Another Bible Commentary: 2 John

1 The Elect Lady seems to be the Bride of Christ aka the Church. Or, it could be a wealthy believer that hosted church services in her home. Take your pick.

2 Jesus is the Truth (John 14:6). He lives in us and will be with us forever (John 17:20-25).

3 Amen.

4 John is writing in part due to docetist heretics who thought that Christ doesn’t have a human body and that therefore His suffering and death on the Cross were only an illusion (which was a proto-Gnostic doctrine).

5 We’re not under the Law of Moses, so Jesus didn’t pick Believe and Love out of the 613 regulations; instead, He offered it as a new commandment in John 13:34-35. Since John isn’t Paul (Galatians 2), he wrote to a largely Jewish audience in Turkey (though admittedly more mixed with Gentiles, particularly later in his ministry); they were still zealous for the Law of Moses (Acts 21:20), so Leviticus 19:18 still sounded old to them. At any rate, John didn’t write to add a command they’d never heard before this letter.

6 See Matthew 22:37-40 for the Old Covenant shadow of John 6:28-29 and John 13:34-35. We show our love for Him by loving others, which is what He commanded. See 1 Corinthians 13 for what love is like. Tradition says that late in life, John’s sermons were simply: “Little children, love one another.”

7-11 amounts to: “don’t be a docetist; be a Christian”.

7 See 1 John 2:22. There was some end-times focused fanfiction published in the 1970s and 1980s that focus on “The Antichrist” as a scary future bogeyman or an attempted Fake Jesus, but the biblical terminology is that anyone who denies the physical reality of Jesus Christ (at the time of John’s writing, ever since then, today, and in the future) is an “antichrist”.

8 In essence, “Don’t let the church you’ve worked so hard for get taken over by a bunch of heretics.”

9 See 1 John 2:23. You don’t graduate from grace; the people who had stopped preaching the Cross and the Resurrection and started preaching an enlightenment of self-effort through discovering a “Christ consciousness” (that people they felt superior to allegedly lacked) were missing the most important thing.

10-11 John said not to materially support Christ-denying ministries. Encouragement for material support of Christian ministries is understood from what John just said about loving each other. The consequences of this pronouncement are seen in 3 John, and the fallout from that is addressed in 1 John.

13 “sister” is likely the congregation in Ephesus.

Previous Post

Next Post