Clough Fellowship Chapel

1 John Lesson 4

Slides

When you’re going through sequentially a book of the Bible and you come to a special day or Mother’s Day you are tempted to break the momentum and do a specialized thing, but another way of doing that is to trust the Holy Spirit to be working in the Scriptures so that on that particular day truths will come out that are appropriate. And I think and I hope that you will find that so today as we turn once again to John’s first epistle.

Remember that this epistle, toward the back of your Scriptures, it’s the last on the list of the little epistle books, was written by an old man. The apostle John, at this time, we know from church history, probably live well into his nineties. And he left Jerusalem and went up to the area of Asia Minor, Turkey now, and spent the rest of his years near Ephesus. John, there’s not known too much about him but we know some example stories from church history. Eusebius in Ecclesiastic History, chapter 8, sites Arameus as saying, and this is a famous incident, we don’t know whether this actually happened, but I am repeating it to you because it shows you that imbedded in church history was a tradition that this elderly apostle, all the way to the end of his life, was concerned with preserving the truth that had been originally given to the apostles. We’ve already seen that, he said “that which was from the beginning, that which was from the beginning, that which was from the beginning,” because he doesn’t want the truth to be modified, updated or corrected by false teaching.

So the idea is once God has historically revealed Himself in history, then that is, so to speak, becomes concrete; you don’t mess with it, it stays the way it’s given. And that’s always the battle, and it still is the battle in our time. But here’s a little story that at least Arameus recites and he was not that far removed historically and time wise as the apostle John.

“John, the apostle, once entered a public bath to wash, but ascertaining that Cerinthus was within,” Cerinthus was a leading heretic of the time, so John and some of the Christians are going into this bath and they see this guy, Cerinthus there. So he ascertained “that Cerinthus was within, he leapt out of the place and fled from the door, not enduring to remain under the same roof with him. John exhorted those within to do the same; he said, ‘Let us get out of here lest the bath fall in, as long as Cerinthus, that enemy of the faith, is inside.’”

So whether that actually happened or not it shows you that at least the church fathers thought of John in that light, that he was the diehard preserver of truth and doctrine. If you look at the bulletin white sheet you’ll see the outline that we’ve been following, which follows the format of a logical discourse and we point that out to you, and Sunday we have put in bold type the section in that outline that we are currently going through. We do that because commentators and translators have said for years that gee, you know, John’s Gospel is logical but his epistle seems to ramble. And they kind of make this steamy window that this ninety year old man was going senile or something, and he was suffering from Alzheimer’s and he just kept repeating himself. But if you study the text carefully, John is not an old man falling apart; he may be an old man but his mind is very, very sharp, and he has his thoughts very well organized.

So let me review, if you look again at the white sheet, you’ll see underneath the table, you’ll see that there are three key ideas, and we’ve already introduced those in the first sections. Now what he’s going to do, he’s going to develop how those apply in every day situations. So the key idea is from 1 John 1:1-4, and if you’ll turn there you’ll notice that verse… you can’t read verse 1 of this epistle too often because this is the biblical view of truth, and I cannot emphasize strongly enough that if you are looking seriously at the issue of truth, you can forget most of what you’ve been taught in the public educational system because at no point in the public educational system are teachers permitted to get into the presuppositional levels of truth. If they were, they would get involved in a theological discussion and the ACLU sewing room. So teachers are actually prevented from going in depth into the basis of truth.

But the Bible totally goes against the entire enlightenment tradition that we have this public domain of the scientific facts and then we have the subjective main where you have you values and I have my values and that flows out of the pagan view of man that we are nothing more than naked apes. The Bible presents it differently; the Bible says there is only… there is coherence to truth because God doesn’t think incoherently; He structured the universe coherently, and when God speaks and He acts in history, He speaks and He acts in a rational manner. So truth is different in the Scriptures than what we have learned. And that’s why it requires us to pay particular attention and careful attention to listen to what the apostles are saying because all the practical things don’t mean anything if we aren’t sure of the foundation underneath them.

