Chapter One

The essence and certain truth of the Gospel of the Word of life (1-4). God is light (5). The character and conditions of Christians’ communion with God and Christ (6-10).

1 John 1:1. Concerning what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, what we have looked at and what our hands have touched, concerning the Word of life, — 1 John 1:2. for the life appeared, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you this eternal life, which was with the Father and appeared to us, — 1 John 1:3. what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you, so that you also may have fellowship with us: and our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. 1 John 1:4. And we write this to you so that your joy may be complete. Expressing his thought in a somewhat complex manner, the Apostle begins his Epistle with the witness: “we proclaim” (Greek: apangellomen) or “write to you” concerning the Word of life (Greek: peri tou logou tes Zoes), which was from the beginning (Greek: ho en ap’ arches), which we have heard, which we saw with our own eyes, and which our hands touched. As we have seen, even in antiquity the close similarity of this beginning of the Epistle to the beginning of the Gospel was noted, and this similarity, in the opinion of the ancient Church fathers, shows the identity of the subject matter of the writings and the teaching about God the Word, or the Divine Logos. “The Word of life” here, contrary to the opinion of some commentators (Westcott, Düsterdick, and others), does not mean only the divine teaching that Christ the Savior proclaimed to humanity (compare Phil 2:16), but is precisely the designation of God the Word, as is shown both by the construction (John 1:15 is the usual form used by the Apostle John with the genitive case of a person, and see this reference for other examples), and by the context of the Apostle’s speech: only about the personal Divine Word, or the God-man, could the Apostle say of himself and the other apostles: “we have heard, seen with our own eyes, looked upon, and our hands touched,” and in verse 2 the Apostle testifies that this life—the eternal life of the God-man—was with the Father and was made manifest to us, which fully recalls the words of the Apostle John about the Divine Word-Christ in the Gospel: “in him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4). The Apostle’s use in the Epistle of the same words and expressions as in the Gospel—such as logos, zoe, en, pros—further confirms the kinship or identity of the concepts and their relation to one and the same principal subject, God the Word. Not repeating what has been said in the notes on the Gospel of John John 1, we observe only that the designation of the Son of God as Logos in both the Gospel and the Epistle was not the work of the Apostle’s independent reflection, but was revealed to the Seer of mysteries in a specific supernatural revelation (see Rev 19:13). The eternal being of God the Word is expressed in the passage under consideration by the words “en ap’ arches” (was from the beginning), as in the Gospel: “en arche en” (“in the beginning was”), which means before the beginning of time, in other words, without beginning and without end, and therefore eternally. Similarly, the “word” “was” signifies not temporal existence but the self-subsistent being of a certain reality, the beginning and foundation of everything that has come into being, such that without it the latter could not have come into being” (Theophylact the Blessed). In showing the perfect reliability of the apostles’ evangelical proclamation about God the Word, the holy Apostle points to the fullness that excludes the possibility of any doubt about the apostles’ knowledge of the God-man, based on their complete spiritual and sensory experience: all external senses and all internal spiritual powers of the apostles participated in the experiential knowledge of God the Word, revealed in the flesh: “they touched with both mental and sensory touch, as, for example, Thomas did after the resurrection. For he was one and undivided, one and the same—visible and invisible, comprehensible and incomprehensible, intangible and tangible, speaking as a man and working wonders as God” (Theophylact). The Divine Word for the Apostle here, in verse 1, is called the Word of life, and in verse 2 is called Life (Greek: he zoe), which was with the Father and was made manifest to people, eternal life (Greek: ten zoen ten aionion), which the apostles proclaim, including the one writing this present Epistle, St. John. In verses 3 and 4 the goal of proclamation in general and of this Epistle in particular is set as this: that through the proclaimed and written word of the apostles, Christians should have fellowship (Greek: koinonian) not only with the apostles, but through them with God the Father and Jesus Christ his Son: “through the word we receive you as partners in what we have seen and heard; thus we have you as partners of the Father and of his Son Jesus Christ, and having received this, we, having clung to God, can be filled with joy” (Theophylact the Blessed). Thus, in the Epistle the teaching about the Divine Word is disclosed chiefly from the aspect of the imperishable, eternal blessed life that has its source in God the Word, and from the aspect of Christians’ fellowship with this self-subsistent source of all life. If the Gospel of John develops the proper teaching about the person of God the Word, Jesus Christ, then the Epistle applies this teaching to life; on the basis of true knowledge of God and faith in Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God, it builds up the life of each individual member of Christ’s Church, so as to bring all to eternal life, to eternal blessedness in fellowship with God.

