(Opening prayer)
Well, today we’re going to move into this area of sanctification in 1 John. It’s one of those places where all of the preparation that we’ve done, hopefully, will help us as we walk through the text here. If you’ll look at the handout, I’m just concentrating on that section of verse 29 to 3:10a. When you see me put a, b, and split verses just understand that the verses weren’t there when the apostles wrote - the verse designations that is. Those are translators’ impositions on the text. So when you see 3:4, 3:16 and so on; those are all impositions. It’s just ways of organizing it.
When we come down, John is a big proponent of using the four-letter word l-o-v-e, love. Because he uses that over and over again, we want to be careful we understand it because that word is totally misused, totally misunderstood by our culture today. So we had this diagram two weeks ago before I went out of town. I want to review this again. This is a fundamental basic, basic idea and concept in doctrine. We want to be sure we get this right. Our culture does not get it right. In most conversations you’ll have, it is not being used right. So one of the arguments for compassion and so on, while well intended often times, are not substantive. They’re not correct.
You go back and we start with God. We start with the trinity. Remember we deal with a triune God – God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. It’s the trinity, it’s precisely the trinity, that people of course outside of the Christian faith ridicule as illogical and so on. It’s precisely the trinity that gives you a personal God. Isolated people don’t have any social dimension. It is only the trinity, only the trinity, where we have a God with a social dimension. So it’s the multi-node the triune personal nodes within the godhead that give us a personal interacting god who is self-sustaining. A solitary monotheism has to create something external to itself to exercise love. Love has to have an object. What’s the object of a solitary monotheistic deity? He doesn’t have an object. So if he has to create an object in order to exercise his attribute, he’s not self-sufficient. So it’s only within the trinity where you have God from all eternity immutable, unchangeable and totally self-sufficient. That means God did not have to create. That was a decision God made. Theologians have a word for it. He condescends to do that. But He didn’t have to do that. God didn’t deprive Himself of something because He didn’t create. So our God is socially complete, and He is totally self-sufficient. He depends on nothing outside of Himself. This is important for us to understand, His self-sufficiency.
Well, now there are three attributes that we want to look at. The attribute of righteousness we can think of as the attribute of a moral standard. Righteousness - think of a yardstick in your mind’s eye. So for the word righteousness when you see the word righteousness just think yardstick, measurement, standard. So that’s the attribute of righteousness.
Then we have the attribute of justice. For justice, try to think of the idea of implementing the standard. So justice is the implementation of righteousness. So you have righteousness and justice as part of God’s character.
Now last week while I was in Tampa, I was discussing with some lawyers this issue of righteousness and justice; and I threw out the illustration that I’ve used here of the trial in 1945 of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. I made the point that the prosecutor who was our Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson – the prosecutor at Nuremberg had a problem because the Nazi lawyers, the lawyers that were defending the Nazi war criminals, argued that you could not convict the people of Auschwitz, the Nazi officers in charge, for violation of any law because they were in total compliance with German law. So if all the Nazis were in total compliance with the state, how do you prosecute them? By what law? You can’t prosecute the Nazis war criminals at Nuremberg by American law. They weren’t under American law. They were under German law. Were they or were they not in compliance with German law? Therefore they could not be prosecuted. So the prosecutors had to come up with something. The only thing they could come up with is that they needed a standard.
Jackson used these words. “I need a standard that is not transient and not provincial.”
Now what did Jackson mean by those two words - not transient and not provincial? Can anybody think of that? They couldn’t be changed from age to age and it couldn’t be localized. Where do you suppose you get law that is non-transient and non-provincial? This is the problem. I brought this up to the lawyers last week because we had that very animated discussion. I was so pleased that they finally realized that Nuremberg was pulling it out of thin air. Where do you get law that is not transient and not provincial? What you wind up with and we’re doing this with environmental legislation today on a global basis. What they mean is a Gallup Poll of all nations.
“So the only source of non-local, non-transient law is the Gallup Poll,” they would say.
So the best that unbelief can do is come up with Gallup Polls.
What do we have in our laps? The Word of God. So this is why this diagram is so important. If you do not have a standard of righteousness and justice that is non-transient and non-local, you cannot avoid tyranny because in the final analysis somebody has to make the decision; and the elite whoever have the power to make that decision will make that decision. This is why people, faith in the God of the Scriptures is a government limiting belief because it’s not transient and it’s superior to all thought of the state. I was so pleased that these lawyers, one of whom is one of Florida’s top 4 lawyers. So I was talking to somebody that has been honored by the Bar Association.
