Thoughts on 1 John 5

Today’s reading: Numbers 34; 1 John 5

I started this blog with the hope that it would help other people engage more with the Word, make a few more connections between various passages and ideas, and just generally come to enjoy the Word more than they have before. Maybe more than for anybody who reads these daily posts though, writing these has forced me deeper into the Scriptures than I would have otherwise gone. Today is the 95th day in a row putting one of these posts out, and while some days there is something in the reading that jumps off the page that I am excited to write about, other days are like today…

I mentioned a couple days ago that I have a hard time with John, so I was really hoping that Numbers 34 would have something worth writing about so I wouldn’t have to worry about understanding 1 John 5 well enough to write about it. But the borders of Canaan and the names of the tribal chiefs in charge of the allotment of the land didn’t really give me much to write about from Numbers today, so I had to dig deeper into 1 John 5.

Normally in a reading plan I would have read this chapter, not really had any idea what I just read, and moved on. Partially that can be laziness on my part, but it’s also partially that I know a lot of biblical authors reuse themes and ideas, so my not understanding might be more that I need to have more of a background in the prophets or something rather than just that I need to dig into that one bit over and over.

Trying to track with and understand John this morning I’m not even sure how many times I read through this chapter, and to be honest, I still don’t feel like I have a handle on it. I don’t get his thought flow, I have no idea what he is talking about with the water and the blood, I don’t know what sin it is that leads to death or why that means we shouldn’t pray for someone caught up in it. There is just a lot in here that is super unclear to me.

But I wanted to explicitly call that out for a few reasons. One reason is that there is a common conception out there that the Bible is cryptic and difficult to understand, and so it’s probably not worth trying, and if you started with 1 John, I could completely understand that sentiment. However, I would put John’s letters up as anomalous in that regard, and significantly more cryptic and difficult to understand than really anything else in Scripture. So yes, there are difficult parts of the Bible to navigate, but that doesn’t mean it is not worth diving into it and seeking to learn it as a whole.

The second reason I wanted to call this out is to make sure people know it is completely fine to not understand something. I have spent the last 15 years studying and teaching the Bible in various capacities and I would put myself out there as knowing it pretty well. I don’t have a seminary degree or anything, but the Bible is definitely something of a fascination of mine. Between time spent reading the Bible, trying to memorize books of it, studying it for teachings, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, or reading books on it, or on theology in general, I spend probably a minimum 3 or so hours a day engaged in the Word, and most days more than that, and have for years now. And yet, despite all that time and interest, there are still things I run into that I don’t understand, and that’s okay. Should I put some time in at some point to try to understand 1 John better? Maybe, at some point. But there are just so many things to learn, so many things to understand, so much to dive into and meditate on, so much that God has revealed of Himself to us, so much to be fascinated and enthralled by, that while I haven’t stopped to try to understand 1 John better, I also haven’t stopped learning or growing in the rest of the Scriptures. So I want to encourage you, especially if you are newer to a regular habit of reading the Bible, not to get discouraged or down on yourself for not understanding something you are reading, and also to not feel the need to stop your reading until you do understand it. Feel free to stop and study something more deeply to try to understand it if you want to, but especially if you haven’t read the whole Bible at least a couple times, I would personally suggest you invest your time reading what you haven’t read yet rather than trying to study one passage deeply. The biblical authors reference and reuse each other’s work all over the place, so the more we understand the breadth of Scripture, the more we will be able to understand its individual parts.

And finally, the third reason I wanted to call out how much I still don’t understand 1 John 5 is to point out what is still clear. For all that is cryptic in how John writes, the gospel is still abundantly clear, and we need to never lose sight of that. It can be easy to get bogged down in the minutea in a book like 1 John and miss the forest for the trees, but the forest is significantly more important than the trees. So even if I don’t understand one or two of the arguments John is making in support of the gospel, that doesn’t mean I can’t understand his point that, “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life,” or, “And this is the victory that has overcome the world - our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”

There are so many clear statements John makes about the gospel; that we are in Christ by faith, that those in Christ have eternal life, that eternal life is only found in Christ and in no other way, etc. So while yes, I don’t know what John is talking about with the water and the blood, or with the sin that leads to death, that doesn’t stop me from understanding the most important thing, and that is that my eternity is secure in Christ by faith.

So while this morning’s post might not help you understand 1 John 5 any better, hopefully it can be an encouragement to you to keep running after the Lord through His Word. There is such richness, goodness, and life for us in the Scriptures, and my hope and prayer is that we, as a community of God’s children, would find a daily increasing excitement for and joy in the Scriptures as we come to know our Father more intimately, day by day, through them.