1 John Lesson 24
Today we’re going to get into 1 John 2:20-23. This hopefully will be the next to the last time on this whole section of resisting the world’s system here. Again we’ve put the outline in the notes under introduction again so you don’t lose the forest for the trees. There is a structure to this epistle even though folks somehow don’t think it exists. Keep in mind the overall argument here is in John 2:12-27. The material in the book prior to verse 12 is all introduction. It’s all to kind of set the pace for fellowship with God. How do we have fellowship with God? From verse 12 on it deals with the fact that we live in a hostile environment. So we have to deal with the hostility of the environment.
By the way if some of you have seen the movie God is Not Dead, you’ll know what we’re talking about – a hostile environment. If you haven’t seen that, I would recommend it to any young person high school age or college age because you on college campuses will encounter that kind of an atmosphere. If you go to the film, take a few minutes at the end of the film when the credits come down on the screen and see if you don’t notice the fact that the people who wrote the script for this film actually took the script as a collage of lawsuits. Carol and I sat there at the end of the film watching the credits come down the screen and we counted at least 30 different lawsuits that ADF had filed on universities and their faculties for harassment of Christian students. The drama is not Hollywood drama. The drama and the dramatic episodes that are in that film - it’s really a collage of many different lawsuits.
In fact Nate went there last Sunday night after I told him and Andrea about it. They sat there and I told them to watch at the end for the lawsuits that are coming down the screen. Nate perceptively saw one of the lawsuits was UMBC.
He says in fact, “I[‘m wondering whether central theme of this movie didn’t occur at UMBC right here in Baltimore because when I went there, there was a vehement atheist and Christian students were advised not to take his particular course. So when you see the film, think about those things. I would urge you if you have children that are into the college age bracket or you have high school students that are going into that kind of an environment that you either have them see the film or you see the film and think about what that film is saying. It’s very - in all the so-called Christian films that I have seen I think this is the most realistic one I’ve ever seen - period. The others are usually biblical themes and so one. This one is a movie that expounds on a contemporary cultural situation that’s very, very real.
Before we get to the text let’s open with a word of prayer.
(Opening prayer)
Just to review, we’re talking about 1 John 2:20. If you look at verses 18, 19, and 20 in the text in chapter 2 there just to review - you’re talking about three groups of people. So you kind of have to keep those three groups of people in your mind. When you’re reading the text the easy way to do that is think of the pronouns. He or she is a third person. “You” is a second person – people he’s addressing. The “I” or we – that’s the first person. So if you think in terms of pronouns first person, second person, third person that will help you as you go through the text to spot who the three groups are.
So for example in verse 18 he says:
NKJ 1 John 2:18 Little children
So those are the people he’s addressing - you all. He is addressing the second person pronoun there. That’s group of people who were the listeners to this epistle as it was being read in the local churches there.
NKJ 1 John 2:18 Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.
So the apostle unites himself with those readers. We know. Then he says:
NKJ 1 John 2:19 They went out from us, but they were not of us;
See the pronouns playing back and forth - they and us. There’s a group of these false teachers that apparently have come out of Jerusalem and they’re circulating out into the boonies and out into the Levant. As they circulate out in those places, the people who are new believers are sitting there being deluded or being tempted to stray because I mean after all these people come from Jerusalem. Where did the apostles come from? They came from Jerusalem too. So there is a tendency there to be deceived because these guys came from Jerusalem.
So John says, “Just a minute. They went out from us. They separated from us because they were not of us. They were not of the apostolic authority.”
But then he says in verse 20:
NKJ 1 John 2:20 But you have an anointing from the Holy One, ...
So we want to look at that. We’ve looked at verse 20 several weeks now. We take the majority reading of the text.
NKJ 1 John 2:20 …and you know all things.
This is not a claim for omniscience. It’s just a quote from the Upper Room Discourse. Remember first epistle of John is actually John’s development of Jesus’ briefing in chapters 14, 15, and 16 in the gospel. So if we have a question about a vocabulary problem in 1 John, where do we go to find out the meaning of the vocabulary? We go to John 14, 15, 16 because that’s when Jesus taught in those same words. One of those expressions Jesus had was He says:
NKJ John 14:26 "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, …
It doesn’t mean that we are going to become omniscient. It means all things that we need to know. So that’s the meaning of that.
