Clough Fellowship Chapel

1 John Lesson 3

Slides

If we can have [slide #1] we’ll review just a few things about our outline, if you turn to 1 John 2 we’re going to get into that section. We’ll look at 2:12-27 which is the central thesis of this letter. Again, many commentators have struggled with this epistle, many translators have struggled with this epistle. As I said, one frustrated translator said that I give up, I’ve translated the Gospel of John but when I get to 1 John it just looks like this man isn’t thinking in an orderly way. People have even accused John, at 90 years old, of being senile and so forth, because they can’t track the argument of the book. In recent work on this epistle it’s been found that there was a deliberative orator type organization so it’s not without credibility that John, writing a letter that would be read publicly, because he wasn’t going to all the churches, this is a letter that was read in his absence to groups of believers, so it’s not unlike him to have structured this along these lines.

We’ve already dealt with the prologue and the preamble and we have studied how he has approached the issue of fellowship with God, which is a basic tenant of this entire epistle. Today we’re going to move on and deal with one of the central thesis of this thing, he introduces it in 2:12 on down to 2:27. That’s the section in which he states his purpose in this epistle. And the purpose he has is to exhort believers to maintain fellowship of eternal life. In the bulletin outline that you have, I’ve rephrased that a little bit to make it a little bit more interesting; resistance against the world systems and its satanic manipulators.

This is a very sobering passage, and we want to answer the question up front, why is an epistle that is concerned with the fellowship with God so emphatic about defending against heresy and false teaching. The answer John is going to give us as we work our way through this epistle is two-fold. Every time you have apostasy or heresy or false doctrine, the immediate result is breaking fellowship with God. You cannot take a stand on false doctrine and at the same time have fellowship with God; it’s just impossible because God is a God of truth and every false teaching basically projects a false theology of who God is and what He is like. So that’s one ramification, and “whatever you sow, that shall you also reap.” So number one is that we lose fellowship with God.

But John is going to introduce a second, even more sobering, result and this one may come as a surprise to some of us, and that is that when we are out of fellowship we are losing opportunities in our personal history to bear fruit that can be taken into eternity with us and {?} quality of eternal life. Eternal life has a relative quality; in other words, whether we believe in Christ or not decides whether we have eternal life, of course, but the Bible speaks of a Bema Seat judgment in which we are not just going into an awards ceremony, be we are also going to be judged and that which we thought maybe was great things for God are going to be purged. So we’ll understand our personal history, what was valid about it, what was not valid about it. And so the second effect of false teaching is not only does it knock us out of fellowship, not only does it distract us, but it robs us of going into eternity with fruit that we could have borne and did not. And this is the sobering side of this epistle. As much as he talks about love, as much as he talks about loving each other, it’s all related to this.

If we could have [slide #2] by way of review we want to also remember the issue of life. It is hard today because we all have been trained in a secular educational system in which life is seen primarily as material; endlessly we talk about DNA, endlessly we talk about genes, everything’s in the genes, forgetting the fact that genes can be turned on and turned off, based on things in the environment and our personal choices. But nevertheless, we want to contrast the biblical view of life and the pagan view of life and it starts with these fundamental ideas; here’s the fundamental idea. Here’s the fundamental; this is what underlies everything. If you can grab this great idea of Scripture it will guide you through all the details. So rather than lose the forest for the trees we want to concentrate on the top part.

Central and basic to the biblical view of life is the Creator/creature distinction; the first verse of the whole Bible: “In the beginning God created…” and He created everything. If we lose that we cannot understand what life is all about. The Creator/creature distinction says that God existed for all eternity; it also says that God did not have to create the universe, that God was self-contained. Theologians have a word that begins with “a”, it’s called aseity, God has aseity, meaning that He is self-contained, satisfied, He doesn’t need anything outside of Himself to be happy. So God is a self-contained God and He voluntarily chose to create. That makes everything that He has created dependent upon Him. Nothing in the creation is self-sustaining. Nothing in the creation can be self-contained. Everything else outside of God is derivative and dependent upon Him. This affects your philosophy, it affects metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, every area of life; it’s a profound point.

In the pagan view, and by pagan… I’m not using the word “pagan” as some people think that this is a dirty word or it’s a name-calling device, it’s the dictionary term, you can look it up yourself. The definition of a pagan is this: one who does not believe in the biblical God. It’s very simple. So let’s use vocabulary because vocabulary God has given us to be a tool of thinking. So we have the word “pagan.” This includes all the production of an unbelieving view of life. Let’s look at some of these.

