The Letter and the Gate
- Herbert Berkley
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Diotrephes, Demetrius, and the Two Postures Before Arriving Truth
3 John 9–12 (ESV)
Most of what we read in the New Testament was written for a specific community in a specific crisis. We know this in the abstract. What we sometimes forget is that those crises were not theological. They were personal. Someone had done something. Someone had refused something. A letter had to be written. Third John is thirteen verses. It was written to one man, about one situation, and it names names. What it sees in that situation has not aged a day.
“I have written something to the church, but Diotrephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge our authority. So 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, and also stops those who want to and puts them out of the church.”
3 John 9–10
Six words in, John names the disease. Who likes to put himself first. In Greek it is a single participial word: philoprōteuōn. It is not a description of ambition. It is a description of love. Love of the first place. Not wanting it. Not reaching for it. Loving it.
John is not guessing at the motive. He is naming it. Most negative examples in Scripture require some construction from the reader. You trace what the person did, observe what God said, work out what was underneath it. Not here. John opens the door and shows you exactly what is inside. And what is inside explains everything that follows. The slander. The blocked hospitality. The expulsion of members who showed welcome to people Diotrephes had decided were unwelcome. Every action traces back to the same love, the same door, the same refusal to let anyone else hold anything he considered his.
It helps to understand what was at stake when someone refused to welcome a traveling brother in the first century. The early church had no buildings. What it had was movement: teachers, missionaries, letter-carriers moving between communities, and each community’s reception of those people was itself a statement about whose network they belonged to. When you opened your door to a traveling brother, you were saying: what this person carries, I receive. John had put it plainly three verses earlier. Those who show this hospitality are “fellow workers for the truth” (3 John 8).
Diotrephes understood this. That is why he refused it. If the brothers were welcomed, the community would receive teaching and connection that had not passed through him first. He had arranged things so that whatever arrived in that congregation arrived through one door, and he was the one standing at it. He was not protecting the church from dangerous people. The men John commends in this same letter (Gaius, Demetrius) are not presented as a threat. What Diotrephes was protecting was simpler and more ordinary than that. He was protecting his position.
Three verses after the description of Diotrephes, John writes this:
“Demetrius has received a good testimony from everyone, and from the truth itself. We also add our testimony, and you know that our testimony is true.”
3 John 12
Three witnesses. One sentence.
The congregation testified for him. John testified for him. And then that phrase — hypo autēs tēs alētheias, by the truth itself — which is unusual enough that it stops you. John is not merely saying Demetrius believed correctly or behaved well. He is saying the shape of Demetrius’s life had become so consistent with the gospel that the gospel was willing to put its name on him. That man. There. What is missing from that sentence is Demetrius testifying for himself. Diotrephes had to maintain his own standing constantly, because standing built on control is standing that can be dismantled. Every expelled member, every blocked letter, every act of slander was maintenance on a position that required maintenance. Demetrius needed none of that. What he had could not be threatened by the arrival of anyone.
I have rarely felt what Diotrephes felt. That much is honest. But I have been prideful enough to taste it — the small version, the room-level version — and what I noticed is that it did not feel like pride. It felt like clarity. It felt like knowing where things ought to be. What I have come to understand, slowly and not always willingly, is that this is how it starts for all of them. The taste. Then the quiet need for another taste. Then something that begins to resemble what we see in the people we read about in the news and name without hesitation as a lust for power. I do not think I am far enough from that trajectory to write about Diotrephes from the outside.
John’s Gospel opens with this:
“He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”
John 1:11–12
The word translated did not receive in John 1 and the word translated does not acknowledge in 3 John 9 share the same root. This is not a coincidence of translation. It is the same apostle, writing in the same language, returning to a pattern he had watched play out at the largest possible scale before he watched it play out in a small congregation somewhere near Ephesus. The high priest had things to protect. Pilate had things to protect. The Sanhedrin had arrangements that would be complicated by a risen Messiah. Every one of them made a version of Diotrephes’s choice: position over the word arriving.
And we know how that ended. They put him outside the gate. Three days later the truth was back, not diminished, not waiting for their permission, not dependent on their hospitality.
Christ is the one who had the actual first place, not the manufactured version Diotrephes spent so much energy maintaining, but the real one: the preeminence that belongs to the one through whom all things were made (Colossians 1:18). He did not protect it. He set it down, took the form of a servant, and received what the Father gave rather than seizing what he could have claimed (Philippians 2:6–8). The exaltation came after that emptying. Not before. Not by self-appointment. Which means the one who has received the gospel already has what Diotrephes was killing himself to hold. The position does not need protecting. It cannot be taken.
“Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.”
3 John 11
Keep imitating. That is a present imperative. An ongoing posture, not a decision made once.
Here is what that looks like in practice, and it is not comfortable: when something arrives from outside your community, outside your theological circle, outside the sources you have approved for yourself: a correction you did not ask for, a voice you did not generate, a word that would cost you something to receive. What happens in you? Not what you intend to happen. Not what you would say happens, if someone asked on a Sunday morning. What actually happens, in the moment when the brothers show up and the welcome would require you to open a door you had quietly decided to keep closed? Diotrephes did not see himself as a proud man. The language of protection is always available to the man who is actually protecting his chair. He could have told himself he was being discerning, maintaining standards, guarding the community. Those words are not wrong in themselves. The problem was what was underneath them.
The test is not the language. The test is the door.
John never tells us how the confrontation went. He does not say whether Diotrephes stepped back, whether the community was restored, whether the expelled members returned. The letter ends and he disappears from the biblical record. We do not know his name from anywhere else. That silence is not an oversight. The text does not exist to finish his story. It exists because another letter is arriving somewhere right now, carried by someone whose life has already been shaped by the truth in it. And somewhere a door is either opening or it is not.
JHN-003/004 • 3 John 9–12 (ESV) • Written for Our Warning v2.0 • Quiet Fire Devotionals
