Gnostic Pentagram

“If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.” (1 John 1:8-10)

As a child growing up in an evangelical church, I can remember 1 John 1:9 as being one of the first verses we memorized, after John 3:16, of course. How come we didn’t memorize 1 John 1:8 or 10?

I can just here it now… “First John one, eight:” (you always had to say the reference at the beginning and the end of the verse) “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us… First John one, eight.”

“Good work, Johnny. Here’s your gold star.”

Not gonna happen.

Why was I completely unaware of 1 John 8 and 10 until I studied 1 John as an adult? Why were 1 John 8 and 10 a revelation later in life, as if I’d never heard them before, and I was raised on the Bible? Well I guess the answer to that is that there was no basis in our understanding, nor were there models in the leaders we followed to help interpret the fact that as Christians we will continually deal with sin, and that, indeed, it is a worse state to live giving the impression that you don’t sin than to live in open confession of your sins.

And why are there two almost identical verses about living as if you didn’t have sin and only one verse to handle your sin when you do sin? Because living as if you had no sin is the more egregious error. In fact this failure to deal with sin is the main thrust of this whole first chapter.

Go back to verse six: “If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth” (1 John 1:6). The crux of the understanding is around the meaning of walking in darkness and walking in the light. We always thought walking in darkness was doing bad things, being on the dark side, being with bad people. When, in fact, walking in darkness is to live so as to hide the bad things you do. If walking in the light means being revealed, walking in darkness means being secret.

This interpretation of 1 John takes on even more significance when you understand why John wrote this in the first place. He was trying to refute the Gnostic Christians who had wedded the new teachings of Christ with the Greek separation of the physical and spiritual realms and come up with the idea that it didn’t matter how you lived or what you did in the physical world as long as you believed all the right things in the spiritual one. (Sound familiar to anyone?)

So John builds his whole argument around the fact that Jesus came in the flesh – we saw him and touched him – and our faith has to work in the flesh so then we had better be honest about our sinful natures because we still possess them. The Gnostics were living as if they had no sin while they were sinning all over the place and John called that walking in darkness.

It is far worse, and does greater damage to others and the truth to hide your sin than to bring it out into the open.  Let me ask you, “Where do you see this true meaning of 1 John lived out? Where is the gathering of believers where one is more likely to confess sin than to hide it? Tell me, seriously, because I want to know.

Show me a church that has kids memorizing 1 John 1:8 and I’ll move so I can go there.

“First John one, eight: If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us… First John one, eight.”

“Good work, Johnny. Here’s your gold star.”