On the left side, I should have put it on the right side, the left side, the Creator/creature distinction, has certain implications. Man and nature are derivative and both are dependent. If you skip over to the right side you’ll see there’s an opposite statement. If we believe in what is called the continuity of being, all that’s a fancy term, it just means everything is of the same kind of existence, that’s all; we have the cosmos and there are angels in the cosmos and they’re a little higher and then there’s man and man is a little lower, and then there are animals that are lower, and then there’s molecules and atoms and so on; it’s just part of a spectrum, like a rainbow. That’s what we mean by continuity of being. Some scholars in the Middle Ages talked about the chain of being but it’s the same thing, continuity of being. The central axiom is that nature is all there is and nature is independent and not dependent upon an external creator, by way of origin or sustenance. This is why you often see in literature nature called “Mother.” It’s an idiom, but when you look at it, when you read these articles, look for the capital letter, it’ll be “Mother,” capital M, or “Nature,” capital N. Oftentimes where it is used that… because they know very well what they’re saying, this is a God-substitute. So that’s why that noun is capitalized.

So then we come down to the second thing, and this is very vital; if God created, then every form such as a lamb, shape, behavior, fur, that animal, that lamb has a form, you can take a picture of it. You can observe it, you can see how stupid it is sometimes; this is why God uses it as an illustration for believers. So we have the form of the lamb. Now from the pagan view a lamb is just a by-product of neo-Darwinian natural selection; it’s a casual result of a Chance-born process. That’s what ever kid is taught in school, and here’s the lethal dimension to this. It sounds innocent but let me just take this idea a little further with you. If that’s your view, when you look at a dog, or a cat, or a lamb, that these are just casual results of evolution, that man is also part of the casual results of Chance process, then that’s all there is.

Now let’s turn it around; come over to the left side; if God designed the lamb, the horse, us, cats, dogs, birds, if He designed those, then there’s intelligent design behind it with a purpose. And we know in Scripture that God is using animals, often as metaphors, to teach us truth. So conclusion: the metaphors of Scripture that use nature exist not as arbitrary literary things that somebody just thought of when they were writing and said Jesus would make a good metaphor to use in my writing class. That’s not the truth at all; from a Christian biblical point of view a metaphor works only because God created that form to be revelatory of Himself. These animal forms are revelatory. This is why Jesus is called “the lion of the tribe of Judah,” there’s something about a lion that God designed into the lion in his behavior, in his looks, in his strength, so when we look at a lion we see something there that Jesus says is like “the lion of the tribe of Judah.” So these are big ideas, and the sad thing is, in our educational system, thanks to the ACLU, the Anti Christian Liberties Union, we have an entire curriculum that robs kids of this great view of life, and the result is that kids can graduate from senior high school and they have never engaged, mentally, the great ideas. They can’t; they’ve been eliminated. You can’t engage great ideas without engaging the religious side of life.

So then we come down to the next implication; man alone is in God’s image, not any animal, not even angels; in some way you and I are structured in “the image of God.” And the purpose of our being in the image of God is to think His thoughts after Him, worship and adore Him. That’s our purpose. On the right side man is just a naked ape and you see this manifest increasingly in environmental literature, that man is a scourge on the planet. When the hydroelectric damn in Maine was postponed because of a tadpole or a pollywog or something, that was more valuable to the environmentalist than aborted babies and fetuses. You see, it’s a reverse process. The point is this, watch it: ideas have consequences. Grab an idea and sooner or later that idea will reap the consequences; continued over and over and over to tell people that life is only what’s on the right side of that diagram and sooner or later people are going to behave that way. You’re going to have people depressed because any thinking student can say if all I am is a Chance process, I might as well kill myself. Why not? There’s no purpose, there’s no reason to live. And so what do we have? Increasing suicide. Gee, how did that happen—ideas have consequences.

And we come down, ultimately, to the most important thing. At the bottom of this chart, the result of the biblical view of life is that we are ultimately, moment by moment, held accountable and responsible, not blaming someone else, not blaming our circumstances, but ultimately we are responsible before the God who is there. That’s the high view of life. We wonder why we have irresponsibility in our economy and our institutions—ideas have consequences. What have we been teaching for the last hundred years in the public school system? A view of life that now we pay the price for. There’s no surprise in this.

All right, in the bulletin I have the review of the first part of the epistle because John wants us to experience eternal life because God, the Trinity, before they created the world, did not have the created world, they were self-contained, and the Trinity had life within itself. That’s the archetype and source of what we call life. And so we say, in summary, John introduced from chapter 1:5 down to chapter 2:11, he told us how we have contact with the members of the Trinity. And we have contact with God the Father, we come to Him, God is the God in whom is light and in Him is no darkness at all, the immediate issue there is our sin versus His holiness. This is why Mike is teaching in the prayer group we adore God before we can confess, because we don’t confess until we are aware of our sin; we aren’t aware of our sin until we look at God. It’s a simple process.

