"I didn’t write to you because you are not having come to know the truth but rather because you are having come to know it and because every lie is not out of the truth."
-John’s readers know the truth. He is writing to believers who know the truth. He says he is not writing to them because they do not know the truth - in other words, he is not writing in order to chastise or correct them. This letter is for their encouragement - and ours, those of us who have also believed thru this Word (from John and others) passed down to us. We are having come to know the truth. We came to understand it and embrace it at some point in the past, God regenerated us and gave us new life and new understanding at that time, and that life, that knowledge, that truth, remains with and in us still today.
-No lie is of the truth. Again, there is an age old battle, a clash of opposites. The truth and the lie. The lie is not the complete absence of truth (in the same way that darkness is the absence of light). There can be some element of truth in any lie. In fact, the most effective and diabolical deceptions contains some element of truth. The preposterous is much harder to swallow. But make it plausible, and the masses may be fooled. This is certainly the tack of the enemy. He did it in the garden. He tried it in the wilderness. Use some truth, but twist it, or shade it somehow. And yes, sometimes simply flat out contradict it. But herein lies the reason why it becomes so important to know the truth. To become so familiar with it, to let it become so ingrained in you that you can readily and easily spot a counterfeit. That’s how they train bank tellers. They (only) expose (and overexpose) them to good bills, to the true ones. Over exposure perhaps is not the way to go in film photography, or on the beach, but it is definitely the way to go with truth. Over, not under. You know the truth, John says. Good for you. Let’s go over (it again), let’s go over-board, let’s let the indwelling Spirit help us double down and learn it again, take us further up and deeper in.
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