Clough Fellowship Chapel

1 John Lesson 2

Slides

If you’ll turn to 1 John again, and in your bulletins [slide #1] we’ll have the overall outline, we’ll go back to that. We spent some time last time explaining this particular outline and why we’re using it; I won’t go over that except to say this morning we’re going to be on the preamble, which is still the first part of this discourse. We mentioned that many of the people who have studied this epistle have been frustrated by what they say is John’s rambling. By looking it as a deliberate oration I think you’ll see that he is not rambling; John is very precise in his vocabulary and we want to review several concepts. In your bulletin you have the area of the concept of truth, the concept of life and the concept of revelational authority.

I want to say a few points about that because that underlies the entire epistle, and most of us come out of a contemporary culture in the West where we have been deeply infected with concepts of truth that are totally anti-biblical. [slide #2] The man who was responsible for this in the West was a German by the name of Immanuel Kant, there were others of course, but Immanuel Kant was the guy that set out with typical German precision to outline this theory of knowing and this is the best that unbelief can do.

We just want to spend a few moments, he’s very involved, we won’t belabor the point here, but suffice it to say that what this German philosopher did was he was able to articulate a defense of knowing if you do not accept the Word of God. That’s what he was trying to do, and he spelled it out in much the same way as the New Age religions, as the religions of the Orient and so forth. This is called the age of enlightenment. What he did is he split truth in half, so if you look at the text of John, verse 1, you’ll see that we have a conflict here because John does not see a split in truth. He says, “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.”

So that in John’s view and in the Bible view truth is unified; there’s no such thing as a split field. What Kant did is he said we have sensory perceptions, and so the things that we can sense we process in our minds and come up with concepts. The concepts aren’t out there, we invent them up here, in our heads.

So now truth has become totally and completely subjective. Then, because we can’t sense the laws of logic, we can’t see, smell and taste ideas and concepts, we generate those, and that’s that upper story that he has, the so-called noumenal, and so these become subjective also and what we have now is a total view of truth that is absolutely subjective and it has extreme dangerous consequences in the way we’re thinking.

Let me give you four consequences of this way of thinking right around us. One is: it always breeds a spirit of revisionism; if I come across something and I don’t like it I have as much authority in my mind to undermine that concept as the person who originated it. So there is this propensity to revise everything. So now we are learning American history as revised, and we have to eliminate, for example, the great role that Christians and the Bible played in the American Revolution and the origins of this country because that is offensive to the modern theologian, the modern historian, therefore we have to revise it.

We see this also in ancient history; because we don’t like the fact that Israel existed and miraculously saved from Egypt, in a revolution unprecedented in history, you have millions of people exiting a super power nation without an army; how did this happen… clearly miraculous. And yet because we cannot accept a miracle in history we have to revise ancient history and come up with a history that is false and a history that collides with Scripture.

Then we also have to revise, because we don’t like it, the external world of biology, botany and zoology because we see design there and we can’t stand that so we want to revise it and attribute all sense of design to sheer chance, as long as we can get away from our God-consciousness.

Finally, a fourth result of this Kantian way of thinking is contract breaking. Romans 1 tells us one of the hallmarks of a pagan society is it can’t keep its word, and we see this both in the government level and in the personal level. We see a government that’s making promises that in no way can it every maintain; no way can it ever fulfill those promises, but people like to hear the promise so they go along with it. We have personal illustrations of this; the rising divorce rate in this country since 1962, 1964, when prayer was eliminated from the public schools, we now have people that marry, shack up or whatever, and they don’t want to engage in a covenant promise; they just want to live in the moment.

These are all the results of this concept of truth. I want to show you very briefly [slide #3] the effect that it’s had in science and math. It’s ironic that the judge in Pennsylvania in the Dover case said that intelligent design is religious and therefore should be eliminated from the classroom. What the poor judge didn’t understand was that here is a philosopher of mathematics and he’s laying it out, following that Kantian thought he says: “the significance of mathematics arises precisely of the fact it is an art; it informs us what depends upon our minds; it does not enable us to explore remote regions,” in other words, math is not telling us about what’s out there, all it’s telling us is what’s in here; it’s a great mind game, it’s stimulating, but it doesn’t tell us what’s out there, and the result is that he can come up with that last sentence and I wanted you to see that last sentence because here’s somebody who knows. This is not a fundamentalist telling us this; this is not some Christian telling us this. I am not paraphrasing in a mistaken way; this is their own words. “We are the law-givers of the universe.” That immediately follows from this Kantian view of knowledge. Of course, John and the Bible goes against that completely.

