11. A Letter About Love and Truth
Despite its diminutive size, the shortest book in the Bible – the third epistle of John – carries a powerful message. On the surface, the epistle is a short exhortation from the apostle to the believer Gaius encouraging him to give hospitality to another believer, Demetrius (who may have carried this letter as an introduction), because a powerful local church leader, Diotrephes, was forcibly denying hospitality to members from outside his congregation.
This is perhaps all that we might expect to see in a "book" that is only 14 verses long, but Third John nevertheless carries a simple but profound underlying message. This "message beneath the message" has to do with the interaction between the Christian qualities of love and truth – which are mentioned (often in combinations such as "love and truth," "love in the truth," "truth and love," etc.) ten times in this letter's fourteen verses.
Beginning in the first verse, John salutes Gaius as someone "whom I love in the truth" (3 John 1:1), setting the theme of his message. In the following verses there are other indirect correlations between the qualities of love and truth, such as verse 8 where hospitality and truth are related. As we saw in chapter 9 (Lessons in Fellowship), John then uses the unhospitable Diotrephes as a negative example of the failed connection between love and truth by writing:
… Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will not welcome us. So when I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, spreading malicious nonsense about us … (3 John 1:9-10). While it is easy to miss the connection here, we should read the statement in the context of John's stress on love and truth throughout the letter. Diotrephes' failed love – his love of self and self-aggrandizement – is paired with his failed truth – his spreading of malicious lies. This pattern is repeated when John then writes:
… he even refuses to welcome other believers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church (3 John 1:10b). Here John shows Diotrephes' failure of love has a direct connection to his subsequent failure of truth in twisting doctrine so that true members of the faith are expelled.
Next, John says, "Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good" (3 John 1:11a), and he then gives the example of the faithful Demetrius who is to be imitated. In this case, John says, "Demetrius is well spoken of by everyone—and even by the truth itself" and "We also speak well of him, and you know that our testimony is true" (3 John 1:12). In other words, Demetrius is clearly liked and loved as a result of his behavior – his love – and the result is his right relationship with the truth.
So, in the course of his short letter, John repeatedly shows that we cannot express – or fail to express – love without it affecting the truth in our lives. Conversely, he tells us, we cannot express – or fail to express – the truth without it relating to the love we show. This is a principle that extends far beyond the particular circumstances in which this little letter was written – one that applies to all of us in every aspect of our lives. John tells us that love and truth are interconnected: we cannot weaken or strengthen one without the other being weakened or strengthened also.