the Third Week after Epiphany
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Bible Commentaries
Coffman's Commentaries on the Bible Coffman's Commentaries
Fellowship with God; Confession and Forgiveness.Chapter 2
Christ as Advocate; Love and Obedience.Chapter 3
Love and Righteousness; Children of God.Chapter 4
Test the Spirits; God's Love and Ours.Chapter 5
Faith in Jesus; Overcoming the World.
- 1 John
by James Burton Coffman
The beautiful prologue (1 John 1:1-4) is like the one in John's gospel, having the profoundest dimensions and embryonically stating the theme as: "God manifested in Jesus Christ, that man may have fellowship with the Father through the Son."(F1) The remaining six verses are part of a complicated paragraph running through 1 John 2:28 and which begins with "God is light" (1 John 1:5), the first of three epic statements about God which are usually cited by scholars as marking in a rough sense the three major divisions of 1 John. The other two are: "God is righteous" (1 John 2:29) and "God is love" (1 John 4:7-8). As noted in the introduction, however, a satisfactory classical outline of this letter is hardly possible.
The echoes of the great prologue in John's gospel are so pronounced in these first four verses, with just those variations which are believable in John but which no forger would have dared to attempt, that this shorter prologue here has been understood by the Christians of all ages as a convincing Johannine signature. Nobody except John could have written this.
