1 John Lesson 36
Well this morning we’re going to have a little problem in that the projector isn’t getting the signal from the computer on the slides. This one particular is very critical to the concept I’m teaching this morning so you’re going to have to use your imagination because I’m going to have to explain the slide to you. I’ll just give you a…I’ll describe what the slide looks like because it is a new slide; and it’s one that is crucial to the whole point of what I’m getting at here in the front end of the lesson.
(Opening prayer)
Well we’re going to and if you’ll follow the handout, we’ll go through a little bit on the review. The first thing you see on the handout is again the idea that we’ve gone over and over and over in this epistle. We want to keep repeating it. That is the link between doing righteousness and loving the brethren. If you’ll look at the text at 1 John 3:10, this text, the second clause in verse 10, is where this happens. So just want you to see the text.
It’s critical that in our culture, of course those of us who are…the age of most of us in the classroom here - we don’t have to worry about it; but for the younger people who are growing up in a visual society where everything is visual, one of the problems is that they don’t develop, unless they really put their minds to it, they don’t develop the ability to look carefully at the text. We can speed read and do those kind of things; but when you get into some of the details of Scripture to actually mine the truths of Scripture and dig them out, you really have to pay attention to how the sentences are constructed just because the sentence structure under God’s created design for language is important.
In verse 10b, 3:10b, you’ll notice it says:
NKJ 1 John 3:10 Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother.
So there you have it. Loving the brother and doing righteousness are connected inside one sentence. That means for John, he doesn’t see a difference between these. Now we do. So again we have to think back to the slide that I’ve used again and again where I have the trinity – the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit on a slide. I have righteousness and justice and love –I have those three attributes of God. God loves righteousness; God loves justice. So inside the character and essence of God, there’s no separation between righteousness and justice and love. The separation that we get in our culture is something the culture had imported into our thinking. But it’s not scriptural. It’s not true. It’s one of the modern delusions of our culture. So righteousness and love are connected in Scripture.
As I put in the outline, you’ll see two points there. The first point is that this kind of love selects its object – I should say from the integrity of God, but using the integrity of God as its norm and standard. In short, this love in the Scriptures is discriminatory. This again is a culture clash with words.
Everybody is saying, “Oh, I don’t discriminate.”
Of course you do. You discriminate every time you open your mouth. Every time you use a noun you’re discriminating. So that’s just another piece of foolishness in our modern culture. We all discriminate. We all do it all the time. We have to. If we didn’t discriminate we would have an unlimited amount of input to our minds. We’re filtering it all the time.
This kind of love that John is talking about does discriminate. It discriminates between that which is not righteous and that which is righteous. There’s always a standard.
It was amusing to me to watch some of the dialogue that goes on over the last couple of years about same sex marriage. Ryan Anderson has written the fundamental text on defining and protecting the traditional concept of marriage. Ryan works with some ethicists at Princeton University and is a student there. He has gone around to various university campuses and given lectures. He always gets confronted with the idea that he’s being judgmental and he’s being discriminatory by holding to traditional marriage.
In the responses he gets, people say something like this. Here’s a typical sentence. Now listen to this sentence and see if you can spot the fallacy.
“I don’t care what your theology is. You ought to accept marriage for all people.”
In the last sentence did you hear the word “ought?” So on the one hand here we have somebody saying you shouldn’t discriminate; then they say you ought to do something. Do you see the conflict? They’re using an ethic. So you can’t say we’re going to be nondiscriminatory. Always, everyone every time they use ought and should is using an ethical standard. So don’t tell me you’re not using an ethical standard. Of course you are. You’re just being sneaky about it; but you’re using an ethical standard. That’s something that comes up in conversation all the time.
We have to say gently and graciously, “Well, I’m sorry. You’re judging me.”
The moment you use should and ought you’re dictating to me there’s an ethical standard that exists and that you insist that I conform to that ethical standard. So the first thing to notice about righteousness and loving the brethren here is it is discriminatory based on the standard of righteousness and justice.