Now here’s where we get into logic. One of the…I almost have to laugh and it’s pathetic that some of the critics of Christianity somehow think the Bible has a logical problem. In fact you could teach a course in logic from the Scriptures. No kidding. Because the discourses – just take Jesus alone. In His dialogue with the Pharisees, He’s always using very disciplined logic in His conversations. Here you have an example of it. Once John says that you know all things meaning you know the original truths that the Holy Spirit illuminated the church to.
Now he says:
NKJ 1 John 2:21 I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and that no lie is of the truth.
So this is an appeal. Something can’t be A and not A at the same time. That’s a basic fundamental rule of logic. Something is either true or it’s false – or maybe because of our finitude we can’t decide whether it’s true of false; but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true or false. So those are those 2 verses.
Now today we’re going to move on to verse 23 – actually verse 22 because verse 22 is the immediate one after 21. Look at verse 22 and what do you see as you read verse 22? How would you paraphrase it in our contemporary expression?
NKJ 1 John 2:22 Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son.
Look at the first sentence.
NKJ 1 John 2:22 Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ?
In the Greek original it’s structured this way. Now the translators don’t translate it this way because this is rugged. It doesn’t come across smoothly in English. If we were to take a literal way a Greek person should have read this and thought, here’s what it sounds like.
Who is a liar if not the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ?
Who is a liar if not the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ?
Now when somebody says that, what they’re saying in our vernacular (street vernacular) would be, “Man, if this person isn’t a liar, no one is.” So now do you see the thrust of what John is saying here. In other words, if someone denies that Jesus is the Christ; then he is the ultimate liar or the teller of falsehood.
So this raises the issue now. If John is asserting that the ultimate lie is that Jesus is not the Christ, what does that imply about the clarity of revelation in Jesus? Let’s think about this. If John’s saying that person A - he is the epitome of a liar because he doesn’t see that Jesus is the Christ; what is John thereby implying about the clarity of the revelation?
Comment That there’s sufficient evidence that it’s very clear. Nobody can really deny it
Yes. There’s sufficient evidence out there so if you don’t respond to that evidence you’ve got a problem. This is a powerful claim in our time because it just doesn’t fit our cultural way of handling this.
The way we handle it today is, “Well, you know you really can’t be sure. God’s revelation isn’t that clear.”
Now thinking in terms of agenda, spiritual agenda, why do you suppose the world’s system as the world, comes up with a clause that the revelation isn’t clear? If the revelation really isn’t clear, what does that do for you and me as far as if we were unbelievers? What does that do for us if we can assert correctly - if we can assert correctly - that the revelation isn’t clear?
Comment We can relocate authority.
We what?
Comment We can relocate authority
Okay. We’ve made ourselves the authority. When we look at our ultimate destiny in the Scriptures we’re going to be faced with our own judgment - believers at the Bema Seat, unbelievers at the Great White Throne. But at that point in our existence we’re going to be accountable to?
Comment If there is no god, to nobody.
Yes, or if there is a god and his revelation is not clear what can we defend ourselves by saying?
Comment We didn’t know
We didn’t know. Yeah.
Comment It’s not clear. To me it boils down to this. “I don’t need to listen to you tell me about Christ when that’s an opinion and you can’t prove it and I can’t prove so la-la-la…I’m not responsible for any…because it’s really not clear. After all we have errors and we know that there are many gods and many ways to serve god and on and on and on. So I’m not really accountable, other than my own opinion.” I was there once...
Well all of us who became Christians later in life can identify with that because we all have been there. But what that does, it decreases responsibility. It would be very nice ultimately to plead before God, “Please excuse for not believing that Jesus your Son is who He claimed to be because you know God you really didn’t make it clear to me.” So if we can blame God for being unclear that makes us feel better if we have ulterior motives about avoiding a judgment.
So when we get back now thinking in terms of verse 22 - first sentence when John is saying:
NKJ 1 John 2:22 Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ?
What he’s saying there is that Jesus Christ’s revelation must be clear. To make that a little bit clearer I want to show some passages right in this epistle. Then we’ll want to look at some passages in John’s gospel. In this epistle if you look back in chapter 2 verse 18. In verse 18 he uses the verb know.
He says:
NKJ 1 John 2:18 Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.
So the antichrists have made themselves aware. They’re false teachers running around. And he says, “You can tell. You can tell. You’ve got sufficient revelation to identify who these guys are and you have sufficient revelation to understand that when these guys start showing up on your doorstep pal, these people are motivated by the spirit that ultimately is going to culminate in the Antichrist.”
So let’s go to 1 John 1, thinking in terms of the revelation that God has given. In verse 1 it says:
NKJ 1 John 1:1 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life --
Those are the empirical senses: sight, sound, smell, touch. You have at least three empirical senses that he’s asserting there.
