John makes this statement – about overcoming the evil one – to “young men,” 1 John 2:14. Which is truly amazing, because John is saying it’s possible for even young people to have power over the devil’s world, and at the most vulnerable time of their lives too, when their emotions are all over the place, and they don’t have the benefit of experience yet either. 

It’s also amazing, because the devil’s world of money and greed feeds off young people. The young are its best clients, because they’re so easily sucked in by the three ‘baddies’: “lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (16). Those three are the bad part of the world, in which the evil one takes what are normal and natural, God-given desires in us, and twists them instead into all-consuming selfish addictions to whatever my body wants, what my eyes like to look at, and what makes me look great. And the world feeds on that, broadcasting to the young on every frequency available, that to “eat, drink and be merry” – feeding what self wants – is the best and only goal worth chasing in this life now.

So how on earth do young people break free of that, or never fall for it in the first place?

Did it have anything to do with the “fathers” John was also writing to in verse 13? The “fathers” were the first in line to hear what John was teaching, and the first to learn from John the importance of obeying what Jesus taught (2:3). These older folks, then, had “known Jesus from the beginning” (2:13, 14), which had given them a lifetime of experience and stories they could tell of the power we humans have over the devil’s world that the teachings of Jesus provide. 

Was it then in “fellowship” with these veterans of Christianity, who’d been through the mill, been hit from all angles by the devil and his tricks, and come through them all into a kind of peace and calm about life where very little rattles them, that was now inspiring these younger folks, or younger Christians, to “overcome the evil one” too (2:14)? 

John seems to think so, because it’s fellowship with God and each other that he’s focusing on, and the gifts the Holy Spirit has given to each group to help the others. With one other great gift the older folk have to offer as they age, the realization that “The world and its desires pass away”….(next blog)

The evidence of the Holy Spirit being “poured out on all people” in Acts 2:17, would be “young men seeing visions” and old men “dreaming dreams,” both of which would be attached in some way to “the last days,” when the age of the Kingdom of God would begin.

At that time the Holy Spirit would fill the old and the young with dreams and visions of that Kingdom, inspiring in their lives the evidence that it was already happening. In the old folk it would create a lifetime of following Jesus’ teachings, which form the foundation of the Kingdom of God and how the whole world will be living for eternity. It’s why the Holy Spirit inspired them to live that way, so that clear evidence of what the Kingdom of God is based on, and the effect it has on people, can be seen in their lives. And isn’t that what we older folk dream of and live for too? 

But what about the young? They can’t depend on a lifetime of living by Jesus’ teachings as evidence of the Kingdom of God already in operation on the planet. But what the Holy Spirit does in them instead is give them a vision of the world as it could be, and they want to gear their lives to that.

Which is a great gift the Holy Spirit has given us as a human race, because isn’t it the young we all depend on so strongly to take the fight to evil? In wartime, for instance, it’s always the young who are on the front lines. They’re the ones with the energy – and the heart to put their lives on the line. It is extraordinary how young people – with everything to live for in life – will give themselves to serving the needs of others, and even giving up life itself.

And what makes it even more extraordinary is that they may not attend any church, or profess any religious bent, or even mention God, but they have a good moral compass, they’re capable, confident, wise, good living people who love to serve, work hard, and they are honest and respectful in all their dealings – and aren’t they grand people to be around too?

Their glory (as John puts it in 1 John 2:14) is their strength, which either consciously or unconsciously has come from “the word of God living in them,” where the Holy Spirit is inspiring them for all our sakes to make our world liveable, and prove to us all that, no matter what age we are or what stage of our Christianity we’re at, we really do have “Power over the devil’s world”….(next blog) 

According to John in 1 John 2:14, it’s possible for “young men” to “overcome the evil one.” He tells them, and us, how it’s possible too: it’s because “the word of God is living in you” (same verse).

But how did that happen in them, and not in Adam and Eve and the Israelites? Simply put: it was “the effect of the Holy Spirit.” When Jesus ascended to his Father to ask him to send the Holy Spirit, the Spirit would open up a completely different relationship with God, where we humans, even as “young men,” could “obey Jesus’ teaching” out of love for him, John 14:21 – just as Jesus obeyed his Father out of love for him (31). 