So the contact with the Father comes face to face with the issue of His integrity that is uncompromisable. We contact the Son by respecting His commands as the commands of the Father. “If you love Me,” Jesus said, you’ll keep My commands. So the issue is on His teachings, and we come in contact with God the Holy Spirit, although John hasn’t actually talked about the Holy Spirit per se, we come in contact with that by loving the brethren, taking care of those whom the Holy Spirit has regenerated, in whom the Holy Spirit indwells, and with whom the Holy Spirit is working in life and history. We do that, not because we’re enthralled by another brother or sister, though we may enjoy them. The reason for our concern for another brother and sister in Christ is because of what God is doing in that person, not because of personality, not because of some less important point.

Let’s come to 1 John 2:12 and let’s inspect verses 12, 13 and 14; follow with me in the text, and again I say if you don’t have your Bibles I’m sorry, but you’re going to be lost. Preachers have noticed over the last five or six years, with power point slides, that if they keep putting the Scriptures on the power point nobody brings their Bible. So Mike and I have deliberately refused to put the text of Scripture on the power point slides and now you have to look at your Bible. And the reason for doing that is this: sometime you’re going to have a problem in your life and you need to be familiar with your Bible. You have your own Bible, you know, your translation, you’re used to it, you know where to find things in it; that’s what you want to do. That’s why it’s important to do this, if you don’t want to mark the Bible, someone gave you a real nice Bible and you don’t want to mark it, my suggestion to you is go to a copy machine and Xerox the pages and then you can mark all over if you want to on the pages, but you’ll still, if you Xerox your translation, you’ll know and be familiar with it, you’ll know where to go. So that’s why we want you to get into the text, read your Bible.

“I write to you little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake. [13] I write unto you, fathers, because ye have known Him who is from the beginning. I write unto you, young men, because you have overcome the wicked one. I write to you, little children, because you have known the Father. [14] I have written to you, fathers, because ye have known Him who is from the beginning. I have written unto you, young men, because are strong, and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the wicked one.”

What do you notice immediately about verses 12, 13 and 14. Obviously he’s talking about three steps; turn to the next slide. John is going to start using the word “abide” here. Now I don’t know what translations you all have but that’s translated three or four different ways in the English. One word is “continue,” another word is “abide,” another word is “remain,” but whatever the word is behind it is this Greek verb, menw, [meno] and it increases in frequency as you move into the central part of the epistle. This is by design. John is not random in his writing; he is very careful in how he is selecting his vocabulary. We are in this section and you’ll notice, there’s a four-fold increase now in the frequency of this word, and this is a relatively small section of the Bible. This tips us off that John is moving into this issue of abiding in Christ. And then by this big pinnacle here, chapter 2 to chapter 5, in the center, he goes over this and over this. So that’s one thing we want to observe.

[Next slide] We also want to notice that he has these three age levels: children, fathers, young men. You’ll also notice that he repeats himself but if you look at the tense of the verb he changes it. Look at verse 12; is that present or past tense? Present, right? “I am writing you little children, I am writing you fathers, I am writing you young men.” There’s a little textual problem with the next one, “I write unto you little children,” but the best one is that it is also a present tense.

Now look what he does with the verb tense in verse 14; he talks about the same three but this time it’s a past tense: “I have written unto you, I have written unto you…,” now what is John doing here? Every time John uses “I have written” or “I am writing” you he’s emphasizing whatever it is in that local context. That’s just his peculiarity as a human author; the Holy Spirit is using that. And he’s addressing his people, it’s like look, I have told you. You know, every parent, you parents, you know, how often do you say to your kid, now I told you once, I told you twice, I told you a hundred times. Every parent knows what we mean when we say that. And so this is what John means here, “I write you” and “I have written you, now pay attention what I’m writing you” he’s saying. So obviously he’s concerned. Now this is the first step that John is going to use in building and fortifying our ability to resist the cosmos around us. This is part of spiritual warfare.

So notice the first thing. One of the issues that John is dealing with is that spiritual conflict always begins by trying to distract us from what the real issue is. It seems that Satan and the principalities and powers are experts at diverting attention, of distracting attention. So in the first step that John says in spiritual conflict, the first thing is you’ve got to deal with being diverted and distracted from truth. So he emphasizes “write” twice, and now he’s going to go through and treat his believers with three modes, or aspects of their life. Some have said that these three mean different levels of maturity in the congregation and that obviously can be true, but it also has a problem because later he addresses everybody as children. So he’s flipping back and forth through this nomenclature and we suspect that what he’s saying is… and that’s why on this outline I’ve said “as” little children, and “as” fathers and “as” young men. In other words, how you look at life.