Then he says:
NKJ 1 John 1:2 the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us --
Then he testifies to that. He’s making the claim that this was public revelation. The problem that we have with our liberal culture is that people think religious truth is some mystical spooky thing that is just internal to my brain. They never think of it as something public. When God spoke the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, the Bible is claiming that a million people heard this. This is the most stunning legal political act in history – involved more publicity that Jesus Christ Himself – the giving of the Ten Commandments - the basis for all Western civilization’s law code for heaven’s sake comes out of the Ten Commandments. Now we have courts and judges that are second-guessing this.
Well let’s go to the Gospel of John, all the way back to the Gospel of John. Look how he starts the gospel. He consciously writes like he does here in John 1. He’s consciously going back to Genesis; he’s constantly referring to the beginning. In John 1 how does he say?
NKJ John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
So Jesus as the Word Incarnate is part of the triune God.
NKJ John 1:2 He was in the beginning with God.
Then in verse 3 it says of the Word, which is the Second Person of the Trinity:
NKJ John 1:3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.
Now look at the fourth verse. It’s the 4th verse that I wanted to get to here because we all know the first 3 verses; but look at the fourth verse. What are some implications of the 4th verse? Does he say in verse 4, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of the Jews?”
NKJ John 1:4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
He uses his men because Jesus was the light of all men. Notice what he says in verse 9 – same thing. He says:
NKJ John 1:9 That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.
So wherever you have truth - if I’m a scientist and I’ve done my experiment and I sat there and I’ve looked at this physical phenomenon. I’ve described it mathematically. My equations I set up. I test to see if my observations fit my set of equations. To write an equation I need constants. So the moment I start writing an equation, I’m automatically having to assume certain things are constant with time. If you don’t have a constant you can’t write any equation. All mathematics requires a constant so I have to have something constant. I have to assume that the laws of logic that I used to build my equations are going to be true on Sunday like it was true on Tuesday. So I’m assuming all kinds of things in this. What this verse 9 is saying is that whenever anyone, believer or unbeliever, arrives at something that’s true, they’re already abiding in pieces of the light. In other words there is no such thing as truths just for Christians and truths just for unbelievers. Truths are truths or everyone whether we agree with the truth or not, whether we know the truth or not. There’s a very powerful thing in John’s thinking and we believe that John’s thinking was inspired by the Holy Spirit’s thinking.
In John 8 this is another incident that happened. This is one that would be great if a movie producer could get hold of dramatically enacting chapter 8:12. Here He is in the Temple. Now this is an example of what C. S. Lewis said many, many years ago. You can’t say that Jesus was a good man. Either you say that He was who He claimed to be (the Son of God) or He was a lunatic; but don’t come up with any patronizing nonsense that you believe Jesus was a good moral teacher. That option is not open to you. Either you have to call Him a lunatic or you have to call Him who He is - the Son of God. Here in verse 12 is what C. S. Lewis means. Look at verse 12. Are these remarks in verse 12 the remarks of a sane person if they’re not literally true? What would you do if someone stepped up to you and said verse 12?
Comment It’s like someone…
Yeah, deluded. So how do you deal with something like verse 12 and say Jesus was just a good man?
Comment -...now days you hear a lot of stuff like popular music. People like the idea of light within you and people are going toward this more and more towards this saying that maybe Jesus acknowledging deity within you. That’s what you need to do. …something I notice a lot.
Comment Any chance I could jump in on this?
Okay Yeah go ahead.
Comment I just noticed in the following verses the Pharisees responded to Him by saying…You are very … about yourself, your testimony is not true. That goes back to Jewish law where the basis is that a person could not come up and either defend themselves or indict themselves by their own personal testimony. It had to be testimony outside of themselves or somebody else that would verify or recuse them based on what they were saying. You can’t step up and you know state where you’re coming from because if you’re one person testifying about yourself. According to Jewish law that wasn’t allowed.
I hope all of you are connecting with what Nate and Joel are saying here. Nate brought up a point about modern music and the lyrics of modern music and the thinking around modern music. It’s the pantheistic feeling that we all have deity, that we all have light. So at first it does seem like modern music could reinterpret verse 12 by saying that I am the light of the world, you are the light of the world because we all have deity within us.
But now Joel’s pointed out if you read the next few verses – look what happens.
NKJ John 8:13 The Pharisees therefore said to Him, "You bear witness of Yourself; Your witness is not true."
