Clough Fellowship Chapel

1 John Lesson 5

Slides

Let’s turn to John 14 of the Gospel because today we want to just review again the vocabulary that John uses. People often come to Scripture, even orthodox theologians, with presuppositions that are theological and these presuppositions may be true but they tend to read them into the text and miss some of the emphases in the text, thinking they already know what the text is going to say. And one of the ways to discipline yourself out of that is to remember one of your fundamental Bible tools is a concordance. Everybody should have a concordance that is key to whatever translation you like. And one of the rules is if you look up a word in the concordance, the first area that you look at is the area of the same author. So if you’re looking at words like “love” when you’re looking at a concordance you want to look up all of John’s writings, and then if you can’t get settled in that then you expend the wealth out as Paul used the word, because although the words generally are used the same way, each author has a particular nuance to it.

And so we want to go to John 14 because this was part of the upper room briefing that Jesus gave the disciples prior to His crucifixion. And John is fascinated with this upper room briefing; he never forgot this. And when he writes his epistles he writes out of that expression; he just remembers standing or sitting, whatever they did, in that room listening to Jesus Christ tell them, look, I’m not going to be with you much longer so fasten your seat belts, sit down, and let Me tell you the basic principles that we now know are going to go on for over twenty centuries of time.

So in John 14 let’s just quickly look at some of these expressions. In John 14:7 we have the way John uses the word “know.” “If you had known me,” He’s talking to Philip, “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him… [8] Philip said, Lord, show us the Father…. [9] Jesus said, Have I been so long with you, and you have not known Me, Philip?” See how He’s using the word. It’s not a word there that depicts the difference between saving, being saved and not being saved, or being a Christian and not being a Christian. What he’s talking about there is knowing Jesus Christ in a sanctifying way, and from a spiritual growth. There were no unbelievers listening to this; these were all disciples and He was encouraging them to know Him.

So that’s one of the ways John uses that word. So when we see know, k-n-o-w in the epistles we ought always to think in terms of its usage in the upper room discourse. In verse 12, he comes down, he says, “Most assuredly I say to you, He who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father. [13] And whatever you ask in My name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” There he’s talking about fruit-bearing, for laborers to grow, to produce, and he’s talking about prayer in that context of fruit-bearing notice. Prayer isn’t just off there by itself, it’s in a context.

Then in verse 15 he uses another expression that John picked up and uses again and again in his writings. “If you love Me, keep My commandments.” And the word there means to guard and protect; he’s not arguing for a Pharisaical type thing; he’s arguing to respect the authority of these teachings that I give you. In verse 16 he says, “I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever.” And there he introduces something that is going to abide in us, the Holy Spirit in the church age, and that’s a subject that we’re going to deal with this morning in 1 John. In verse 20, if you continue down through the text, “At that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.” Now the use of i-n, in, is not there talking forensically, as Paul does in Romans, it’s a relationship thing; clearly, “In that day you will know that I am in the Father, and you in Me,” Jesus is not in the Father because of soteriology or forensically, He is in the Father because He is in relationship with the Father. So i-n, the preposition “in” as John uses it refers to the relationship, a deepening relationship.

In verse 21 Jesus says, “He who has My commandments, and keeps them, he it is who loves Me,” now watch what He says because this is talking about spiritual growth and the advance to maturity, “and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him, and I will manifest Myself to him.” That’s talking about advancing in our understanding and appreciation of Jesus Christ in our Christian life. It says “manifest.” Now these people are already believers, but what he’s saying, there will be an additional manifestation “if you keep My commandments” you will grow spiritually and understand more of Me, getting a bigger view of Jesus Christ.

Then in verse 23 He makes another stunning claim, and again, this is referring to spiritual advance. He says in verse 23, “If anyone loves He, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him,” and now notice what the clause is, as a result of that spiritual growth, that obedience, that walking by faith, “then we will come to him and make our home with him.” That is a stunning claim of advanced spirituality where the Father and the Son are at home in a believer’s heart. I’ve heard people who have interviewed persecuted saints who have survived horrendous torture and suffering, and they say when you talk to these people who have had some of their eyes gouged out, who have been burned, who have scars on their bodies for their testimony for Jesus Christ, that one striking thing isn’t that they’re resentful against their persecutors. They said that when you talk to these kinds of people what comes off to you is they have a peace, they have a peace about them and it’s striking because their degree of patience is so much greater than ours. And somehow in surviving the horrendous torture and persecution these believers have advanced to the point that is described here where they know, they have that confidence because the Father and the Son have made their home with them; the persecutors can do what they want to, they can burn them, they can kill them, but they know in their heart that God the Father and God the Son abide with them, and it gives them a powerful, powerful stability and a strength to withstand tremendous horrors.