But there was more too, because when the Holy Spirit was then sent as Jesus promised in Acts 2, Peter “stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice,” verse 14, “and addressed the crowd” with “what was spoken by the prophet Joel” (back in Joel 2:28-32).

“In the last days,” Peter begins in Acts 2:17, quoting Joel, “God says I will pour out my Spirit on all people.” To a Jew hearing “the last days” it meant the new age of the Kingdom of God, the one great dream they’d all had for centuries when God would “restore the kingdom to Israel” (1:6), and then through Israel bless the whole world as God had promised to Abraham back in Genesis 12:3 (and Isaiah 49:6).

Was Peter saying, then, that this time had finally come? Well, they’d know if it had, because, as Peter continues in Acts 2:17, “Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.”  

Visions and dreams about what, though? About the Kingdom of God being set up on this planet, now that the time had come for it to happen. And who is it going to show up in the most? According to God in the book of Joel, it’s going to be the “young men” and the “old men.” 

Which John tells us later is exactly what he’d seen happen. The old men, or the “fathers” as he calls them in 1 John 2:13, “have known him who is from the beginning.” They’ve been rooted solidly in the teachings of Jesus for years, because their “dream” (Acts 2:17) is to see the whole world at last living by those teachings, as promised. But what about the effect on the young? According to Joel, ““Your young men will see visions”….(next blog)

In 1 John 2:14, John has one more thing to say to the “young men” – he’s writing to them “because you have overcome the evil one.” So when John writes earlier in the verse that these young men are “strong,” he means this kind of strong, that they’ve stood their ground against the wiles and power of the devil.

And they are “young men” too – young in age or young in their growth as Christians – either way or both, they haven’t caved in to evil. Which is amazing, because they’ve managed to do what Adam and Eve didn’t do, and what the Israelites in the Old Testament never did either, so something since must have changed to enable people – still in the developing stage of their humanity and their Christianity – to fight off the devil. 

Well, we know now what that “something” was: it was the most gigantic moment in our human history, when “the Son of God appeared” on this planet in human form and “destroyed the devil’s work,” 1 John 3:8. He did what Adam and Eve and the Israelites didn’t and couldn’t do: he resisted the evil one in a face to face battle in Matthew 4 and sent him packing. How? By using the one weapon God gave us humans from the beginning: HIM. 

He’s always been there for us, with his wisdom and his strength. He was there in person for Adam and Eve, and if only they’d listened to him and let him guide them. And the same with the Israelites. He was always there for them too, again with his wisdom and guidance on hand at all times, but they wouldn’t listen to him either.

But Jesus did. He lived on “every word that comes from the mouth of God,” Matthew 4:4. That was his weapon that overcame the evil one. And the same for those “young men” John was writing to. The means by which they were able to overcome the evil one was “the word of God living in them” too, 1 John 2:14.

But how did that happen? Why were they able to do what Jesus did, and not do what Adam and Eve and the Israelites did? Well, we know that too now, that it was the second most gigantic moment in human history, when Jesus ascended to his Father after being victorious over the evil one and asked his Father to “send the Holy Spirit to live with us and in us,” John 14:16-17. And “The effect of the Holy Spirit” was amazing….(next blog)

In 1 John 2:14, John writes to “young men because the word of God lives in you.” Whether he means “young” in age or young in their Christian journey (or both) – the same point would apply, that they’d caught on to the essential ingredient in the growth and development of their fellowship with God. 

It was the same essential ingredient that created the fellowship of Jesus with his Father, as Jesus himself explained in John 14:10, that “The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father living in me who is doing his work.” So it was the word of the Father living in Jesus that created their fellowship together, and gave Jesus the ability to speak and act as strongly and effectively as he did.

Well, John is now writing to young men, or young Christians, who are displaying the same strength in their words and actions, and for the same clear reason too, that “the word of God is living in you.” In context, John is referring to Jesus as “the word of God,” so it was Jesus’ words that were being lived in these Christians, and that’s what created their fellowship with him and the strength they had. Or as John put it in 1 John 2:3, “We know we have come to know him (enter into real fellowship with him) if we obey his commands,” because what happens to “anyone who obeys his word,” is that “God’s love,” verse 5, “is truly made complete in him.” And when God’s love happens, creating a love for God and each other in us, “we know we are in him” (5). 