[slide #4] Here is a guy who wrote in the 19^th century the hymn that’s in our hymnal, hymn #560, and unfortunately the editor of our hymn book thought he was going to revise Pierpont and took out this stanza, you won’t find it in our hymn book; in fact, on the bottom of the page you’ll notice where they put a little parenthesis, “(adapted)”, so they’ve kind of butchered psalm 560, but in the original version of this hymn Pierpont had this stanza and if you understand what Pierpont was getting at in this hymn you’ll see what he’s done. He says, “For the joy of ear and eye, with a heart and mind’s delight, for the mystic harmony linking sense to sound and sight.” See what he’s doing? Unified field of truth; he is breaking against the Kantian enlightenment idea that these are just in our head. Rather, what he says is we can link the mystic harmony, the harmony that comes from God’s design that links our sense, our sense of right/wrong, our sense of value, our sense there’s truth out there, that sense can be linked to sight and sound. That’s what John is doing here in verse 1 and we want to recognize that we cannot accept the apostle John’s statement in verse 1 while we’re accepting the western idea of truth. Impossible.

Let’s go on and we’ll see the concept of life; he says in verse 3, he says, “For that life was manifested, and we have seen it,” and that life was the life, notice he calls it the “eternal life,” the first time he uses the word eternal, “the eternal life, which was….” “which was with the Father,” and with the Son, that is prior to the incarnation this eternal life existed. And this involves immediately a view of life that collides with everything else we’ve learned in our western education. We have learned to think in terms of life as coming out of the molecules, we spend a lot of time deciding what’s the difference between non-living and the living and then we talk about cells and then we talk about plants and we talk about the animals, and finally we talk about man and we look at life going from the basement upward, whereas the Bible says that life preexisted the physical universe, and the life, the kind of life that preexisted the physical universe, was the life of the Trinity. It was the personal and wonderful relationship that God the Father had with God the Son for millions and millions of years. That is the origin and core of life. So everything else is lower life forms. So everything you study in biology and botany and zoology are basically lower material life forms of the kind of life that comes from God Himself.

If you go to [slide #5] we’ll show you what Jesus is talking about here are passages from the Gospel of John that John is going to use in his epistle. We mentioned this last time; in John 14:9 He says this quote, He says, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip?” That tells you how k-n-o-w is going to be used in this epistle; it’s not talking about salvation, it’s talking about knowing Christ and growing and experiencing it. We use that expression all the time; somebody does something unusual and you say gee, I thought I knew him but I didn’t. That’s the way John is using this verb, k-n-o-w. “He who has seen Me has seen the Father….” [10] “…The words that I speak to you, [I speak not of Myself, but the Father that dwells in Me,]” I don’t speak on My own authority. So if we were there and we were videoing Jesus, what we would be videoing are the words of God the Father, speaking through God the Son. That’s how close the Trinity is.

Finally, in John 17:21 He says I have given them the words which You are, I pray “That they may all be one, as you, Father, are in Me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us,” now how do you make sense of that last clause if it isn’t a relationship. It can’t be salvation, the Father doesn’t have to be saved to be in the Son. They’re talking about that sharing of eternal life. So as I said last time, we could paraphrase the meaning here of life as John saying come, little children, into the circle of fellowship that we apostles share with the Triune God. It’s on a very, very high level of fellowship. This is not talking about just social relationships here; this is actually being admitted into the very heart of the Triune God. He’s talking about God the Father talking to God the Son and He’s praying that we can come into that fellowship. That is a very, very high view of life.

Finally we have the concept of revelational authority, in your bulletin is the glimpses that tells you some of the bloody history of the translating of the Bible and we don’t appreciate that because everybody has a Bible when today millions of Christians in other persecuted areas do not have but a page of the Bible, we forget that that book you’re holding… I hope you’re holding it because if you don’t hold it today you can be lost, that Bible comes to you through the blood and sweat of a lot of people, and the little glimpses thing from church history will show you what men went through.

Today we’re going to from 1 John 1:5 all the way to 1 John 2:11, this should be [slide #6]. I want to show you something about John. If you look at John he does this again and again; he loves contrast. If you follow the verses you can see this very quickly, just in a minute. Look at verse 5, look at the topic of verse 5, “This is the message which we have heard of Him, and declare to you, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” The Greek text there emphasizes “NO darkness, at all,” whatsoever. Then, [6] “If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and we don’t practice the truth; [7] But if we walk in the light,” you see, verse 5 is positive, verse 6 is negative, verse 7 is positive, verse 8 is negative; verse 9 is positive, verse 10 is negative. Do you see the pattern? And you notice something else about the pattern? All the negatives, verse 6, verse 8, verse 10 begin the same way, “if we say,” and he’s talking to believers. In other words, he’s saying what comes out of the mouth is not necessarily what’s true, “if we say, if we say, if we say,” and he’ll use that oftentimes in Scripture.

