Clough Fellowship Chapel

1 John Lesson 6

Slides

Let’s turn to 1 John 1, and we’ll finish our series on this epistle. We’ve been going through the epistle of 1 John and as we go through this, remember that this was the theme epistle from which Fellowship Chapel obtained it’s name, “Fellowship.” So in 1 John we want to review just a moment here and if you follow in your bulletin insert, I’ve got the outline for those of you who would like to take some notes. But if you turn to 1 John 1:3 we will review that for just a moment.

In 1 John 1:3 he says, “That which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us, and truly,” or “in reality our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ. [4] These things we write to you, that our joy may be filled.” And the word “fellowship” there, it means sharing, it’s the Greek word koinwnia [koinonia] and it means sharing something, but the point that John is making in this epistle is that what we are sharing with him, he says “that you may have fellowship with us,” who’s the “us?” The “us” are the apostolic circle, the men who wrote the New Testament, “That you may have fellowship with us,” “may share with us the fellowship that we have with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ.”

The sharing is a sharing of a personal relationship with God. It’s fundamental in coming to the Scriptures that we understand that the relationship between God and man, once salvation is achieved, is a personal one. If you talk to converts from Islam, you will find quickly that one of the attractive diversities of the Christian faith to them is the fact that you can have a personal relationship with God. One lady who was a Muslim told me one time, when I asked her how the Holy Spirit led her out of Islam into Christianity, I asked well, what happened, what did you read, what did you think? And she said you know, I read through the Old Testament because I was trying to refute Christianity to my sister, and she said what finally got to me was reading the book of Psalms. I said to her, I said well what about the book of Psalms was it that grabbed you. And she said well, in the book of Psalms you have David and the authors of these psalms interacting with God and arguing with Him; we would never argue with Allah, we would submit to him but we would not argue our case before him, and there’s a freedom that I saw in the book of Psalms. And that’s the point about the fellowship that John is talking about here.

But we want to understand the terms of that fellowship, what the fellowship is is a relationship with God, but it had certain preconditions and John wrote another book in the Bible, the Gospel of John, that was written to those outside the Christian faith. And he concludes that Gospel by saying there are many things that I could have told you about Jesus (after all, John is the oldest apostle, he lived into his nineties and he has a memory that goes back to the original source material). And so he says I could have written many things but I’ve selected these eight or nine different things to write about in my Gospel, “in order that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that once you believe that you possess eternal life.” That’s a stupendous claim. And that’s the point that Christianity is saying either Christianity is an absolute lie, or it is saying one of the most profound things in life, that eternal life of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the relationship they have, that kind of a relationship is available through trusting in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

Then the other precondition of fellowship, of course, is that we can become Christians and not walk the talk. So that gets into the abiding section, and that’s what this epistle is concentrating on. The gospel is in the Gospel of John but the abiding is in the epistle of John. And so if we can have the first slide we want to show some of the background ideas, remember John comes to the Gospel, comes to these truths of carrying ideas that we moderns must understand. First of all, he carries the idea that truth is absolute, it doesn’t change. Two plus two is four, in the time of Aristotle, two plus two is still two, he has a concept of life, that life derives from the top down, not from molecules up, totally clashing with the view of modern secular society. And he holds the view of authoritative revelation, that there ideas that are absolutely true, not because of John, or not because of Peter, or not because of Paul, but because these men were recipients of divine revelation. Or said another way, they received thoughts and words from God Himself, such that had you been on, for example, Mount Sinai when God spoke to Moses, if you had had a DVR you could have recorded the voice of God Himself in Hebrew. That’s what we mean, that’s the stupendous claim that is meant by Scripture’s authoritative revelation.

We’re looking at one particular word that John is going to use again and again, and that’s the word “love.” But because that word has been so evacuated of serious meaning in our time we want to spend a little time to review that. This is the frequency diagram of the various structures in 1 John and as we went half way through, the purple lines here depict the word “righteousness” and the blue line represents “love.” You see what happens, right about midway in that epistle, after he’s talked about righteousness, then he starts talking about love, and we use the analogy that as life is to light, love is to righteousness. The love of the Scriptures here has a righteous component, or we would say in modern English vernacular it has integrity. God doesn’t lose His integrity.