He said, “Charles you’re right. If we do we have belief in God, we must have tyranny.”
So those are the options. This is the option in the Roman Empire. This is not a new idea. This goes back some 1500 years. Under Caesar, Caesar demanded final allegiance. What was the title of Caesar in Greek? Kurios, Lord. That’s why when the Christians said, “We believe in Kurios Iesous; we believe in Lord Jesus,” – do you see how politically that was threatening? How would you as a pagan Roman who saw that the only way to peace in those years was the Roman army under Caesar’s control? You have these people most of whom are uneducated talking about Kurios Iesous. What do you do with that one? See, that was politically disruptive.
Remember this because we’re getting in our culture today where as a believer in Jesus Christ, you are going to be a political rupturer. You are going to make people uneasy by your confession of absolute faith in Jesus Christ. So that’s where we’re going as a culture so we might as well get comfortable with that because that’s where we’re headed.
To come back to the text here, in the trinity we have God’s righteousness, God’s justice - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Now we add the third attribute of love. God loves righteousness and justice. That’s the object of His love and that’s the only thing that satisfies His love. Well if that’s the only thing that satisfies His love, then the Father who loves righteousness and justice - He respects it in Himself but also in the Holy Spirit, in the Son, the Son likewise, the Holy Spirit likewise. You can’t separate God’s love from God’s righteousness and justice.
Now the problem is we all have a pressure built against us, the peer pressure, to separate love from righteousness and justice. The culture wants to eliminate the moral dimension of love; and that’s where we’re getting all of our social problems. The point is it’s coherent in God.
Now let’s apply this to the gospel. We’re all sinners. God loves us. But how does He love us? How does God love the sinner without violating His righteousness and justice? Let’s think about that. John 3:16 - that’s John’s way of pulling this together. When you memorize John 3:16 – God so loved the world. Why is that little “s-o” in there? Let’s think about that in John 3:16. Why doesn’t it say God loved the world and sent His only begotten Son…? Why does s-o come inside that verse 16? Anyone?
Yes, Paul.
Comment
God loves it in this way. It’s unconditional in the sense it’s conditioned on God. But two questions. Is it permanent in the sense - is it always going to go on toward the world? Or is there someday it’s going to stop? He gave His only begotten Son – gave His only begotten Son to do what? Why did He give His only begotten Son? Why did He have to give His only begotten Son in order to love sinners? Because He has to satisfy His righteousness and justice. He’s not separating His love from His righteousness and justice. So if God loves the world, it’s not a sentimental love. Let’s get away from the sentimentalism here. It’s not sentiment.
It’s not, “Oh gee, I love the people.”
He loves the people in a substantive way by dying, having a Son die for sin. But that isn’t a permanent thing. Love is going to be permanent. Here in 1 John 3:1 - here’s he’s back at the same thing. It amazes John that Jesus would do this, that the Father would do this. So in 3:1, look what he says. The same thing he says in John 3:16, isn’t it? Behold - that’s a powerful imperative there.
NKJ 1 John 3:1 Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!
So he’s saying that as a situation involving something that takes consideration. That love is not going to go on and on and on. One day He’s calling it quits. The kind of love He’s talking about here we would call, Paul would call grace, g-r-a-c-e, because after a while when a certain point in history is reached the offer is withdrawn.
Joel
(Comment) It’s sounds like you’re making the point that to say that God is love does not mean that God just sits there and kind of generates love towards the world without doing anything. His love is defined by what He did. If I’m not mistaken there’s a passage in the Bible somewhere that says that as a man does, so is he or something like that. I know for a fact that it says out of a man’s heart the mouth speaketh. In other words, there’s no separation of your character from your characteristics – the things that we do. In the book of Revelation I think it is, you’ve got these heavenly beings that are falling down before Jesus and saying, “Worthy is the Lamb who claimed to receive power and glory and honor and so forth.” I take it that what they’re saying is because He is the lamb that is slain, because of what He did; He is worthy to receive these things. So when God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. His love is defined by what He did, not by just being there.