And then in John 15 he talks about the vine and the branches, and he talks about bearing fruit. He says “Every branch in Me,” and there we aren’t talking just about believers, remember, “in Me,” “Every branch that abides in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away,” or “He lifts up; every branch that bears fruit, He prunes that it may bear more fruit.

There are two kinds… there are actually three kinds of branches here, one is in a relationship with Christ, is a young believer and doesn’t bear fruit. A PhD dissertation was done at Dallas Seminary where the fellow who did this study had studied viticulture and had studied not just viticulture but culture of the first century and he wanted to know how people dealt with vines, grape vines, because it was a major crop in those days. And he discovered an interesting thing that explains this passage in an exciting way. He says if you look at the way they did it, in the spring, what they would do is they would take a branch that was not bearing, that had very few buds on it, and they take care of that and support it and lift it up. In that way, that branch, by the fall, would be bearing fruit. So that’s one type of branch and that’s what Jesus is saying here, that a person who may be abiding with me and just doesn’t bear fruit; that’s just a branch, no buds are on it yet, but he takes… not “takes it away,” that’s a poor translation because if you look elsewhere John is always talking about lifting up, that’s the verb that’s used in John 3 when he talks about the Son of Man being lifted up, not taken away, it’s {?} lifted up.

See, the branch that bears fruit He prunes, so that’s the branch is fruit-bearing, is an advanced believer, but then it’s pruned. And that depicts the trials of life, the tests that God brings into our life to propel us further to spiritual maturity. And this sometimes is shocking, why, you know, everything’s going fine, why did this catastrophe happen. In one sense that test happened to propel us to the next stage in our growth; we wouldn’t grow if He didn’t push us this way.

Then there’s a third kind of branch, it says, later on in verse 5 He says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. He that abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; without Me you can do nothing. [6] If anyone does not abide in Me…” does NOT abide in Me, again in terms of John’s vocabulary that’s talking about a believer who disobeys, who does not want to abide in Him, “he is cast out as a branch, and is withered, and they gather them and throw them into the fire.” People have grabbed onto that as a loss of salvation passage; it actually isn’t, it’s just talking about, as John straightens out elsewhere in his writings, 1 John 5 being one of them, God physically disciplines believers; when we are habitually rebelling against Him He’ll kill us. I mean, that’s… every time Mike has done communion he’s gone through 1 Corinthians 11; what does 1 Corinthians 11 say? “For this cause many are” what? “weak, sickly, and many sleep.” So in the Corinthian congregation many believers had been put to sleep, not because they went to sleep with Paul’s preaching, but they went to sleep physically because they were just simply disciplined out of this life. So these are some harsh things from John; John’s not just talking about love.

So in John 15:12 he then says, [11] “These things have I spoken unto you….” [12] “This is My commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you. [13] Greater love has no man than this, to lay down one’s life for his friends. [14] You are My friends, if you do whatsoever I have commanded you.” So that gives some flavor of the vocabulary.

Now if we could have slide 1 please. This is the main section of the epistle and we said that John, in chapter 2, has warned believers, he writes little children, he writes the fathers, he writes the young men, and he warns them of deceivers and false teachers, and that’s the problem in this epistle. John is upset by what he is seeing happen and he wants people to get straight on what’s going on. So we want to talk just a little bit about this by way of review, this overall passage from chapter 2 verse 28, chapter 4 verse 19. There’s a sandwich here in that chapter 2 verse 28, chapter 4 verses 17, 18 and 19, both speak of having confidence before the Bema. There are many judgments in the Bible, don’t confuse the judgments as one, they’re not one, there are several of them. And one of them is believers evaluation; it’s called Bema. That’s what John is talking about; he doesn’t want us to be ashamed, he wants us to have confidence in the Bema. So that’s the point, and he’s saying that we’re in the battle, we’re in a spiritual battle and we have to deal with the things going on but we want to deal with it realizing that we’re going to reap the consequences.