And so to see that a moment we are going to go back to the Old Testament to the Ten Commandments, so if you’ll hold the place in 1 John for just a moment, turn back to the book of Exodus, just to check up on me, that I’m not misleading you, and in the book of Exodus is the report by Moses of what went on on Mount Sinai. There are several candidates for the real Mount Sinai today that are being debated. The candidates, you have a list there that I saw in the Negev, it’s a very barren and lonely place, that was the traditional site of the giving of the Ten Commandments, I can see why because the silence is stunning. There are no competing noises; you can’t hear cars, trucks, televisions or rock music or anything else; it’s all quiet. So God obviously got the people in a position where He could talk to them with peace and quiet.

But here in Exodus 20:6 he says that “I visit the iniquities on…” but showing mercy, “I show mercy to the thousands of those,” and there’s the word, “love,” “those that love Me and keep My commandments.” Now clearly that’s not talking about some romantic nature to l-o-v-e here. The word in the Hebrew, in this context, is talking more in terms of loyalty. It’s like… it’s used of literature of a subordinate to a king, that kind of thing; it’s loyalty. So what God is saying, “Showing mercy to the thousands of them who are loyal to Me, and who keep My commandments.”

In the next chapter, Exodus 21:5 you’ll see the same concept, and I show you these because this is the Old Testament from which was translated into Greek, and which sets up the vocabulary for the New Testament, because the New Testament is written in Greek, and the Greek words were used in the Old Testament translation. The word agape is not found in most secular Greek literature, so it’s only defined here by the Scriptures. And you’ll see this was the case of a slave wanting to be with his master. And by the way, these slaves were not slaves in our modern sense of the Word; they were slaves in the sense of debt slaves. We have plenty of that still going on, as we just saw in the financial crisis. The point is that his time is up and he has a choice as to whether to stay on or not, and it says in verse 6 that “his master shall bring him to the judges…” and so forth, and that seals the point.

But in verse 5 is where l-o-v-e occurs, “if the servant plainly said,” that is, free of his own volition, “I love my master, my wife and my children, I will not go out free.” That word “love” again, there’s the context, not a romantic thing, it’s talking about a loyalty thing, it’s talking about a ranking thing.

So coming back to 1 John, I’m laying the basis so we do not misunderstand, this l-o-v-e thing is not some sentimental goo, this is talking about a loyalty to rank and authority. So, we’ll have the next slide, we’ll review just a little bit the implications of this word in human relations. Having had my share of human relations department training and a supervisor, I often thought as I listened to this, everybody says you have to respect people and so forth, and I think it’s somewhat ironic that in our secular West we’re supposed to respect people and believe we all evolved from molecules upward. Now, having respect for a naked ape is a little different than having respect for someone made in God’s image by creation. And people often… you know, they don’t think about this. But look at these particular points.

Respect exists, this is anybody, Christian or non-Christian, only if we see others as images of God. If you do not see someone else as having inherent worth, not because you said or the government said, or somebody else said, but having inherent worth because God created that person, he may be obnoxious and you can’t get along with him, but the point is there’s a respect for that person because they’re made in God’s image. Now if that’s not there, then ultimately everything else, basically is… we can be passive and we like people because of approbation, we’re seeking approval and so on. But if we do that, if we’re passive in a relationship like that we’re looking for approbation from so and so, my girlfriend, my boyfriend, or somebody else, my wife or husband, if my value comes from someone else approving me, then what I’ve got, basically, is I’m vulnerable to peer pressure. And this is why young people are vulnerable to peer pressure; they haven’t learned yet that your worth has got to be rooted in what God thinks of you, not what somebody else thinks of you.

Which gets us to the second point, and that is stability exists in personal relationships only if it is structured on an unchanging thing, and that is God’s unchanging image. It’s not involved in changed beauty, personality and usefulness can bear it; this is why in this country we’ve already gone through the abortion thing; the next thing on the table or the agenda will be euthanasia; those of us who are getting older are {?} so we’re no longer useful, we’re no longer productive so encourage suicide. That will be where our country goes next, and it’s a logical flow because if our value is only what we can do, or what we can contribute to society, and we can’t contribute to society then, you know, get rid of them. Light follows night; day follows night. So on a biblical point of view, though, we have a stability because we see people, whether they’re crippled, whether they’re handicapped, whether they’re old, whether they are young, they are made in God’s image, period. And that should have some sort of an implication.

