2 John – Loving in Truth

If someone were to ask you the question: What is the greatest threat facing humanity today? What would your answer be? What do you consider the greatest single danger to the human race on this planet?

• Nuclear war (20 years ago definitely #1)

• Pollution of our environment

• A globalized economy (G8 summit in Genoa)

• AIDS epidemic (Africa, Asia)

• Religious fundamentalism (e.g. Palestinian-Israeli conflict)

• Genetic engineering; cloning, etc.

I would like to submit to you that the greatest danger facing humanity today is that, by and large, we have abandoned the concept of moral and spiritual truth. We have decided to live our lives as though there were no such thing as truth.

Oh, people still talk about truth, but by “truth” they do not mean something absolute. Truth has become plastic; changeable—you can alter it to fit different situations. Truth becomes different for each individual. What is true for you may not be true for me, or for the next person. And this is particularly so when it comes to moral and spiritual truth.

This is not a new idea – you will find that this viewpoint is so widely accepted in the halls of our universities—our institutions of higher learning—that it almost goes without saying. The overwhelming majority of scholars, thinkers, writers, people of influence in the media, politicians, philosophers, business leaders, artists, and even religious leaders now believe that it is no longer possible to say for certain that certain spiritual and moral absolutes are true and others are not.

And this view is the greatest threat to humanity today because it actually cuts away our ability to deal with all of the other problems that I have mentioned. If many mutually contradictory things can be true, then in fact, nothing is true.

Let me give you an illustration.

In his important book The Divine Conspiracy, author Dallas Willard tells the story of a bright young Harvard student who has an interview with one of her professors. She has sought out this professor because she has decided to leave the university. This is an exit interview.

This very intelligent young woman was an excellent student. But she came from a working class background, and she had to work her way through Harvard by earning money cleaning dorm rooms. And that experience had disillusioned her.

Again and again, she told the professor, students who were in the same classes with her studying the same subjects treated her ungraciously because of her lower economic position. They treated her without simple courtesy and respect, and were often rude and sometimes crude to her.

One young male student in particular kept propositioning her to sleep with him. This young man was a brilliant student with whom she had taken several courses in moral reasoning and ethics. He had excelled in these courses and had received the highest marks in the class. And yet none of that ethical and moral learning had seemed to make any impression on his character.

And she could no longer deal with the jarring “disconnect” between what was being taught in class and what was actually being lived on campus. So she was leaving the university.

The idea of truth—particularly that there could be such a thing as absolute moral and spiritual truth—is a rather quaint, old-fashioned idea by today’s standards. And yet the idea of spiritual truth is at the very foundations of who we are as human beings.

We come today to the little book of 2 John. Tucked away in the latter pages of the New Testament, it has the distinction of being the very shortest book in the Bible. The longest book in the Bible is Psalms, with over 50,000 words. 2 John has only 350. It is really not a book at all; it is a letter roughly the same length as a letter that you or I might write today. It has a companion letter called 3 John, which is only a few words longer. And these two little letters nestle in the shadow of a much larger letter called 1 John.

These three letters were written by the Apostle John – one of Jesus’ intimate circle of disciples. He wrote them somewhere between 85 and 95 AD. The same man wrote the Gospel of John about five years earlier, and the Book of Revelation perhaps five years later.

The message of all of these books, but particularly of 1, 2, & 3 John is that there is such a thing as truth, that this truth is to be found in Jesus Christ, and that this truth is the very foundation of life itself. This subject is highly important to John, because all through his writings you find him talking about truth, and the stark contrast between truth and error; light and darkness;

John 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John presents Jesus as the source of truth. No less than 26 times in his Gospel, John quotes Jesus as saying “I tell you the truth…”

In the book of Revelation, John describes Jesus as the “faithful and true” witness – the one who testifies to the truth.

John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Jesus prays for his disciples:

John 17:17 Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.

As he stood before Pilate, Jesus said:

John 18:37-38 For this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.

And then Pilate asks that cynical question; that question that could well be heard in the halls of higher learning today: “What is truth?”

Well, what IS truth anyway? What do we mean when we talk about “truth”. Truth is that which conforms to what actually is. Truth is anything that is congruent with reality.