Keep in mind the Pharisees’ objection here goes back to the Torah. In the Torah there were rules of evidence.
By the way in our courtrooms - so many of you have been juried - rules of evidence that are used in our courtroom today come from the Torah.
So here it says:
NKJ John 8:14 Jesus answered and said to them, "Even if I bear witness of Myself, My witness is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going; but you do not know where I come from and where I am going.
NKJ John 8:15 "You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one.
Then he says in verse 16:
NKJ John 8:16 "And yet if I do judge, My judgment is true; for I am not alone, but I am with the Father who sent Me.
Then goes on the testimony of the Old Testament law, the testimony of His Father through miracles. So that’s the answer to a subjective pantheist who’s saying, “Well, I’ve contemplated my navel this morning at 25 minutes and I think there’s light down there.” This is talking about a true truth that’s true for everyone. That’s the kind of thing that the Gospel of John is saying, and of course John himself is saying.
Now we want to come over to some more controversy in 1 John. Here we get into a contemporary thing that is in the headlines if you noticed the last two days in the paper about a little incident that happened in Carroll County. In Carroll Country the County Commissioner or the head of the Council of Carroll County got up in a meeting last week - I guess this week – past week, this is Sunday – and said and prayed in a public meeting in the name of Jesus Christ twice after a judge commanded her not to. So she openly defied the Federal Judge and prayed publicly in the name of Jesus. So now we get into a very touchy thing. This is in the military now. If I’m a chaplain I’m not supposed to pray in Jesus name. If I’m the county commissioner or something I can’t pray in Jesus’ name because some amateur theologian called a judge has created this deity – this fake deity.
So let’s think about this. This is a contemporary situation. When we study the Word of God what makes the Word of God living and powerful – when you study the Word of God you’ll ask yourself how does what I’m studying on this page connect with where I am today in our culture. If you keep asking the Word of God those questions the text comes alive for you. If you don’t, what you do is you learn religious truths and you begin to live in your own little greenhouse over here totally separated from the real world and you find progressively more and more difficult to apply truths of the Scriptures because you don’t know what’s going on out there and you’re not used to evaluating what’s going on out there.
So let’s look at 1 John 2 going back over 2,000 years to the Apostle John. But we’re talking about what happened last week thousands of miles from where John wrote. In verse 22 John says and if you have King James or New King James you’ll see that there are two parts to verse 23. If you have some of the new translations, you’ll see there’s only one part there. We don’t particularly care. It’s another one of those textual problems.
NKJ 1 John 2:22 Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son.
23 Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either; he who acknowledges the Son has the Father also.
Now when we started this back a while ago, we talked about the trinity. So now here we go with some deep thought. The Bible insists that God is one in essence and three in personality. Obviously He is three in one sense and one in another sense. There is no internal logical contradiction with the Doctrine of the Trinity. But we went through the elements of the Doctrine of the Trinity. We isolated these. This is not original with me. This is Dr. Nathan Wood, President Gordon Caldwell of back in the 30’s, wrote this book. He pointed out if you look at the Doctrine of the Trinity as it’s classically stated in church history and as it’s revealed in the text of Scripture - it’s absolute threeness – can’t be no more no less and none can exist without the other two. Absolute oneness, each is the whole. There are three modes of being not of revelation but modes of actual being. There is a logical order from the Father to the Son to the Holy Spirit. There’s a derivative order. The Father begets the Son. The Father and Son send the Holy Spirit. There’s a revelational order. The Father is unseen but revealed in the Son. The Son acts in history. The Holy Spirit is unseen but reveals the Son – three personal center of consciousness.
Now summarizing all that, here’s the thing about the trinity. The reason why the trinity is so important is if God is a solitary person - He’s all alone; He’s solitary person – how can He exercise the attribute of love? What do you need if you’re a person to act out love? You have to have an object outside of yourself, right? You can’t sit there and love yourself. You have to love someone.
So now the trinity is the only concept of deity in the world that allows for a love within God. All other situations, whether it’s the solitary monotheism of Islam or something else, the point is that such a lone solitary deity must create an object outside of himself in order to exercise love, which now makes God dependent on the creation. God had to create in order to exercise His attribute of love. So the trinity is very, very important in preserving the social the dimension of people. We have an eternal society (if you put it that way) long before creation. The problem with the modern western mind is that we believe in materialistic evolution spontaneous generation of life. Atoms don’t love one other. At what point – do you need 1,003 atoms to become a person? Or, do you need 18 million atoms to become a person? How many atoms make a person? Well, you could go to infinity in a pile of atoms and still not have a person. So this why all this is very, very involved; but it’s very, very important. But for our purposes, looking at this verse, we want to look at some of the other what we call the triunities. People often say if fact if you remember when Pat Cate came here from Missions Emphasis about 4 or 5 years ago. He was the missionary to the Muslims. We were sitting downstairs in the room. He and I were playing this game about he was playing the Muslim and I was supposed to be the defending Christian.