And so he starts out with “you, little children, because your sins,” and “your” is in the Critical Text but not in the Majority Text, “little children, the sins have been forgiven on account of His name.” Now what’s he talking about. Is that verb tense “forgiven” past or present? Look at it carefully; that verb tense is past. So now he’s talking in the present to believers, and he says now look, as little children start right here, remembering that “your sins have been forgiven through His name.” In other words, they have exercised the protocols of 1 John 1:5-2:2. This is what would we would refer to as the priesthood of the believer. Historically the priesthood of the believer means, and it was articulated in the Reformation under Martin Luther, the priesthood of the believer says this: that when it comes to your fellowship and my fellowship with God there does not stand between me and God, or you and God, an institution, a person, a priest, a pastor, or whatever. This is an access directly to the Father. Historically this unleashed tremendous freedom in the history of Europe; it broke the dominion of an institutionalized church that held people down by saying that you have to be dependent upon this institution in order to approach God. But the priesthood of the believer is a freedom promoting concept; it’s very powerful.

And he says, you children, you’ve had this experience, “your sins have been forgiven for His name’s sake.” Now why does he want to use that to avoid spiritual distraction? Because it tells you that before these guys, these false teachers showed, before they told you we have to revise the Word of God. Weren’t you doing fine? Were these guys involved in forgiving your sins? No. Were these guys involved in separating you from God? No. Well, just remember then your past Christian experience with the Lord. See what John’s doing; he’s going back into your personal and my personal history; don’t be distracted from what God has already done in your life. Start there, because if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, that is, if you have personally trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior, then at that point you were born again; at that point you were justified, the Holy Spirit came to indwell. All kinds of things happened; Dr. Chafer, founder of Dallas Seminary once summarized thirty-four different things happened at the time that you trusted in Jesus Christ. So those are all your operating assets. And so what John is saying is, don’t you remember? How were your sins forgiven, children? Weren’t they forgiven by going directly with your priesthood, directly to the Father. Did you need a false teacher? Did you need one of these guys that’s going around here saying that you’ve got to listen to me? Did you need Immanuel Kant, those of us who have been brought up in the “age of enlightenment?” What did we do before the age of enlightenment? We went to God the same way, before then the same as now.

Look at the next one. “I write to you fathers,” now here I would say “as fathers,” let’s go back, I think we advanced too far, “as fathers,” what is he saying to the fathers? He’s saying “because you have known who is” what? “…who is from the beginning. What does that tell you? There the word beginning means arch [arche], as it does in his Gospel, the beginning of the universe. In other words, “fathers” refers to a believer who is mature, who operates from a position of strength, who has a framework, and if I may put in a little ad here, I have produced a framework series, two hundred twenty-four lessons, it’s going around the world but you can get it on a DVD. And those were lessons that originally were designed to deal with hippies back in the 70s who were coming into town and totally spaced out by drugs and everything else, and those were lessons that were originally designed to deal with hippies back in the 70s who were coming into town and totally spaced out by drugs and everything else, but had thoroughly understood the culture of our modern era. And I quickly found out that if you tried to teach the Word of God to them you might as well talk Swahili, because it just never communicated. And so what you had to do is you had to break down the Scriptures and you had to feed it piece by piece as an integrated system, not pieces because they can chew up the pieces. Any pothead can take any portion of Scripture and bury it, so you can’t give pieces of Scripture. You have to give the whole coherent form and it takes time to do that.

So this is the father who has known, past tense, in other words, mature believers, he’s saying, haven’t you “known him who is from the beginning.” If you have known the one who is from the beginning why do you need false teaching? Why do you need the latest hot poop from the theological think tank, if “you have known who is from the beginning?”

And then he comes to “young men” and notice, this is interesting; chronologically he doesn’t say “children, young men and fathers.” He says, children, fathers, and young men. Why do you suppose he put “young men” after the “fathers” here? Well, what’s the title? The title is resistance, spiritual warfare, conflict, and the word here for “young men” are young men of warrior age. So he’s bringing up the issue of combat here.

“I have written to you, young men, because you have overcome the wicked one,” and this is the first time John, in this epistle, addresses the issue of Satan himself. “…you have overcome the wicked one.” How have they overcome the wicked one? He’s going to go on and explain that in a little bit. “I write unto you, little children, because you have known the Father.” Now here he switches the word for child, here’s a little baby, coming to his father as daddy, that’s that flavor there. And so he says… again, think of yourself as children, because you’ve known daddy, you’ve “known the Father.” See, all this preceded the false teaching. So he’s starting again from operating assets, from their own position.

