Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a PhD in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

We'll go ahead and get started.

When we get started, we'll be picking up in First Epistle of St. John, chapter two, verse

three.

We didn't get all that far last time, but considering how long I could have rambled on about 1 John 2 verse 2, I feel like I did

quite well by restraining myself. But also, as I mentioned last time, 1 John 1 1 1 1 1 1 through

2 2 is, despite that sounding funny, is really sort of the introduction,

right, where he sort of lays out the themes he's going to be talking about through the rest

of the epistle.

So it was worth spending a little extra sort of detailed, detailed time on that because

these things are going to keep coming up as we move

through the epistle.

And as I also mentioned last time, St. John tends to structure all of his writing.

It's sort of really obvious in Revelation.

It's less obvious in St. John's Gospel.

Somewhere in between here in First John.

He tends to structure things sort of cyclically.

They'll sort of loop back.

And so it's not just a case, as we saw with St. Paul, where he sort of introduces concepts

and then sort of goes through the epistle and develops them.

It's more that St. John introduces them and then he's going to

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