In verse 13 John goes on to say, “I write to you, fathers, because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, young children, because you have known the Father.” Now we see that some of John’s little children are fathers, others are young men, and others are young children.
The fathers are those believers who are mature in the divine life. They are classified by the apostle as the first group among his recipients. These believers are fathers because they “have known Him who is from the beginning.” The words “have known” are in the perfect tense. This denotes that the state produced continues. These mature believers have known; therefore, they know all the time. Such living knowledge is the fruit of the experience of life.
John says that the fathers have known Him who is from the beginning. Here “from the beginning” is used in the absolute sense. The One who is from the beginning is the eternal, preexisting Christ, who is the Word of life from the beginning (1 John 1:1; John 1:1). Knowing in the way of life such an eternal Christ is the characteristic of the mature and experienced fathers, who were not and could not be deceived by the heresies that claimed Christ was not eternal. As the eternal, preexisting One, Christ existed from eternity. This eternal One existed before all created things came into existence. Truly He is the eternal and preexisting One.
Here John does not say that the fathers know the Son of God or Jesus Christ. Rather, he says that they have known the One who is from the beginning; they have known Christ as the eternal, preexisting One. This knowing is a matter of experience, not merely a matter of doctrinal knowledge. If we would know Christ as the eternal, preexisting One, we need to experience Him. The apostle John did not ascribe this qualification to the young ones. It was to the fathers that he ascribed the qualification of knowing through experience the One who is from the beginning.
Among us there are some fathers, those who have come to know the Lord through their experience of Him. To know the Lord in this way of experience takes many years. This is the qualification of those who can be called “fathers.” The criterion that determines who is a father is the experiential knowledge of the Lord as the eternal One, a knowledge that is gained through the life course of many years.
In verse 13 we also have the second category of believers—the young men. These are the believers who are grown up in the divine life. One characteristic of these grown-up and strong young believers is that they overcome the evil one. This is possible because the young men are nourished, strengthened, and sustained by the word of God which abides in them and operates in them against the Devil, the world, and its lust (vv. 14b-17).
Overcoming the evil one is a strong evidence that a believer has grown to be a young man. I can testify that in the church life today there is a group of young ones who overcome the evil one and also overcome evil things.
The third category of believers mentioned by John is that of the young children. These are the believers who have just received the divine life. They are classified by the apostle as the third group of recipients.
John says that the young children have known the Father. The Father is the source of the divine life, of whom the believers have been reborn (John 1:12-13). To know the Father is the initial issue of being regenerated (John 17:3, 6). Hence, such an experiential knowledge in the youth of the divine life is the basic qualification of the young children, who are the youngest in John’s classification.
Just as a child of a human father knows his father, so the young children in the divine life know their Father. The New Testament tells us that we have received the Spirit of sonship, in which we cry, “Abba, Father.” All the young children know their Father; they know the One who has begotten them with the divine life.
In verse 13 John says, “I write to you, young children.” Here the Greek word is egrapsa, have written; in other manuscripts, it is grapho, write. Although egrapsa, according to more recent manuscript discovery, is more authentic, grapho, which is taken by the King James Version and J. N. Darby’s New Translation, is more logical according to the context. The apostle in this verse addresses his writing to each of the three classes of his recipients, all in the present tense. In the following verses, verses 14 through 27, he addresses each of the three classes again, but all in the aorist tense (v. 14 to the fathers and young men; v. 26, see also v. 18, to the young children).