And once we have that concept, and as John is going to teach us in his epistle, when we “love the brethren,” that puts us in a position where we’re having fellowship with God, and when we have fellowship with God in the sense John means, then we are free from being manipulated because the issue in our life is what God thinks of us and what I’m supposed to do and where I fall down and fall flat on my face and I come back through the cleansing believer priest ministry in 1 John, that is the center of… it doesn’t mean that we are immune from ups and downs in personal relationships, but it means that we have a stability for them.

Next slide please; we’re going to look at this main section again and today we finish. Today we’re in the last section and we’re going to start from chapter 4, verse 20. And in your bulletin you’ll see the outline, as on the slide. We’ve gotten down through chapter 4 verse 19, and now John is going to give us some insights as a pastor. Remember, these apostles weren’t just apostles that sort of contemplated infinity and wrote the Bible, but they were also intimately involved with people; they were pastors, fundamentally, and they were training other pastors. So in verse 20 of chapter 4 we have a new section, and this section, as you can see in the outline, goes down to chapter 5, verse 3, halfway through verse 3. Let’s look at that; follow me in your text if you have one.

“If someone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen. [21] And this commandment we have from Him, that he that loves God must love his brother also. [5:1] Whosoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God; and every one who loves Him who begat also loves him who is begotten of Him. [2] By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep His commandments. [3] For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments,” you kind of get the impression he’s talking about keeping His commandments, it’s repeated three or four times there. But let’s go through this slowly and see if we can absorb what this elderly apostle is trying to teach us through his letter.

First of all, he’s arguing, as he does elsewhere in this epistle, that if there’s nothing to substantiate the verbal talk then we do not have someone in fellowship with God; it doesn’t mean they’re not saved but it just means right at that point that it’s not the persona of the regenerate nature showing up. So “if someone says I love God,” that’s the religious person who can say that, “and hates his brother, he’s a liar,” and the point is that one can easily say I love God, because He’s invisible, as John says, “nobody has seen God at any time,” it’s very easy to say that. The problem is, what does that mean and how does it show up in life. So that’s why he has in this verse, how can love God whom he has not seen.

And in verse 21 you’ll see that there’s two times that love is used; see those two verbs? “This is the commandment that we have from Him, that he who loves God, must love his brother also.” Notice the sequence; the first “love” is loving God; the second sequence is loving his brother. One is rooted on the other and that’s why we have the title of this section, the love of God is the basis for love of the brethren. There is no other basis; everything else is sentimentalism, manipulation, some sort of personal gimmick program, but only if there’s a sincere belief in who God is, that this person is also a person in whom God is working, in whom God the Holy Spirit indwells, then we have a special relationship. This is more than just respect for them as made in God’s image, but it’s an attraction to the work of God in their life. So we have that first thing, first part, in chapter 5, verse 1.

And notice in verse 1 he says, “Whoever believer,” now here’s a definition of what a Christian is from the apostle John; it’s very simple. It’s not talking about the institution here, it’s not talking about going to church, showing up, impressing everyone or something. He’s talking about what goes on in our hearts. “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God,” now little children can believe but in their childlike fashion they do not have a deepened understanding of what they’re doing. This is why when they get to be ten, twelve, thirteen, you know, they start to rebel. A part of that is they need to have faith and stand on their own two legs; they can’t say I believe this because daddy and mommy did it. We have to come to the point where we believe that, we accept that. So a believer, a child may say well, I believe that Jesus is having to come to God.

Well, that’s okay, that’s good for a child, but for an adult we understand far more; we understand that Jesus Christ, as John says in chapter 1, He’s the Creator of the universe. Jesus Christ preexisted the virgin birth. Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the second personality of the Trinity, and that means Jesus Christ appeared in the Old Testament; without a body. He appeared as the {??}, the angel of the Lord. And so the Son of God showed up historically at point after point. Then He became incarnate as a man and undertook… this is orthodox Christology, the Church has held this ever since it was defined in the 4^th century at the Council of Chalcedon, when they said Jesus Christ is… they had a compact way of saying it. We sit here and maybe we neglect some of these great creeds, but these guys took four hundred years to say this carefully, and here’s what they came up with:

“Jesus Christ,” here’s what the orthodox definition of what Jesus Christ is. “Jesus Christ is undiminished deity,” first of all, meaning that God did not give up attributes when He became incarnate. He “is undiminished deity, and He is true humanity,” that is, He’s a real human being who has flesh, He was hungry, He was tired and so forth. So “Jesus Christ is undiminished deity, true humanity,” and then they said, “united in one person,” how that can happen we don’t know, except for the fact that if we believe in creation and we believe we are made in God’s image, we were created with the incarnation in mind. So the human body is not antagonistic to the purposes of God. Tertullian, the great church father said: When God leaned down in the dirt of the garden of Eden to pick up the clay to formed the body of man, He was looking down at the corridors of time when He personally would incarnate Himself in that body. Jesus Christ is undiminished deity, united with true humanity in one person forever without confusion; that is His Creator/creature natures never mixed up and became some sort of in between thing.