2 + 2 = 4, not 5, not 3, not 4 million, but 4. That statement is true, because that conforms to what actually is. And when it comes to mathematics and the hard sciences, truths like that are easy to nail down. Because we can measure truth, we can test it, we can prove it. We can verify that sort of truth through empirical observation.

But when you get into the realm of spirituality and morality, it’s a different ballgame. You can’t put God into a test tube. You can’t measure love with a ruler. You cannot prove the existence of God, or what he’s like, or how he wants us to live through a process of logical deduction. Our powers of empirical observation are useless.

We aren’t able to gain any knowledge—any truth about God—unless he chooses to share such knowledge with us. And that process – the process of God sharing otherwise unavailable truth with us is called “revelation”.

Now God, has in fact, done this. God has revealed to us truth about himself, and about ourselves – truth that we could gain in no other way.

He has done it through four channels, and we don’t have time to talk about each of these in detail, since we want to get to the message of 2 John. But these four channels are:

1. creation – the world around us reveals evidence of a great and powerful designer; the hand of a super-intelligent architect.

2. our conscience – within each one of us there is a mechanism for determining right and wrong – a mechanism that functions quite independently of our will, our emotions, and our intellect. Many times we have to override the warnings of this mechanism in order to do what we want to do. And if we override it frequently enough, we can eventually still its voice. But how did this mechanism get there? It’s presence seems to indicate that it was put there by someone or something outside of ourselves—something that cares very much about morality; about questions of right and wrong.

3. the Bible – there is this book which claims to be the words of God. A skeptic might say “Big deal. There are many such books.” But the Bible is unique among all books. Written over a period of 1,500 years, it has such a unity of theme, such an internal consistency, such a power to transform lives, that it could only have been the work of a divine Author.

4. a man named Jesus Christ – an actual historical figure who claimed to be more than a man; he claimed to be God himself in human form; he claimed to be the embodiment of the Truth, and he backed up that claim by peforming stunning miracles. He taught as no one has ever taught. He had such penetrating insight into human nature. And he died and rose from the dead. His life has had by far the greatest impact on human history of any person who has ever lived

So these four channels are how God has revealed truth about himself to us; the first two – creation and conscience – reveal “general” truths about his existence and his moral nature; the second two – the Bible and Jesus Christ – reveal “specific” truths: detailed information about God’s character, his actions, and his expectations of us.

The Apostle John is particularly engaged with the fourth channel – the man Jesus Christ. And it is no wonder, because John had the privilege of actually spending close, extended, intimate time with Jesus as one of his disciples. And the impact Jesus made on his life was incredible.

John saw firsthand that Jesus was the truth embodied. Everything that the Bible taught about God, Jesus demonstrated in human form.

• His love was God’s love

• His power was God’s power

• His truth was God’s truth

• He did exactly the kinds of things that God would do if he came here and visited us in person.

So you have this idea of Jesus Christ as the very embodiment of God’s truth flowing through the writings of John, and when we come to the letters of John it is, if anything, even more pronounced. Because by the time John wrote these letters, there were counterfeit teachers presenting a spirituality that was not based on God’s revealed truth in Jesus Christ.

These teachers were saying that spiritual truth was not exclusive to Jesus Christ; there were many avenues of approach to God. There were many sources of spiritual and moral knowledge – there were many truths. (Sounds a lot like what people are saying today, doesn’t it?)

And furthermore, many of these teachers were saying that what you believed didn’t have anything to do with how you lived. How you chose to live your life and treat others was of little consequence. What really mattered was the spiritual knowledge you had. (That also sounds quite familiar, doesn’t it? Remember the story from Harvard University?)

But John, in these little letters says “No!”

• You cannot have many truths, because then you have no truth.

• You are either in the light or in the darkness.

• You are either alive or dead spiritually.

• You are either of the truth or you are lying.

• You are either a child of God, or a child of the devil.

• You either have spiritual life or your do not have the life.

• You either belong to Christ or you do not.

• There is no “in-between”.