Slide 2 please; I want to review John’s concept, we’ve been at this for two or three Sundays, but it’s vital to understand or else you’re going to take l-o-v-e out of context in this epistle; read it as a sentimental thing and miss John’s point. Light is to life as righteousness is to love. Those two things go together, and we have an intra Trinity version of that; the Father loves the Son because the Son has absolute righteousness, I’ve just indicated with the symbol +R, that the Son, being perfect righteousness, the Father loves that, and for all eternity the Father and Son were happy, had perfect happiness, because they had fellowship one with another. The love they had was a love in an environment of holiness. So the love we’re talking about here is not some sentimental goo, this is a love that emanates from the Trinity from all eternity, and we have the Son who loves the Father in a corresponding fashion. So we start here, we don’t start from the bottom working up, we start at the top and work down for the meaning of l-o-v-e.

And when we come to the point of loving the unrighteousness, loving us who are fallen, we get into the concept of grace. Grace is when God’s love extends out beyond the righteousness and He starts to deal with a fallen creature that He loves, but what do we know about the love of God now? That love will never be eternally satisfied unless there’s righteousness. So, in order for God to deal with it He has a program we call grace policy, but the grace policy doesn’t go on forever and ever; the grace policy started right after the fall when God made the offer to Adam and Eve, and will end at a certain time in history. Grace does not go on forever; it is the day of grace, and during that grace period God opens the door for salvation, and that salvation plan is based on absolute righteousness. This is why God rejects human merit at the point of salvation, because He provides us with the righteousness of Christ.

All human merit is denied at the entrance way to salvation. The reason we can walk through the door at salvation is because Jesus Christ has given us His righteousness. That’s the only way. We don’t come there with out little presents, we don’t come there with our brownie points; we don’t come there with anything else that speaks of human merit. Whatever we come, whether we’re rich, whether we’re poor, whatever race we come out of, whatever circumstances we come out of, we come to that door only because Jesus Christ has given us His righteousness. That’s the way God can save the unsaved, how God can save us as sinners without compromising His righteousness.

And then we have, toward Christians, once we are walking in the light, Jesus said He wants us to bear fruit, but the fruit only comes, He said, “if you abide in Me.” Why is that? Because He has created, regenerated us a new nature that alone is righteous; we ourselves are not righteous. The only righteousness we have is that which God creates in us, and it’s that platform of regenerated nature empowered by the Holy Spirit that produces fruit acceptable to Him. Now we can produce a lot of human good but that’s not what gives confidence before the throne of grace or before the throne of Bema Seat. What gives us confidence is fruit that is acceptable to Him, and since He is righteous and He will not compromise His righteousness, only fruit that fits that righteousness, and therefore fruit empowered by the Holy Spirit through our nature is acceptable with Him.

Now involved in this is a concept of consequences. And I want to spend some time reviewing this because you want to have this in the back of your head as we come to these passages in John about do this, don’t do this, do this, don’t do this. It’s a concept that’s been lost in our culture today and here’s the concept; very simple—you reap what you sow. God gives us choices but He does not give us the ability to dictate the consequences of our choices. Every human gimmick, every human counterfeit to Christianity, tries to get around this rule; every single one of them. And when we do that as believers we’re carnal and we’re not producing fruit for the Father.

God says, and in His righteousness, and in His absolute love, He created history in which people would fall into sin, and He did so because He is a God of love and righteousness. Now this conflicts because what we have going in our society is the idea that everybody should be equal. Right? What was the French Revolution? Liberty, equality, fraternity, and you cannot coexist. Let me lay down a principle here; liberty cannot coexist with equality. It just can’t, because people are going to make different choices and wind up in different consequences of those choices. They are not going to be equal; some will trust in Jesus Christ and enjoy eternity with Him. Others will reject Jesus Christ and wind up in the lake of fire forever and ever. That’s not equal; those are the experienced results of human choices. And we can see this in normal everyday life because God has so structured everyday life so it reflects this principle.