Then John says, “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God,” that’s regeneration; that’s what’s required to become a Christian and be born again, to believe that Jesus is the Christ. It’s not talking about good works, it’s not talking about believers doing this, doing that, doing something else, it’s talking about understanding because if you understand that, the Holy Spirit is talking to you, and clarifying the thinking as to who Jesus Christ is. “…everyone who loves Him who begat,” that is God, “also loves Him who is begotten,” there’s the essence of John’s l-o-v-e thing, that if we really love God then we’re going to love His handiwork.

And so he says then, in verse 2, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep His commandments.” So when we are sensitive to God, when we are in fellowship, when we are doing what He wants us to do, then John says that we have a basis for saying that we really love the brethren. There are two ways, I think, that John means keeping His commandments is a manifestation of loving the brethren. One is if I’m sensitive to what the Holy Spirit says in the Scripture about taking care of other believers and so on and so forth, then I’m loving the brethren. Now this particular person, I may not like personally; I may have a personality thing with this person. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s sort of like in the military you have a combat team and you may not like somebody else but you’re in the same battle together and you have to have unit cohesion and teamwork or you don’t survive. Well, that’s the same idea John is getting at; we are living in hostile spiritual territory and we’re all on the same side in this thing. So he’s saying that if we would keep His commandments then we love the brethren.

Now, halfway through verse 3 we move to the second section in this epistle. Now some of you have asked, why do I break up verses like this? Well, I’m not breaking them up, here’s the big deal. The verse numbers in your Bible were put there by editors. In the original manuscripts the verses all run together. In fact, they’re all capital letters, in one sense, there’s not any pronunciation, so editors have to go in here and kind of divide up the text like you would put footnotes in a paper, so that you can reference it, but that doesn’t mean that the verses necessarily are braced. A good example of that is if you want a real exercise sometime, and you just love diagramming sentences, if they still teach that in English class, if you really want to diagram a sentence, here’s a challenge—try diagramming Ephesians 1; it’s the longest sentence in the Bible. I guarantee you, you can’t put it on one 8½ by 11 sheet of paper. It just goes on and on and on, because Paul gets onto one thing, he unfolds into another thing and he cascades into something else, and that shows you the way Paul is just so loaded with stuff that when he unloads it’s just a cascade and you get that if you try to diagram the sentence in Ephesians 1.

Well, here in 1 John 5:3 we have one of those structures, and it’s a {???}but what it means is that you have a break and in verse 3 there’s a break. Most of the translations, I do notice, have a period in the middle of verse 3, so I think if you’re tracking here with me you’ll see that. Now this is the second section in the outline, the opposition, being situationally aware of the spiritual nature of the world around us and here it says, “And His commandments are not burdensome,” the idea there is weighty and impossible to carry out. So the argument basically is: is God giving us orders that He has not enabled us to carry out, and He’s not giving us the operating assets to handle. This is crucial because you can tell John was a pastor and when He said that love the brethren was keeping His commandments, obviously people were raising their hands and saying hey John, I’m sorry, but I have a problem trying to keep these commandments here, this is not easy stuff. So he does what Jesus did when Jesus said My yoke is easy, My burden light.

Here he’s saying that His commandments are not grievous. Now we are introduced to a whole line of thinking here, and if you look in your outline you’ll see, verse 3 down to verse 15, this is going to be an argument to people who say I can’t live the Christian life because, because of this, this, this, this, this and this. These commandments are grievous, they are burdensome, they are hard, and I find it very difficult. So how does John answer this? You notice he doesn’t answer it with a rah-rah section. He doesn’t get people pumped emotionally, because obviously when you’re done pumping emotionally you get a vacuum after a while, you can’t handle that. John wants something more stable than being pumped. John wants us to think about Jesus Christ, and think about who our commander in chief is here.