So that’s verses 1-4, the key ideas were the idea of truth and the idea of life. Once again remember he says “the Word of life.” And again we’re face to face with the biblical view of life that’s totally different than everything we’ve learned in school. Everything we’ve learned in school is from molecules to man, up the chain of being. The Bible doesn’t do that; the Bible says there’s a Creator/creature distinction that manifests itself across the entire board of human thought. And so the archetype of life is what is in the Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, first. And remember, God did not have to create the cosmos; if He did He would be dependent upon the cosmos. So the Bible says that God is totally self-sustaining and independent. And He created the universe with a creative act and when He did so, then He created forms of life that are analogous to Him. And so we have a top down view of life instead of a bottom up view of life. Again, {?} of truth, the key idea, has to be understood to appreciate the reason that goes into this.

Then if you go down to 1 John 1:5 to 2:11 we said in that section, and if we could have the first slide please, we said that we have contact with God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, and God the Son. And we come into contact with the Trinity and John is very explicit; he distinguishes the Father, the Son and the Spirit showing the Trinity is embedded there from the very beginning; it’s not something that the Church invented four hundred years later, it’s embedded implicit in the apostolic writings, with God the Father’s coming to terms with His holiness; I said, if you look there you’ll see in 1:5 you’ll see, “This is the message which we have heard from Him, that God is light and in Him is no darkness, no, none at all.” We’ll see that again today and it’s very vital to the interpretation of the rest of this epistle, that John talks about the immaculate holiness of God the Father. There’s no sin, there’s no compromise, there is no darkness, and he keeps going over and over this and over this, and it’s a key to interpreting some of the more difficult passages that we will see this morning.

So John is saying, then, that we have a holy God and we come to God with our conscience. And the question is, how do we know that we’re in fellowship with God? Well, conscience acts as a mirror, and you don’t clean yourself in the mirror; you clean yourself with soap. But theologically we don’t have any soap, all we’ve got is a mirror, so how do we get clean? John says that, in verse 7, he says “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, and have fellowship with Him, the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.” But what we tend to do is we tend to clog the mirror up with all kinds of blame shifting techniques, rationalization, what have you. But these are all just techniques.

However, verse 9 tells one of the protocols of fellowship with God is to confess our sins and the idea there is to acknowledge them; it’s sort of entering a guilty plea in a courtroom. It’s not an acknowledgment that we’re sinners, God knows that, we know that. The issue, however, is what specifically, where specifically are we at odds with God and His holiness. And so conviction of sin is vital, and that’s why there’s a very, very important verse in verse 9 that teaches a doctrine that revolutionized western history. You can’t think of verse 9 as a revolutionary verse but here’s what happened. In verse 9 it says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

In that verse there is no intermediary; every single man, woman and child is free to come to God the Father on their own without any intermediary. That goes for government, that goes for church, that goes for even a pastor. The idea is that we come as individuals before God, face to face. That’s called the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer, and historically in the West that is the basis of two things: responsibility and it was accountability and it was freedom. Liberty, you can say liberty and responsibility are balanced. Why are they balanced? Because an individual is responsible to God’s holiness. So it’s not conformity to an external regulation or an external rule; this is why civilization advanced wherever the Word of God has been taught because it teaches self-restraint.

No government can restrain sin; all government can do is to pass rules and regulations and so on, but it doesn’t change hearts, it doesn’t change the attitude of people. But the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer says that you are accountable, I am accountable for the Father, period, independently of everyone else. And it gives us liberty because beginning in the fourth century, the Church, through Augustine’s influence, adopted two basically problem… Augustine did a lot of great stuff but he also did a lot of stuff that messed up the Church, and one of the things that Augustine did is he bought into replacement theology, whereby Israel is replaced by the Church, and once he did that, then you have a specialized priesthood, which is true in the Old Testament, now comes across to the Church. But prior to the 4^th century no one spoke of a specialized priesthood because it was understood that every believer is a priest.

So Augustine brought replacement theology in. He also, at the same time, turned what we call Eucharist, or Communion, into a holy sacrament as a sacrifice; instead of a memorial he made it to be actual sacrifice, and once he did that you have to have a priest to give a sacrifice, hence in the 4^th century you have a specialized priesthood that develops. And so it was the Protestants in the Protestant Reformation that re-taught the priesthood of the believer and that, historians tell us, started the revolution politically in Europe, because it meant that the kings who controlled these different countries in the name of the church, they lost power because individuals could now go to God, independently of any external authority. It was pure freedom to approach God. So historically verse 9 is an important point in this protocol for fellowship.

