God Is Light, God Is Love verse-by-verse Greek exegetical notes on First John
A Greek-first reading of John's first letter — the eyewitness prologue, the message that God is light, the tests of fellowship, the warning against the world and the antichrists, the children of God, the declaration that God is love, and the assurance of eternal life. Confessional Reformed-evangelical exegesis with Greek attention where it clarifies the text.
About First John
The First Epistle of John comes, on the early church's consistent testimony and on the strong internal evidence of style and vocabulary, from the same hand as the Fourth Gospel — John the apostle, writing late in the first century to churches in the orbit of Ephesus. The letter has no formal greeting or named author; it reads as a pastoral circular, written after some had “gone out” from the community (2:19) denying that Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh (4:2–3). Against that secession the apostle writes to reassure those who remain.
The purpose is stated outright: these things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life (5:13). Where the Gospel was written that people may believe (John 20:31), the letter is written to believers that they may know. To that end John supplies what later readers have called the tests of life — a doctrinal test (confessing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, come in the flesh), a moral test (keeping his commandments, walking in the light), and a relational test (loving one another). The three run together and reinforce one another throughout.
The style is famously simple and famously deep: short clauses, a small vocabulary, and a series of stark antitheses — light and darkness, truth and the lie, love and hate, children of God and children of the devil. Two great declarations anchor the whole: God is light (1:5) and God is love (4:8, 16). These pages read the letter passage by passage in its own Greek, with the same restraint and confessional care as the companion notes on the Gospel of John.
Chapters
All five chapters of First John are complete — read verse by verse from the prologue (1:1–4) to the closing charge, “keep yourselves from idols” (5:21).