EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/9/2025 9:46 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
“That Christ Is The True God”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
1 John 5:20-21
Message of the verses: “20 And we know
that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding so that we may
know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ.
This is the true God and eternal life. 21 Little children, guard yourselves from
idols.”
We began looking at the letter of 1 John on August
1, 2024, and Lord willing will finish this first letter that John wrote this
evening.” I have mentioned that next we
will begin to look at 2nd John in the next “evening” SD.
MacArthur
writes “These closing verses finally bring the epistle full circle. John began with the coming of the Word of
Life 1:1-4); now he closes with certainty that ‘the son of God has come. The present tense of the verb heko (come) indicates that Jesus has
come and is still present. The Christian
faith is not theoretical or abstract; it is rooted in the practical truth that
God became man in the person of Jesus Christ.
“Because
no one can know ‘who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son
wills to reveal Him’ (Luke 10:22). Jesus
has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true. But beyond mere knowledge, Christians have a
personal union with Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ (cf. Rom. 8:1; 1
Cor. 1:30; 2 Cor. 5:17; 1 Peter 5:14). The
Bible teaches that the only way to know the true and living God is through
Jesus Christ. No one can be saved apart
from Him (cf. 2:1-2; 4:10; 14:5; John 14:6; Acts 4:12).
“John’s
three fold use of the word alethinos (true)
in this verse stresses the importance of understanding the truth in a world
filled with Satan’s lies. The last use
of the term points to the most significant truth of all—that Jesus Christ is
the true God and eternal life. The deity
of Jesus Christ is an essential element of the Christian faith, and no one who
rejects it can be saved.
“John’s
concluding warning, Little children, guard yourselves from idols, reflects the
crucial significance of the worshiping the true God exclusively. The danger of idolatry was especially serious
in Ephesus (where Artemis (Diana). A few
decades earlier, the ministry of the apostle Paul had sparked a riot by her
zealous worshipers (Acts 19:23-41). But
the danger was not confined to Ephesus, as Paul’s warning to the Corinthians, ‘You
cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of
the table of the Lord and the table of demons’ (1 Cor. 10:21), indicates. Though few in our contemporary culture
worship physical idols, idolatry is widespread nonetheless. Anything that
people elevate above God is an idol of the heart. Every ‘lofty thing raised up against the
knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:5) must be smashed, and only Christ exalted.
“In
a dark world filled with uncertainty, Christians have the glorious certainty
based on divine revelation—‘the prophetic word made more sure…a lamp shining in
a dark place’ (2 Peter 1:19). While the
world stumbles blindly in the darkness (Jer. 13:16), God’s Word is for saints ‘a
lamp to [their] feet and a light to [their] path’ (Ps. 119:105), because ‘the
commandment is a lamp and the teaching is light’ (Prov. 6:23).”
And with that we finish the letter of 1 John, and I
can say that listening to sermons and reading MacArthur’s commentary makes this
book much more understandable. The thing
that I learned from this letter was that John started to teach something, then
stop and talk about something else and then later on in the letter would add to
the first teaching, and he seemed to do this throughout the entire letter.
Another
thing that kind of interesting to me is that when we go back to the 21st
chapter of John and read about Jesus bringing Peter back into line after he
sinned by denying the Lord three times and so Jesus then asked him three times
if he loved Him, and Peter got a little annoyed at this. Then Jesus told Peter how he would glorify
the Lord by how he would die, which was crucifixion. Peter then asked the Lord how John was going
to die, and Jesus told him that if He wanted to that John would live until He
came back, but then said not to be concerned about this but be concerned about him. Now comes the part that is interesting to me
and that is that John wrote the Gospel of John, 1 John, 2nd John,
and 3rd John when he was probably in his90’s. Think about how much
material that is in these four books and how old John was when he wrote
them. Now I realize that the Holy Spirit
is the author of the Word of God, but this still seems very interesting to me.
4/9/2025 10:36 PM
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