We see this in economics; the corresponding principle in economics is the free market, because in the free market the business man makes a choice; businessman B makes another choice; businessman C makes another choice; businessman D makes a fourth choice. They are all diversifying their choices because none of those businessmen, A, B, C, or D understand completely the future, so they’re betting against an uncertain future. And in a free market you have diversification. Some people are going to bet this way and lose, some people are going to bet this way and win, but at least you won’t have a total disaster. But when you come to Marxism you are going to have a few bureaucrats dictating the entire market and if they are wrong you’ve got a big problem now because a few people, in whom is concentrated power of choice, the choosers are now limited and therefore your choices are limited and therefore the consequences are very, very sensitive to the rightness of that choice. Marxism has always failed for that because it tries to create equality by destroying liberty. This is always true, whether it’s Islam or whether it’s Marxism, it is always a destruction of liberty.

What does Marxism and Islam have in common? A fear of liberty. The theologians tell you this, I’m not making this up because read the Muslim theologians. In order to get at the kingdom of righteousness, the only way you can guarantee a human righteousness is to make sure people don’t make wrong choices. So how do you get people not to make wrong choices? By depriving them of a choice, limiting them of the choice. So you’ve destroyed freedom in order to produce equality, and that’s a total reversal of the plan of God.

God started out with liberty in the Garden of Eden. And God is a perfect God, He is a perfect righteous God, and He is a perfect loving God. So righteousness and love are compatible with liberty. So the conclusion is that we receive consequences of our choices, and that’s love. That’s the policy of a loving God, and any time you interfere with that process, you suddenly undercut and you reap a disaster. When you start the top down thing, and an easy way to see this, I always tell students when they are studying politics and social studies and history, you want a political philosophy? There are a section of Old Testament books that you need to read; one is the book of Judges, and you know what happened in Judges? You have liberty but you have a desensitized conscience in society so every man does what is right in his own eyes and you have chaos. That’s the reputation of libertarianism, the book of Judges.

And then you come back through, you read Samuel, 1 Samuel 8 which is the most politically astute, wise passage in all of God’s Word where the prophet Samuel warns them about top down leadership. He says I’m going to give you a kingdom; God is going to give you a kingdom but you are going to reject, you are going to be horrified the day you made this choice. And that’s the story of 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, it’s a narration of the failure of leadership. Because why? The people in Judges are corrupt, and in Samuel-Kings the leadership is corrupt. So how can you get a perfect society if you have top down leadership that’s corrupt. You can’t, and that’s why Islam will fail, that is why Marxism has always failed and will always fail again, because you never can get an omni competent and incorruptible leadership. That’s why we believe in the coming Kingdom of Jesus Christ, because Jesus Christ will set up His Kingdom with resurrected administration and therefore you have incorruptible leadership and therefore you can have a perfect society because you have perfect leadership. It is only available in the Word of God, not through some human gimmick.

Let’s go to 1 John 2 and we’ll start, if I could have the next slide please. One of the things, not just economics but in every area God has designed our total environment to be revelatory of His principles. So it’s not surprising that when we see bad choices made there are consequences and when we see bad consequences we should say oh-oh, I’m a Christian, I’m looking at this sociological situation, I’m looking at this economic situation and I see suffering. Now when we see that kind of situation you are thinking, as a Bible-believing Christian you ought to say to yourself, what rule of God has been violated here? God did not intend that we live in unhappiness, [can’t understand phrase, something about designed the system]. So if this is happening we have rebelled in some place. For years I’ve looked at some Christian to please do a report on the economic consequences of sin to the gross national product. And as you can well imagine, take drugs alone and you can see what it’s doing to {?}.

Well somebody finally, in Georgia, the Institute for American Values did a study called the taxpayer costs of divorce and unwed childbearing. Here’s a study done over years of time with a lot of data and information, and what they’re doing is they’re computing the minimum cost per year to the United States economy of divorce and unwed childbearing. This is when homes are destroyed, children are raised in single parent homes, and you have the destruction of the institution of family that God has designed. Here’s the minimum dollar per year of the United States economy; one hundred and twelve billion. And the authors say that this is absolute minimum, the absolute minimum estimate—one hundred and twelve billion dollars every year. That means in eight to nine years a trillion dollars going right down the drain simply because we are not following the principles of God’s Word. They even break this down by state and here in Maryland the percent of total poverty living in unmarried household, you take the poverty level and you look at the percent of the total poverty in Maryland, living in unmarried households, it is 84%. So tell me what the cause of poverty is. See, you can’t violate God’s rules; you reap what you sow.