John is something that is very unpopular on university campuses today: he is a radical dichotomist; an absolutist. It’s “either / or” with him. He says we must put our faith in that which is true – namely Jesus Christ – or we have no basis for building our lives. We have no basis for relating to one another in healthy and productive relationships. We have no basis for building our lives on proper moral and ethical foundations. We must build on the one thing that is true – namely Jesus Christ and his teaching.

People nowadays seem to think that, when it comes to spirituality, if you just have faith, then all will be well. And it isn’t terribly important what you have faith in; just so long as you have “a faith” of some kind.

Nothing could be farther from the truth! Everything hangs, not on your faith, but on the object of your faith. It isn’t THAT you are trusting; it is WHAT you are trusting that matters. And John says in his letters that when you put your trust in Jesus, who is the living embodiment of God’s truth, then you will have a basis for LOVING and for LIVING, for RELATIONSHIPS and for RIGHTEOUSNESS.

In 2 John, he emphasizes loving in the truth. In 3 John, he emphasizes living in the truth. Let’s look at 2 John.

2 John 1:1-5 The elder, to the chosen lady and her children, whom I love in the truth — and not I only, but also all who know the truth — because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us forever:

Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, will be with us in truth and love.

It has given me great joy to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as the Father commanded us.

John identifies himself as simply “the elder”. At this point in his life, he was an old man. And he was serving as an elder among the churches in Asia Minor, and was well enough known in that capacity that he could refer to himself simply as “The elder”. He was somewhat of a celebrity as he was the last remaining apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ.

He addresses this letter to the “chosen lady” (“elect lady” – KJV) and her children. Rather than this referring to a specific woman and her family, we feel that this is probably a personification and that John is writing to one of the churches in Asia Minor, the “lady” being the church, and the “children” being the members of that church. The lack of any personal names such as we have in 3 John, and the overall sense of the letter seems to confirm this. Down in verse 13, he closes the letter by saying “The children of your chosen sister send their greetings” which would quite naturally be a way of saying “the church from which I am writing send their greetings”.

As you look at the first few verses, it should be quite obvious that John is concerned about the matter of truth as he writes this letter. He uses the word “truth” no less than five times in these first four verses. He says to the recipients:

I love (you) in the truth — and not I only, but also all who know the truth — because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us forever…

Why do people generally love one another? Usually it is on the basis of emotion, or attraction. We have good feelings for one another. We share common interests. We feel comfortable with one another.

But John is talking about something totally different here. He is saying that, among Christians, the basis for our fellowship is not any of these things. It is the truth. We are to love one another “in the truth” (v. 1) and “because of the truth” (v. 2).

In other words, our love for one another is built upon the fact that Jesus Christ, who is the truth, “lives in us and will be with us forever” (v. 2). He is the glue that holds us together relationally.

I fear that Christian churches today do not always show this. Our churches frequently appear to be held together by human cords rather than divine cords. We have a church made up of baby boomers over here. We have another church of a certain economic or racial makeup over there. We have another church that appeals to a particular style of worship over there.

Our fellowship tends to be built on demographic factors, cultural factors, socio-economic factors, rather than on the “truth factor”; the glue of Jesus Christ, who is the truth.

And the world sees this and says “You Christians are no different from anyone else. You congregate according to your preferences. Birds of a feather flock together. You talk about love, but there doesn’t seem to be anything in you that can transcend these barriers that naturally keep people apart.”

John Stott says “We do not love each other because we are temperamentally compatible, or because we are naturally drawn to one another, but because of the truth which we share.” Love must be based on truth and that truth is found in the person of Jesus Christ.

John continues in verse 5:

I am not writing you a new command but one we have had from the beginning. I ask that we love one another.

Back in 1 John 4, John wrote:

Whoever loves God must also love his brother. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.

John isn’t saying that love somehow precedes our belief in God’s truth, but that love is the clearest test of our belief in the truth. And so we are commanded to love. Just as John used the word “truth” 5 times in the first four verses, he uses the word “command” 4 times in verses 4–6.

Love means living according to God’s commands. When we live in obedience to God’s commands in Scripture and the teaching of Jesus, we are going to find ourselves loving one another – doing that which is right for one another, best for one another.

This is what John means by “walking in the truth”, which he mentions in verse 4 and verse 6. There is harmony between living and loving if you base your life on the truth.

v. 6 - this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands.

