, 1-11-04
INTRODUCTION
What is now called “The Church” was not yet 50 years old when a rather disturbing and even dangerous teaching began to creep in among Christians. The erroneous teaching could be traced back to Greek philosophers such as Plato, who taught this: SLIDE: There are two distinct realms of reality:
MATTER: there is the realm of physical matter, the physical world of stuff, which you can see and touch, where you currently live.
SPIRITUAL: And then there is the realm of spirit, a higher world of ideas and thought and spirit, which you cannot see or touch.
TWO REALMS ARE NOT EQUAL
However, these two realms of reality are not equal in value and authenticity and quality, the Greek philosophers would say. The truth is, physical matter is inferior, deficient, even evil. It is a perversion, a cumbersome distortion of reality. The physical imprisons the spiritual. Your goal in life, taught the Greek philosophers, must be to escape this physical prison, and to attain the higher world of concepts and spirit and knowledge, understanding.
NOT COMPLETELY INCOMPATIBLE WITH CHRISTIANITY
Now in among this Greek teaching came Christianity, which taught that there is in fact one God, who is spirit, and he sent his son to earth to somehow lead those sinful humans back to God. This basic understanding of Christianity was not completely incompatible with Greek dualism.
SLIDE: And so those who fancied an interest in both Greek philosophy and Christianity began to search for, and even create a belief system which more suitably coalesced Greek and Christian understandings of reality. This belief system became known as…Gnosticism.
5 GNOSTIC ERRORS INFLUENCING CHRISTIANITY
Gnosticism introduced five errors into Christianity:
1. Man’s body, which is matter, is therefore evil. (Evil does not exist because of sin and wrong moral choices we make. It is simply because we have physical bodies. And sin doesn’t permeate our entire being--our hearts and minds--it is limited to the physical.) This is to be contrasted with God, who is wholly spirit, and is therefore good. (God is not good because he is a morally good being. He is good solely because he is pure spirit.)
2. Salvation is the escape from the body, achieved not by faith in a savior, but by attainment of special spiritual knowledge (or gnosis), by becoming an enlightened, clever, intellectual thinker. In Greek culture the most admired person was not the politician or athlete but the philosopher. And in Christianity the most admired person would be the intellectual who could discuss spiritual ideas on a higher level than anyone else.
PROBLEM: CHRIST’S HUMAN BODY
However, there was the issue with the Christian teaching that the Son of God had come to earth and taken on a human body. This could not be, because a body is evil. There must be some other explanation.
3. Christ’s true humanity is denied. If matter is evil, there’s no way God himself could have taken on a physical body. This denial took on one of two approaches:
A. Docetism (from Dokeo, “to seem”) He only seemed to have a body.
B. Cerinthianism, after Cerinthus, who taught that the divine “Christ” joined the physical “Jesus” at baptism, (and God pronounced “This now is my beloved son…”). But the divine Christ left the physical Jesus just before he died, causing Jesus to cry out “My God, My God, (or “my god part, my god part“) why have you forsaken me?”
4. Since the body is evil, it is to be treated harshly. (Paul dealt with this in Col. 2:21-23 p.1166). Mistreating your body is not honoring to God, and it is not the way to achieve holiness. St. Francis did this.
5. Dualism leads to moral liberty and abandonment. Since matter--and not the breaking of God’s laws--was considered evil, you could do anything you wanted in your body. Wild, physical living has no moral consequence.
JOHN WRITES
Can you see how this philosophy was appealing, and a dangerous distortion of true Christianity--like so many new, appealing religious trends and approaches today? Somebody authoritative had to confront Gnosticism. So someone did--the most authoritative Christian alive, the Apostle John, the last living disciple of Jesus at the time. He writes a letter, to be circulated among Christians. We call the letter the First Epistle or Letter of John, or “First John” for short. John had already written The Gospel of John, his book about the life of Jesus. Now he will write three letters: First, Second, and Third John, and five years later he will write a book we call The Apocalypse, or The Revelation.
HISTORICAL DATA
Because this is our first day of a series on The First Letter of John, before we read what John had to say, let me just mention some historical data.