In 1 John 2 we want to watch this thing here, and he’s talking about distinguishing the righteousness of God in our experience, and why he’s doing this is because he wants us to understand where the battle line was and we went through that a Sunday or two ago. God is righteous; just look at the text, John 2:29, what does it say? “If you know He is” what? “If you know He is righteous…” 1 John 3:2, what does it say? “…see Him as He is” righteous. Verse 3, “Every man that has hope purifies Himself as He is” what? “Pure.” Verse 5, “And you know that He was manifest to take away our sins and in Him there is no” what? “No sin.” Verse 6, “He that abides in Him does not sin,” why? Because its fruit being generated by the Holy Spirit to the sin nature. Verse 7, “Little children, let no one deceive you; he who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous.” And so forth and so on.

So the point that John is saying here is, there’s a battle going on between God’s program of grace and cosmos diabolicus, and he wants to see us… the battle lines start right in our heart. And he wants that very, very clear, because lest we… if we misunderstand that, we always attribute the problem to society, to my wife, to my husband, somebody else; it’s always somebody else. And in this passage no, it’s not somebody else, any one of us can do this because we are fallen; we have a new nature but we can choose at any point whether to sin or not.

Then we covered last time verses 10-23 where he’s talking about focusing on the loyalty, the love of the brethren. Basically it’s the same kind of thing that you have on a football team, when you have loyalty player to player because you’re in the game. If you’re thinking about love and brethren here, and you’re not thinking in terms of cosmos diabolicus as the environment, you miss the point. That’s like thinking about a football game and thinking only about one team, never thinking about the opposing team. See, the context here is we’re in a battle, so it’s like John was saying look, you’ve got to be loyal to what God is doing in the lives of other people.

Now today we come to 1 John 3:24 and in this passage, this is the third and end section of this large section, he’s going to raise a new point that he hasn’t raised yet. And if you look at chapter 3 verse 24 you will see a phrase for the first time in this epistle. You read that phrase in John 14 when we started this morning, but if you look carefully at 3:24 you notice something new. “He who keeps His commandments abides in Him,” we’ve heard about abiding in Him before, but now, “and He will abide in him,” now we have the indwelling fellowship, “by this we know that He abides in us, by the Spirit He has given us.” So now we’re involved with walking by faith, we’re abiding in Christ, here is God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, God the Son, making our home in us. So now we have the reciprocity.

See, it starts out with “we abide in Him” but “He also abides in us. So now how does He abide in us? It says “by the Spirit whom He has given us.” Well then the next question we ought to ask John is: well, that’s nice John, but when you talk about spirits, how do I measure a spirit? I can’t take its temperature, I can’t see it, so how do I know what the Spirit is that abides within? Now we come to the test, verses 1-6. There’s going to be two answers to this question. One answer is going to be that what John has done involves revelation of the Word of God, and another involves the operation of love among believers.

Let me take a minute or two, we’re going to run over this morning a little bit but let me give you an account of history so you can get a little flavor of what this guy, John, was like. Remember, John was the Son of Thunder during the Synoptics; this guy had a temper and the Lord worked on that in his life, but John’s not a man, even at ninety, to sit down and take it passive. So here’s an incident that Clement of Alexandria, one of the Church fathers, gives an account. We don’t know whether this is actually true or not but evidently what it does testify to is a flavor that the early church had of this apostle.

“Clement recounted a true account which illustrated the character of ancient John. While in Smyrna to mediate a dispute, John left a young convert in the care of a newly appointed pastor, who was to supervise the youth’s spiritual training. After the convert was baptized, the pastor lost track of him, and the next thing anyone knew was the young man had fallen into bad company and taken to crime, moving from petty offenses to major crime he became a leader of a band of thugs” he didn’t even live in Baltimore, by the way, “…notorious for violence and cruelty, and blood-thirstiness. When John returned to Smyrna he inquired about the convert. The embarrassed pastor said the boy’s dead. ‘Dead’ asked John, ‘How did he die?’ And then the pastor was forced to tell him that the young man was now the leader of a gang of highwayman.”