Then he says, [14] “I have written to you, fathers,” and he doesn’t change anything here, notice the word here follows the same, but now notice what he does with young men, that’s the one he changes the most. So now he expands it, he says not only have you “overcome the wicked one,” but he explains it, “because you are strong, and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the wicked one.” Now we know what is on John’s mind; now we know what he is saying is that Jesus, in John 15:7, which was basically on John’s mind, Jesus said this in that briefing to the disciples, and you remember John’s characteristic of writing is he appears to be mimicking how Jesus sounded when He was close in with His disciples. That’s why his style of writing is different from Matthew and Mark who recorded his public discourses. John records Jesus’ private briefings when He was just relaxed and He was sitting with His disciples, this is how He talked. And in John 15:7 Jesus said, “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, then,” consequence, “you ask what you desire, and it shall be done to you.” So that tells us that in John’s thinking, when he talks about the young men the second time, “you are strong and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the wicked one,” on his mind is probably prayer, one of the great spiritual tools in the spiritual conflict.

You’ve had the experience, first of trusting in Christ, and when you trusted in Christ, what happened? You defied the hostile spiritual environment in which we live. The act of trusting in Christ as Savior is an act of defiance against the principalities and powers. And every time you trust the Lord in the middle of a crisis or the middle of an event, the faith-rest drill, you are defying the principalities and powers. So all of this first section, summarized here, this is to meet diversionary maneuvers by going back to your journal, to the journal of your Christian life. Before this latest revisionism, John says, you were doing fine, so what’s the problem?

Now the second step in the resistance, [next slide] John is going to deal with “do not love the world, the things in the world” and I’m going to use the illustration of one of the famous battles in history in World War II. This battle as I have studied it has so many parallels to the church age that I gave it one time here Memorial Day, you remember. And it has vital elements that I think are easy to visualize and are directly applicable to the Christian life. Iwo Jima, you all know Iwo Jima because of the flag raising, if you go to Arlington Cemetery you see the great statue of those men who were on the mount of Suribachi, raising that flag. Before I studied the battle I always thought that that raising of the flag was the end of the battle; I thought that was the raising of the flag in victory, but it wasn’t. [Hit it again please] There’s an aerial shot of Iwo Jima just prior to the invasion. If you’ll note carefully on the right side of Iwo Jima, it’s a 550 volcanic cone, called Mount Suribachi, the rest of that island is flat, but this is what we call the high ground, and in military parlance, whoever controls the high ground controls the battlefield, ultimately. This is why there’s a battle for satellites, this is why the Chinese right now are a major threat to the United States because they are developing the capability to destroy out satellites. And while we’re worrying about our IUD’s in Iraq the Chinese are developing a tremendous military machine that we are going to have to face with a depleted budget.

So the high ground is always crucial. Now I’ve drawn a ring around that because one of the two keys to successful strategy is: number one, envelop the enemy. By enveloping the enemy we mean we cut off his lines of supply, we cut off his lines of communication. And by this time Iwo Jima has been cut off; there’s thirty thousand Japanese soldiers in there that are treating Iwo Jima as the holy ground of Tokyo, because unlike all other possessions in the Pacific, it was Iwo Jima that the Japanese thought of as sacred ground and would not let any non-Asian, non-Japanese occupy or touch their feet to that ground. That was sacred ground. So they dispatched thirty thousand Japanese soldiers that dug fifteen miles of tunnels and totally enveloped that island, underground. It was a big surprise to the United States forces. And this was considered impregnable; it must stand. All thirty thousand Japanese knew that they would die before they would let that ground be taken. It was a basic thirty thousand man suicide mission, to hold Iwo Jima. The idea, the commander of the Japanese garrison gave the order that I don’t want any Japanese soldier dead before you kill ten Americans; we are going to bleed the Americans before they take this land.

So the Americans come in, the Marines, basically, in one of the largest invasions [next slide] and here we have 110,000 Marines in 880 vessels, the largest Marine operation up to that point. And so they begin to attack, they begin to land along the beach, and you’ll notice in the smoke, the Japanese are raking the beach from Mount Suribachi; the guys hit the beach and instead of meeting beach sand or soil so they can dig a fox hole, it’s volcanic dust; there’s no place to hide, and Marines by thousands, tens of thousands are shot and killed. Our casualty count was enormous trying to take Mount Suribachi because the Japanese were dug in, and they would rake that beach with fire from this 550 foot high thing. And we had encircled it, we had cut them off, but we had to capture the high ground.

[Next slide] Eventually we captured it, and that led to the raising of the flag, and here’s this Marine crawling up that thing, and a photographer looking back on the beach and you can easily see how anyone with a gun in that position could just rake that beach, and anybody crawling up on that beach is going to be within the range of their gunfire. So the point was that the Marines had to capture the high ground, and when the flag was raised on Mount Suribachi all the ships that were out in the waters waiting began to blow their horns, and that was the signal, the high ground had been captured. It took thirty days of bloody fighting before the rest of that island is taken, but the high ground had been taken.