Let’s look at verse 5, this starts that passage, and what he’s saying here is what real enlightenment is. I’m sure you all can remember your history course or your social studies course and the teacher would go on and on about the age on enlightenment. And it’s all humanist garbage because what they’re trying to say to you is the Middle Ages was dark because the Christians dominated society, but then we came to the enlightenment, when we freed ourselves from Christian influences. It’s exactly reverse; the Middle Ages is not as dark as they say, and the so-called enlightenment is darkness, and that’s what John’s point is going to be. It’s exactly opposite to the way you learn it in the classroom.

Verse 5, “This is the message which we have heard from Him, we declare to you,” so here is the heart of the whole epistle in that light is God’s holiness, His attribute of integrity. It means that when we come face to face with God, as all the people in the Scriptures who ever saw God did, they covered their mouth because we because we become conscious of how dirty we are in the light of His light. We have a sense of sin but we can’t get to the sense of sin unless we have a sense of God’s holiness, and when this is dropped out of theology, as it has been, you have a trivialization of everything else, the cross becomes trivial, sin becomes trivial, the whole thing, the gospel is just a psychological thing.

But it starts with John with the attributes of God. We can see that this fits the way God has designed the physical universe around us. Every part of the physical universe around us is revelatory of God, [slide #7] you’ll see here God designs… we call it the sunflowers. Now if you ever watched a sunflower what does a sunflower do as the sun tracks across the sky? The flower is moving. Have you ever thought about designing a sunflower? You have to have a light sensor on that flower, and for those of you who are engineers it has to have a [?] mechanism on it, it has to be scanning, so that it knows when the sun moves. So somehow that sunflower has a light scanner built into it, then it has a network that stimulates the cells to change, the muscle cells in the stem of that sunflower. So we have an intricate machine in every sunflower. This is the wonder; see, kids aren’t taught this any more because everything…, this all came about by Chance. But if you study math and science as a Christian, Bible-believing thinking, science becomes a worship area. No one should study science in a humanistic silly way that’s taught in school. What you do is you worship God as you study this; this sunflower is an amazing machine. And the challenge is… try inventing one yourself. Think of the complicated machine you’d have to have to track the sun and do it, by the way, with cells that grow and reproduce. The sunflower grows from a seed; try making a machine that would be that small and would grow into a sunflower and preserve this function. Think about it; you can’t do that.

Think about something else; why do you suppose God has this for us? Just to decorate? Or does He want us to look at this and say to ourselves as believers, look, I have designed the creation around you to teach you something about Me. Life likes light, life is built for light and we are built for the holiness and righteousness of God; that’s why He’s constructed the universe this way.

Then He says in verses 6 and 7, verse 6 and 7 are connected, He gives us two options, two states, two ways that we can operate. This is all experience now, this is not talking about the plan of salvation, this is talking about what happens after salvation in our walk with the Lord. We can do two things; “If we say we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and we don’t practice the truth,” we’re lying. That’s pretty strong language. [7] “But, if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.” Let’s observe verses 6 and 7 for a moment. Notice he uses for the subject of the verb “we.” Do you suppose John included himself in the “we?” Yes, he’s saying the apostles can do this too, the apostles have to watch their fellowship with the Lord. “If we,” including himself, the apostle John, “If we say we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and we don’t practice the truth.”

And then he says if we do, “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another,” and by the way, correcting a mis-thought from that verse, verse 7, we often read it, and I myself have read it this way, is that “we have we one with another” in the sense that we have fellowship here in the Chapel, a time of greeting one another, and that’s true, we have fellowship, but that’s not what this verse is talking about because if you look in the context who’s the fellowship with? Notice the last time it’s used; he says that we have fellowship [3] “with the Father, and with the Son, … [6] If we say that we have fellowship with Him,” not with each other, “with Him.” So what he’s saying is “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, then we have fellowship with the other one,” that is the other one walking with us, which is “Him.” “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with Him.” Then He says, “the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.”

So now we have to come to understand a little bit about this cleansing that goes on because in verse 9 he’s going to talk about it, and he’s talking about it as conditional. In verse 6 there’s no cleansing, in verse 7 there is cleansing, so again, this is talking about something operating in what we call phase 2 or the sanctification period, the time between the time we become a Christian and the time we die or the rapture, whichever occurs first. So it’s talking about that, and [slide 8] it goes back to the temple motif. Remember we said if you look at the Gospel of John somehow John was plugged in socially or some other way with the priesthood, either through John the Baptist or somehow, maybe it was Nicodemus, maybe he knew Nicodemus or something, but John, in his Gospel is talking about what’s going on with these guys when they are crucifying Jesus. So John’s had access somehow to these guys. So the temple and the truth… remember John is the one that talks about Jesus and the cleansing of the temple and to him it’s very, very important, he puts it early in his Gospel.

