Dark Chronicles3 min read

Diotrephes

He loved to be first. He refused the apostle's authority. He put people out of the church.

📖Based on 3 John 1:9

John wrote a short letter.

He addressed it to Gaius.

He said he had written to the church but Diotrephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge our authority.

That is the whole portrait.

A man who liked to put himself first.

He was not a false teacher fighting doctrine.

He was not leading people into immorality.

He simply wanted to be first.

And that wanting had metastasized into something with real consequences.

John said: If I come, I will bring up what he is doing.

Talking wicked nonsense against us.

And not content with that, he refuses to welcome the brothers.

He also stops those who want to and puts them out of the church.

He gossips about the apostles.

He refuses hospitality to traveling brothers.

He removes people who try to show that hospitality.

All of it in service of his own preeminence.

Not in service of truth.

Not in service of the community.

He got one sentence of direct description.

Who likes to put himself first.

Everything else in the description was downstream from that sentence.

The gossip. The refusal. The expulsions.

John told Gaius not to imitate evil but good.

Whoever does good is from God.

Whoever does evil has not seen God.

Diotrephes had perhaps never led a heresy.

He had perhaps never denied a doctrine.

He had simply built a small kingdom around himself.

In the middle of the church.

And defended its borders aggressively.

His name survived two thousand years.

As a warning.

Scripture — 3 John 1:9
"I wrote unto the church: but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the preeminence among them, receiveth us not."

Reflection

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His sin was not heresy. It was preeminence — the need to be first in a community that was built around servanthood.

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John didn't describe his theology. He described his behavior. The behavior was the theology.

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