Yes, what Joel’s getting at is there’s a connection between character and action; and John is going to bring this out to the regenerate nature which is confused by some people that go through this chapter 3. So we want to link this up. What I’m doing now is I’m just taking l-o-v-e and I’m connecting it to God’s character. We maintain that connection. We don’t sever it because if you sever it you wind up with sentimentalism. Our society would love to have a sentimental deity, a deity that is a Santa Clause deity that loves everything I do. Pat’s me on the head when I’m wrong and so on.
God’s love to us costs. We have to keep these characteristics together.
Let’s look now at 3:1. We already looked at 2:29. I showed this slide last time. We looked at the three phases of salvation. We’re looking over here at our position. This is the reality ultimately. But in our position we said there are many things, dozens and dozens of blessings that God has given us at the point of salvation. It behooves us to know these because these are operative assets that we have to rely on. We need to really know - when I trusted in Jesus Christ and He made me born again, what other things happened then? That was a momentous time.
It’s like the ladies that went to the tomb and all of a sudden Jesus is resurrected. That happened in maybe it happened in two and half seconds, whatever time it took for a resurrection to happen. But when it happened lots of things happened. He got a new set of clothes. Where did the clothes come? Jesus didn’t walk naked out of the tomb. But the burial clothes are sitting there left in the thing. So obviously He got a pair of clothes from somewhere. Then He walked out and He had a body - all done, all new. So these are things that happened in that miraculous moment of the resurrection.
But there’s a miraculous moment of regeneration. So John is going to concentrate on regeneration, the making of a new nature in us at the point of salvation. Then of course there are all kinds of other things. So when he says:
NKJ 1 John 3:1 Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!
…he’s really talking about regeneration there. Then he adds:
Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.
On your handout I point out that this is the Greek verb ginosko, which is, perceive. The world does not understand us because it never did understand Jesus. Why doesn’t the world understand Jesus? Let’s go back to that. Why is Jesus misunderstood? If you don’t think that, read Time Magazine every Christmas time or Easter. It’s the latest confusion. Each year they publish confusion on the dates, trying to talk about Jesus.
Why can the world not understand the historic facts of Jesus? This is a question to answer. It’s the same thing in verse 29 of chapter 2. The principle is this. You have to interpret data. Facts and data are mute. Facts and data have no information content to them unless it’s given to them by an observer. In order for me to interpret a circumstance in my life or to understand and put this fact in the overall picture, I have to have something there first. I have to have a framework with which I interpret reality, circumstances, and data.
Where do I get the framework? Well, I hope I would get it from the Word of God. But if you don’t have the Word of God or we’re suppressing the Word of God because we don’t want to go where we know the Word of God is going to take us – so we suppress it. If we suppress it we become unable to properly interpret life. So people are unable... A secularist today trained in our educational system is trapped in a cage in which he actually cannot understand Jesus. So that’s why Christians are misunderstood. This is why we have to struggle to try to communicate our faith to an unbelieving generation. They literally have problems understanding the basic essentials of our faith because they’re not regenerate. This is social discourse. It takes energy. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes prayer to try to break through and have them understand what we are talking about. What we are talking about does not sound like it’s rational or sensible to them, to their ears. So this is what John’s talking about.
NKJ 1 John 3:1 …Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.
That’s an occupational hazard that we have in our culture.
Now in John 3:3 we read this – or verse 2 and then we’ll get to 3.
NKJ 1 John 3:2 Beloved, now we are children of God;
Notice the present.
NKJ 1 John 3:2 …now we are children of God;
He’s affirming that we are regenerate. We are in this phase 1. We have a result there.
NKJ 1 John 3:2 …we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be,
That’s the future tense. So in terms of this diagram we’re talking about over here, phase 3, the ultimate culmination.
it has not yet been revealed what we shall be,
Now notice John is very physical, very observant. Remember how we started this epistle. We have heard, we have seen with our eyes. We have looked upon. We have touched. See he’s very empirical that way. So what he’s saying here is that it is not yet revealed what we shall be. He’s talking physically. We don’t know what we’re going to look like eventually.
NKJ 1 John 3:2 …but we know that when He is revealed,
There’s the Second Advent.
NKJ 1 John 3:2 ...when He is revealed,
He censured now.
NKJ 1 John 3:2 … but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is
Now commentators have wondered about that last clause where it says:
NKJ 1 John 3:2 …for we shall see Him as He is
What’s John’s reasoning there? Anybody want to guess about the meaning of that clause?