John is talking about how “our fellowship (comes about) with the Father and with his Son” (1:3). It comes from obeying the word or commands of Jesus, which came from the Father (John 12:49-50). And John is adamant on this point: “The man who says, ‘I know him,’ but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him,” 1 John 2:4. And in verse 6, “Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus walked.” And Jesus’ walk was always love, which is why John wrote in verse 10, that “whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble.” God’s love in us creates that kind of strength and integrity and stability in us. 

And John was seeing the effect of that love that came from Jesus’ words living in people. A mighty powerful effect it was too, as even young men were “Overcoming the evil one”….(next blog)

For close to sixty years John has been watching the effect of his teaching. He’s watched newly hatched Christians grasp the love of the Father and his Son, enabling them to put their past lives behind them and start afresh, knowing they’re forgiven and forever loved as fully fledged members of God’s family. 

John then watched these same Christians set out on their new lives. John calls them “young men,” but it could be someone of any age who’s well into the next stage of their Christian lives, seeking to live as Jesus lived, 1 John 2:5-6.

They’re growing up well too, because John also writes that they’re growing up “strong,” verse 14, the Greek word meaning “mighty” and “powerful.” They’d entered that stage in a Christian life – pictured in Hebrews 10:32-35 – “when you stood your ground in the face of suffering. Kicked around in public, targets of every kind of abuse – some days it was you, other days your friends. If friends went to prison, you stuck by them. If enemies broke in and seized your goods, you let them go with a smile. Nothing they did bothered you, nothing set you back.”

Just like the apostles who, when flogged in Acts 5:40, “never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ” (42). And when Paul was nearly stoned to death in Lystra in Acts 14:19, a little while later “he got up and went back into the city” (20). These men were unstoppable. There was “nothing in them,” as John phrases it in 1 John 2:10, “that could make them stumble.” 

This was how it was in the early stage of the church, when like typical “young men” they were full of drive and energy. Life was tough at times, and opposition could be severe, but as Paul wrote in Colossians 1:29, “I struggle on with all the energy God gives me, which so powerfully works in me.” Paul had learnt too, that “I can do everything through him who gives me strength,” Philippians 4:13. 

And it was this same strength that John had seen developing in those he’d watched as they too entered this stage of life as a Christian, when life was tough and the world and its influence pressed in on them, but then seeing them come through it in a great show of strength. And it was thrilling to see. But so was the reason for why they had such strength: because “The word of God lives in you”….(next blog)

John has a second thing to write to those he calls “dear children,” this time in 1 John 2:13. Again, he’s talking to those starting out on their journey into “fellowship with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ” (1:3). 

And they’re well on the way, because, John writes, “you have known the Father.” Which ties in with the first thing John wrote to his “dear children,” about their sins being forgiven, because the reason their sins had been forgiven was because of the Father’s love. The two go together, as John goes on to explain in 1 John 4:10, that “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and (it was he who) sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” 

The realization that our sins are forgiven leads to understanding that it was the Father’s love for us that got that ball rolling. And how crucial that is in our fellowship with him getting off to a good start, because as John writes in 1 John 4:19, “We love, because he first loved us.” We set out on life, therefore, “knowing and relying on the love God has for us” (16), knowing too that he loved us at our worst. 

And isn’t that how life starts for us as babies too? Our fellowship with our parents starts off the same way. We enter the world as entirely selfish beings. As one Dad said about his baby daughter, “I found, first, that she was very lazy. She did nothing but lie around the house all day, and contributed absolutely nothing to the household except to make a lot of trouble for everyone. And she was rude. She would burp right in your face and never apologize. She was utterly unconcerned about another’s reaction or another’s welfare. She was also highly uncooperative, oftentimes waking us up in the middle of the night for demands that could well have waited for morning.”

