OKAY, THINK QUICK (all right, all right, quickly): what do we call the two main parts of the Bible? It’s not a trick question, nor a hard one. Answer: the Old Testament and the New Testament. Of course. But now for a somewhat harder question: how do the two relate to each other? Why is one “old” and the other “new”?

We live in a world in which marketers constantly stoke our desire for the new, our willingness to pay for the next version of…well, whatever we may buy. The lure of the next iteration of the iPhone, for example, is hard to resist (and as of this writing, we’re up to version 15). You might be perfectly happy with the one you have now. Indeed, if you stop and think about it, you probably don’t “need” the bells and whistles of the updated version; it wouldn’t really improve your life in a significant way. But you want it anyway. Apple is banking big bucks on that kind of desire. And so are other people who want to sell you something. As one car dealership shamelessly announced on their signage: “Nothing ages your old car faster than someone else’s new one.”

True. Embarrassingly so.

The words “old” and “new,” therefore, aren’t just logical opposites; we may feel differently about them. “Old” is outdated, passé, worn out, useless, irrelevant — something to be discarded in favor of the “new.” Do we sometimes bring that bias to our perception of the Old and New Testaments? That may be why when biblical scholars John Goldingay and Scot McKnight published their translations of the Old and New Testaments respectively, they called them the First and Second Testaments instead.

Put differently, the New Testament doesn’t replace the Old; it’s like the next chapter in an ongoing and ancient story. Yes, in that chapter God does things that even people familiar with the old story might not have expected. But that doesn’t mean the old has been discarded, as if God one day decided to start all over with a new and better plan. What’s new is a continuation and fulfillment of the old — and a surprising one at that.

PREVIOUSLY, WE’VE SEEN how John writes to his beloved readers about both what he calls an old and a new commandment. Here again are his words, this time from the Common English Bible:

Dear friends, I’m not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the message you heard. On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light already shines. (1 John 2:7-8, CEB)

First he says, “I’m not writing a new commandment to you” — but then he seems to take it back, saying, “I am writing a new commandment to you.” What gives? In the span of two whole sentences, did he suddenly change his mind?

Remember that one of John’s reasons for writing the letter in the first place is to keep people from being led astray by false teaching. With that in mind, I take him as saying, “Beloved, you can be sure that what I’m saying to you isn’t some newfangled idea I came up with on my own” — with a possible implied subtext of “unlike some other people I could name.”

No, what John is teaching them is rooted in an “old commandment.” By this, he means first the teaching about Jesus, which they have already heard and believed. Beyond that, he also means the teaching of Jesus himself, which includes the ancient commandments to love God wholeheartedly, and one’s neighbor as oneself.

At the same time, however, he doesn’t want them to miss what’s new about the gospel message. As we’ve seen, at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, he described Jesus as the “true light” that was “coming into the world,” a light that the world’s darkness cannot overcome (John 1:5, 9). He uses the same language here. Coupled with his declaration that God is light (1 John 1:5), John calls Jesus the “true light” to say that he was the authentic representation of the nature of God. That truth is part of the gospel his readers have already heard.

But John also wants to put new emphasis on something they may have missed or forgotten in the controversies swirling in the community. The truth of the gospel is seen “in him and in you” — in Jesus and in the people who follow him as Lord. Remember, Jesus both claimed to be the light of the world himself (John 8:12) and called his followers to be the light of the world as well (Matt 5:14).

That’s the next chapter of the story. The God who separated light from the darkness, who revealed himself to his people in light, also revealed himself in the person of Jesus, the light of the world. And those who would be his disciples must also walk in the light, must shine like candles in the darkness.

How do they do that? As we’ll see, it begins with love.