Then John goes on, as we saw last time, to announce, as you follow in that chart, you see the second phase, from 1 John 2:12 thru 27, there he states his purpose, and John’s purpose is he’s concerned that false teaching, and if we can have the second slide please], that false teaching will destroy our fellowship with God. And so we have resisting this cosmic effect, cosmos being the organized spread of the fall throughout and permeating all institutions of civilization, it’s not material, it’s a spiritual designation, so hence we theologians have called this cosmos diabolicus, meaning it’s a name for the entire affect of the fall across human society.

So John says we have to resist that, and he gets down to the third step and we’ll see that very graphically today. The threat is this, that if we permit false teaching to deny the person of Jesus Christ, we automatically sever fellowship with God the Father. If we sever fellowship with God the Father, the next consequence is we go into eternity having lost valuable time in which we could have borne fruit and we are going to be shamed at His coming. So this is severe consequences here, so Paul’s doctrine is not something in a theological seminary classroom here; this is the effect of false doctrine on the Christian life which then affects the quality of life of believers in eternity. So it’s a sobering point that John is making.

Now this morning, we come now to 1 John 2:28 and we won’t go all the way to 5:17 but we’re going to go, probably to the end of chapter 3. This is a fast pace so fasten seat belts because we’re going to go through this pretty fast and there’s some difficult verses in here. But if we’re going to cover the whole epistle in six times this is necessary to do this.

So if you turn to 2:28 we’ll begin; and we begin by noting that in verse 27, the end of that previous section where he stated the point, the threat, the situational threat to fellowship, in verse 27 he told you, he says, “the anointing which you have received of Him abides in you, and you have no need that any one teach you;” he’s talking there about identifying right and wrong, applying the Word of God to situations, “and you do not need anyone to teach you, but as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is true, and it is not a lie, just as it has taught you, you will abide in Him.”

Now verse 28 begins the new section; here the verb turns from a future tense to an imperative. “And now, little children, abide in Him,” how do we know that John is logical in his thinking? Because he uses a literary construction known as an inclusio; an inclusio is this; remember in the ancient world the parchments were written without verse designations, without chapter designations, so how did they distinguish sections. Well, one of the techniques of distinguishing a section is you identify an idea; we put it up there, and when you finish the section you say the same idea and put it out there. So now you’ve bracketed a whole section.

Now let me show you the brackets that John has built into this; 1 John 2:28, and we point this out in your bulletin, 1 John 2:28 and 1 John 4:17 and 19 form the bread of this sandwich. If you’ll look first at 28, we’ll look at the theme, and then we’ll compare it with chapter 4:17-19 and we’ll see the same thing. So in 2:28 he says, “Now little children,” addressing every believer, “abide in Him, that when He appears, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming,” and he’s talking there about the rapture and going to be with the Lord. And so he has this theme of confidence or shame before Him. This is confidence of shame before the Lord, face to face. So now this idea of abiding, of walking by the Spirit, now becomes critical because it has an eternal consequence. He says we don’t want to be ashamed before Him; he’s not talking here about loss of salvation. What he’s talking about is loss of opportunity and the impact this has on rewards and so forth. So that’s verse 28, where verse 28 talks about… notice the same word there, by the way, that he quotes over and over.

Now if you’ll turn to 1 John 4:17, and watch what he does here. Here’s the other side of the inclusio. And this section here, verses 17, 18 and 19, I’ve seen this on greeting cards, I’ve read it in news stories and it’s always misapplied. Of course, you can’t expect too much from the media these days, mostly, as Cal Thomas said, the closest they come to the Bible is the Gideon Bible when they stop in a motel, but the point that Cal hit is that if you understand the Scriptures this has nothing to do with normal every day life situations; it’s talking about love within the Church for believers. That’s the context. But look at the implication: “Love,” he says, “has been perfected,” or has come to its functionality, its intended functionality “among us in this that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as He is, so are we in this world.”