In the next few verses, John warns his readers about the false teachers.

2 John 1:7-11 Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.

Watch out that you do not lose what you have worked for, but that you may be rewarded fully.

Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not take him into your house or welcome him. Anyone who welcomes him shares in his wicked work.

He calls them “deceivers”. A deception, in order to be effective, has to look like the real thing. A counterfeit bill can’t be passed unless it looks like a real one. And this is certainly true in the spiritual realm. There are deceptive teachers and teachings that would seek to lead us away from the truth.

And the one quality that they all share is that they deny the true identity of Jesus Christ as being God come in the flesh. They would say that he is really not God, or he is really not man. John goes into greater detail about this in 1 John 4…

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.

(describe Spirit of Truth and Spirit of Error brochure)

Notice the end of verse 7: “Any such person is THE deceiver and THE antichrist” You see who is really behind such teaching: it is the devil himself.

Having warned against this danger, John in verse 8 warns against succumbing to it.

Watch out that you do not lose what you have worked for, but that you may be rewarded fully.

This is not about losing your salvation, it is about losing your reward in heaven.If we are faithful in living the Christian life, God promises us rewards in heaven. But if we fail to persevere in the truth—if we follow these deceptive teachings—we are in danger of losing that reward.

The false teachers were saying (and still are saying today) that their version of spirituality was superior – that it was far ahead of anything else on the market – that it was newer and better, and certainly far ahead of quaint, backward old Christianity. They were “running ahead” as John says in verse 9. And anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God.

Verses 10 and 11 offer an intriguing glimpse into the life of the early NT church.

If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not take him into your house or welcome him. Anyone who welcomes him shares in his wicked work.

Although travel in the ancient Roman empire was pretty commonplace because of the good Roman roads, finding acceptable accommodation was something else.

The inns and hotels of the time were pretty rough places – not much better than brothels. So Christians who traveled had to depend on one another for hospitality.And Christian missionaries and itinerant teachers had a particular need of this. So Christians were therefore urged in the NT to practice hospitality, such as in Hebrews 13:2

Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.

But what about these false teachers? They were traveling around too, and they “appeared” to be Christians. John says “Don’t give them hospitality. Don’t welcome them into your house.”

Now doesn’t this seem rather odd, coming from a man who just a few verses earlier said that we ought to love one another? Is John now saying that we shouldn’t love people who don’t believe as we do? Who don’t share our opinions?

Well, the first thing we need to understand is that the people John is referring to are those who are going around teaching heresy. They are teaching doctrines that are opposed to the true doctrine of Christ.

They come to your door, (or to the door of the church – remember this letter was written to a church) and they come bringing their deceptive teaching with the purpose of spreading it.

John is not referring to our relationship with individuals who might have been fooled themselves into believing false teaching. He is referring to the teachers of the wrong teaching; the ambassadors of it. Those who are out there in a quasi-official capacity trying to make converts. These are the people we are not to welcome.

There are such people abroad in our neighborhoods today. If someone comes to your door for the express purpose of spreading false teaching, shut the door politely, but firmly. I do not believe that we are to welcome such people into our homes for the purpose of trying to debate them. They are not there to hear the truth; they are there to spread their teaching.

God may give us other opportunities to befriend a person who is involved in another religion, to engage them in conversation, to build a relationship with them in the context of which we can present the truth of Jesus Christ. But that is not going to happen at your front door.

The second thing that we need to learn from these verses is that John is not talking about people who differ on minor details of Christian doctrine. He is talking about people who have fundamentally twisted the basic Christian message: that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; that God has become man and that god-man is Jesus.

We have no right to withhold fellowship from fellow Christians because they might have different views on certain issues that are peripheral to the basic Gospel.

The third thing that we need to realize from these verses is just how dangerous error about the person of Christ is. John says that when it comes to truth and error about Christ, the stakes are so high that we are to reject not only the false teaching, but also the false teacher himself. Teaching that deviates from the message of the NT about who Christ is and what he did is to be rejected.

Which brings us full circle to where we began. What is the greatest threat facing humanity today? It is the belief that there is no moral or spiritual truth that is definitive.

John, in these little epistles, tells us that the truth is to be found in Christ.