Now that is a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ ascending into heaven and sitting at the Father’s right hand, and John is going to refer to that in this passage. So if you look at verses 15-17 he’s going to address the issue of the cosmos. “Do not love the cosmos,” or the world, “or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. [16] For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not out of the Father,” or caused by the Father, or supported by the Father, “but is actually supported, motivated and energized by the cosmos. [17] And the world,” the cosmos, “is passing away, and the lust thereof.”

Reading from Volume 2 [page 77] of Dr. Chafer’s Systematic Theology, that founded Dallas Seminary, I won’t read it all in the interest of our time, but here’s what he says about the cosmos, definition of it. “The cosmos is a vast order or system that Satan has promoted, which conforms to his ideals, aims and methods. It is civilization now functioning apart from God—a civilization in which none of its promoters really expect God to share, who assign to God no consideration and respect to their projects; nor do they ascribe any causativity to Him. This system embraces it’s godless governments, conflicts, armaments, jealousies, its education, culture, religions of morality and pride. It is that sphere in which man lives. It is where he sees, what he employs. To the uncounted multitude it is all they ever know so long as they live on this earth. It is properly styled the satanic system, which phrase is in many instances a justified interpretation of the so-meaningful word, cosmos. It is literally a cosmos diabolicus.”

So the idea is an order here. John is saying don’t love that. Now here we learned what love means in John, so watch this now because this sets up the meaning of l-o-v-e, which he’s going to use again and again and again and again and again, loving the brethren. Now clearly loving the world doesn’t involve some sexual thing; it doesn’t involve some emotional thing, it involves something else. How would you translate l-o-v-e in this context? I’ll tell you I would translate it as allegiance, as loyalty. And what he is saying is do not have loyalty, or allegiance, to the world. And then he explains, “all that is in it, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,” you see that even back in Eve when she took the fruit, she saw it would be good to eat, it looked good to the eyes, and it would make one wise. The three elements are always there, and he’s saying that is not out of the Father, it’s not sustained of the Father. Everything in the world is not sustained by the Father in the moral and ethical sense, in the fulfillment sense.

And finally in verse 17 he says, “The world is passing away, and the lust thereof.” By the way, [next slide please] and when he says “The world is passing away, and the lust of it,” notice, it’s present tense. Now here is what real enlightenment means; it’s not what some history person, nor some social studies teacher has taught you about the age of enlightenment, beginning after the Reformation, or thereabouts. The age of enlightenment, for everyone’s enlightenment, began with the resurrection and ascension and session of the Lord Jesus Christ. That began the destruction of Satan’s kingdom, because from that point on, every person, man, woman and child, that trusts in Jesus Christ becomes that spiritual insurgent to Satan’s cosmos. We are out of kilter with the world system.

And so this is why “the world is passing away, and the lust thereof,” because Jesus Christ has taken the high ground, the Mount Suribachi’s, so to speak, of the cosmos, which is the seat at the Father’s right hand is now occupied. The dream of Satan, in Isaiah 14, to be like the Most High, I will be like God, is totally thwarted. That seat is occupied—sorry! And it’s permanently occupied by the resurrected, ascended Lord Jesus.

So this is the second step of resistance and it involves how God cuts off His domain. This diagram, you’ve seen it again and again, but again I emphasize that in the Bible evil is bracketed; it started at a point in time and it’s going to end at a point in time when God judges it. Nowhere, outside of the Scriptures, will you ever find an answer to the problem of evil—nowhere! It’s not us, the Christians, who have the problem with evil. It’s every pagan who has the problem of evil because they don’t have… look, here’s they have—evil and good always existed, always will exist. Isn’t that a real thrill. But in the Scriptures we have a beginning to evil and an end to evil, that’s why the Bible says we have hope. Not like Karl Marx who couldn’t figure out what the dictatorship of the proletariat would look like and he admitted that, because he was blinded by the economic fall of his time, so forth and so on.

So the point of resistance [next slide please] is this. John has said, as we said in our introduction, 1 John 5:19, “the whole world lies passively in the sphere of the evil one.” Second, Satan’s conspiracy of evil is for losers. That’s the implication of the strategy of Scripture. If the world is passing away, then the only people that are in that, the only destiny they have is they’re going to be losers. It’s the Christians that are going to be the winners in history. So Satan’s domain is a domain made up of losers and people who just love to lose, since Jesus Christ has taken the high ground.