The second thing is in practical thing it’s not judgmental in the nasty sense. It’s gracious. Here’s how it can gracious at the same time it’s discriminatory. It discriminates between idiosyncrasies in someone. See what it says in 2 - looks beyond human idiosyncrasies. It looks beyond that at reality according to God’s gracious plan and looks at the ultimate end. So the love that John is talking about here is looking at a fellow believer with all the warts, because we all have them; but it looks beyond the warts to the work of God in that person and the ultimate end of the work of God in that person. That’s how a righteous love can coexist with imperfect people. It’s looking beyond the idiosyncrasies; and it’s looking at what God is doing and what He ultimately will do in that person. This is not some being nasty kind of thing. It’s actually being very stable and being very consistent.
So now we have to go to the other thing that I want to introduce and as I said the projector doesn’t work today so I’m going to have to describe the next slide to you. What we’re trying to do is discriminate, distinguish between growth and being in fellowship or out of fellowship. These are two aspects to sanctification in the Christian life.
So let’s look at growth first. And let’s turn to Hebrews 5:11. Here’s an example of where growth is straightforwardly addressed in the Scriptures. In Hebrews 5:11, the author of Hebrews is going into some pretty heavy Old Testament theology because he’s addressing Jewish people. In particular he’s addressing Messianic Jews, that is Jews who have personally trusted in Jesus Christ who recognized that Jesus is the Messiah. He’s gone on and on here so far halfway through chapter 5 and he’s dealing with Melchizedek and he’s dealing with these kinds of details of the priesthood and so on.
Notice what he says beginning in verse 11:
NKJ Hebrews 5:11 of whom we have much to say, and hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.
So that was the limitation on the part of believers that he was addressing.
you have become dull of hearing.
Then he adds in verse 12 - again he said you should be growing. You shouldn’t all of a sudden going into dull of hearing.
NKJ Hebrews 5:12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers,
That is you should have grown to this point where you can share these truths with other people.
you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food.
13 For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe.
14 But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.
So that’s - the author of Hebrews is basically addressing real people whose growth has stopped. In fact their growth has reversed. They’ve become childlike when they should be adults-like. That’s one of the other areas of growth, when viewed from Scripture it can be reversed. You can actually un-grow. We’ll take that up in a few minutes. But just observe the text here for some details.
Verse 12 says that there’s an expectation of growth. There should be growth. Then he goes on to say that it’s because:
13 For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe.
Notice in verse 14 how he says that growth ought to have been done. He says in verse 14:
14 But solid food belongs to those who are of full age,
Then he explains that growth period.
those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil
You’ll notice he’s talking about not just academics here; he’s talking about use where they have had to make decisions, a series of decisions. By deciding to obey the Word of God at this point, at this point, at this point; then that’s part of the growth process.
Now in the main service, our pastor’s going to go into Daniel 3. One of the things in Daniel 3 you’ll see is that those three guys that were thrown into the furnace weren’t able to stand up to Nebuchadnezzer because they became Christians yesterday. Those three young fellows were able to stand up to Nebuchadnezzer only because they had made decision after decision after decision after decision after decision in their life to obey the Word of God. So it came natural to them in the sense that they had strength that came about by a consistent obedience to the Word of God. That’s related to growth.
Now if you’ll look at the outline, two concepts growth and fellowship - one growth from the moment of justification to death or the rapture. That’s the interval of time we’re talking about, our Christian life. It’s rarely or ever studied. It has its ups and downs. Notice it has downs. We can retrogress. That’s what happened here in the Hebrews congregation. It’s a product of the intake of the Word of God and use of the Word of God versus hit and miss uptake - getting sermonettes for Christianettes which is all through our culture, evangelical culture today.
Pastors – I was just talking to someone in Albuquerque - pastors getting heat if they teach the Word of God more than 25 minutes at church. That’s ridiculous. People can watch a football game for an hour and a half; and they can’t listen to the Word of God for 25 minutes? We’ve got a problem somewhere.