Now let’s start there; love had been brought to its function, the word telio~ [telios] means mature, “has been matured among us in this sense, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment,” and he has just got through saying, as we will see, he’s talking about exercise of respect and admiration for the work of God in believers.

If we could have the third slide, please. This is a biblical view of HR [Human Relations]; you always have HR groups and every large corporation. Let me show you what the Scripture teach about human relations, just in a very, very quick scan here, because John utilizes this idea in a very narrow sense. Let’s start with a broad sense and then we’ll zero in on the narrow sense. Respect exists… now this is tough because this separates biblical doctrine from overall pagan ideas of respect. Watch. Respect exists, for other people, only if we see others in the images of God, (everything else is approbation lust or manipulation). Now that’s kind of hard, kind of a tough way of saying it, but apart from the Scriptures, apart from seeing another individual as God’s image, apart from that, what is the basis for your respect? Well, it’s whatever they can do for me; that’s manipulation. Well, I respect people, I want to create a good impression; well, that’s approbation.

You see, apart from the Scriptures there’s not a genuine solid foundation for respect; respect comes because of the doctrine of creation. I see that person, whether I like the person or not is not the issue here; the issue is whether we respect the person, they are made in God’s image. I have to respect Osama Bin Laden as a man made in God’s image that should be witnessed to with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now here’s a murderer and if I’m in the military or the police I’m going to go get him, and I will use armed force if I have to, but I can still respect him because I hold him accountable as one made in God’s image. He’s not just an animal let loose, he is a person who has rebelled against God and I can see that as a Christian.

Stability exists only if respect is built for God’s unchanging image. And otherwise it’s built on scintillating personality, which goes up and down, so if I am going to have a stable human relationship it can’t be moved by someone aging. You know, mothers, as you get into the 30s, 40s and 50s, things look different in the mirror and your husband can’t, if he’s going to respect and love you, he can’t respect and love you because of the outstanding beauty you were at 25. That’s got to change. So his respect and his love and concern, in order to be stable, has to be rooted on something other than physical beauty. It has to be rooted on something other than what you can do for them; it’s got to be rooted on something other than somebody’s scintillating personality; maybe they go through a depression, now what are we going to do. See, there’s no stability. The stability comes only with the scriptural truths of who people are, made in God’s image. Freedom from manipulation, enablement and antagonism as eternal life is exercised, and we’ll see now, as we go into this section, how John develops this.

So let’s go to 1 John 3:1, because he is going to go through this third chapter and he’s going to provide for us sort of the details of how loving the brethren works out. He starts out in verses 1-3 by going over what it means to be a Christian. You notice he starts not with the problems of the situation, but what God has done. So he starts out and he says: “Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the children of God; therefore the world did not know us because it did not know Him. [2] Beloved, now we are the children of God, and it’s not yet revealed what we shall be, but we know that, when He is revealed we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. [3] And every one who has this hope in him purifies himself just as He is pure.”

Now there are tons of truth packed into those few verses. We can only skim them this morning, but one of the first things to notice in verse 1 is the word “behold.” It is an unusual word in the original language. It is not the usual word to go see, this is a stronger verb than that. This is the actual verb to see, it’s not just an idiomatic “see,” it’s seeing and studying it and drawing conclusions. It’s the same thing he’s taught back there, remember he said, go back to the protocols of fellowship, start with what God has done in your life, don’t get distracted… same thing, same truth.

So he says “look carefully at what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called the children of God,” that’s our heritage. If you are here this morning and you have trusted in Jesus Christ as your Savior you are a believer; if you have not, and you’ve tried to approach God on your good works, that doesn’t work and this would not apply in that case. But these are believers to whom this epistle is written, “that we should be called children of God, therefore,” notice the “therefore.”

“Therefore the world does not know us because it did not know Him.” Now the word “know” there is a word which comes to mean understand, it means to interpret carefully. The question is this: Jesus Christ walked around this planet for thirty years plus. How many people recognized who He was? The majority? No. No! The minority. Now if Jesus Christ is the highest revelation of God that has ever yet happened in human history, and the majority failed to understand who He was, what does that say about the whole idea of democracy? See, democracy is not infallible and the idea is majority votes don’t determine truth here. He says the world does not understand Him, and it doesn’t understand believers, and the reason it doesn’t is because its cosmos diabolicus, which we covered in that first section.