He said, “Well, one plus one plus one is three. You’ve got three gods.”
So he used addition. So I turned it around and used multiplication. One times one times one is one. It was this bantering that we did back and forth, good natured bantering. But what we were dealing with was the fact that in Muslim evangelism you wind up having to deal with this thing. So these are triunities that are out there. God is triune. You would kind of expect there are things in the creation that reflect His triunity. Think of space. How many dimensions are there to space? There are three. Mathematically you can describe all space in terms of either X or Y or Z. So one becomes all.
We dealt with time How many modes of time do we have? Past, present and future. A moment in history at one point is either past – can be all past. At the end of history every moment will be all past. At the beginning of history every moment was future. So we have that. Then time shows us something else. Time as it were flows toward us out of the future into the present and then after we experience the present moment it slides into the past – marvelously parallel to the revelation of the Father that comes to us in the Son and the result of that revelation is the work the Holy Spirit does.
Then of course we mentioned the personality. People have a nature. They have divisible body circulating in reality. Then we have the personality which is the impact that person makes on society. So it’s not true that the trinity is some sort of abstract thing, notion that is nowhere present. We have no tools inside creation to think about the trinity with. We’ve got at least four tools to think about it. The point that we’re making here in verse 23 is this claim.
Let’s read the verse again with that trinity understanding.
NKJ 1 John 2:23 Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father …
Now why is that true in the light of the Trinity?
Comment
The Father and the Son are one. Which of the 3 persons of the trinity is the seenness (the visibility) of God? The Son. So if you’re going to deny the Son and you’re going to claim this Jesus guy was just a guy - not really God incarnate; if that’s your position, then how can you know God? If He’s God and He’s incarnated Himself and walked around and given testimony and you don’t recognize that; how can you say you know God? Example if we turned all the lights out in the room here and I had a bright light that I held up in my hand and you said you didn’t see the light; and everybody else did see the light, what are you saying about yourself? You’re blind. The problem isn’t the light; the problem is with you. So that’s what’s John’s saying here in verse 23. If you can’t recognize God in Jesus Christ you’ve got a problem. You can’t say that you know God.
So we have in the remaining minutes today, let’s think about this thing because you and I, all of us, can get ourselves into this mess that the executive out in Carroll County got into where for example you’re asked to pray at some social function and somebody comes to you before you get up to pray maybe for grace for the food or something, whatever.
They say, “Could you make a prayer; but don’t pray in Jesus name?”
Now that puts you on the spot. How are you going to respond to that and why? There are certain different situations will demand you respond differently. So we have to think about it. There is not just one response to that.
I’ll give you one blatant response that happened out there when at MIT I had asked Colonel Thieme to come up for a Bible conference one weekend. He was my pastor and was a wonderful Bible teacher; but he was very dogmatic. He was the military guy that sort of acted like George Patton. He got up in the graduate hall dining room at MIT. There were about 200 graduate students eating there for lunch. We had all the Christian guys and we had back in those days there were probably half a dozen coeds in the whole institution. But, we had some Christian gals there and you know how you do in a wedding thing like we had when Nate and Andrea had a wedding reception thing. We had all the tables you know together. Well, imagine this. We have 3 long tables with students either side of the tables. Colonel Thieme’s at the end of the table. So we wanted to have a word of prayer before we started the meal. Somebody in the graduate - I forgot who it was. My mind doesn’t remember all those details; but somebody kind of came over and said, “It’s okay if you pray for a meal here; but don’t use Jesus name.”
Well, that was the wrong person to tell that you don’t use Jesus’ name. So he gets up in his command voice with a voice that you would have heard across the street and prays in the name of the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the God Man Savior Jesus Christ and sits down. Man you’re looking around and you could have heard a pin drop in the graduate hall dining room.
That’s one way of handling the problem. But you may not obviously if you want in that situation but what are some ways? If you for example are elected to public office and you’re in that kind of a social situation – you wouldn’t have the situation if first somebody said to you or a judge said to you, “Don’t pray in Jesus name.” If that didn’t happen I wouldn’t feel at all socially inhibited to pray in Jesus name. But the moment somebody tells me not to, now I’ve got a problem. So I have to respond. What do you think would be some different kinds of responses?
