The Biblical Context of 3 John

Thanks for visiting Bible Mountain. This is the second in a series of lessons on The Third Letter of John. Watch the video or scroll down to read the transcript. In this lesson I explain the Biblical context of 3 John.

Transcript:

Hi, thanks for watching Bible Mountain. This is the second in a series of lessons on The Third Letter of John. 

In the first lesson I talked about why. Why is The Third Letter of John in the Bible? Why should you and I study and learn The Third Letter of John? In this lesson, I’m going to talk about the biblical context. Then in the third and fourth lessons I’ll talk about the historical and geographical context. The context is important in order to understand how Third John fits into the rest of the Bible. 

In the fifth lesson I’ll start going through The Third Letter of John verse by verse. Verse one tells us about the author and recipient. The authorship is important because it affects how we understand the letter, and how the letter fits in the rest of the Bible. What's important about the authorship of Third John is not so much who wrote it, as it is who did not write it. 

Verse two talks about prosperity and prayers. Verses three and four talk about the joy we experience when our children live godly lives. I’ll look at this in the context of both birth children and spiritual children. 

Verses five through eight talk about hospitality and how we should treat fellow believers. Verse five talks specifically about how to treat strangers. Verse six talks about doing things in a manner worthy of God. There’s a lesson in that for us. Likewise, there's a lesson for us in verse eight about being fellow workers with the gospel. That's important for people who support missionaries, but don't go out and do missionary work. 

Verses nine and ten talk about bad hospitality and we’ll see an example of what we should not do. In verse 11 there's a command to imitate good and not evil. Then in the last lesson in this series we’ll look at the conclusion of The Third Letter of John and conclude our series through The Third Letter of John. 

As I said earlier, in the first lesson I talked about why. Why is Third John in the Bible? Why should you and I study and learn The Third Letter of John? We learned that Third John is about hospitality. It is a letter that contains instructions on how Christians should treat other believers. It specifically talks about how Christians should treat other Christians who are strangers and other Christians who are involved in evangelism and missionary work. I’ll talk about that even more in future lessons. 

In this lesson, I’m going to talk about the biblical context. We’ll look at how this letter fits into the rest of the Bible. The biblical context also helps us understand why this letter is important to us.

Let’s start by thinking about the whole Bible. As you know, the Bible is divided into the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Greek. The Old Testament tells us about people and events from before the time of Christ. The New Testament tells us about people and events during and after the time of Christ. The Old Testament is primarily about Israel. The New Testament is about Jesus and The Church. 

Now let’s talk about the New Testament. The first four books of the New Testament are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They tell us about Jesus. They tell us about His birth, a little bit about His childhood, and a lot about the time Jesus traveled around the Holy Land, teaching people, performing miracles, and healing people. They tell us that Jesus was crucified and buried, and that He rose again the third day. 

Next in the New Testament is the book of Acts. The book of Acts tells us what the apostles of Jesus did after Jesus ascended back to heaven. Jesus had told His apostles to go out and tell the world about Him. The book of Acts tells us some of the things the Apostles did as they started to fulfill that commission to go out and tell the world about Jesus. 

The last book of the New Testament is the book of Revelation. Revelation tells us about future events, events that have not happened yet even as I speak. 

In between Acts and Revelation are various letters that were written by church leaders to other individuals or churches. These letters contain doctrine. They also contain instructions about how we should live our lives and conduct ourselves as people and as followers of Jesus.

13 of those letters were written by Paul. The other eight were written by various men. One of those letters is The Third Letter of John. This is the letter we’re looking at in this series of lessons. Third John is the third from last book of the Bible. 

What we learn from this is we should learn and study The Third Letter of John because it is part of this group of letters that was written to Christians and The Church, telling us how to live as Christians in the church age. All of us who are followers of Jesus need to know what this letter tells us about how we should treat our fellow believers, so that we live as Jesus wants us to live.

Thanks again for visiting Bible Mountain. I greatly appreciate you spending some of your valuable time watching my videos and reading my articles. The next lesson will explain the historical context of 3 John. If you haven't already done so, please join either my email list or my Patreon Page in order to make sure you receive that lesson as well as all of the future lessons in this series. 

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Once again, thank you for watching Bible Mountain.

Scripture quotations from 3 John taken from a translation by Bible Mountain.

“All other Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible®,
Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973,
1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation
Used by permission." (www.Lockman.org)