So let’s look at the tabernacle which was the divine design of how to approach God. And the tabernacle… of course the Shekinah glory, the presence of God, was inside that tent, in the Holy of Holies. And when the priest went in they had washed themselves in that laver, which is in the front of that place where the presence of God is. And that’s the picture that we have here, except the point is that the cleansing is through the blood of Christ, not of bulls and goats and so forth, as Hebrews says.

Let’s go on because in verses 8-10 he’s going to talk about cleansing and how we come into contact with God, our Father. Overall this morning we’re going to look at the Trinitarian structure of this passage because later he’s going to talk about our point of contact with God the Son. Then he’s going to talk about his point of contact with God the Holy Spirit. So there’s a long thing here about the approachability of our heavenly Father. So let’s look at verses 8-10 and we’re going to expand this idea of cleansing.

“If we say we have no sin, we,” notice it’s also the apostles, the apostles are included here, they’re not infallible, contrary to Roman Catholic theology the infallibility exists in the finished revelation; it doesn’t exist in the conduit of that revelation. Israel was the conduit of the Old Testament text, and the text was infallible but Israel wasn’t. And the apostles are saying we’re not infallible; remember what Paul says, if I even, subvert this gospel, in the book of Galatians, let me be damned. So once the revelation comes out in history, it’s locked, it’s set in concrete, that’s where the infallibility is, not in the people who gave it. So that’s where Protestantism and Catholicism has, for centuries, debated the issue.

In verse 8, “If we say we have no sin,” and he’s talking about our guilt, this is the situation now, we’re walking in darkness, and how do we recover? Well, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” So one of the things we know right away is that sin can be self-deceptive. That’s what’s so hard about it, that’s why the Bible talks about “examine yourselves,” because you can fool yourselves. I can fool myself easy and you can fool yourself, and he’s warning against self-deception, we can deceive ourselves, “and the truth isn’t in us.” Now that doesn’t mean soteriologically, “truth in us” means it’s not operationally functioning. John is on experience of the eternal life of Christ and so when we’re walking in darkness, “the truth isn’t us,” in the sense it’s not in our computer, it’s not there, we’re not functioning with it.

“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleans us from all unrighteousness,” and the word there for confess is a word that you would think of in a courtroom situation. Remember John is giving testimony and he keeps using these words that kind of have a forensic impression to them. The word “confess” here means to basically put in a guilty plea; it means that faced with the testimony that I have in my conscience, I admit forensically, that I have sinned before the holiness of God. That focuses it in on the cleansing, “If we confess our sins,” if we acknowledge what He has accused us of, then, and it doesn’t say that you go through a long agony. Emotionally you may have a revulsion, how could I do something so stupid, and we’ve all had that realization; what was I thinking of when I did that, geez, and we can have that emotional reaction, but other times we won’t.

The issue here isn’t the emotions that accompany it; it’s the act itself of acknowledging that you and I have sinned at a particular point. Let me warn you here because people can go into depression over this and in church history there have been whole centuries when people have done this. The difference between God the Holy Spirit convicting of sin and Satan flailing you for your wrongdoings is this: when the Holy Spirit convicts of sin He always does it specifically, there’s a specific thing, a specific disagreement in your heart that you know that was wrong. When Satan flails at you it’s some vague depression, black cloud type of thing that you’re a scumbag and you’re awful and you’ll never recover and you’re an idiot and you screwed up so bad there’s no hope for you. That’s all satanic stuff and that’s what leads to depression. That’s not how the Holy Spirit talks to us; the Holy Spirit is a gentle shepherd as well as a stern teacher, and he’s after a conviction. You got to court and you watch a trial, and most of you have been on jury duty, you know how careful the prosecution and the defense attorneys are, they’re talking about chapter and verse of the law code, this charge or that charge. They’re not talking about gee, Joe is a bad guy. That’s not the charge you hear in a courtroom. It’s Joe did this at this particular point; that’s the point, and so the same here.

So, when “we confess our sins,” when we enter a guilty plea, “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins,” that is, He is faithful, He always does it, He never fails, and He is “just,” meaning He doesn’t compromise His integrity. That’s a problem with all non-Christian religion; ever solitary monotheism out there that denies Jesus Christ has a prophet. Think of Islam, for example, here you have Allah, supposedly all holy, and then you ask a Muslim, well, how am I forgiven for my sin? Well, it’s just the wait thing; you know, back and forth, and where do you come out? Well, even if that were true, you know, I did 1,662 sins, what happens to those? Well, Allah forgives that. But that doesn’t deal with the legal problem. Did you ever think of a human court where the judge just cleans the plate? It doesn’t happen. So you see, you have to keep all of the Christian doctrines correct, they all are a structure and a framework. Jesus is the only location, the cross is the only location where you preserve at one sense the love and grace of God and at the same time you have the holiness. That’s the only place where the two come together. You don’t have that any other place than in the cross and the finished work of Jesus Christ, period. So, John says, then “He is faithful and just to…” all the other dirt, all the other uncleanness.