Before Dr. Walvoord died, who was the President of Dallas Seminary, a young seminary student asked Dr. Walvoord and Dr. Walvoord had been around Bible churches now for 50 years as a minister.
He said, “Dr. Walvoord, over your lifetime of 50 years, what do you notice?”
He went on and described certain things. One of the things he said was that forty or fifty years ago what we call Bible churches (they had different names at different times); but Bible churches 40 or 50 years ago had Bible conferences. Today they have music concerts. This is the shift in the culture.
Now we’re not against music. The only problem with music as I was told by guys who are that’s professionally trained in music, the average congregation does not have someone in it that’s professionally trained in music and therefore the music education doesn’t happen in the average congregation. It used to years ago. Some of the greatest music ever written was written by Christians for Christian worship. So there’s a problem there. Part of that’s our fault because we haven’t encouraged our young people to go into the arts and take advantage of these things. That’s one of the problems.
But notice the third thing under one there is consistence of doing circumstances with Word of God versus blaming my spiritual condition on my genes and bad relationships when in fact my present condition is the result of my chosen responses to other people’s interactions with me and to various events in my life.
I put that in there because in talking and reading Christian counselors that work with some very difficult problems... I was reading reports from professionally trained pastor -counselors on some of the hardest cases they ever worked with. In one of those cases – and I did this research because when I was doing it, it was here when we were dealing with that Proposition 6 thing and same sex marriage and the homosexuality thing came up.
In that discussion one of the points even Christians make is that. “Well, that is such a terrific problem that people have to just put up with it. They can’t reverse track. They can’t get out of homosexuality. It’s just built into them.”
Well, immediately a red flag goes up because in 1 Corinthians 6 Paul says, “As such were some of you.”
So that can’t be true that you can get out of it. It’s no more different and this is one of the insights that these biblical counselors point out to - it’s no different than any other sanctification problem. The problem is that we have something called the fallen flesh that wants to dominate our life, and we have to deal with it. In Romans 6, 7, and 8 unless we’re going to cut out Romans 6, 7, and 8 and throw out it of the Bible - what does Romans 6, 7, and 8 say? It says we have a new nature, and that we can be separated from sin. Now are we perfect in doing that? No. None of us are. We can’t look down our self-righteous nose at somebody else having a problem because we have our own problems. But we can still argue that with a regenerate nature, as we’ve discussed in 1 John 3 here, and with the indwelling Holy Spirit; it is simply false to say that we can’t do anything about it.
In working with these particular people with this particular affliction, one of the insights the pastor that I read did, is he dealt with the problem by not dealing with it. He dealt with the problem by circumventing it. This is what he did. He would approach people struggling with this, he would never ask them about their homosexuality. He would ask them about their prayer life. He would ask them about how often during the week are you in the Word of God. Do you have an anger problem? He would go through the normal everyday stuff and crud that we have to put up with. Lo and behold when he gets through doing the inventory, they’re messed up all over the place. So instead of focusing on the problem, what he did is he went around it and did an inventory check - what are we doing here, what are we doing here, what are we doing, what are we doing here. Are we making a decision over here based on the Word of God or letting flesh and your anger take over? Are we doing something over here because you’re going to dedicate a certain time to study the Word of God and to prayer?
“No, we’re too busy. We got to do this over here.”
So there are decisions being made all through the perimeter. They find interestingly when you start cleaning up these decisions and start replacing them with godly decision-making, all of a sudden the problem starts to go away. So that’s how they dealt with this. I think it’s a valuable lesson because these are guys on the front lines. These guys work with this day after day after day after day, week after week, month after month. So they’re valuable people to read and listen to in how they cope with this. So that’s the growth thing.
Now fellowship – what I did and as I say the projector’s not working this morning. Let me describe the slide that I’m trying to use to visually communicate the difference between growth and fellowship. Visualize a graph. You got your y-axis and your x-axis and you’re seeing a straight lines going like this or like that, like that this or like that. So growth goes up and retrograde, up and retrograde, up and retrograde, up and retrograde. Now what I did on the slide, every time the line went up I colored it green. Every time the line went down I colored it red. So you have green line, red line, green line, red line, green line, red line. You think of those two colors, that’s fellowship. The line itself is growth. In other words, you’re either growing or not.