Then we have the third one, this is what John is going to say and it’s contained in his last little phrase, in verse 17. This is where he gets into something not often spoken of in our Christian circles. He says: “The world is passing away, and the lust thereof; but he that does the will of God abides forever.” And that is the one who does the will of God, that is a believer who is operating in fellowship, who is actually implementing and having fellowship with eternal life, and that life is have fruit in his life, “abides forever,” meaning that he takes into eternity the results of that fellowship in operation. So that’s why John is saying you’ve got to be careful, he’ll amplify this later, but he’s saying that it’s only what we Christians produce in this life that goes into eternity with us and sets up our quality of life, ultimately, before the Lord, at the Bema Seat. So that’s the resistance issue.

Now we come to step 3, [next slide] and that is 1 John 2:18-27. If you look at verse 18 he says: “Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard the antichrist is coming,” now think about this, in a day and age when everyone is talking about universalism and we have to be acceptable to everybody, how do you think this ninety year old apostle would come across on CBS? “Little children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.” What does he mean by “last hour?” He means the eleventh hour of history. You see, there isn’t another age to history before Christ comes because Christ is the maximum revelation God is going to give. So the world is held accountable to the revelation God has already given. “He that has the Son has life, and He that has not the Son of God has not life.”

There’s no extra deal going on here; all the post-Christian religions are trying to argue that, well, we’re adding to the revelation. And John says no you’re not, Christ is the Son, par excellence revelation of all time and there “ain’t gonna be any more” until He comes back and then He’ll be revealed in a sudden climactic event. So, any person then opposing that is antichrist. And what he’s linking with, every false teacher that denies the deity of Christ is motivated by the spirit behind the antichrist. We don’t have time but you can check that out, 1 John 4:1-3 where he makes that argument, that the spirit behind false teachers is the same spirit that will ultimately motivate and characterize the false prophet in the book of Revelation, the antichrist’s aide, so to speak, the false prophet.

Then he says, verses 19-20, he says, “They went out from us, they weren’t of us, for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us,” there’s that menw [meno] again, “but they went out that they might be made manifest that none of them were of us.” He’s talking about people that work within the church; it’s a sobering warning that a lot of the most seductive heresies seem to come from within. This is why when you have an ostensible Christian university and you have a few people on the faculty that get a job, by the way, paid for by sacrificial gifts from parents who think they’re sending their kid to a good Christian school and making all kinds of sacrifices in their family to pay the tuition to go here, and we have a few of these renegade professors in Christian universities who make it their job to undermine the faith of the students. And this goes on; it’s not just secular universities.

So John is talking about these people “come out from among us,” are they believers or not. That’s a problem we have in all the New Testament epistles. Some evidence points to the fact that some of these were believers; 1 Timothy 1; 2 Timothy 2; 2 John, all refer to heretics as believers who are going to be disciplined. John says I turned them over to Satan for discipline. And so some can be believers but then we have Acts 15:24; Galatians 2, that speak of unbelievers creeping into the church. The whole point John is saying is they are not apostolic representatives because that’s why…if they would have continued with us doctrinally, they might be manifest that they are not of us. If they split from the truth that you have had from the beginning, that’s an ID check, right there. So one of the issues in this third thing: beware of revisionists who try to update Scripture. Realize the authority of biblical revelation you have already trumps all other teaching authority. See, that’s why we go back to the original languages. The Scripture, in its authority, trumps all other competing authorities and that goes for some human viewpoint professor in the classroom. The Word of God is the final authority. So this is why John says “they went out” and so forth and so on.

Now he says, verse 20, “You have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things.” Now clearly he’s not talking… we are omniscient, but what does he mean by “all things.” Well, you have to go back to John 14, 15 and 16, that {?} briefing. What did Jesus say? The Holy Spirit shall come and shall reveal to you “all things.” Now does he mean the Holy Spirit gives omniscience to believers? No, but “all things” you need to live in the church age, that’s what the Holy Spirit has given, i.e., the New Testament. So at this point the New Testament obviously wasn’t canonized because this epistle was being circulated. “You have an anointing,” so there’s an inner illumination of the Holy Spirit, “you have an anointing, and you recognize all things.” They’ve already benefited, they’ve already been taught these things.

[21] “I haven’t written you because you don’t know the truth, but because you do know it,” and so then he develops [22] “Who is a liar but he that denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son.” Look at this. Look at what he is saying here in the light of our uniformitarian view of life. “He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son.” That is pretty strong language coming from the apostle of love.

He says, [23] “Whoever denies the Son has not the Father.” Now think of what our courts are doing to chaplains in the U. S. Military who pray “in Jesus’ name.” You’re not supposed to pray in Jesus’ name; you can pray to some generic deity but you can’t pray in Jesus’ name. Well, if I can’t pray in Jesus’ name, sorry, I’m praying anyway.

