By the time John got around to writing 1 John, he was a very old man, maybe a hundred years old, which explains why he often addresses his readers as his “dear children” (2:1). But like a Grandpa he’s got a lot of wisdom and experience to pass on, having possibly been with Jesus since he was a teenager, and definitely having lived what he’s writing about for seventy years or more already.
So, what does the Grandpa in him want his “children” to grasp? It’s remembering who they are: that they’re not just his children they’re primarily the children of God. Remember for always, then, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God. Because that is what we are,” 1 John 3:1.
And because that’s what we are, John gets us remembering what that means in 1 John 2:12-14. That, first of all, verse 12, “our sins have been forgiven on account of his name.” Because that’s the bedrock we base our Father’s love for us on. We see his love in Jesus, that “name.” In that name, the Father has given us a bell to ring in our heads any and every time we’ve stepped out of the light into the darkness, and been stumbling around being idiots. Because what Jesus does when that happens is “speak to the Father in our defence,” verse 1.
So here’s Jesus presenting himself to the Father on our behalf, mentioning us by name, of course, which is embarrassing in itself, but even more so when mentioning what we’ve said or done required Jesus to have himself murdered for us being idiots, rather than us.
But also knowing that’s the set up the Father put in place to get the point across as to how much he and Jesus love us. They have a conversation together that results in the sin being forgiven, which is somehow relayed to us so we don’t jump off a cliff in our disgust at ourselves, and out of the darkness we step into the light again, our fellowship with our Father restored, which could then lead to restoring fellowship with any fellow human we mangled by our stupidity as well.
It’s amazing, because as children of God, it means there’s no problem that cannot be worked out. Thanks to Jesus the problem caused is forgiven and the wrong righted (1:9). And for John, having experienced Jesus doing this in his own life again and again over a span of seventy years nonstop, he could say of Jesus, “I know him, I truly do”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 