Students of the Word: Recent Episodes
Corey Olsen
To be a Christian is to be a student. The word “disciple” means “student”, and before he ascended to Heaven, Jesus’s final command to his students was that they should go into all the world and teach, making more students (Matthew 28:19-20). As Christians in the modern world, our calling is still to be students of Jesus and to help each other in fellowship as we learn about Him and from Him. We are to be Students of the Word, studying the Bible, the written word of God, as we walk as the disciples of Jesus, the living Word. My name is Corey Olsen, and I am hosting a Bible study open to anyone who would like to join me as a Student of the Word. Would you like to join me for a patient, thoughtful, and prayerful study of the Bible together, reading whole books verse by verse?
After a look back at how paragraph three fits into the big picture, we plunge ahead into a discussion of I John 2:7, the first verse in paragraph four. Our discussion contains some fun explorations of the Greek, in which we look at the potential implications of John's choice for the pairing "old" and "new", have some fun with verb tenses, and think about the many relevant senses of the phrase "from the beginning."
The last sentence of John's third paragraph brings together all the terms that he has been throwing around in this third paragrah, as well as bringing back one or two from paragraph two and introducing a big new one as well. It is a wonderfully rich and dense sentence, not to mention really tangled up and hard to to follow -- until we notice that John is doing something completely brilliant and beautiful through his apparently convoluted syntax!
Today we went back to complete out discussion not only of I John 2:4 but of the parallel statement that completes the sentence: I John 2:5. We have a lot of very fruitful discussion of what it means to "keep" Jesus's commandments, and then explored the rich and powerful idea of "perfecting" the love of God.
After a look back over where we have come from, we begin discussing the third paragraph of John's epistle, starting in chapter 2, verse 3. After all those "if" statements about deceiving ourselves and making God a liar, we may want to know: How can we be sure? How do we know if we are in community with God? John addresses that squarely in his third paragraph.
Turning to the second chapter of I John and ready to begin the third paragraph of the epistle, I suddenly realize that we are actually still in the second paragraph! The rhetorical shift at the start of the second chapter seems not to open a new idea, but to begin the conclusion of the previous series of parallel ideas. And in that conclusion, John explains the simple but profound status of our relationship with sin.
In this second half of the last sentence of this big second paragraph of the epistle, we learn not only more about the nature of Jesus's work for us, but the magnitude of its cleansing power.
The last verse of Chapter 1 provides the fifth and final if/then statement in this paragraph. We spend some time looking at the patterns that the whole series presents, and some of the implications they have for us.
Having heard a couple times now about lies and self-deception through things we might say, we now learn about a positive use for speech: one that connects our unrighteousness with the righteousness of Jesus, bringing us into cleansing and koinonia.
In verse 8, John seems to address the question of sinlessness head-on. We spend a good deal of time working out the parallels between verse 6 and verse 8, looking at walking in darkness and John's apparent extension of the "walking around" metaphor with his reference to how we can "lead ourselves astray".
This week we follow up with a longer discussion of verse 7, considering the promise that it contains which completely transforms the otherwise rather terrifying message of verse 6. We discuss the syntax of John's sentence, and consider especially what the "if/then" structure of the sentence suggests. We focus on the structure of verse 7, looking at the parallel between the light and the blood, with a little trinitarian digression concerning being "in the light". Finally, we confront the strange and uncomfortable fact that right in the middle of everything, in pride of place, is the reality of fellowship one with another that is the primary consequence of walking in the light.
Light and darkness, truth and lies: John's language here is pretty stark and uncomfortably uncompromising here in verse 6. In this episode we confront this difficult verse, and, glancing ahead, we can begin to see that this opposition contains a promise, not a threat.
In this session we discussed not one but two verses. In verse 5, we finally get to the message, the proclamation itself that John has been setting up in the first four verses. But it sounds like we might be the ones getting set up! In verse 6, John drops the hammer.
In this session we finished discussing the first paragraph of 1 John 1, looking at the significance of joy's fulness and the awesomeness of John's pronoun usage. For those following (more or less) live: there will be no new study until April 10, 2022, as I will be traveling the next few weekends. In April, we'll get to the actual message!
Today we get to the main verb and finish the whole first sentence of 1 John! John announces his intention to proclaim ... something, but then instead of actually proclaiming it, he explains why he is going to proclaim it. And the primary reason he gives is probably not what we thought it was going to be. Surprises and twists abound this week, as we discuss 1 John 1:3!
Having just mentioned the Word of Life stuff, John interrupts himself in 1:2 to tell us more, not about the Word, but about the Life, and how it is related both to us and to God. Also, we have started a discussion board in a Slack workspace. If you would like to join us for discussion and sharing, send me a note in the Contact Form at the bottom of the homepage at studentsoftheword.org, and we'll send you an invitation to join us!
In this session, we discuss the rest of 1 John 1:1 (yep, the whole verse!). Questions discussed: Which arche? Who is the "we" in all these clauses? What is the logic of the progression of the noun clauses, and what do they suggest about our relationship to the Word of Life?
In this first episode, Corey gives an introduction to the Bible study, explaining what we are and are not setting out to do in these sessions. After answering a lot of questions, we do finally start discussions, which get almost as far as "the beginning".