Those of you who are engineers and you had calculus, it’s the first derivative of the graph. The first derivative is plus or minus. It can’t be anything else - zero but it’s flat.
I don’t know why even theologians have a problem with this. This was the thing Dr. Chafer who started Dallas Seminary wrote about in his book He That Is Spiritual in 1919.
He had a big problem with all the reform people jumping on his back saying, “Oh well, gosh, you’re know you’re not appropriately honoring God’s sovereignty. Growth is sovereign.”
Yeah, growth in under sovereign control; but it’s not oblivious to personal decisions. You make personal decisions; otherwise we wouldn’t have imperative verbs in the Bible, right? Doesn’t every imperative verb address itself to volition?
What are we doing? Think of every parent. When you tell your kids to do something, you’re not talking thinking to yourself, “Well, he’s on autopilot.” Did you ever see a kid on autopilot? See what happens when they’re on autopilot.
There’s an imperative. An imperative is addressed to volition.
So in 1919, he got savagely reviewed by certain reformed guys saying that he threatened reformed theology by introducing this idea of choice. Well, that no more threatens theology than saying:
NKJ Acts 16:31…"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved…
That’s addressed to volition. That’s the graph. That separates growth from fellowship. So that’s why I have under number 2 in the handout John 15:5 that we talked about because John 15 is the fundamental place in the gospel where the word “abide” starts. This whole thing in the epistle comes out of the Gospel of John.
NKJ John 15:5 "I am the vine, you are the branches.
There’s the great metaphor.
He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.
Nothing. That means abiding is a prerequisite of doing fruit and unless we abide - no fruit.
So then I review S and HS in the handout the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In that, point out that the Father - we have a conscience that has awareness of His nature. When we sense that we’re out of it; we confess our sins, 1 John 1:9. The Son is where in the present we are interacting. God’s nature is always there; but we have to see God’s nature and we see God’s nature in the Son because He’s the Word of God. He’s revealing God. So there it’s acquaintance with the Word of God in making positive decisions toward what we see of God’s nature in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is we appreciate, respect His work in other believers.
Now a way of thinking about this and maybe this might help if you particularly are prone to worry. Here’s a way, a concept maybe that will help you. Earlier, back weeks and months ago when we started this I warned you ahead of time that this epistle was going to deal very heavily with the trinity. The trinity is embedded in all this. I said people will often make little slight remarks about Christians. You believe in the trinity and how irrational that is. It’s not irrational at all.
I gave you tri-unities that are all around us. That is time. If you think of time, there are only three dimensions to time. At one point in eternity future all points can be described as past, present or future. So time can be any of those. Any one of those can describe all of time. So we have a tri-unity. It’s not 4 versions of time. It’s only three versions of time - not 2, 3.
Think of the flow of time. There is another characteristic in time. It’s very parallel to the characteristic of God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit. How does time flow to us? It flows out of the future. Can we do anything about moments in the future? No. Flow comes out of the future into the present. Now can we do anything in time present? Yes. Then once it leaves us and goes into the past, can we do anything about the past? Of the three areas of time, the only place we can do anything is in the present.
Now yes, we can learn from the past; but that’s not going to change the past. We learn from the past in order to make better things in the present. We can’t do anything about the future because we don’t know all that’s in the future. So if you think about this, when we worry and we get into a panic, what it’s often over is some concern about the future that’s coming to us. We can’t do anything about the future.
Sometimes it’s peaceful and smooth and gentle coming down and saying, “I can only live in this moment. Right now, the future is in the Lord’s hands. Right now I have this moment that He is giving me to choose to obey Him, to worship Him, to follow Him in the present. I can’t do it in the past. I can’t do it in the future so out of my mind. I’m just going to concern myself with what’s going on right now. I can have the wisdom from the past, but I have to concern myself right now, right this moment.”
Yes Jim.