“We will be like Him,” he says. We’re going to be like Him for this reason – because we’ll see Him as He is. What does that imply about our natural state now? That if Jesus was to appear in His glory, we would have a problem. When He appears, it says we will be like Him because we’ll see Him as He is. It says something about His appearance that requires us to be in a certain state. He says that we’re going to be in that state and I know that because we’re going to see Him as He is. He’s doing this. He’s talking about His future condition, the future physical state of believers.
Then he adds in verse 3 and we want to spend a little time here because we’re getting into a Johannine thing where we’re going to start into one of the most controversial parts of this epistle so we want to proceed carefully.
In verse 3 he says:
NKJ 1 John 3:3 And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.
Now when you read that quickly, you might come away with a truth that’s true; but doesn’t happen to be taught by this verse. People often read verse 3 and come away with the idea that well if I think forward to the time of the return of Christ that will be a motivation in my Christian life and I will purify my life by keeping Him in mind. Now that’s a truth. That’s taught in Paul. That’s taught in other places. The problem is that isn’t precisely the truth that he’s getting at here. We can tell that because of the last clause. Look at the last clause in verse 3. That is a very, very strong clause. That ought to warn us that John is looking at something here. We want to be careful we’re looking at the same thing John’s looking at.
He says we are going to be as pure as He is pure. Is He perfectly pure? Then how can John say that if we have this hope within us we purify ourselves in the same degree that He is pure? This is a Johannine expression of what in Paul’s letters we call the Doctrine of Justification. The Doctrine of Justification says at the point of salvation you and I receive the righteousness of Christ so in terms of that first diagram God loves us as we are in Christ, because we have Christ’s righteousness. Now here what confuses us a little bit is that “purifies” is in the present tense. It almost sounds like he’s saying you keep on purifying yourselves. We have to be careful of the present tense because the present tense can mean that, but it can also mean… There’s a use called the perfective use of the present tense here.
Let me take a minute here. A perfect of purity in grammar, a perfect means it happens at a point in time with results that continue. That’s the pure version of a perfective. It happens at a point in time with results that continue. We use that in English when we use the words “I have done something.” I have done something. You did it in the past and the results are continuing now. I have done it. So that’s the perfect.
The present says I’m doing it. Now here we have a present but it has a perfective sense to it in the same sense as Paul in one of his letters says this. He says, I think it’s Corinthians, “I hear there are divisions among you.” Now there’s the present tense – I hear. I hear there are divisions among you. But it doesn’t mean I keep on hearing it. It could mean I heard about it. Like for example we do that every day in our everyday English. I hear you have a problem. How many times do you have to hear that you have a problem in order to make that? Only once. You might have heard that somebody has a problem you just say – you’re being courteous. You’re being polite. You say, “I hear you have a problem.” You’re using the present tense. You could have in the same thing used “I have heard that you have a problem.” That probably would have been the more accurate way of saying it. “I have heard that you have a problem.” In other words I heard it once and now I remember that so I remember that you have a problem because I heard once. I have heard. But in ordinarily language we also use I heard. I hear that you have a problem. So this appears to be one of those perfective uses of the present.
This is ceremonial purification by the way, that word purify. It’s very much like Titus 3:5, the washing of regeneration here because it’s the only thing that makes sense with the last part of that verse, pure as He is pure.
Now this introduces us to verses 4 to 9. In verses 4 to 9 we once again see John’s method. Remember we said at the beginning of the letter John positive-negative, positive-negative, positive-negative. Over and over John writes this way. Look at this. If you go through those verses, verses 4 to 5, what does verse 5 say?
NKJ 1 John 3:4 Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness.
NKJ 1 John 3:5 And you know that He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him there is no sin.
So verses 4 and 5 are talking about sin - negative.
Then in verse 6 it says:
NKJ 1 John 3:6 Whoever abides in Him does not sin.
See there’s positive.
Then in 6b, the last part of verse 6:
Whoever sins has neither seen Him nor known Him.
There’s negative.
Then we come to verse 7.
NKJ 1 John 3:7 Little children, let no one deceive you. He who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous.
There’s positive. But then in verse 8:
NKJ 1 John 3:8 He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.
So there’s verse 8.
Then in verse 9:
NKJ 1 John 3:9 Whoever has been born of God does not sin, for His seed remains in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been born of God.