1 John 1:5. And this is the message which we have heard from Him and proclaim to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in Him at all. The substance of the gospel brought to earth by the incarnate Word of God, heard from him by the apostles and proclaimed by them to humanity, the Apostle John here expresses in the form of a brief aphorism with contrasting positive and negative thoughts (antithetical parallelism): “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Judging by the aphoristic character of this expression, and even more by the Apostle’s direct testimony: “we have heard from him,” one may suppose that here is reproduced an exact saying, the very words of the Savior—one of those numerous unwritten sayings (Greek: agrapha)—sayings of the Lord not recorded in the Gospel that have been preserved only in the writings of the apostles (such is the saying cited by the Apostle Paul in his speech to the Ephesian elders: “it is more blessed to give than to receive” Acts 20:35) or in later monuments of Christian church tradition. It is possible, however, as some interpreters suppose, that this saying is a generalization, condensation, or recollection of several similar sayings of Christ the Savior about himself as light (John 8:12), expressed by the Apostle himself in aphoristic form. In any case, the statement: “God is light” is one of the expressions used by the Apostle John in which he describes the very essence of God, such as: “God is spirit” (John 4:24) and “God is love” (1 John 4:8): while other New Testament writers speak of God’s attributes and actions, St. John speaks of what God is in his very essence. The fundamental concept conveyed by the name “light” when applied to God is the concept of absolute moral perfection (compare Jas 1:17), the most perfect holiness. As in the visible world light is the most excellent and beneficial element, illuminating all things, warming, giving life, so in God “light” is the totality and fullness of his divine perfections—holiness, wisdom, omniscience, grace, and others—by which God illuminates all things in the world, enlightens, gives life, and leads to blessedness. And there is no deficiency in any of these divine attributes, no shadow in the eternal light of the divine essence. “Thus he is light, and there is no darkness in him, but spiritual light that draws the eyes of the soul to the vision of him, and turns it away from everything material, arousing the desire for him alone with the strongest love. By darkness is understood either ignorance or sin, for in God there is neither ignorance nor sin, because ignorance and sin exist (only) in matter and in our disposition.... And that the Apostle calls sin ‘darkness’ is evident from his Gospel saying: ‘And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ (John 1:5), where by darkness he calls our sinful nature, which by all its inclination to fall yields to our adversary the devil, drawing us to sin. Thus Light, united with our nature, which is so easily overcome, became completely beyond the reach of the tempter, because he committed no sin (Isa 53:9).” From the teaching about God as Light, the Apostle makes two moral and practical conclusions: a) the necessity for Christians to walk in the faith of truth and purity, to acknowledge and confess their sins, and to be cleansed by the blood of the Redeemer (1 John 1:6), and b) their duty to keep God’s commandments, especially the commandment of love (1 John 2:3-11).

1 John 1:6. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in darkness, we are lying and are not practicing the truth; 1 John 1:7. but if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin. Each Christian as a member of God’s kingdom must be in living fellowship with God. But a necessary condition for this is the Christian’s walking in the light of truth and holiness. In the absence of these conditions, the Christian would be deceived or would permit conscious deception, considering himself to be in fellowship with God—the Light of truth and holiness. The sharpness of tone seems to suggest that the Apostle has in mind certain false teachers who distorted the true understanding of the essence of Christian life and fellowship with God. “Thus, when we accept you as partners with God, who is light, and in this light, as has been shown, there is no darkness and cannot be, then we too, as partners of light, should not receive darkness within ourselves, so as not to suffer punishment for the lie and together with the lie not to be cut off from fellowship with the light” (Theophylact the Blessed). True fellowship with God, true walking in the light according to the law of becoming like God, necessarily shows itself in fellowship with neighbors, in love of brothers. But the source of the grace-giving power to walk in the light of fellowship with God and neighbors is solely in the redemption of the whole world by the blood of the Son of God. “No one, loving truth and striving to be truthful, would dare to say that he is without sin. Thus, if such a concern possesses someone, he should not despair: for whoever enters into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ is cleansed by his blood, shed for us” (Theophylact the Blessed).

1 John 1:8. If we say that we do not have sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 1 John 1:9. If we confess our sins, He, being faithful and righteous, will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:10. If we say that we have not sinned, we represent Him as a liar, and His word is not in us. Even in the closing words of verse 7, the Apostle expressed the thought that sin acts in Christians and that all of them have need of the cleansing power of Christ’s blood. Now, apparently having in mind false teachers who denied this truth, the Apostle with particular insistence proves the necessity for all Christians to have consciousness of the corruption of their nature and their inclination to sin. The lack of this consciousness, and especially its complete absence, leads not only to harmful self-deception (verse 8), but further—in the end—to denial of Christ’s redemptive work, to the acknowledgment even of God himself as a liar (verse 10), for if people can be sinless in themselves, then redemption and the Redeemer are unnecessary, and the words of Scripture about the necessity of redemption for all would turn out to be false. But while denying and condemning with complete firmness such self-deception and claims to perfect sinlessness, the Apostle at the same time resolves the natural question that arises: how then can one reconcile the sinful state of a Christian with the necessary requirement of fellowship with God, who is light? The Apostle gives the answer to this difficulty in verse 9 to the effect that the necessary condition for our fellowship with God in the presence of our undoubted sinfulness is confession—that is, open, decisive, and persistent acknowledgment of our sins: “if we confess our sins”—confession not of sin in general alone, but of specific sins, known as deeds of darkness. That confession of sins cannot be confined to internal consciousness alone but must be accompanied by external confession or open self-judgment before God and before the witness appointed by God to bind and loose human sins (John 20:22-23), is already presupposed by the meaning and New Testament use of the term “to confess” (Greek: homologein), which contains the thought of external expression or utterance of something before people (compare Matt 10:32-33; John 1:20). “How great a good is produced from confession is evident from the following words: ‘declare your sins first, so that you may be justified’ (Isa 43:26)” (Theophylact the Blessed). When we fulfill the required condition—confession of sins—God, according to the Apostle’s assurance, will certainly forgive the sins of the repentant (Church Slavonic: “will forgive our sins”) and will inwardly cleanse the sinner from unrighteousness (“will cleanse us from all unrighteousness”). In this, God’s both fidelity and righteousness are accomplished. “God is faithful, which is the same as being true; for the word ‘faithful’ is used not only of one to whom something is entrusted, but also of one who is himself very faithful, whose very own fidelity can make others faithful as well. In this sense God is faithful, and he is righteous in that he does not drive away those who come to him, no matter how sinful they may be (John 6:37)” (Theophylact the Blessed).