¹. . . concerning the Word of Life— ²and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us— ³what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.

Like the opening to his major biography on the life of Christ, our writer speaks of the same Word of Life:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

“And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory
. . .” (John 1:14)

John wrote both his gospel account and his letters in the twilight days of his life, but the memory of the events was branded indelibly in his mind, soul, and spirit. Of course it would be, considering he spent some three-plus years with the living “Word of life.” Do not we ourselves remember the details of our own first interactions with the One who revolutionized our lives?

John, it seems, cannot stop rehearsing his eyewitness testimony. Three times in the first three verses, he asserts that he has “seen” the Lord. And he continues to “testify and proclaim” to all who will listen. As with the other disciples, skeptics could not shut them up! The only way to stop them was to martyr them.

But John’s passionate, obsessive proclamation of Jesus Christ was not a self-indulgent compulsion to assert his own significance. No, his compulsion was to bring others into the same kind of intimate fellowship with “the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.” While his personal experience of Jesus with his physical senses—”we have heard . . . seen with our eyes . . . touched with our hands” (verse 1)—was undoubtedly amazing, John saw that others who did not have the same experience could nonetheless have the same fellowship. The memory of Jesus’ comments to the apostle Thomas in the upper room must have continually reminded the original disciples that those who come to faith without the physical interactions with Christ will in no way be less blessed:

Jesus said to [Thomas], “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.” (John 20:29, see also John 17:20)

Prayer: Lord, thank You for the same fellowship I can enjoy with You and the Father, about which the apostles testified and enjoyed. I desire others to have this also.