That’s positive. So here we have positive-negative, positive-negative. Now if John’s writing with that kind of style (yes-no, yes-no), what does that in the overall sense tell you he’s getting at? Why would he do this? Why would he write antithetically like this? Why this particular style of writing? He deliberately chose this style of writing. Why do you suppose he chose that style of writing – yes-no, yes-no, yes-no? If you were writing that way, what would you be doing? What would you be trying to say? What was that Paul?
Comment I would be trying to contrast, make it clear, this-this, this-this, this-this, this-this. Do you get it now?
Yes. You’re making a contrast. Why would you want to make a contrast? Because your listeners need to make a choice. So this is addressed to choice. This or this. You don’t have 3 options. You’re not like Facebook with 58 gender options now instead of the binary. We don’t want to have binary options on our gender. We have to have 58 different kinds of gender. So here Paul has two – John has two (positive-negative, positive-negative.)
So that’s the theme of this thing. Now we want to be careful because all of these phrases that we just threw in the pronoun sense are third person. He who does this; whoever does that - third person. Remember from English class back before we had sex education dominating everything and we taught English. We have first person, second person, third person. First person is me, I. Second person is you. Third person is they. First, second, and third – all these are written in the third person as principles.
Back about six or seven lessons ago we were over in chapter 2. Turn back to chapter 2 and there’s a structure in chapter 2:3,4, and 5. I said at the time you want to watch this structure because this is going to occur later in the epistle. Here it is. This is the text, 1 John 2:3,4,and 5. Look at the structure and think first person, second person, or third person. Look at the structure.
NKJ 1 John 2:3 Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.
First, second or third? First.
Look at the last verse, 5.
NKJ 1 John 2:5 …By this we know that we are in Him.
First, second or third? First.
So bracketing the third is the first like a sandwich – first, first. Now inside of that…
NKJ 1 John 2:4 He who says, "I know Him," and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.
NKJ 1 John 2:5 But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him.
It’s all third. The fact that it’s tucked in between the first tells you that John includes himself in this. But the way he includes himself is he illustrates the principle with the third. I said when we went through this back lessons ago, “Watch this because it’s going to come up again and again in the epistle.”
When John uses this construction here, that third kind of person, he’s not abstracting it as those people. He’s saying that it applies to all of us, including me. Now when we move from chapter 2 to chapter 3, he doesn’t bother with the first person anymore. He takes the third, and he starts teaching principles. In other words, final point here, he teaches principles with the third person.
So let’s go back to chapter 3 now. In verse 4, he starts and
when you read verse 4 you want to ask yourself - what does verse 4 tell you
about one of the problems that John must have been facing? He says in verse 4.
NKJ 1 John 3:4
Whoever commits sin also
commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness.
The word there anomia - commentators have wondered about this. The only hint we have about why does he distinguish between sin and lawlessness? It sounds like the way he’s talking here is that to him and to his readers, lawlessness is worse than the word sin. It’s as though he’s encountering people who are trivializing sin, and he wants to make the point.
He says, “People don’t you understand sin is lawlessness?”
That second noun is emphatic on the first one. One of the things, if you look up this word anomia and you go back (it’s a Greek word)…and go you back to the Septuagint translators and you say, “Gee, I wonder how they used this word. Did they pick from the Old Testament law?”
We don’t get much help there because they use anomia to translate 24 different Hebrew words so there’s a problem there with that in the sense we don’t really know. It’s hard to get a grip on this. What we’ll say that is that apparently anomion - one of the words it did translate frequently in the Old Testament is iniquity. It was a word kind of like garbage, filth. That was kind of the connotation. So apparently what John is trying to say is don’t trivialize sin. Sin is anomia.
Yes, John.
Comment If I may offer an alternate suggestion to that. I was actually contemplating this morning – why we don’t use the word sin in the culture any more; but we will talk about criminal behavior or we will talk about evil in society. But we won’t talk about sins. I think the reason is sin has the connotation of a direct offense against God. So, to admit sin is to offend God. To say that lawlessness equals sin goes from a personal violation to a general violation. Every society who will admit to law and lawlessness but to equate that general impersonal thing with personal offense to God brings the two together.