Comment Concerning the future…if you plan the future – we’re getting older. We’re planning for our retirement years now, saving and stuff like that. We’re looking forward to the future. I can’t change what’s going to happen there necessarily; but if I plan properly in the present - is that what you’re saying?
What Jim’s bringing out is how you plan for the future. It’s not living in the future. It’s planning for the future. If you plan for the future, on what basis do you plan for the future? Isn’t it what you’ve learned from the past or others have learned from the past? So you don’t know what’s happening in the future. In fact there’s a passage in the Bible that deals with planning for the future. It’s in James. What does James say? James is addressing businesses, Jewish businessmen that are traveling around the Levant. What does he say?
He’s says you shouldn’t say, “I’m planning so good; I’ve got it knocked, boom, boom, boom. We’re going to do this, this and this.”
This is nonsense. You don’t know the future. Your future is what the Lord is going to deal with. All you can do is say on the basis of the past on the basis of the Word of God what He tells me I can plan for the future; but I don’t control the future. I don’t know the future totally. For all you know, tomorrow the rapture could happen. So much for your plans for retirement. So the point is that planning for the – yes, you plan. But you plan on the basis of the lessons of the past interpreted by the Word of God.
Comment
We’re not in the future. We’re in the present.
Comment I’m sorry.
Join the present.
Okay, let’s look at verses 16 to 18. Now verses 16 to18 in 1 John are a chunk of text. One of the things about chunks of fragments of text is that there are language tools that are objective. Language tools are useful. This is why you want to learn when we read passages there’s a structure to language because God designed language to be this way.
In 1 John 3:18 – verse 16, excuse me - you notice the two first words. What are the first two words in verse 18?
NKJ 1 John 3:16 By this
We’ve seen this over and over and over again in John’s writing.
16 By this we know
I said when we dealt with this earlier, this structure; I said to watch out because when you see a sentence with “by this we know,” look to see if as the sentence goes on there’s a conditional clause in it. If there’s a conditional clause, then we know that it’s going to continue. There’s an explanation there that “by this” means what’s following.
But then if you look down at verse 19, we have:
NKJ 1 John 3:19 And by this we know
…again. So flags ought to go up when you see “by this we know” in verse 16 and “by this we know” in verse 19. The question ought to go through our minds – “by this,” does this in verse 19 refer to what follows or does this in verse 19 refer to what preceded? That’s the question you always have to ask every time you have a “by this.”
The rule is that when you have a “by this” and it doesn’t have any explanation or contingency; it’s referring to what preceded. So making a long story short, verse 16 is the intro to this section of fragment of Scripture. The sentence that starts in 19 is finishing it. So this forms what we call pericope. It’s just a fragment of text. It’s a thought. So now let’s see what the thought is.
NKJ 1 John 3:16 By this we know love,
Some of your older translations have “we know God’s love.” You’ll see “God’s” is in italics because it’s supplied. There is no “God” in that sentence.
NKJ 1 John 3:16 By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.
17 But whoever has this world's goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?
18 My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.
19 And by this we know that we are of the truth,
We won’t get to verse 19 today because of time; but notice something else that’s happening here.
NKJ 1 John 3:16 By this we know love,
This explains it.
because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren
Now in both cases the word life is used, but watch the difference. When God lays down his life - by the way which member of the trinity is He in verse 16? Father, Son or Holy Spirit? Son
NKJ 1 John 3:16 By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us.
There defines what love is, by how it expresses itself in history. Notice that when this love is expressed in verse 16 – it’s easy to remember. It’s 3:16 just like 3:16 in the gospels. This love that is displayed here is not some sentimental goo. This love that is expressed here did something that conformed to righteousness and justice. So where you have the liberal elements now, “We’re going to take out the cross out of our hymnbooks. We’re going to ask the songwriters to change the lyrics because we want to get rid of that.”
The Presbyterian Church USA just did that – eliminating the atonement from their hymns because that’s cruel.
“What we want to talk about is God’s love.”
