Free Bible Commentary
“First John 1:1-4”
Categories: First John“What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life—and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us—what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete.”
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The Apostle John gets right to the business at hand as He confronts the false, Gnostic teaching that God had not literally come to this earth in the form of a human being through the man Jesus Christ. With his first words he harkens back to “the beginning” (verse 1), when God spoke the heavens and the earth into existence (Genesis 1:1), to the fact that “the Word” was there with God, and that He was God, as He always had been from the infinite span of eternity (John 1:1-5). This eternal Word (Logos) who became flesh (John 1:14), John and the other Apostles had heard with their own ears, seen with their own eyes, and touched with their own hands.
More than that, they had “looked at” or “looked upon” Him over and over again as they spent day after day in his glorious presence, witnessing His miraculous power, hearing His divine wisdom and experiencing His palpable grace. And they were privy to this privilege before and after His death and bodily resurrection. John personally saw Jesus heal the sick and raise the dead. He was there with Him in all His radiant glory on the Mount of Transfiguration. He witnessed His anguish in the garden (when he was not asleep), and looked on helplessly as His Savior died the agonizing death of crucifixion. But John also saw and touched and “handled” the Lord’s resurrected body, and marveled as He was lifted up into the clouds.
Jesus was not some optical illusion or phantasm. He was God manifested in the flesh; a real, corporeal, living, breathing human being who died for the sins of the world, and arose from the grave to defeat death and bring salvation to all mankind. Jesus is the Word of “LIFE”. The Word, who was with God and was God, came into the world to confer life. He was and is the giver of all physical life (John 1:3), and He alone has provided spiritual, “eternal life” because of that which He accomplished for us in the bodily form of the suffering, servant, Messiah.
John and the other Apostles had the right to declare or “proclaim” (verse 2-3) Jesus Christ because they had been with the Lord, were personally selected by Him and empowered through Him to speak in His name. But John did not declare the eternal, incarnate, crucified, risen, glorified Lord for material gain or personal acclaim. His only motivation for professing the truth and fighting against error was so that He could share the spiritual blessings he had found in Christ Jesus with all believers. To say that John proclaimed Jesus to offer “fellowship with us” implies that the original recipients of the letter were, at the very least, perilously close to losing the “fellowship” they enjoyed with faithful believers in the Lord. If they followed after the lies of the false teachers and were carried away by the error of unprincipled men (2 Peter 3:17), they would not share in a faith of the same kind as that of the Apostles (2 Peter 1:1), and they would be lost. When Christians sever fellowship with God, the Lord’s people are left with no choice but to cut ties with them as well.
Fellowship with God and His people through obedient faith in His Only Begotten Son produces a “joy” that cannot be comprehended or concocted by anyone or anything in this world. Joy is the “calm delight” that is produced by owning a relationship with the Father, through Jesus the Son, that time cannot fade and thief cannot steal, and that will ultimately culminate in the eternal bliss of heaven above. John wrote of the reality of God’s plan through the sacrifice of His Son in order that the joy of his readers could be made complete. This divine joy is readily availble for your taking and for you to share with the ones you love.
Please read 1 John 1:5-10 for tomorrow.
Have a blessed Lord’s Day!
-Louie Taylor
