The most marked feature of the style is the constant occurrence of moral and spiritual antitheses, each thought has its opposite, each affirmative its negative; light and darkness, life and death, love and hate, truth and falsehood, children of God and children of the devil, sin unto death and sin not unto death, the spirit of truth and the spirit of error, love of the Father and love of the world.
THEOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL VALUE.
The Epistle is not a designed compendium of systematic theology or
handbook of Christian doctrine for catechetical training, being written
not for the instruction of the ignorant, but expressly for those who
"know the truth." Yet "in no other book in the Bible are so many
cardinal doctrines touched with so firm a hand." No other book gives a
formal definition of sin, and none so often alludes to the atonement in
the blood of Christ presented in its various phases, no other so
magnifies love and identifies it with the divine essence, and no other
so distinctly teaches Christian perfection attainable by all believers
who here and now claim their full heritage in Christ, perfect love shed
abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit. John writes as if conscious that
he is writing the last statement of Christian truth in epistolary form,
just as he had written the last of the Gospels.
"Each point is laid before us with the awe-inspiring solemnity of one who writes under the profound conviction that 'it is the last hour.' None but an apostle, perhaps none but the last surviving apostle, could have such magisterial authority in the utterance of Christian truth. Every sentence seems to tell of the conscious authority and resistless, though unexerted, strength of one who has 'seen, and heard, and handled the Eternal Word, and who knows that his witness is true."'
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