“The old apostle,” now he’s ninety-five here at this point, “the old apostle tore his clothing in the Middle Eastern gesture of mourning, let the thunderbolt of his wrath fall upon the pastor, who had been so careless so as to neglect to supervise his recent converts. Despite his fourscore and fifteen years, John called for a horse, and galloped off to the back country where the former convert was believed to be hiding out with his gang. Presently he was surrounded by the gang and John said ‘I’m not going to try to escape and I ask for no mercy. This is what I have come for, now you take me to your leader.’ When the bandit chief saw John he turned and he ran. ‘What are you running for, my boy,” said John, huffing after him.” So now John’s running at ninety-five. “‘Why are you running from your own father, who is unarmed and very old; be sorry for me, child, not afraid of me, you still have hopes of life. I will account to Christ for you and if need be, I will gladly suffer your death as the Lord suffered death for us. To save you I will give you my own life. Stop, believe, Christ has sent me to you.’ The chief, who could easily have eluded the old man, stopped. He approached John and he fixed his eyes on the ground. The apostle moved toward him and the bandit flung his arms about him sobbing, while John knelt and kissed the young man’s right hand as a token that the member with which he had wielded his sword had now been cleansed by repentance. And so John led the young man back to Smyrna,” and in Clement’s words, “interceded for him with many prayers.”

Now that’s the man that’s writing this text. So let’s look at one of the texts. He says in verses 2, 3, 4, 5 and all the way down to 6, follow with me this text. This is a hard text; this is going to offend some people here who imbibe in our modern culture of every kind of an exclusivist claim is wrong, it’s discriminatory, it’s hate speech and so forth. But I want you to see this.

[2] “…every spirit that confesses that Jesus is Christ come in the flesh comes from God. [3] And every spirit that does not confess that Jesus is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is the spirit of antichrist, which you have heard was coming and is now in the world.” Notice what it doesn’t say; it doesn’t say every spirit that denies that Jesus is come in the flesh, that would be active. Rather, it says any spirit that merely does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.” That’s powerful stuff. And furthermore, that kind of spirit is the spirit of the coming antichrist.

Now we have to understand biblical thinking about the spiritual realm all around us. We’re not going to get spooky, that’s not the object here, but we need to, as Bible-believing Christians, understand that we live in an environment where there are angelic beings, both fallen and elect who are occupying… who are seeing us. In fact, in Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians he says they’re watching us; they could be watching us now, we don’t know how many angels are in this room right now. But… maybe they’re laughing but that’s all right, the point is that they are in our presence.

Now if you hold the place here, I want to take you over to Proverbs 1; this is a fundamental point about spirit world, and I’m showing you this because the tendency in our culture is to think of spirit world as some little spooky thing with creepy things that you see in the movies, special effects and so on. So let’s get the revelation of what these things are.

Proverbs 1:23, this is lady wisdom talking to young men; this area of Proverbs is the education, by the way, of young men. And in verse 23 she says, “Turn at my rebuke; surely I will pour out my spirit on you, I will make my words known to you,” parallelism there, the pouring out of the spirit is not some spooky thing here, the pouring out of the spirit is revelation of a content full thought. It is thoughts that are revealed, and we can be influenced by thinking that doesn’t come from us, but it comes from outside of us. That’s the danger of the spirit world; that’s why we have to have a guard in our minds.

Now if you’ll turn back further in the Old Testament I’ll show you a stunning passage in 1 Kings 22. This is one of the few times in history that men have been privileged to peer into the unseen world of history. Now this is really something because this tells you something you’ll never see in the media; of course, there’s lots of things you won’t see in the media, but you surely won’t see this. This is a report by an Old Testament prophet of an historical situation that was set up in the unseen realm and could be observed politically and religiously by everybody else. It involved King Ahab.

1 Kings 22:19, Micaiah “said, Therefore, hear the Word of the LORD: I saw the LORD,” that is Yahweh, “sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven,” that’s ALL the host of heaven, that means angels, fallen and elect, “all the host of heaven standing by on His right and on His left. So here it is, he’s looking at the very throne of God. [20] “And the LORD said,” now isn’t this interesting, we’re having a little discussion, in When the Empire Strikes Back remember they have a cosmic council that met with everybody from Galaxy 462 to earth, and all these creatures. Well, this is the real thing; that was just Stephen Spielberg, but this is the Holy Spirit telling us what’s going on. This is an angelic council that is meeting in heaven somewhere, “And the LORD said, Who’s going to persuade Ahab to go up that he may fall at Ramoth-gilead?” I want to take him off the scene of history; how are we going to assassinate this political leader, get rid of him? That’s the Lord speaking. How are we going to destroy King Ahab, he’s an apostate.

