Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. If this is your first time ever here, welcome. I'm super glad that you decided to carve out some time to hang out with me. That is a huge honor. And what you'll figure out pretty quickly is that we are going straight through the book of Matthew. We do that in like 10-ish minutes every weekday morning. And that means that at this point you might be starting to thumb through your podcast app because, like, oh, well, maybe I need to go back to the beginning. But you don't have to. I mean, I think it'd be fun if you did at some point, but you're welcome to just jump in with us right here. Usually there's enough context to bring people up to speed pretty quickly, as we are now seven chapters into the document. But another thing that you're going to figure out pretty quickly is that every now and then we step aside to another part of the Bible or to explore a little bonus question so that we're thinking about Matthew in the larger context of the Bible and Christian thought in general. So we don't kind of lose ourselves in one narrow little spot and try to have that narrow little spot apply out to everything else. I mean, we want to read all of it in light of all of it. And today is one of those every now and then where we got to step aside to another text for just a minute. And the reason for that is that last week, as we're working through the Gospel of Matthew, chapter seven, and we're thinking about the idea of Jesus' kingdom that he's describing, this kingdom with beautiful, loving, godlike values and a whole different way of thinking about stuff and things that have different values and currencies than the regular world system that you and I are used to. And as we're talking about that, we're seeing how Jesus is effectively ramping up his invitation, or I guess you could say command, for people to come and participate in this kingdom to live as citizens of this truer, realer kingdom. And one of the questions that inevitably people back then would have had, and that inevitably people now are going to have, is how do you know if you're in? Some people think you make a choice to be in the kingdom. Other people think that God picks everyone who's going to be in the kingdom. Some other people have kind of a middle view of that. All of that aside, what we know is that Jesus is telling people to come be a part of the kingdom. And the very rational, honest question that many would ask would be, okay, cool. I think I want to do that. I think I did that. How would I know? And so I pointed to this threefold test of orthodoxy, of being a Christian, of being a kingdom citizen that exists later on in the New Testament in a book called First John. And in pointing people to that, I kind of threw out this flippant homework assignment. I was like, hey, just go read it, you'll see it. And maybe this threefold test for am I a Christian or Am I in the kingdom is very obvious to some, but maybe it's not quite as obvious to everybody. And I actually got a really great comment over on the subreddit from somebody who goes by the handle Roaring Turtle. It goes like this. So a quick question. Matt's mentioned on a few occasions of John writing a threefold proof of a person's sincere belief in Christ. I've read first John since then, and I may just be oblivious or too sleep-deprived to catch it, but I didn't see it as clearly laid out. I would love to be pointed a little more clearly towards specific passages. Thanks. And again, if you want to go over and catch conversations like this, there's a link in the show notes of every single episode that says discuss this episode here, and that'll take you to redit.com r slash tmbh podcast is where we hang out and do the discussion, which is of course free to participate in if you would like. A guy named Elijah Q jumped in and gave some really excellent thoughts on this, but rather than just reading Elijah Q's response, I thought it would be worth our time to go over and look at 1 John together to look for this threefold test, to point out where it appears in the text, not just because it's a good, thorough academic exercise, but because, well, I don't know, maybe you're wondering if you have signed up and you are in the kingdom or not. And this book is incredibly helpful for answering that question. So, original context: 1 John is written by John, the same John who did the gospel, the same John who we believe to be the beloved disciple, and the same John who tradition says lived to be the oldest of any of the disciples. He's the only one, if I remember correctly, who is not purported to have died a violent death as a martyr. He lived out his days in what we would now call Turkey or islands just off the coast of Turkey within the political orbit of Ephesus. And of course, he wrote the oddball of the four gospels, not that it's like wrong or bad. It's just coming from a different perspective with a different agenda. The details seem to line up pretty well, but it has a little different feel to it. And I think part of the reason that John and all of John's literature has a little different feel is because he is writing a bit later, and because he is writing in response to a counter-movement within or against Christianity that had emerged as people tried to synthesize Greek assumptions that people just believe to be immutably true with these new Christian assumptions, which they also found very appealing. So they mush that stuff together, and what you get is something that is often referred to as dualism or a specific expression of dualism that gets called Gnosticism. And one of the Gnostic dualistic beliefs is that the physical is bad and the spiritual is good. And so some Christians influenced by Gnosticism would look at that and say, well, since the physical is bad, I need to reject my body in every imaginable way. And it also means that Jesus and the Father, they're not really on the same page like Jesus held it out as being. The Father is bad because he made physical things in creation, and Jesus is good because he spiritually liberates us. Well, I mean, that sounds pretty good and Greekish, I guess. The only problem is it doesn't sound like Jesus, and it doesn't sound like what the Bible teaches. It doesn't sound like Jesus as being the bun dun dun dun to the bun-bun-da-dun dun of the first part of the Bible. Jesus is the completion and the fulfillment of what God has been doing all along, not a departure from that into