Don’t expect approbation and understanding from an unregenerate society; it’s not going to happen. You’re always going to be, as a believer in Jesus Christ, odd person out. So get used to it, suck it up and move on. That’s just the way life is this side of the Kingdom; it’s not always going to be that way. The Lord Jesus Christ will straighten things out ultimately. But right now, until… it’s the day of grace and He’s being gracious for a lot of people to freely choose for or against. But the idea is that in this world the only approbation that we should seek is from God, because if we start seeking approbation from the cosmos, immediately we’re going to compromise our position, we’re going to make ourselves dependent upon a cosmic… a manipulated thing of Satan.

So here in verses 1-3 he lays out the lists. Then he says at the end, he says, “It doesn’t yet appear what we shall be,” John is very, very heavy, next slide please, he’s going to distinguish, I want to show two vocabulary slides; one is how he’s using these two nouns, “love” and “righteousness.” We’re going to see a distinct shift. See, this is not the rambling of a ninety year old man that’s forgot half of his life; this is a carefully put crafted narrative. What he’s doing here is in this series the {?}, the dark thing is the use of righteousness. And you’ll see in the section we’re in, all of a sudden, righteousness trumps love. Then the next section he reverses himself and now love trumps righteousness. Now this is built on an analogy, and let’s… they still have this on the SAT’s when you take them in school, it used to be that they’d have about fifty questions, A is to B as C is to D. I don’t know whether they still do that, but I remember they used to. And so here’s the analogy; light is to life as righteousness is to love. That’s why John clears the issue about righteousness first, because he wants to get across the point of what God is in His righteous character, His integrity. He will talk about love after that because the love never compromises His integrity or His righteousness.

So that’s the vocabulary, and then of course you know, the next section he really goes after this love issue, but he can do that because he’s first clarified the righteousness issue. The love emanates from His integrity; you can’t have biblical love without integrity. Integrity is the foundation of love.

Next slide, this is the verb to manifest. John uses this again and again and it’s crucial to the interpretation because what he’s looking for is something you can see. Remember how he started the epistle? “That which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we looked upon, that which our hands have handled,” manifested, publicly observable. So when we’re talking about believers and unbelievers and carnal believers in this next section, what John is looking at isn’t directly whether the person is a believer, it’s whether they’re acting like one or not. It’s an external behavior that he looks at and if you can see how frequently he uses phaneroo when he comes into this section; that’s the Greek verb that’s translated to manifest, translated show. Now here in chapter 3, we have it again. [2] “It has not yet been revealed what we shall be but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.” So there will come a time in human history when Jesus Christ is perfectly revealed. And then he says, “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is, [3] Everyone that has this hope in him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” Notice, “just as He is pure,” that’s perfection. So this is not a psychological thing, this is sort of a Johannine analogy to Paul’s justification by faith.

Next slide please; now we go in in this section and we see the contrast, and here we see the same thing we saw back in chapter 2, light and darkness, light and darkness, righteousness and unrighteousness, righteousness and sin, over and over, repetition, this that, and so this is the contrasting way he speaks.

Now we come to one of the more controversial and difficult passages in this epistle so let me dig in carefully because this can be misunderstood. This epistle is not written as a test of salvation. There has been a tradition, coming largely out of Reformed Theology that this epistle was written to test whether somebody was a believer by their fruit, teaching that basic fruit inspection. That’s not what’s going on here; he’s clearly talking to believers. He’s addressed them again and again as little children; there’s no doubt in John’s mind that the people to whom he is speaking are believers. The question, however, for John’s point of view is phaneroo, for manifestation; is the righteousness of regenerate nature showing fruit or is it not. Parents understand this; every mom and dad knows what it means, you’re at a football game or something and your son makes the pass and he gets the goal, he says “that’s my son.” And then he fumbles the ball and you go to the men’s room. Now what’s the dynamic there? The dynamic is that you’re proud of your son and he’s acting like he ought to act; and when he flubs he’s not acting like your son. That’s the angle he’s coming out of here.