So, “…one spoke on this manner, and another spoke on that matter,” they’re having a discussion. The Lord is proposing to this angelic council, anybody got a plan here? [21] “And then a spirit came forth,” now it is singular, “a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, and said, I will persuade him. [22] And the LORD said to him, In what way? So he said,” here’s the proposal of this spirit, “I will go out and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And the LORD said, You shall persuade him, go.” Now it’s one spirit, but he said I will persuade all of his prophets. He had over four hundred prophets. How does one spirit influence a mob of people? Lesson learned in Scriptures; one spirit can control a society, and they control a society by injecting false thought into how people think, and people who are stupid and buy into every thought that comes dancing through their heads are losers and suckers for this kind of thing. And the only criteria we have to stop that is the Word of God. That’s why there must be a filter in your mind and my mind, because that’s how we stop this stuff. Our spiritual defense is the amount of the Word of God that you have in your heart that you can use to run by this kind of thinking. This kind of thinking—mind, is this of the Lord or not?

Let’s return to 1 John 4. So this is the doctrinal test, and John is arguing that the spirits that refuse, that is, a teacher who comes, I’m not saying a ghost is going to come to your front door, he’s talking about the fact that you’re going to have… by the way, can I have the next slide, I forgot that, how can we recognize the Spirit… click the next one, this is the first answer, check whether the picture of Jesus Christ fits the New Testament revelation. That’s the only way you can test it; there’s no Geiger counter that you can tell, gee, do I detect a spirit around me. You can’t do it that way, they’re elusive, they can’t be detected, so the only way you do it is test it with the Word of God.

Verse 4, “You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” Who is in us? The Holy Spirit. [5] “They are of the world…,” so that’s talking about the Holy Spirit who is going to come into this whole thing; that’s why we’re talking about the indwelling Spirit, because it’s the indwelling Spirit that gives us the revelation, illumination. “They are of the world; they speak of the world and the world hears them.” That’s why every Easter and Christmas Time Magazine, Newsweek and everybody else has the latest poop on why Jesus couldn’t be the Christ. And everybody buys the magazine, the hot number on the newsstand. Why? We have an explanation right here, “They are of the world, they speak of the world, and the world hears them.” It’s all the same spirit, the same spirit of apostasy, antichrist spirit, that will eventually take over the world, is at work in authors, journalists, media people. And we’re just simply fooled to sit here naïve, thinking that this isn’t happening. The universe is more complicated than it appears.

So then it says, [6] “We are of God,” talking about the apostles here, “We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God doesn’t hear us. And that’s how we know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.” The one who adheres to the Scripture, again, “That which was from the beginning must abide in you,” the same thing. So in these first six verses we have answer number one—how do we recognize the indwelling Spirit? Because He will confess in our hearts to the authentic Jesus Christ of Scripture, and if the Spirit does not confess this, and it can be a philosopher, it can be somebody in literature class who argues that human language is incapable of transmitting thoughts from God’s mind to man’s mind—the spirit of antichrist. That’s a false view of language, and it’s all through the literature field today. But if you believe that you can’t read the Bible authentically because the Bible totally collides with that position on language. Language is something God spoke to Adam and taught Adam. Who started the first language? The conversation of God and Adam in the garden. Did they have a problem? Was God trapped in His transcendence and He has to reach down with some goo from postmodernism to kind of symbolize to Adam what He means? Of is He talking with Adam, walking with him in the garden. Of course He’s walking with him, there’s no problem with language.

We come to the second answer, is there a manifestation of loyalty to what God is doing in believer’s lives? Is there a sensitivity to what God is doing? Verses 7 and 8, “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God.” See, there’s that “knows” again; what’s he talking about? Experiential knowledge, in fellowship, walking with the Lord, abiding in Him. [8] “He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.” And that’s the other stunning statement in this situation. This is a stunning statement that compares to 1 John 1:5, and in 1 John 1:5 remember it said “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” So we have the idea, then, that God is not only righteous, but He is love; He is the epitome of love.

