When the apostle John wrote his first of three letters preserved for us in the New Testament, it’s quite
possible he was attempting to address a very specific local issue, and that the
letter’s intended recipients would have understood what he wrote primarily in
their own local context.
If so, he wrote it in a remarkably broad and general way, touching on issues that have troubled
mankind since the very beginning of its history.
It seems to me that in his thinking John goes right back to the first chapters of Genesis.