So now you’ll notice, from chapter 5 verse 4 on down you get into all this doctrinal stuff about Jesus Christ and the testimony to Him. And you say how does that… what has that got to do with His commandments being grievous? It’s because the object of our faith is what motivates and energizes us to keep on keeping on. It’s not faith as a feeling; it is something else, so we come now to this point.

We want to look at verse 4; verse 4 starts off with a “For.” “For whatsoever is born of God overcomes the world.” Remember I said, when we started this epistle, because John was very, very old when he wrote this thing, and people think, gosh, you know this guy, he was kind of senile or something and he rambles and… you know, it’s kind of sentimental writing. And I said watch out, John is far from sentimental. This epistle is carefully and logically structured down to the very word, the very sentence structure. And when you see verse 4, and you notice it begins with F-o-r, “For,” this is an explanation, “For,” he says; explanation of what? That His commandments are not grievous.

So here’s the beginning of his argument. “For whatever is born of God overcomes the world.” You’ll notice it doesn’t say “Whosoever,” again, the English people, English grammar people notice that this is the neuter, not the masculine case. Why do you suppose it’s neuter in case and not masculine; you would expect to see, would you not, “For whoever is born of God overcomes the world.” You wouldn’t expect “whatsoever” overcomes. Well, whenever you have a shift from the masculine to the neuter it emphasizes the quality, the inherent quality of this. So he’s talking about the power of the recreated nature {?}. We tend to bury this in the ceremony of baptism or something and forget that baptism is a ceremonial depiction of something else that’s very deep, and what is deep is that God {?}create something. When you trust in Jesus Christ, you at last see who He is and trust in Him, God the Holy Spirit creates within you what we call a regenerate spirit. How He does this nobody knows. It’s an instant of time.

It, spiritually, is the same as resurrection; how fast does resurrection happen? Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 just like that, one time, you know, you are talking about a natural body with the molecules and the flesh that we have, and then you have, all of a sudden, the resurrection happens, instantly, it doesn’t take a million years to evolve from a natural body to a resurrection body; it happens instantaneously. Well, regeneration happens instantaneously and so he says, the first argument is that we have operating assets that include regeneration. So number one, we have to know these things and not be discouraged. We may have financial reversals, we may have all marital reversals, we may have all kinds of reversals in life but what John is arguing here is you’ve got to go back, number one, to what God has done in your life. You have to know that, you have to KNOW that He has created something within you.

“Whatsoever,” he says, “God has created overcomes the world.” So now we want to deal a little bit with overcoming the world. There’s a hymn, Faith is the Victory, so on and so forth, and we get razzing on that verse and we go through the chorus, faith is the victory, and the impression I’ve always got from singing that was that what that hymn was saying was you got to have the oomph, you know, it’s got to be a feeling, the intensity of the feeling is what overcomes the world. No, that’s not what it says; in fact, you read the stanzas, not the chorus, the stanzas in that hymn you see that he’s talking about the same thing John is. What overcomes the world is Jesus Christ; we are blessed by being identified with Him.

This requires just a minute or two of biblical history. Let’s look at the world the way the Bible looks at it. I was trained, like many of you, we go through secular history courses and so forth and so on, we came out of the cradle of civilization, etc. etc. etc. everything was good and gracious and after we got from the Greeks and the Romans we got classical structures of government and so forth. But the Bible has a little bit different view of history. The Bible argues that there was one time a catastrophic global flood that destroyed humanity. After that, Noah got off the boat with eight people, and all the races come out of Noah and his family. I facetiously in race relations courses talk about the fact that we all got off the same boat, and that literally is true in the Scriptures.

See, the Bible has antidotes to racism, and it is there is no such thing as races, plural, there’s only one race, it’s called the human race, “in Adam.” So you have the colonization of the planet and these people went out and colonized all the continents. We have maps, somebody obviously mapped Antarctica before the ice cap because you can go down there and you can see on these maps riverbeds that we haven’t discovered until the 50s and 60s with ice penetrating radar; now all of a sudden we see a river there. But it’s been under an ice cap for thousands of years. Well, who was it that made a map of Antarctica? I don’t know, but the sons of Noah that colonized the planet and set up civilization were geniuses; they were the ones that built the pyramids, both in the western hemisphere and in the eastern hemisphere. Why did they build pyramids? Because the earth was still shaking, and it was a stable structure. It may have been also induced by Nimrod’s tower of Babel imitation.