So he says, “Whoever commits sin commits lawlessness, and you know that he was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him is no sin.” See what he’s doing; he’s going back to the light, the holiness of God again and again in this passage. He says look, whatever these revisions were doing they were trivializing sin; we know that from the way he’s writing. And he says no, he says Jesus was to take away our sins, and in Him is no sin.

Then he makes this statement in verse 6, look at this one: “Whosoever abides in Him does not sin,” now people hit that one and they say oh-oh, is that talking about perfection. And there’s been a tradition in the interpretation of this epistle of weaseling around this by saying well, what’s that saying is that no one habitually practices sin. Well, if you do that, if you camp on the continuing action of the present tense, which in some cases that’s true, you’ve got to go to the author and how he uses it. If you do that you’re in trouble with chapter 1 verse 8, because in chapter 1 verse 8 he says, “If we say we have no sin,” to take the same approach would mean if we say we don’t continuously sin we lie and do not the truth. It doesn’t fit; it doesn’t fit the text. John isn’t using the present tense this way; he’s using it as a characteristic, as a practice, as an act.

[7] “Let no one deceive you, he that practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous.” See, that’s perfection, that’s not talking about frequency. There’s a standard there; that’s what we call the life of Christ manifested, abiding in the vine, if you abide in Me, that’s a command given to believers. And so he says, “He who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous.” So when we are filled, says John… what does Paul say? “ If we walk by the Spirit we shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh…” “shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh,” go out of fellowship, and then we’re acting like Satan’s children. So it’s very convicting for a believer to realize that in seconds we can be out of fellowship and basically be Satan’s little tool, and that is disruptive in the church and in the congregation.

So he says, “Whoever abides in Him doesn’t sin; whoever sins hasn’t seen Him, or known Him.” And again we take the verb “see” and “know,” as we have said before, and go back to the upper room discourse in chapters 14, 15 and 16 and we’ll watch how Jesus Himself uses those verbs. He’s talking to believers in the upper room discourse, and when He says you don’t know, it’s like do I really know her, or do I really know Him, when they act in unexpected fashions.

So he says, [8] “He who sis is of the devil; for the devil sins from the beginning.” The dynamic, while we were living in cosmos diabolicus the dynamic, the sobering alternatives here, is either we are empowered by the Holy Spirit or we are empowered by the cosmos. There’s no gray area there. We are receiving signals, so to speak, from the Word of God and the Holy Spirit, or we’re receiving signals and operating in accordance and residence with the evil environment, the cosmos.

And so he concludes, and verse 9, of course, is the verse the real hard one, “Whoever has been born of God does not sin,” now there he’s talking about the nature. Now as hard as this verse is it shouldn’t be if we’ve read Paul, because what does Paul say in Galatians 5:16-17? The same thing. What does Paul say in Galatians 2:20? The life I now live I live how? I live by Christ. What does Paul say in Romans 7? The life which I live when I sin it’s not me that sins, it’s the flesh and so on. It’s the same truth. So it shouldn’t be a theological problem here, it’s just that we get out of it sometimes on how we treat{?}.

[9] “Whoever has been born of God does not sin; for his seed remains in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God.” That’s talking about the regenerate work that the Holy Spirit has done, which is going to in the next series be the basis and the objective of why we love the brethren. We don’t love the brethren because they’re wonderful people. We don’t love the brethren because of scintillating personalities. We love the brother, the object of our love, it is the respect and love that we have for the Father’s righteous work in believers. That’s where John locates this “loving the brethren.” See, it gets rid of all the sentimentalism, it puts stability in the relationship, it’s solidly theologically grounded.

[10] “In this,” he says, “the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest; whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God,” is not operating according to the Lord and the Holy Spirit, nor is He who does not love his brother.” Precisely in verse 10 we have the shift. Remember I showed you the graph in the vocabulary, of love and righteousness. Well here we have the shift; he is now going to shift, next slide please, he’s now shifting from righteousness to love and now this love, love, love, love through the whole thing. This is where people read this and they think John is senile and he rambles; he’s not rambling, he’s set this thing up very carefully.