How do you talk about God’s love without the cross? That is love. See, this is what I’m talking about. Love, righteousness, and justice go together. You can’t have one of these without the other. They are interlocked in the Scripture.
NKJ 1 John 3:16 By this we know love,
So he’s defining love as the sine qua non here.
because He laid down His life for us.
Then he adds:
And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.
Now in most cases we’re not laying down our lives for the brethren like He laid down His life for us. We’re not becoming martyrs although some believers are becoming martyrs elsewhere in the world. But even that is not a substitutionary atonement. How do we love the brethren? We lay down our lives. What does it mean to lay down our lives? So then he adds it.
Now what do you notice about the person as you go from verse 16 to verse 17? In verse 16 it’s about us. See, that’s the first person plural. Notice what John does here. He does this over and over and over again. He flips into verse 17, and the person shifts. Now what person is it? First, second or third? First person is us, we. Second person is you, you all. Third person is he or she. So he’s shifting to the third person. We said every other time he does this, he shifts from the first person where he includes himself includes all believers. Then he goes to the third person and when he talks about the third person; he’s talking about a principle that he wants us to see. This is the situation. It doesn’t matter who you are; this is a principle. So he shifts from the first to the third. So now the third person. Here’s the hypothetical. This is a principle. This is a situation- phrase in the third person.
He says:
17 But whoever has this world's goods and sees his brother in need,
Now in the handout what I have:
NKJ 1 John 3:17 But whoever has this world's goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?
Look at 3:17. “Whosoever has the life.” That’s literally what it says in the Greek. The noun life here is bios; it’s not zoe which he uses for eternal life, personal relationship life. Bios, from which we get biology, is physical life in this world. When he means life of the world - he means the goods that sustain life in the world. So this refers…it comes to mean possessions.
17 But whoever has this world's goods
The translators properly translated the meaning here. The world’s goods means the life of the world. It is the literal. But the translators are saying are interpreting for us “world’s goods” because those are what sustains life, physical life.
and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him,
Now it’s sort of funny because the word heart is a translation from the word bowels. The Greek word has a very picturesque sound to it. The Greek word for bowels is splaknon. You think of Judas Iscariot hanging himself and his guts come out. It’s splattered. That’s how you remember splaknon in the Greek. So it’s talking about literal innards.
Now this is interesting. Why doesn’t it use the word heart? Why of all the bodily organs is John at this point picking up the GI tract? We know in modern medicine why. Where do you think your emotions are locked into? Your GI tract. So this is part of and it’s probably more than just the GI tract; it’s probably more organs. The point here is that these people that lived in the ancient world knew how emotions worked in their bodies. They were actually quite observant about themselves and their bodies. They realized that emotions are connected physically to us. That’s why he says you shut them off.
Now that’s interesting because what we have here is emotional management. I want to comment on this. Jay Adams did a lot of work on this back decades ago because he had to deal with the emotion of anger. He had to say, “How do we deal with the emotion of anger?” It’s bona fide emotion. We can’t argue that we don’t have emotions. The problem is how do we manage the emotions.
Why does God have emotions? All of a sudden - we’re designed this way. All of a sudden we get mad; and there’s energy there. Well, I like the way Dr. Adams pointed it out. That is that we’re designed to get angry or to have these fears because it’s a mobilizer to do something in the present. It’s a mobilizer to solve a problem that’s in the way. That’s why it’s there. The proper use of emotions is channel them to a solution to the problem. Sometimes it may mean physically fighting somebody for survival; but most of the cases it isn’t.
Most of the cases it’s saying, “Okay we’ve got a mess here. I’m going to fix it.”
The thing you don’t want to do is what John’s talking about. What’s he talking about? What’s wrong in this verse on emotional management? He’s shutting it off. Well, you can’t shut off emotions. They eat you alive. All of a sudden you get all kinds of hormones and toxic substances. You might as well drink poison. It has the same effect as bad emotions bottled up because it triggers all kinds of chemical reactions in our bodies.