AUTHOR: John, the son of Zebedee. Originally a fisherman. “The disciple whom Jesus loved.” Part of Jesus inner circle. (Along with Peter and James)
Having said this, I should mention that no where in the letter does John give his name. But all of the church fathers understood John as the letter’s author, including Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen. No one other than John was ever suggested as the author. In addition, the style and vocabulary of the letter is very similar to that of the gospel of John.
THE RECIPIENTS: Believers. (2:12, p.1207 3:1, 5:13). But the letter does not indicate who they were or where they lived, and no one is mentioned by name. A circular letter. Early Christian writers place John in Ephesus during most of his later years. The earliest confirmed use of I John is in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) where Ephesus is located. Clement of Alexandria indicated that John ministered in various churches scattered throughout Asia Minor. We can assume, then, that John wrote this letter from Ephesus, to be read by all the churches in the area.
DATE: A.D. 85-95.
PURPOSES:
1. That we may have fellowship (I John 1:3)
2. That we may have joy (I John 1:4)
3. That we may not sin (I John 2:1)
4. That we may not be deceived (I John 2:26)
5. That we may know we are saved (I John 5:13)
READ I JOHN 1:1-4
V1 We’ve seen Jesus, he had a physical body.
V2 Who is this “we”? I believe it is the apostles. All except John are dead, but he speaks of the group. This special group of 12 was called to testify. They were given a special place in history to testify to the fact of Jesus life, teaching, and resurrection. Now they are dead, but their testimony lives on in the Scripture they wrote.
They were like witnesses in a court trial.
V3 We proclaim it to you. Its not elitist, its not secret or hidden. The truth has appeared (KJV: manifested). John says “I proclaim it to everyone who will listen, because we want them in our fellowship, to be among the number of the redeemed. Don’t you dare keep it quiet or hide it from anyone.”
CONCLUSION: APPLICATIONS FOR US TODAY
Gnosticism isn’t much of a problem today. But there are some extremely important lessons for us to learn from I John.
1. Christianity is not to be elitist, exclusive discriminatory, selective, superior for “higher-ups” arrogant. But sometimes we do see this among Christians, this attitude of “I’ve got more Bible knowledge than most people. “Too bad those poor slobs can’t discuss things on the level I can.” This is inexcusable.
A. Jeremiah 9 says “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, but let him boast in this: that he knows the Lord.” Paul said that the Christian message isn’t higher knowledge, its foolishness, READ I Cor 1:18-31, (p.1128)
B. Humility, I Peter 5:5 “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
C. Constantly reaching out. Matt. 28:19 , “As you go, make disciples.” Yet how many of us have made a disciple in the last 10 years? Perhaps because we’re elitist. We’re in, and that’s all that really matters.
D. Unity, not divided by intellectual categories. Eph 4:1-3
2. Dualism is not Biblical. “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.” Its true that God is spirit, but He created matter and in Genesis 1:31 He called it “very good.” And while this world is corrupt and fallen, and the Bible calls your body “this body of death,“ the fact is, God is going to create a new Heaven and a new earth and if you are a Christian you will receive a new body. It will not get cancer, you will not hurt your neck, it will not grow old, but it will be a physical body. Salvation is not escaping your body and physical matter. It is escaping sin and the guilt of your offenses.
3. What you believe matters.
If all that was required was some vague belief in God, including some notion of his son, then the Apostle John would not have bothered to confront this small influence of Greek culture on the gospel message. But John is worked up! He’s afraid that these people are close to believing and teaching a message that is not sufficient to save them! God requires of us more than belief in the spirit world and some vague religious faith.
READ Glenn Barker, p293
4. When you read the Bible, study the context .
I John is another reminder to us that the Bible is a collection of books and letters, written to real people in history, concerning real issues at the time. Before we can understand and apply the Bible to us, we must first understand the background and context to which the book or letter was originally written. Most study Bibles will give you 2 or 3 pages of introduction before each book of the Bible. Utilize those. In this way we will understand the Bible and avoid error.
