The unique feature of this opening salutation is John’s surprising emphasis upon truth and his linking of the truth he thus emphasizes to love. Indeed, the word “truth” occurs four times in the first three verses and one more time in verse four. In these verses John claims that he loves the elect lady and her children “in the truth,” that these are also loved by all others who “know the truth,” that this is true precisely “because of the truth,” and that in this they are all following the way of the Father and Son, who indeed dispense the great blessings of grace, mercy, and peace “in truth and love.”
These phrases are of importance, for they are expressions of the fact that we are bound to other Christians by the bond of truth and that truth is the ground of love. Why do Christians love one another after all? It is not on the ground of some special but imagined compatibility, for they are often highly incompatible. It is not merely on the grounds of some deeply shared goals or programs, as would be true, for example, of some voluntary social service agency, though Christians do have many goals in common. What binds the Christian community together is a common commitment to the truth, out of which love arises. This means that Christians will differ fundamentally from the false teachers in their midst or from outright heretics. For a time false teachers and Christians may share common goals. For a time the false teachers may even be indistinguishable from those who are truly born again. But the false teachers will leave and go out into the world, as John said earlier, while, on the other hand, Christians will demonstrate that they are true Christians by remaining with one another in truth and by walking in love.
So the truth must endure. It must be held high. As Stott writes, “So long as the truth endures, in us and with us, so long shall our reciprocal love also endure. If this is so, and Christian love is founded upon Christian truth, we shall never increase the love which exists between us by diminishing the truth which we hold in common. In the contemporary movement towards Church unity we must beware of compromising the very truth on which alone true love and unity depend.”1
Verse four brings the reader to the body of the letter, from which also we learn the occasion of its having been written. Apparently members of the church to which John is writing had crossed the apostle’s path recently, and these had brought great joy to him because of their apparent and continuing growth in the truth. He wishes to share this joy and have more of it. Consequently, he writes to the church from which these Christians came, first, to praise it and encourage it in its life and witness and, second, to warn it against a danger which John out of his wider experience perceives to be approaching from without.
1John R. W. Stott, The Epistles of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964), 203.