So he says here’s a guy – has this world’s good. He sees his brother in need and then he shuts down his emotional response. You can’t shut it down. How does the love of God abide in him?
Is this person John would say in our lingo - how can he be in fellowship and act this way? The compassion is - how do we solve the problem.
That leads us now to verse 18 because 18 is the behavioral imperative results. Instead of shutting down the emotions here…
NKJ 1 John 3:18 My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.
If you look at the handout you’ll see and this was another slide I was going to show this morning. This is a chiasm. Chiasm in the text is where you take proposition; you take a second proposition; then you take a third proposition that’s like the second one. The fourth time is like the first one. If you look at those four words: word, tongue, deed and truth; what do you notice about tongue and deed that connects them? What do they have in common? What do the first and 4th words have in common? Look at the chiasm here. How would you classify the difference between loving in word, loving in tongue? How are those two different?
Paul
Comment
The others are just flailing around with the problem, not doing anything about the problem. Now connect or contrast the first word and the second one – word and tongue - and see if you don’t see a connection between those two that’s like deed and truth. Let me say it this way, how is word related to tongue as truth is related to deed?
Comment Words are expressed by the tongue…
Okay, there you go. The truth expresses itself in deed. The word truth is alethia. That means the real stuff. The first and fourth words are abstracts. The second and the third words are concrete words. So here you have the word. It’s expressed with your physical tongue. Truth is expressed in a physical deed. The trick in a chiasm is when an author uses this; he’s always looking at the inside of the chiasm. So of the four words, it’s words number two and three that he’s contrasting. He’s contrasting mouthing off and doing something about it. That’s how these structures in language kind of help you grab the meaning from the text.
Now I have in the outline the conclusion. I tried again. This was on a slide but thankfully it’s on the handout too. Biblical love and the rhetorical love - this is the cheap love that we have in our society today. What is the contrast? Quickly, biblical love based upon God’s integrity. The result of that is it respects the creative and saving work of God in people. It is stable and enduring. It can be stable and enduring through up and down circumstances because it’s not anchored on what’s happening. It’s anchored on God’s character and God is the same yesterday, today and forever. So there’s the stability in this sort of love. Finally it acts in accordance with the Word of God which means we can’t express it if we aren’t careful and always looking for the Word of God as our reference for expressing this sort of love.
Now let’s go on the right side of the column. Here’s what’s going on. I taught rhetorical love meaning mouth off words. It’s the words let us not love in word and tongue.
Secular rhetorical love is based upon fallen human suppression of God’s integrity and replacement by feelings of compassion and ethically bear a notion of fairness.
That’s what’s going on all around us. It’s basically a feeling of compassion. Well, that’s an emotion. Of course there’s a feeling of compassion. The problem is how do you challenge the feeling. You have to have a standard on which to challenge that.
Fairness doesn’t tell you a thing about what’s going on. It’s back to this business of equality. Is a blind person equal to a seeing person when it comes to driving a car? No, they’re not. You can’t decide whether they’re equal unless you deal with driving a car. That’s the issue not the word equal. As we said you can put an equal sign between any two objects; but the equal sign doesn’t make two objects equal. An equal sign ought to testify that they are equal. You had to decide before you put the equal sign whether they were equal. Then after you decided they were equal, you put the equal sign in.
Same thing with equality. Flailing around saying, “I believe in equality,” isn’t saying anything. Before you say something’s equal, you got to know they’re equal. Okay.
Then the second thing, it perverts to degrees and tries to create human value ex nihilo.
“Human rights.”
What’s the basis for your saying human rights? Human rights are rooted. Molecules don’t have morals. Molecules don’t have rights. So because I’m 30 billion to 30 trillion molecules walking around doesn’t mean I have any rights. Nor does it mean you have rights or anybody else has rights. A bag of evolving protoplasm does not have rights. You have to have a basis for asserting that somebody has a right. It is unstable and short term in contrast to stable and enduring.
Finally it may or may not act and if it does act in accordance with human speculation. So I think that’s a good contrast in this love that we’re talking about here. Okay.
(Closing prayer)