[10] “But if we say that we have not sinned,” now here you can see the progress, here it’s not like verse 8, general sin, verse 10 is a specific sin, so here’s the believer who has been convicted of a personal sin, I am aware of my sin, I am aware that I blew it, I’m aware that I disobeyed the Lord here, here, here, so I’m going to deny it. I don’t want to acknowledge it, I don’t want to turn in a guilty plea because I don’t want to have to be in reliance on Him, I want to do it myself, or some such reason. “If we say that we have not sinned,” when we have been convicted of it, “we make Him a liar,” so now in the courtroom situation we’re arguing, by doing that we are saying God commits perjury. Now that’s a serious charge. Either we accept the testimony of the Lord or we perjure, we accuse Him of perjury in this confrontation, “and His Word is not in us.”

I want to give you five examples where this happens, there’s a hundred and eight out there probably, but here are five just so we understand what it means to deny our conscience, deny the Holy Spirit working through us. Here’s what it looks like. Here’s one way: Genesis 3, blame shifting. What did Adam and Eve do when they were confronted with God? It’s not my fault, it’s the other one. We call that blame shifting, and any kid over four years old is great; they’ve already learned the skill of the immaculate way of blame shifting. So we don’t have to learn that, it comes natural to our flesh. That’s one way we have of denying the conviction of God; by shifting the blame to somebody else or circumstances, or my genes, of I murdered somebody, as someone said in the California court back in the 60s, I ate Twinkies before and my blood sugar was too high. So we have all sorts of ways of blame shifting.

Second is an example from World War II; the psychologists in the German army had a problem, and they had a problem with the soldiers that were killing Jews in Auschwitz and the concentration camps because these guys were shooting people, gassing people, and it’s awful. They were human beings and they knew what they were doing, and one report says: The German soldiers that were killing the Jews in the holocaust, they had the hardest time shooting women and children, especially children. Many of them had to do something to suppress their awareness of this. So they made the Jews the scapegoat for economic disaster in Germany. But that wasn’t enough, the psychologists said, so the psychologists had to deal with these upset Germans who were having to kill people every day, I mean, it was just like harvesting a crop. And they had to do this every day, and these men, many of them, were messed up psychologically, and so one of the techniques that the psychologists used is think of the Jews as pigs and animals, and then you can kill an animal. See what that is? That is a diversion, it is a way, we would call it rationalizing our sin.

So that’s number two; we can blame shift and we can rationalize, and we’re experts at that, and again, every kid over four knows how to do that. Now I’ll give you three examples from Dr. Budziszewski’s book. Budziszewski is a Christian man who is on the faculty of the University of Texas, a very liberal institution, but he’s job protected by tenure and it’s the only reason why, probably, he’s still allowed on the faculty. Here’s what he calls “invented guilt,” a diversionary type of invented guilt. This is another technique when our conscience bothers us before God. “Because I refuse to give up my real transgression, I invest other things with inflated significance and give those things up instead. Perhaps I have pressured three girlfriends into abortions, but I oppose war and capital punishment, I don’t wear fur, I beat my chest with shame whenever I slip and eat red meat; it’s easier to face invented guilt than real guilt.” That explains a lot of some of the social movements that we see today.

Point 4, anesthetizing of violated conscience; abhorrence of what one is doing sinks in even if it does not register consciously. Kathy Sparks, former assistant at an Illinois abortion facility, remarks the first time she witnessed an abortion she considered it no different than a dissection of a frog in biology class, yet, like other staffers in here center, she too started drinking heavily and using drugs. Even though she denied and professed that she wasn’t bothered, why did she have to drink and take drugs. It’s simple: it anesthetizes the feeling of conscience. You don’t have to go to Sigmund Freud to figure this out, it’s all coming out of Scripture.

Finally, five, pseudo confession. It is a stable of talk shows, like Jerry Springer, which has featured guests with such edifying disclosures as “I married a horse,” but the tell-all never tells all; such confessions are always more or less dishonest. We admit every detail of what we have done except that it was wrong; that’s pseudo confession, spill beans but don’t label it as wrong and offensive to God.

So all these avoidance maneuvers skirt around the key issue of coming face to face with the Father and His light and His holiness.