But whatever, the Bible’s argument is that these people were technologically brilliant. Remember this, there never has been a boat built bigger than Noah’s ark until 1850, so it wasn’t until the 19^th century we started doing what these people originally did. We know from Babylonian archeology that they plated jewelry. Now how the heck did they… you have to have batteries to plate jewelry and yet it was done by 600 BC. So these people are not stupid in ancient history; they were brilliant, but they had a fault. No sooner had they colonized that we have the story of the first U.N., chapter 11 of Genesis, where you have the first tendency to worldwide global government under Nimrod, and God broke that thing up because He doesn’t want world government until His Son, Jesus Christ, returns, for a very good reason. When you have world government or any totalitarian government, you are assuming that whoever is the {?}, whoever is the dictator, is omniscient, omni competent and knows everything and makes the perfect decisions.

Now have you ever heard anybody who does that? See, the Soviet Union learned that lesson when they concentrated all decision making on a few, a bunch of bureaucrats. These people couldn’t run a hot dog stand and they were trying to run a nation that had more natural resources than any nation on earth. They couldn’t even feed themselves. Before Stalin took over the Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe and the communist people came in and they were going to collectivize the farms and do all this because they want structure, they want control, they want to reproduce the perfect society. Yeah, they sure did, and the people… they killed all the kulaks in the Ukraine and destroyed agriculture in the Soviet Union so they were important food after they had previously exported. This is the kind of stuff that happens whenever you concentrate this decision making in a small, narrow body.

So God broke up the original attempt, the original totalitarianism in Genesis 11 and right after that He began in Genesis 12 to call out a counterculture, Abraham and the Jews. Ever since Genesis 12 human history has been a battle between a tendency of a civilization to apostacize and go into foolishness and self-destruct versus a line of revelation that came through the custodian nation, Israel. This has always been a problem; it is still the problem in the Middle East. The Jews and revelation are an irritant, and we, as Christians, following that revelation, we are a perpetual social irritant to the world at large. And the things that irritates the world’s spirit as much as anything else is the fact that salvation is exclusivist in the Bible. It is only through the line of revelation that comes down through Abraham on to Jesus.

So now in chapter 5, verse 5, that’s what John means here when he’s talking about overcoming the world. What’s he say? He’s not talking about Jihad here; see, Jihad does the same thing Marxism always did; we’re going to, by force, create a perfect society, but you can’t because you can’t change hearts. Hearts have to be changed one at a time and that’s why there’s not going to be a perfect society, in spite of Mohammed and Marx until Jesus Christ returns to this planet.

So we have in verse 5, it says, “Who is he that overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. He is the over comer; the over comer is one who believes in Jesus Christ as “the Son of God.” Now that means that we believe Jesus Christ is going to be the One who comes back in resurrection glory, He judges the world and He sets up His kingdom. That kingdom will be the perfect society. The problem is, how do you get there, and nobody has figured out a way how to get there. {?}hasn’t, Marxist failed, and now the Muslims with their Jihadism are trying to do it and they’re going to fail too. And the Twelfth Inman is not going to help them either. It’s only Jesus Christ who comes in resurrection power. So that’s why we overcome the world, because we have somebody who overcomes the world; it’s not the intensity of our faith but the object of our faith is the one who overcomes.

Now in verses 6-13 we’re going to see the content of this Jesus. Now here we get into some hard stuff and a controversial verse here; I’m going to explain this to you and we’ll see what we have here when we get done. “This is he,” see, “This is he,” now what is that talking about, how did we start this whole thing? His commandments are not grievous, so John is going to say the way you deal with that tiredness, the fatigue, the frustration, is we revert to the object; the object of my faith is Jesus Christ incarnate, the Son of God. What does John mean by “the Son of God? He means the One who is the Creator of the universe, originally, and He is the resurrector of the universe ultimately; that’s the Jesus Christ we’re talking about.

So, it says: “For this is He who came by water and blood.” Jesus Christ, not only by water, but “by water and blood.” Now that is a hard verse; there basically are three interpretations of that verse; I’ll give you the three very quickly and why I selected the one I selected. One is that the water and blood refers to John 19:35 where it watches the Roman soldier spear Jesus’ side and out comes blood and water. The problem with that interpretation is it doesn’t fit the argument John is making here. John is trying to exalt who Jesus is, not a particular event in His life. Then some argue that the water and the blood refer to the baptism, Christian church baptism and the Eucharist. Again, the problem is that doesn’t quite fit the logic of the passage.

