Download discussion questions:  1 John 2:15-25

 

Table Talk:  “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” – A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

What comes into your mind when you think about God?

[“Table Talk” is an opening question or topic for discussion at the beginning of our time together.  The intent is to help group members (around tables, with four to six at each table) build connections with each other, as well as to guide thinking in a direction related to the passage.]

 

Our discussion began with the difference in perspective between our reading of the passage and the original recipients’ reaction.  Phrases like “the world is passing away” and “this is the last hour” probably caused a more intense response in the first century, read from the pen of the last living member of the Twelve.   We tend to take such statements figuratively.  We believe that Jesus will come someday, but usually the belief has little immediate practical impact on us.  Even the warning about the coming antichrist is part of our “sometime, not now” thinking.  John’s statement that “now many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:18b) carries a different tone. 

John was warning the church about a reality they were already facing:  not the individual antichrist (singular, capitalized in some translations as Antichrist – e.g., the Message, or New Living Translation), but multiple antichrists (same word, but here plural).  That reality in the first century is still true today.  John provides identifying characteristics.  First, they deny that Jesus is the Christ (v. 22a).  Ultimately, they deny the Father and the Son (v. 22b).

Based on John’s description, one person in our group commented almost immediately, “I know antichrists, people who don’t believe in Jesus.”  Someone else raised the question if antichrists and atheists were the same thing.

Recalling the introduction to John’s letters, it is likely that the original readers included Christians from both Jewish and pagan backgrounds.  Jewish believers could accept Jesus as a great teacher, maybe even a prophet.  Recognizing Him as divine presented a significant stumbling block to life-long monotheists.  Christians from a pagan past had no problem seeing Jesus as divine.  Their thinking was crowded with gods.  His humanity was the problem for them.  How could a perfect divine Being even come near, much less clothe Himself with (as they saw it) corrupt, evil physical matter.  John’s first criterion is believing that Jesus (Yeshua, the Hebrew name of a flesh and blood person executed by Rome) is (not was or will be) the Christ (a Greek word with clear divine connotations).  Just as John emphasized in the Gospel he recorded, both the human and the divine are essential to our belief.

John is not addressing atheism (at least not in this passage).  Many people could believe in a god, or many gods, or one God while still denying that Jesus is the Christ.  The beloved disciple is much more specific.  The antichrists he warns about go further than debating about the divinity of the man Jesus.  They “deny the Father and the Son” (v. 22b).  He makes his meaning very clear.  Our response to the Son (denying or confessing) determines our access to the Father (v. 23).

John continues to lay more of the foundation for what would later be understood about the Trinity.  Note a small detail that is apparent but easily overlooked.  The distinguishing mark of the antichrists is the denial of “the Father and the Son.”  John does not combine or confuse the two Persons, as in “the Father and Son.”  That phrase (“the Father and Son” without the second “the”), in Greek grammar, would indicate, or at least imply, that there is only one Person, some kind of amalgamation of Father and Son.[1]  He is precise in representing the two members of the Godhead as two distinct persons.  That precision is seen elsewhere in this letter:  “our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John:1:3);  “you will abide in the Son and in the Father” (1 John 2:24).  John is accurately transmitting Jesus own teaching:  “This is eternal life, that they may know You [Father], the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17.3).

John wants to enable his faithful readers to hold onto that fundamental and distinctively Christian truth of the Three-Personal God (as C. S. Lewis has described the Trinity).  He had warned them of the distraction of the world (1 John 2:15-17) and especially the deception of those who would distort or dilute the truth they had heard from the beginning, the eternal relationship of the Father and the Son.  (As we discussed in our group, John will bring the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, into his discussion soon, e.g., 1 John 3:27.  So far in this letter he has been focused on clarifying the confusion about the Father and the Son.  Perhaps John wisely, and under the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit, chose to describe the Father and the Son first before adding even more complications to his explanation.)  Too often we minimize or ignore the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity.  We may affirm that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but that affirmation may be only a litmus test of orthodoxy and not much more.  May John’s words in this passage stir us to a deeper appreciation of God’s Triune Being to enable us to more fully know and worship Him.

Thinking right about God involves having a Trinitarian framework for thinking about God.  The Trinity should be at the core of our worship because the God who is at the heart of worship is Trinity.  Right belief about the Trinity is important precisely because it is crucial to appropriate worship.[2]

 

Christian worship is, therefore, our participation through the Spirit in the Son’s communion with the Father.[3]

 

The vague idea of ‘God’ which most people in our society imagine to be the central point of concern in all the religions, has been produced by the flowing together of streams from the Bible, Greek philosophy and Muslim theology (which played a decisive part in the birth of modern western theology in the 13th century). This is something very different from the Christian understanding which has always at its centre the figure not of a sovereign potentate but of a crucified man, and which is adequately set forth only in the fully Trinitarian teaching of the early centuries. When the Christians of the early centuries faced the task of saying who Jesus is in terms of the ‘lords many and gods many’ of the classical world, they could only do it by means of the Trinitarian’ model. It is significant that when the word ‘God’ is spoken in discussions such as the present, few Christians think immediately of the Trinity. The operative model is not trinitarian but unitarian.[4]

In our opening Table Talk discussion about what comes to mind when we think about God, several of the comments referred to God as “Other” and “Holy” and “Incomprehensible.”  Only God can truly know Himself.  Because of the Incarnation of the Second Person, the Eternal Son, we can begin to know the Father through Him:

God draws near to us in such a way as to draw us near to himself within the circle of his knowing of himself.[5]

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[1] This would seem to be a reverse application of the Granville Sharp rule.  Applying Granville Sharp, if John intended to combine “Father” and “Son” into a single person, proper grammar would call for a single article, “the Father and Son.”  John seems to go out of his way to avoid that construction to keep the individuality of the Persons clear.
c.f. H. E. Dana and Julius R. Mantey, A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament (Toronto:  The MacMillan Company, 1957), 147.
and https://bible.org/article/sharp-redivivus-reexamination-granville-sharp-rule

[2] Robin Parry, Worshipping Trinity (Bletchley, Milton Keynes UK:  Paternoster Press, 2005), 8; emphasis in the original.

[3] James B. Torrance, Worship, Community & the Triune God of Grace (Downers Grove, Illinois:  InterVarsity Press, 1997), 15.

[4] J. E. Leslie Newbigin, Christian Witness in a Plural Society (London: British Council of Churches, 1977), 7.

[5] Thomas Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives (Edinburgh:  T&T Clark, 1994), 2;
quoted by Darrell W. Johnson, Experiencing the Trinity (Vancouver, British Columbia:  Regent College Publishing, 2002), 61.  Johnson’s book is more readily available and probably more readable.