I John 2:1-2 move from the Father over to the Son; this is sort of transitional, but it tells you in verses 1 and 2 what a tremendous battle is going on. If you just pause and read carefully verses 1 and 2, think of the difference of this passage than some psychology report. I don’t know what the world did before psychology; the Church existed for 1900 years and pastors counseled from the Word of God and then we have some characters like Freud, and Karl Gustav Jung, who by the way, wrote his book under demon possession and he tells you he was, Anima was the demon that spoke to Karl Young when he devised his text; he says I sat there and I wrote what Anima told me and Animus. So we have demon possessed people that set up the whole field of psychology.

Here in 2:1-2, here’s the real deal. This is what’s really going on; it’s not depth psychology, it’s heaven psychology, it’s what the dynamics of heaven. You think how vast our universe is but have you ever thought of this: Somewhere, right now, 11:46 Sunday morning, Jesus Christ in His resurrection body is somewhere in the universe; that’s probably a parallel universe to ours, but He is somewhere. Now granted, in His deity He’s omnipresent, but His resurrection body is at a point in space and when it’s seen, as for example in the martyrdom of Stephen, he sees Him. Jesus Christ is somewhere right now. What is He doing about you and me? This is stunning, that He has the time and the attention to devote to you as a personal individual, with all the billions of atoms that are circulating around the universe, and all the millions of people that live on this planet, He has you personally in mind.

Look at this: Little children, these thing I write to you, so that you may not sin.” So he’s not giving us a carte blanche, he’s talking about grace, he hopes we be deterred by realizing our Father is holy. “And if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, [the righteous],” and notice the title of Jesus. How can Jesus be our advocate, a paraclete, the One who, like the Holy Spirit, helps us? Because He’s righteous, we’re not. See, it’s the Son that’s living in the light; Jesus doesn’t have an access problem, I’ve got the access problem, you’ve got the access problem. Jesus doesn’t, he is “righteous.” So we have a helper at the Father’s right hand.

“Jesus Christ, the righteous, [2] And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the entire world.” How all encompassing His grace is. So now John has moved from the Father to the Son and now if you look on the outline you’ll see from verse 3 on, [slide #9], how John does the same contrast, same style of writing, from verses 3-8, he’s talking about God the Son. Now look how he talks a little differently about God the Son than he had talked about God the Father. In God the Father, our issue is coming face to face with His holiness and His righteousness. Now look how he treats Jesus; remember Jesus is in ascension now, because He’s resurrected, He’s ascended to heaven, He’s no longer physically here, but we have a relationship with Him.

So 1 John 2:3, “Now by this we know that we know Him,” the first verb there, “by this we know” is present tense, and the next one is perfect, meaning we have come to know Him. How do we detect that we have come to know Him, that we are in fellowship with Him? Here’s the test, whether we are in fellowship with Him or not, “if we keep His commandments.” Now that’s not talking about perfection, the word threw [tereo] there is a word which just means guard, it means watch over. Philippians 4:6-7, that great promise, “The peace of God … shall keep your hearts and minds…” that’s protecting us. It’s keeping people unharmed, it’s like a soldier standing guard. So this is not Pharisaism here, but he’s concerned for what? For the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ’s teachings. Remember, in the upper room discourse, Jesus before He left, He says I give you this commandment, so what John is saying is we can tell whether we’re walking in the Lord if we’re keeping His commandments, if they are precious to us, if we pay attention to them. That means we have to have some acquaintance with them.

Then he says in verse 3, “if we keep His commandments,” and then in verse 4, here we go, contrast again, he says, “He who says, I know Him, and does not keep His commandments,” see, there again, “He that says,” that’s always the negative with John’s style, “He that says he knows Him, and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in Him.” So it’s absolute empirical delectability of whether we are in fellowship or not by our attitude toward the teachings of Jesus Christ, which is the New Testament, basically.

Verse 5, “But whoso keeps His word, truly, the love of God is perfected in him; and by this we know we are in Him.” There’s a sandwich construction in the Greek language there, big fancy names that grammarians use, we won’t get into that because we don’t have time for it but we know from the structure that where he says “by this we know,” and then when you look at verse 5, “by this we know” it’s like a sandwich, so everything in between those is emphasizing something, and the emphasis is on keeping His commandments. And “whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected” in the sense that it is now functioning; “the love of God” is doing what it was designed to do, we are in fellowship with Him, we love Him, we are walking with Him.