a new thing. So John is pushing back in his literature on faulty theological assumptions about the relationship between Jesus and God. He is pushing back on this Gnostic pseudo-Christianity that has emerged. And he's pushing back on another version of Gnosticism that would say, well, since the physical is bad and the spiritual is good, it doesn't matter what I do with my physical body. So all of the moral teachings of Christ are irrelevant, and I will indulge my body however I want and do whatever feels good as long as spiritually I'm right with God and I think the right things about God, I should be good to go. First John is a firm refutation of those assumptions. And people break this down a couple of different ways. And Elijah Q rightly points out in response to Roaring Turtle that some people break this out differently than I do. They would say there's maybe a dozen tests of orthodoxy scattered throughout 1 John. I would disagree with that read, though, and say that what we're seeing instead is a repetition of effectively the same three tests again and again and again. And the very grandfatherly caring tone that this now very old man John is taking to what must now be a third, fourth, maybe beginning of a fifth generation spiritually of Christians is one that is meant to really pound home the idea by taking different runs at the same truth as it goes along. And I think there are a handful of very clear restatements of this threefold test for are you a Christian or not? So what I want to do is give you just a little tease of that structure, and then we're going to go and break it down very specifically tomorrow. So the document opens with John saying, That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at with our hands, have touched, this we proclaim concerning the word of life. The life appeared, we've seen it, and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we've seen and heard, so that you may also have fellowship with us, and our fellowship with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. So hey, there's your smoking gun. Why are we doing 1 John? Ah, it's to make our joy complete. What will make our joy complete? If everybody's on the same page about Jesus and what it means for those who are a part of his kingdom to exist in this world, how do we live? What do we do in response to the reality of Jesus? Christian truth starts with a right understanding of the person for whom Christianity is named. The one foundation, the chief cornerstone, the main character of Christianity is Christ. And so implicitly, what John seems to be saying here is look, we saw all this stuff. We are repeating you truth, not the stuff that we made up or that we heard or that we spiritually intuited. We are repeating to you stuff that we saw and that we heard, and that we saw and heard at the same time, and that we saw and heard in ways that break the laws of time and space from Jesus himself, the guy who is the centerpiece of all of this. So implicitly, what John is saying is you guys are also hearing from a bunch of other people who just heard about this recently, like maybe five years ago, and they thought, ah, Jesus sounds like a great addition to our already existent pseudo-philosophical religion. We'll just mush them together and then we'll speak very authoritatively to that, and we'll expect everyone to go with our version of it. John is saying, no, this is a come lately version. It's not trustworthy and reliable. They make the cardinal error of getting Jesus wrong. And unsurprisingly, what flows out of that is wrongness in terms of this pseudo-Christianity, how people who practice it treat each other and how they behave, because the way they treat each other and the way they behave are not in keeping with the actual character and reality of Christ on whom this whole thing is built and who we were with all the way back in the day. We saw the whole thing play out. So, in a really nice way, John is opening this letter by saying, We all agree that this whole thing flows out of Christ. Cool. And everybody here who hung out with Jesus and knew him really well and was called his beloved disciple, raised their hand. Oh, oh, well, it looks like I'm the only one. Well, maybe we'll just go with some of the things that I say then, instead of what these guys who just heard about it last week say. From there, and in response to Roaring Turtles' question, we're going to break this down further tomorrow, we get into an exploded view of these three tests, which are once again, the test of orthodoxy, that is, do you have Jesus right? The test of love, how do you treat your brothers and sisters? How do you treat others? Does it look like Jesus, or are you a jerk? And the third test is that of basic morality and ethics. Do you obey the commands of Jesus? Because again, if you say this is a kingdom and he's the king and you don't obey his commands, then obviously I guess you'd be a part of some other kingdom and not truly subservient to that king. Again, we'll break all of that down in more detail tomorrow. Give you a little bit more of a sense of the outline and flow of reasoning in 1 John. And before we wrap up, just to make sure we're on the same page, the reason we are doing this 1 John thing is not because I'm tired of Matthew and I got distracted. We're doing this because the natural question, especially for you and me, all these years after the fact, coming out of Jesus' push in Matthew 7 to say, hey, choose this narrow way over here. Don't choose that broad, obvious path over there is, okay, well, I think that sounds good and I want to do that. How do I know if I've chosen the narrow way? How do I know if I'm actually doing the kingdom of Jesus thing when he's not physically here to high five me and be like, cool, just so you know, you signed up. I'm Jesus, you're you, high five. Sweet. Now you know you're in. You get the high five of approval. Well, first John's words echo through the ages to give us clarity on that for that very natural question that we would all be asking. We'll pick it right back up tomorrow and do a one episode quick work through of 1 John before we get back to Matthew 7, the day after that. Again, thanks to everybody who's new and jumping in. I'm super glad that you're here and hopefully you're enjoying this little Bible rabbit trail as we step away from Matthew for just a second. All right, I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. We'll catch you tomorrow.