Yes, Laura.
Comment
All right. Laura is suggesting one way to handle it is to pray in my Lord’s name making it sound like to the people around directly that it is your Lord but you’re not at the point you’re praying that making a universal claim for everyone else in the room. Actually it is; but they don’t get it.
Okay, Paul
Comment Perhaps ask that person… what’s the point of praying? Then I might say I can’t pray to your god, why don’t you pray…?
Okay. The other response would be to simply call the bluff. That is and what Paul’s saying here is every statement on this is creating a deity. That’s why you heard me say a few sentences ago that a judge - and we’ve had military judges say this to the chaplains’ corps. We got a problem going on in the military chaplancy right now. We’ve got a problem here. The authorities to be have argued that you can’t have a religiously specific prayer. That is offensive. It’s going to be offensive to other people. The Jews won’t like it. The Muslims won’t like it and so forth.
“So given that social situation we don’t want you to pray in Jesus’ name because that ruffles feathers.”
Now what Paul has said perceptively is that when a person makes that request of you they’re asking you to pray to another deity. There are many deities. Now if you want to get touchy and you have to be gracious about this; but I have some dear friends that are in the medical profession medical and one of their social close friends is a Muslim doctor. They regularly have fellowship and so on. One day they were sitting at the supper table together and my friend, a Christian man, said to his buddy and they knew each other for years so they could talk frankly. To his Muslim friend he said - it was about prayer by the way. And he said “Well we Christians pray in Jesus name.”
And the Muslim came back with something like, “Well, we pray to him in our own way.” The way he phrased it.
So my friend Bruce said to his Muslim friend, “We’re worshipping two different gods.”
This guy got upset with the claim that we’re worshipping two different gods.
Now think about what I just said. What is going on in our collective mentality when we think that the Muslim god and the Christian God are the same? What are we doing mentally? We’re creating a generic deity, aren’t we? An abstract god. Why are creating this abstract god? Because we don’t want to deal with the differences, the theological differences. The problem is an abstract god doesn’t exist.
So that’s why Paul is arguing that when a person comes to you and says something like that you can say, “Well, the only God I know is the God who is manifested in Jesus Christ so that’s the only God I can pray to. So if that’s offensive to you; find someone else to pray.”
Then I would add to the sentence someone else to pray in the name of another god. That might precipitate some fruitful conversation that maybe that person hasn’t thought about. Generic deities don’t exist. Generic deities are a figment of your imagination.
Anybody else have some thoughts on this because this is a contemporary problem?
Comment I think I may…they have told not to pray in Jesus name. So by saying that you do mention Jesus’ name…but I am told not to pray in Jesus name.
That’s a clever way of doing it. If someone tells you not to do something and don’t mention something, the way around it is to mention it but tell people you have been told not to mention it. You have already mentioned it and they can’t do anything about it because they are just repeating what they’ve told you. I have a doctor friend who does that who has several alternative solutions to cancer; but the FDA won’t let him say that. So when he gets up in a conference he says, “Well, I can tell you this works against cancer; but the FDA says I can’t tell you this.” That’s the way he says it. So he protects him against lawsuits that way because all he is doing is repeating what the FDA said. The FDA said that I can’t tell you that XYZ helps cancer. But, in saying that he’s already communicated that it does. So that’s another little clever, neat way around it.
Yes, Anne.
Comment
Okay, Ann brings the Phil Roberts episode with A&E. That’s a good one to bring up Ann because anyone less than Robertson’s popularity would have been shut down. Now here is where you press the world. This is an exciting tactic. The world loves what? Money. So what you do is you give the world the choice of making the money or pushing your secularism. Guess which one they always pick. See? There are ways of doing this. We’re going to deal with Daniel this morning. Daniel pulls a slick one. The whole book of Daniel is basically devoted to wisdom on how to live in a hostile environment. You have to slick. It’s not creative. You have to trust the Lord to give you these ideas. You can’t be smart alecky about it. But it is good to share and think ahead of time. I’m not an Ann Coulter and most of us aren’t. We can’t think boom, boom, boom – like that. I can’t think of what I should have said three weeks ago; but I’m not good at you know – quick things. So you have to kind of think ahead of time of what would you do socially in these kinds of situations. I think this has been fruitful.
Well go back and close with verse 23.
NKJ 1 John 2:23 Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father …
(Closing prayer)