Then verse 6, “He who says he abides in Him ought himself also ought to walk, even as He walked.” That’s why we have the Gospels. That’s why, I know many of you work for organizations where you’ve had a psychology exam, and they have a psychology profile. I remember a group of people were taking the Minnesota Profile Personality test, years ago, and if you indicated on the questionnaire that you prayed, you were abnormal. Well excuse me, but that psychology test was calibrated statistically against society; they had a bell-shaped curve; now you get that in statistics 101, it’s very simple, bell-shaped curve. So that’s the average sinner, it’s not a norm, it’s the average of the fallen human race. And average people don’t pray, so that’s the means, but that’s not the healthy one. If you want to calibrate human psychology there’s only one calibration point. Do you know what it is? Jesus Christ!

When I’m at Aberdeen we have instrumentation and we have to calibrate the instrumentation; if you have a thermometer you have to go against the thermometer ten times better than the one you’re using, and then that has to be traced all the way back to the bureau of standards. And we calibrate, you don’t take measurements without calibrating something. I’d like to go into a doctor’s office and see how often they calibrate their equipment to take your blood pressure; but they usually don’t, it’s not calibrated. You can’t make measurements if you don’t calibrate something. So psychology tests are no good unless they’re calibrated with Jesus Christ. And I haven’t met one psychology exam yet that is calibrated from the profile we have of Him as He walked in the four Gospels. I don’t have a thing with psychologists, it’s just that when they start telling me about the Christian faith I push back.

Verses 7-8, “Brethren, I write no new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning,” notice, “from the beginning” now. Once revelation comes into history it’s set in concrete and that becomes infallible authority. So the “old commandment” is you had it from the beginning, from the time that you first met Christ; “the old commandment is the word you heard from the beginning,” and that’s, of course, he’s going to go into that immediately.

Now in verse 8 we have a transition, just as in the first section, transition from the Father to the Son, now we have another kind of transition, and you want to watch this one. I’ve labeled it in the outline Holy Spirit but that’s because I jumped ahead, but it’s not obvious he’s talking about the Holy Spirit here yet. It will become obvious later as we look at the text. Let’s watch what happens. Yet it is “a new commandment” in the sense of history, this is a new dispensation, and “I write to you, that thing which true in Him and in you,” it’s not true outside of that domain, this is a truth that is “in Him and in you,” so this is something that applies only to believers; it does not apply to the world. This will cause some tension as we go into this passage but I’m just showing you what the text says. “…which thing is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining.” Something new has happened in history with the resurrection, ascension and session of the Lord Jesus.

Now verses 9-11, the last three verses in this section, examine something else. Again, I’ve mentioned in the outline it’s the Holy Spirit, but look at the text and don’t jump to that conclusion just yet. Just read verse 9, 10 and 11 and watch what happens. “He who says he is in the light, and hates his brother, is in darkness until now. [10] He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him. [11] But he who hates his brother is in darkness, and walks in darkness, doesn’t know where he’s going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.”

If you hold the place and turn later in the epistle, 1 John 4, I’ll let you in on John’s little secret because he develops it later in the text. In 1 John 4:12 I’ll show you four verses. Verse 12, “No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us.” Notice, we have not seen God, that’s the Father and His glory. Skip down in the passage to verse 20, “If someone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, how can he love God, whom he has not seen?” And finally, 1 John 5:1, “Whosoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God; and everyone who loves Him who begot loves Him who is begotten of Him.”

John is going to develop a completely new view of l-o-v-e, and we get into that but let me summarize it this way. First, the verb to love is not a sentimental word for John; it means more like would use the word allegiance. When you see that “love not the world” it’s not talking about some sentimental or something sexual about the world, love the world; that’s not what he’s saying. Loving the world is an allegiance, walking in residence with it. So now what does he mean when he says “love the brethren?” He’s just explained it in those verses which we’re going to move to later, and that is, first of all, “he who loves the one who begats loves that which is begotten of Him,” so let me state it this way: the object of this sort of love is a person in whom God the Holy Spirit has done something, that is, regenerated them. The basis for this love is an allegiance, not because somebody is a scintillating personality, a lot of us are stinkers so we’re not talking about personality goo, what this is talking about is a loyalty and a respect for God the Holy Spirit working in that person, and the person is a brother. This is not talking about unbelievers here; you can’t love a brother if you’re an unbeliever, so this is talking about believers, and it’s talking about our relationship with other believers. And that, for John, which is the new thing in this epistle, that is a mark of how well we are integrating ourselves with the Holy Spirit. Do we have a concern and care for the brothers.

