Over the last few days, I read through 1 John and 2 John (along with catching up in Psalms and Numbers), and can barely contain my enthusiasm for starting on 3 John…
Ha.
But seriously, I just don’t get how did 1 John made it into the Bible. Everything in it is just so simple, so underwhelming, it’s like every sentence is followed by a mirror sentence with just the words said in a different order. I really hope that people don’t pick this up and assume all the epistles are like this…
And he likes to tell us some obnoxious absolutes, like: once you follow Jesus you’ll never sin, and if you do sin it’s because you never knew God in the first place. That feels like it could get super messy… Maybe he’s talking about murder or something heinous? Either way, where’s the grace, John?!
In the end, his letters seems so flippant, like he just wants to reduce the way we talk about our faith to a simple set of words: purity, faith and love. He seems to be controlling the masses, or at least hoping people will be just as lazy as him and not question or dig deeper or anything.
From George Orwell’s 1984:
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?… The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
The variety of language and metaphors in, say, Isaiah and James and Romans makes me think that, yeah, maybe I’ll get a little smarter, my brain might process things in a new way, I might speak with a bit more enthusiasm because I’m reading this thing called the Bible. But 1 and 2 John…yeah, not today.