Not a bad description of our lives as little Christians too, because we’re still stuck with a lot of what we were: still being judgmental, impatient, rude, egotistical, easily offended, emotionally volatile, etc. But as that little baby girl grew, a lovely thing happened. She’d cry out “Daddy” and wave her arms around excitedly on seeing him. Because she’d come to know she was always forgiven and always loved by this weary, half-asleep creature, and that’s what would enable her to love in return. 

And with a start like that our fellowship with God can grow too, into the next wonderful stage John mentions, of “Growing up strong”….(next blog)

In 1 John 1:3, John writes that “our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.” And that was something John really understood, because in the years he’d spent as a disciple, watching and learning from Jesus, he’d come to love Jesus very much, and he knew Jesus loved him too (John 13:23).

John also understood that fellowship is with both the Father and Jesus, because in “knowing Jesus,” he wrote, we “know the Father as well” (John 14:7). It was also John who quoted Jesus saying that “the Father himself loves you because you loved me” (16:27). Again, fellowship was with both Father and Son. So it’s not surprising that John was the one gifted to write about “fellowship with the Father and Jesus,” as to what it means, the joy it creates, and how we get to experience it too.

Having experienced that fellowship himself for possibly up to eighty years already, John writes like a wise old grandfather when starting out in 1 John 2:12, “I write to you, dear children.” These are the people at the very start of their journey into fellowship with God, the “newly hatched” Christians beginning their new life as newborn members of God’s family.

What brings them into fellowship with God – at this point in their lives – is “knowing your sins have been forgiven on account of Jesus’ name.” What kickstarts anyone at any age into an awareness of God is “the blood of Jesus purifying us from all our sin” (1:7).

John is talking about how “fellowship” with God is created and the crucial starting point, which is realizing and acknowledging that because of Jesus’ death our past life is no more. Whatever stupid and awful things we’ve thought, said and done, are no longer held against us in God’s eyes. And as literal children in a human family that’s where fellowship begins too, when as kids we said or did something we knew was wrong, but we heard our parent say, “You’re forgiven.” 

That’s the point when a real awareness of love begins, in being undeservedly forgiven, followed by the joy of a conscience relieved, a relationship restored, and learning what being a family is all about.

Because it’s into God’s family that we’re being brought and learning what it’s all about now too. Which, as John adds next, comes from “Knowing the Father”….(next blog) 

In 1 John 2:13, John writes “to you fathers, because you have known him (Jesus, 1:1) who is from the beginning (has always existed).”

What John meant by “knowing” he’d explained already in chapter 1:1-4, that “We’re writing to you because we saw and heard the very Word of life himself, the One who’s always existed with the Father, our point being that you too can know him and the joy-filled fellowship with him that we had when he was here with us in person.” So joy for John was these “fathers” who for years had known and experienced Jesus too. 

And it must have meant a lot to John because he writes exactly the same words to these fathers a second time in 2:14 – because they’d proved his point. From their years of experience they could say of Jesus, “I know him, I truly do,” having taken to heart what Jesus said in John 10:10, “I came to give you life to the full (Greek perissos, meaning  ‘a surplus’, over and above abundance into superabundance, a life beyond what we can even imagine).” 

Like John these fathers believed that when Jesus appeared this was the life he came to make visible and real, 1 John 1:2. And by the word “life,” Jesus meant “eternal life” (2), the life he’d lived forever with his Father (3). The life, therefore, that “we proclaim to you,” John writes in verse 2, “is the eternal life.” Not the utopian fantasies the world dreams up, but life as the Father and Jesus enjoy together, that we can enjoy with them, and with each other.

Which all sounds wonderful, but what’s the key that unlocks this life for us now? John answered that back in 1 John 2:13, when he said, “you fathers have known him.” The key is knowing Jesus. 

But what brings us to the point that we too can say, “I know him, I truly do”? John answered that in verse 3: “We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.” And in verses 5 and 6, “We know we’re living in him (really knowing him) when we’re walking as he walked.” Which makes sense, because Jesus’ commands and his “walk” were both based on love. To obey his commands and walk as he walked is to love as he loved and live as he lived. And doing that for many years, like those “fathers” did, we too can say, “I know him, I truly do.” 

And having done this for many years himself, John knew what it was like, therefore, to have “Fellowship with God”….(next blog)

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)