I use an illustration like this: if you were on a special forces team and you were dropped into Afghanistan, back at the beginning of that conflict, and you had to spread out, and you’re a small team, the first six weeks in the Afghan war there were only 40 people on the ground, so that was an amazing accomplishment, and you’re on this team. You may not like Joe over there, he may have chewed you out yesterday and you just can’t get along with him, he’s a stinker. The point is, you’re on the same team and while you’re in hostile territory and while you are under fire, you will cooperate with Joe, whether you personally like Joe or not, it doesn’t matter. This is not a personality issue, it is recognizing the work of God in someone’s heart and someone’s life, and respecting them, made in God’s image, but further, redeemed by the Holy Spirit. It’s respecting the work of God and that puts you in a more relaxed mode; you don’t have to get bent out of shape when somebody looks at you cross-eyed and it’s a brother or sister or something else, and this bothers you. You can’t let it bother you, John says. You back off and respect them for what the Holy Spirit has done. And if you see a need he says you go ahead for them, you pray for them, but that’s more of a relaxed way of looking at this loving one another thing.

Let’s go to 1 John 2:10, here’s a warning, this is the first time he does this in the epistle, and what we can say is it’s more a situational awareness, or sometimes if you drive out to a military base after 9-11 you’ll see a big sign, you drive your car up the gate, the soldiers there, you’ll see “threat con,” and you’ll see a level, 1, 2, 3, 4, that’s a threat condition. So the intelligence people say what’s the threat of being attacked today and you’ll see a number; so you cue off that number, and depending on what threat con it is you do this, if it’s threat con 5 you do this, threat con 4 you do this, and so forth and so on, you just know what to do in response to that threat condition. So what John is doing here in verse 10, he’s giving a very sober appraisal of a threat condition.

Verse 10, “He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him,” and that “stumbling” means falling down, it means having a problem. What it’s warning is that if we don’t get along with someone who is a believer, and we allow that problem to metastasize into a mental attitude sin, we are opening ourselves up for Satan; that’s what he’s saying, “occasion of stumbling.” And I can’t name the number of church splits that have happened because somebody couldn’t get along with somebody else and all of a sudden this thing escalates and you wonder, what kind of a land mine just blew up here. This is a warning that “walk in the light” and there won’t be a cause for stumbling. It doesn’t mean everybody agrees and gets along on everything or there’s not disagreements on how to do this or how to do that, but it does mean that there’s a genuine respect while we live in a hostile cosmos. That’s the problem. This is not a sociological issue, we are living in a cosmically dark universe that’s hostile to us and there are supernatural powers and principalities all around the place that can take a mental attitude sin, put twelve volts, put a hundred fifty volts on there, and now we’ve got a real problem. So it’s just a magnet to problems.

Look what he says in the last verse, verse 11, “He who hates his brother,” now there are three conditions there, it says “he abides in darkness,” instead of the light, so right now, just as abiding in Christ means walking in resonance with him, walking in agreement with him, so it says, “He who hates his brother is in darkness,” and not only is he in darkness, in his mental attitude, but he “walks in darkness,” so he has a series of choices; the choices are being made such that he basically is reflecting the world cosmos in those choices. “…and he does not know where he’s going,” so he’s lost his sense of orientation, he doesn’t know where he’s going, he’s erratic in his direction, and why, “because the darkness has blinded his discernment.” Isn’t that pretty sobering? All this mushrooms out of the fact that when believers get put out by one another, and John deals with that, it’s a big thing with John, apparently at 90 years old he’d seen this happen again and again so he really lays into it here in this epistle.

Let’s go to the conclusion [slide #10], we can summarize it, and in the bulletin you have the conclusion. The contact with God the Father means coming to terms as sinners with His holiness. That’s the point of contact with the Father. You know the cleansing, God the Holy Spirit, in our conscience, like a mirror, but this doesn’t cleanse, this just shows you the sin. The cleansing… of course the soap, but in the Scripture the cleansing is the blood of Christ. I can’t cleanse myself. See, this is just like salvation, the cleansing has to come from Him. This is our responsibility, what we see in the mirror; that’s your responsibility, that’s my responsibility. So our contact with God the Father is coming to terms with His holiness. Our contact with God the Son is coming to terms with His commandments to us, that they are respectful. We accept the words of Jesus as we would accept the words of God Himself because it’s God the Son incarnate who gave us the teaching. So our contact with God the Son is coming to terms with the authority of His deity. Finally, contact with the Holy Spirit, as we will see, is coming to terms with His work in our midst. And it’s ironic that years and years ago the founders of this local church picked 1 John 3, Fellowship Chapel, the name, and if there’s one thing that this local church has been known for over the decades has been its care for other believers. I don’t think that’s an accident because it fits exactly to this text. Contact with God the Holy Spirit is coming to terms with His work in our midst by responding to the needs of those He has regenerated and sanctified, in other words, the work of God the Holy Spirit. It’s not a human based thing, it’s not sociological, it’s not psychological, it’s theological and spiritual. This completes this passage and next week we’re going to go further into 1 John and get into the explanations of these commandments and he will concentrate on this last one; he has just worked with the “loving one another” and I can tell you the rest of the epistle is the working out of that commandment.