I well remember Col. Thieme coming to M.I.T. years and years ago, we had him as a speaker, and we had all the Christian kids at a big long table in the dining room, of course, this was the public dining room, one of the three or four on campus, and there must have been four or five hundred people in there, and about twenty or thirty Christians, and somebody made the mistake of coming to Col. Thieme and telling him we don’t want you to pray out loud in Jesus’ name when you say grace here. So he proceeded to get up and in a command voice that could be heard across the street, and gave thanks for the food in the name of “the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ.” And I’m telling you, I sat there and you could have heard a pin drop; everybody in that cafeteria… huh? What was that that happened? I won’t tell you what would happen, that’s what happens when you tell me I can’t pray in Jesus’ name, so tell me again. So this is the point, that we are exclusivists, and the Bible insists that we cannot come to the Father except through the Son.

The conclusion now, verses 24-28, he’s going to go back to a consistency check. And if you will show the next slide, this is a quote from the United States White House, quoting our President who in 2006 gave an address to some evangelicals and I want you to notice something. This is not an attack on our President, by the way, because all politicians tend to do this, but I want you to notice the slick maneuver here. You’ve got to learn this because it’s used over and over again: “How to discuss faith in a pluralistic society includes the need for religious people to translate their concerns into universal rather than religion specific values.” What is it saying? “Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father.” Is that a universal, or is that religion specific? This is the bait and switch tactic; it comes across nice because we want to get along with everyone. That’s fine, we can be gracious, but we’re certainly not going to compromise our values for the simple reason there are no universal values. What’s a universal value? Do you take a Gallop survey and find out 98% of the people believe… I doubt you’d even get 98% of the people so there are no such thing as universal values. So this is a contemporary thing.

[Next slide] This is a quickie at that diagram of this last phrase. Look at what it says. “Let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning,” see, there it goes again, the truth hasn’t changed. Once truth is revealed it doesn’t change and it does not need revision. “Therefore, let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you will abide in the Son and the Father.” [25] “And this is a promise, He’s promised us, eternal life,” you’ll be part and fellowship with that. [26] “These things I have written to you concerning them who deceive you. [27] But the anointing which…” now here’s the sentence, there’s a clever verb play in here and I want to show you this because this reinforces the point about “beginning.”

He says, “The anointing which you have received from Him abides in you, you do not need that any one teach you,” this is saying nothing more than what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, “but as the same anointing teaches you,” present tense, “as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things and is true and is not a lie, just as it has taught you,” past tense, “you’ll abide in Him.”

Now what he’s saying here is that the illumination in time past, past tense, you’ve learned a truth, a point from Scripture, maybe John’s writings or Paul’s writings. Okay, that’s something in the past that I have learned. What he is saying is that in the present the Holy Spirit doesn’t conflict with what He has taught in the past. There is a coherence and a consistency to biblical truths; it doesn’t change. And that’s Johns point and that’s how he’s going to conclude this area of abiding in the Son.

[Next slide] This the summary of the whole thing here. In this section, main section, he’s talking about dealing with hostile environment; so let me run this through real quick. Point 1, where he starts, and I think the sequence is important because here’s a guy who’s lived for decades. He’s seen so many things, this aging man, and it’s time that we sat down, and you know, if he were here, wouldn’t it be something to ask John—John, you’ve survived all these things, you’ve seen other apostles crucified, you’ve seen them killed, you’ve seen tremendous persecutions, you yourself was thrown into prison, tell us, what are the keys to resisting this hostile environment? And he would tell us in this epistle, counter “diversions” from your previous experience, your priesthood, framework knowledge and faith choices; children, fathers and warriors. Maintain “situational awareness,” civilization is passive to satanic manipulation, he uses the word “passive,” the whole sick world lies and {?} at the wicked one. God’s plan strategically envelops evil, it begins it and it chops it off. The biblical view of evil is that it is bracketed, making it for losers; the believer’s quality of life in eternity is shaped now by our obedience to His commands.

Three, beware of revisionists that try to update Scripture and add to Scripture. Bible authority trumps all other authority, develop discrimination based upon coherence with the Scripture. A good word, “discrimination.” I know it’s been misused for arbitrary type discrimination, but the verb discriminate used to mean a facility that you got because you were old and you were mature. It was a term of compliment, and not a derogatory term; discriminate means you can discriminate between what is true and what is false. We’re going to conclude today with a hymn that’s in the back of the hymn book. This is a hymn that I found two years ago, one of the few hymns that is devoted to Christ taking the high ground. This hymn centers not on the cross, but it centers upon the ascension and session of the Lord Jesus at the Father’s right hand.