And again, we go back to the analogy, light is to life as righteousness is to love; remember we showed the picture of the sunflowers; God has made flowers to track light, we have almost like a {?} mechanism in the head of the sunflower, it turns and is phototropic, it follows the sun. And so god has designed the whole botanical realm to illustrate the principle that life is attracted to light. And so similarly in the spiritual realm, love is attracted to righteousness and you start with the Trinity; the Father loves the Son because the Son executes perfect righteousness. Love, in terms of the Trinity is based on righteousness. The Father loves the Son in all His holiness; the Son loves the Father in all His holiness. So there He set up the whole distinction. Then you come down within the cosmos; we respect divine image bearers because they are made in God’s image. We come within the Church, we love the work that God is doing in believers. This is why we have mission conferences; that’s what we’re talking about is what God is doing. We always want the missionary to tell what God is doing. Why is he doing that? Because that is what should occupy our concerns and attention.

Now he goes on and he illustrates how not to do it, and he says here in verse 11, “This is the message that we heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. [12] Not as Cain, who was of the wicked one.” Now watch carefully verse 12 because verse 12 ought to be the foundation of all penology. See, the authority is because they are not biblically founded do not understand criminal behavior at the most fundamental level. This is a depiction of the first murder in history and we ought to pay attention to this because this gives you the foundation of all time. This tells you why fratricide happened in the second generation after creation and look what he says. The question you want to ask as you come to this verse is why did Cain kill his brother? That’s the question? Why is there a criminal behavior here? And the answer is in the text. [12] “Cain, who was of the wicked one, murdered his brother. Why did he murder him?” See, that’s the question, why do you have criminal behavior?
“Why did he murder him? Because his” Cain’s “works were evil and his brother’s righteous.”

Now here’s the insight, following this thing, look at the opposite. We said here that love loves righteousness, and hate resents righteousness. Cain hated Abel, not because his brother stepped on his toe or he didn’t smile at him at 9:00 o’clock in the morning. Cain didn’t like Abel because Abel was approved by God and Cain knew it. And he was so angry, ultimately at God, for Abel obeying Him and being blessed. It’s envy, then latitude sin, then I don’t like the universe because there are consequences to my choices, and I can’t get God, He’s up in heaven so I’m going to get you; you have a lot of wealth so I’m going to rip it off because I envy you, when you obviously have been a person who has been responsible financially, you have worked hard and those things are your private property. And we have people, of course, running around trying to take it away, because it’s all based on a mental attitude sin of envy. Really why I resent somebody wealthy is because I’m angry that I wasn’t diligent and doing work myself; that’s the real reason. We make allowances of course for the temporary reverses that we all have in life; we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about a pattern here. This is the example of Cain.

So then he says, in verse 13, “Don’t marvel, if the world hates you.” Why is the world going to hate you? Because if you stand up to righteousness and the world is for unrighteousness you can’t get approbation out of that scheme; there is going to have to be an antagonism.

So as we come now to further on down, we come to verse 14, “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren.” We know, we can judge whether we’re operating in the sphere of life, letting eternal life have its dominion in our life or we’re just carnal, walking abound, energized by the spirit of the flesh and so on. We can tell that by our attitude toward the brethren. “He that does not love his brother abides in death. [15] Whoever hates his brother is a murderer; and ye know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” And there he just says that’s the logical extension; hatred will manifest itself in over criminal activity. When you read in the newspaper about some guy that shot his parents and killed them and massacred them in a house, don’t buy the fact that he had Twinkies for breakfast and flipped out. He was practicing mentally that hatred toward his family for months and months and months, and became a receiver for satanic energization and one morning he just boom; that’s the criminal act. Criminal acts just don’t happen; criminal acts have a breeding ground for ages. We have to practice in order to be a criminal. So that’s the Cain position.

Now the outworking of love, and he goes in verses 16-17, 1 John 3:16, here is the model of love. Now keep this in mind, how God loves us is the model for how we are to love one another. How does God love us? Does He love us more at 11:00 o’clock on Sundays than He does at 9:00 o’clock Monday morning? No, God is unchangeable, it’s the same yesterday, today and forever. So the source of divine love is stable; it doesn’t oscillate from day to day. And so this is the example. “We know love because He laid down His life for us, even though we were stinkers and sinners, “and we ought also to lay down our lives for the brethren.”