Joel made an interesting point here that it’s very clear we will talk about criminal behavior. Doesn’t everyone talk about criminal behavior? Right? There are no restraints against that. Try talking about sin and watch what the results is. We don’t want to use the sin word. It’s precisely as Joel says because that brings up a lot of stuff, doesn’t it? It brings up the fact that I’m ultimately responsible to a holy deity and I just don’t feel comfortable with that. So we’ll talk about lawlessness. The only problem with that is that in the Old Testament code (the Torah) this word was used and of course Joel’s point could still be made - it’s filth. It’s garbage. It’s that kind of….It smells. It’s an offensive kind of thing. So whatever John’s dealing with here, he’s trying to deal with this issue of sin.
He goes on in verse 5 to give why that is so offensive and why it is so serious. We would do well in our society to think about this. That is that you know. He’s saying, “You guys know this.” It’s oida. “I taught you this. You know this.” He says Jesus was manifested to take away our sins. The whole point of redemption is to remove sin. It’s not to bring prosperity per se. Prosperity comes only after the Kingdom of God comes.
So he says, “Don’t you know Christians I’m writing to, don’t you know that He was manifested to take our sins? Of course you know that. Well, then why are you compromising the sin issue? Why are you trivializing it?”
You see the thing was that most students of this era say that the church was finding the early precursors of Gnosticism. This was a disease, an ideological disease, of Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy separated the material from the immaterial. Plato started it and you have this dualism. Because everybody sins and we all have pain, we have sorrow, we have sickness, and we have disease. It’s all material, but somehow we can think of the abstract We think of love. We think of justice. We think of these things as ideas in the immaterial realm.
Think for example of the illustration I gave back at the beginning of this. Remember I had a whiteboard. I wrote the number 2 on the whiteboard. Then I erased it. I said, “Now how many people still know two?” You know two because two is an idea. It’s not destroyed because I erased the number 2 or my computer failed to put the right name there. So the Greeks saw this. The problem was they’re not Christians so they didn’t understand where this idea comes from. They had this idea there was this dualism so they get frustrated with their sins, their crimes, their sickness.
They said, “Look matter is hopelessly corrupt. What you do in your personal life – I mean we all make mistakes and so forth so we resort to this abstract world, dualism.”
What John is saying here is, “Don’t do that. We take sin in the material realm seriously. Flesh is not evil in itself. It’s corrupted.”
So that’s why when he says:
NKJ 1 John 3:5 And you know that He was manifested…
What area is he talking about when he uses that word manifested? You know that He was manifested. What’s that? Incarnation What’s the incarnation? Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us.
So he’s saying then, “Jesus, didn’t you know He came in the flesh to destroy sin?”
Then he concludes the last clause, which now sets us up for this abiding concept.
…in Him there is no sin.
Very simple idea that follows. If Jesus came to destroy sin then in Him there is no sin. Now the consequences of that can be startling, as we’ll get in verse 9. So we have to deal with that as people get very uneasy and rightfully so we need to work with that ended our time today.
Are there any questions? We have a minute or two left.
Yes Paul
Comment
In what verse Paul? Verse 3.
NKJ 1 John 3:3 And everyone who has this hope in Him …
First of all, we have to qualify who has hope within him. The one who’s believed in Jesus Christ. It’s interesting that the King James translates this “hope in Him” and the New King James does it. But I also noticed that the new ESV doesn’t translate it that way. The new ESV translates “he who thus hopes.” That is synonym piseuo to believe. So he’s simply talks about he who believes has eternal life. It’s another way of phrasing the fact that he has eternal life because he says we are pure just as He is pure.
Now is that denying that we’re sinners? Well, then I have the same problem in verse 9. This is where we struggle with going through John’s literature. This is why I said at the very beginning we want to be careful how he uses locatives and en’s and so forth. We’ll go through that walk it through verse by verse. But John at first glance as we said before, his writing looks simple. Greek students love John because gosh you can whip through John in Greek because it’s simple straightforward. But man when you get into it you really realize this guy is deep. He writes simply. The grammar is simple, but the ideology, the content of this is as demanding if not more so than Paul.
Comment The hope, what is that hope?
The hope is in verses one and two, in the context - the hope, the idea that we have eternal life and this will blossom in the resurrection, verse 2. So this hope is the hope in the immediate context, verses one and two. It’s that whole salvation package. Literally in the Greek it says “he who has this hope over him.” The Greek doesn’t say the hope in him. It says “he who has this hope over him.” That’s why the ESV, the more recent translation, was a little more careful in translating this than the King James.
We’ve run out of time. Next week we’ll start going through this more.
(Closing prayer)