Now when we’re going through this love passage, making this the characteristic of Christianity, let me read you two excerpts of the two major movements of our time, Marxism and Islam. And I want you to notice and listen to how often the word h-a-t-e is in this. When you see that the Bible is talking about a God of love, listen to this by contrast. Marvin Olasky was an atheist Jew Marxist who became a Christian and is now editor of World Magazine. But he’s at Yale University. “One morning my language teacher, a Russian immigrant, mentioned the starvation of millions that accompanied the institution of the Society collective farm in the 1930s. He concluded, [quote] ‘If communists ever come to power in this country I’ll cut my own throat.’”

“ That afternoon, as was my custom, I hung out at the communist party’s Angela Davis bookstore, just located off the Yale campus. I told the teacher’s story to a young communist woman; she replied, [quote] ‘That old fool, when communism comes to the United States he won’t have to cut his throat, we’ll do it for him.’” Love, going to build a perfect society with that kind of spirit? “The common denominator of all our activities in the Yale communist party was hatred. We read left-wing communism, in which Lenin called hatred the basis of every socialist and communist movement and of its successors. We read in the World Marxist Review that Lenin hated the enemies of the working class; the struggle was impossible without hatred. Hate, hate, hate, and pay dues of twenty-five cents a month for students and the unemployed where hatred cost a little. Hatred is an equal opportunity virus, but proud hatred was a communist characteristic.” That is behind Marxism and there are Marxists by the hundreds on university campuses today; they don’t call themselves communists any more, they wouldn’t call themselves Marxists but they’re teaching that.

Now here’s a corresponding thing from the Koran. “Ascribed to you is fighting, though it is disliked by you; it may well be that you dislike a thing but it’s good for you. Jews and Christians are the ones whom God has cursed and he whom God excludes from his mercy you shall never find one to help and save. The recompense of those who fight against God and his messenger, they shall be executed, crucified, or have their hands and feet cut off, or be banished from the land. Oh you who believe, take not the Jews and Christians for guardian; surely God does not guide; kill them, wherever you may come to them, seize them, confine them, lie in wait for them and every conceivable plight.” Isn’t that wonderful, two major movements. What spirit do you think is behind that?

Now we come to this text and we’ll finish this passage. [7] “…love one another….” “And this is the love that God manifested toward us,” in verse 9, “God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. [10] In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Notice, the act of love did not compromise God’s absolute righteousness, but in the end it is a love of His righteousness. [11] “If God so loved us, we ought to love one another. [12] No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us,” he’s saying there that you can’t see the indwelling Holy Spirit, so the only way you can detect Him is through that doctrinal test, through answer number one, or through answer number two, which is the test of loyalty and manifestation of love between believers.

Finally in verses 14-16 we come to the end of this passage, where he ties both answer one and answer two together. And notice the verbs, because every one of these verbs he has emphasized previously. Beginning in verse 14, “We have seen and testify,” where do you remember that from? That’s the introduction of the epistle, remember? “We have seen and we testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior,” that’s the first time “Savior” is used in this epistle; it’s only the second time the apostle uses that word. Do you know where the other occasion was that John uses the word Jesus as “Savior?” The Samaritan woman, John 4. This is an adumbration of missions, that He is going to be the Savior of the entire world. [15] “Whosoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.” Notice the reciprocal, God abides in him, and he in God.” That’s that answer number one.

Who is it? “Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God.” And the second and last verse, “We have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” But you have to understand what love is and so we come down to the end of this large section of this passage, we’re going to get into practical conclusions next week to finish out the series. But remember, light is to life as righteousness is to love. That’s the kind of love that John is talking about a love that believers have.

So we might reflect on some application questions as we conclude. Have you and I reflected on what God has done in our lives; that’s the first defense against apostasy, against the cosmos. John says start with what God has already done in your life. The second question: are you and I exercising our priestly access to God for cleansing. That is your liberty. No one can take that away from you. That gives you the right to come to God’s front door at any time because you are a believer priest if you have trusted in Jesus Christ. You don’t need a government, you don’t need a pastor, you don’t need a religious organization, you don’t need a political party to tell you when and where and how you are going to come to God. That is your privilege as a believer in Jesus Christ.

Third, are you seeking to know more of the majestic God-man in the Scriptures? Because Jesus said those who seek Me, I will manifest Myself more and more to them. Are you cognizant of what God is doing in the lives of believers around you? We have a little insert in the bulletin; have you thought about what you can do to help your fellow believers? Help them not in a sentimental way, but help them as you would a teammate that’s in a game, that’s in a conflict.