[17] “Whoever has this world’s good,” and the word there is bios, it means the material things of life, “and sees his brother in need, shuts up his bowels from him,” that’s a good Greek word; do you know what the Greek word for “bowels” sounds like? Splagchma, it’s a great sounding word, very descriptive. And he’s talking about bowels as the source of emotion. Now you can write this off as an ancient literary metaphor… but you’d better not. Guess what people learn in human anatomy? Where are the emotions most manifest? In your whole GI tract. Why do you get an upset stomach when you’re angry? Why does this tear you up? Because your nerve system is connected there; these people aren’t stupid, they knew centuries ago that emotions are primarily in your gut. And so what he’s saying is that you have compassion and you sense a brother has need, don’t cut off the compassion; let it flow out into action because compassion and emotions are the energization for activity.

[Next slide] We have to beware today because there are such things as false emotions. Budziszewski has written a great book, What We Can’t Not Know, he’s a professor on tenure, thankfully or he would be out of a job if he wasn’t on tenure, outspoken Christian man at one of the most liberal universities in the south, the University of Texas. And he teaches political philosophy there and has a tremendous ministry with graduate students in his courses. And he has a neat way of saying things; I can’t say it any better so I’m going to quote Dr. Budziszewski. He’s talking about Paul’s compassion, where compassion, genuine compassion can be a tool to be manipulated.

“There is a right and a wrong way to feel sufferer. One way relieves his suffering, the other relieves what I suffer for him; one gives him what he needs, the other merely gives him what he wants—or just plain puts him out of sight. Compassion ought to make us visit the prisoner, dry out the alcoholic, help the pregnant girl prepare for the baby, and encourage the young homosexual to live chastely. But how much easer it is to forget the prisoner, give the drunk a drink, send the girl to the abortionist, and tell the kid to just give in. False compassion is a great deal less work than true [compassion].”

{? ?} has worked for years down at {?}. See, true compassion takes time, energy and effort. And the problem is this; that you would wear yourself thin trying to love if you don’t first sense that you are loved by God the Father. The glass has to be full before you can pour it out on someone else. And so if the glass is empty we don’t have a sense that God the Father loves you, and this would be a good example for moms, mothers pour out their hearts for their children and pour out their hearts for their husbands, and eventually batteries can run dry here. Well, where does mom get her recharge? If she’s a believer she gets her recharge by going back to the fact that God loves her with an everlasting, unchanging love that can supervise every situation. And when she’s energized by that her batteries are full. But otherwise it just becomes a futile exercise.

Then we come to a passage that unites this as he concludes, he’s going to discuss the issue of prayer, and he says in verse 18, and we covered this in the Sunday School class earlier. “My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth. [19] And by this you will know that you are of the truth,” that is, walking in the truth, “and you shall assure your hearts before him.” Isn’t that interesting; here’s the same word that he’s using later for appearing and having confidence at the Bema Seat, and this is in prayer. [19] “By this we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before Him.” And it really should be translated… this is how we do it, [20] “Should our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.” Now the “all things” in context are our good actions toward other believers.

So there may come those times in prayer when you just don’t feel that, you know, I’m just not perfect enough to come before God, and what John is advising you to do and for me to do when we are in those situations is to think this way. God knows the works that we did were out of our heart of obedience to Him. He knows that. So at that point you override your conscience, but your conscience isn’t always active, you have to override it by the knowledge of this theological truth that God is omniscient, He saw you do that, He remembers you acts that you helped so and so, you helped so and so and so and so… by the way, I didn’t coordinate all this with Tim in this yellow bulletin thing today but it fits perfectly with the idea that there are needs and they have to be fulfilled.

Finally he concludes that when we assure our hearts, verse 21, “if our heard does not condemn us, we have confidence toward God. [22] And whatever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight.” In context the things “pleasing in His sight” are the things we’ve done for other believers. That’s the context of this. And what are His commandments; he concludes, [23] “And this is His commandment, that we should believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and love one another, as He has given us commandment.” So in this section John has rapidly gone through many different areas. He has told us that in living the Christian life we are living in a hostile environment and we are to be situationally aware that at any time we can be energized by the dark side or we can be energized by the Holy Spirit. And we want to abide in Christ, that was the command. And one of the signs of abiding in Christ is that we respect the work of God in other believers.