The best interpretation for this is that the water refers to Jesus’ baptism under John, John the baptizer, remember, John the apostle was the disciple of John the Baptist, he was standing there when Jesus was baptized, remember what happened when Jesus went down into the water? What did they see? They saw the Holy Spirit descend in some way that they described as a dove. So there was the divine confirmation of Jesus at Jesus’ baptism. And the blood is, of course, the cross, and of course we have the three hours of darkness while Jesus was bearing the sins of the world on the cross. So that’s why he says not by water only, but Jesus died.

Now that’s interesting today because when Mel Gibson’s movie came out it was shown throughout the Muslim world, and what was fascinating was the Mullah’s picked that film to show all over the place; my son was in Kabul at the time and it was in every theater, and the point was that the Muslims showed the film because the film showed Jewish persecution of Jesus, so they said good, we can get anti-Semitism started. But God works in peculiar ways because what happened was, in the film what is the center theme about the whole film that Mel Gibson made? The death of Christ on the cross. Guess what? No Muslim believes that Jesus died on the cross, because if He was the prophet of God, God would never let His prophet die such a horrible death; somebody else got on the cross instead, they said. So here we have, under the idea of getting back at the Jews, they fill the theaters with this thing, and my son was talking with one of the missionaries there and he said I’ve never handed out more Arabic New Testaments in my entire career as a missionary than I have after this, because everybody, the Muslims come out of the theater and want more information about Jesus. Great, thank You Lord for having worked there.

So we have, then, this argument, Jesus came “by water and by blood,” evidently the people John was opposing, the false teachers, didn’t believe that.

Now we come to this, if you’ll show the next slide please, we have what we call Johannine Comma; this verse, verse 7 is not teaching anything wrong, it’s a good verse, it teaches you about the Trinity. The problem is, this citement in here, inside the brackets, never showed up until 1611. When the King James translation was translated, all of a sudden this thing appears. It’s not in any manuscript before that so people don’t know how this got in there, but some editor plopped it in. There’s nothing wrong, it just is a nice depiction, but that’s not John’s thought here. If you look carefully, it starts out “Because there are three that bear witness,” it’s talking about evidence who Jesus is, “There are three that bear witness, the spirit, the water and the blood.” That fits the context. So we argue, then, that John is talking about the agreement, the multiple agreement of witnesses and that is crucial for the Bible because the Bible, unlike some ACLU attorneys, the Bible is the source of the rules of evidence that are used in the courts. It’s not just swearing on a Bible, the rules of evidence come out of the Scriptures. It was in the Mosaic courts of 1400 BC, installed by God Himself, that we have… nobody could be convicted of murder unless there were two witnesses; there had to be two, they had to be independent and they had to agree.

That was how they controlled the trials. There was a very careful depiction of rules of evidence. You can see it in Deuteronomy 17:19. Now it means that not many people actually could be convicted of murder, like a lot of people convicted of murder today on circumstantial evidence. But that didn’t cut it in the Mosaic Law Code. They had capital punishment but it was very, very carefully controlled by the rules of evidence. So John was using those rules of evidence to show that the same coherence of divergent testimonies come together and you can test truth by its coherence.

And that’s why in verse 9 he speaks directly to the court system; notice what he says: “If we receive the witness of men,” that is in the courts, regularly we receive the witness of men by the rules of evidence, “the witness of God is greater; for this is the witness of God which He has testified of His Son.” [10] “And he who believes on the Son of God hath the witness in himself; he that believes not God has made him a liar, because he has not believed the testimony that God has given to us of His Son.” And that’s the place where John leaves us in this section where he says that there’s an exclusivity to the Christian truth. That’s what… people don’t like to hear that, that either you believe in Jesus Christ and have eternal life or you reject Him and you’re making God perjure Himself. That’s the claim; disbelief is an authentic claim that God is purging Himself by giving false testimony.

And verse 11 through the end of this emphasizes this. It says, “This is the testimony, that God has given us, eternal life, and the life is in His Son,” notice. He has given us evidence, “and the life is in His Son. [12] He who has the Son has life; and he who does not have the Son does not have life.” See, it goes back to the Abraham thing, for 2000 years, plus Abraham, 2000 more years, we’ve got forty centuries where this exclusivist claim has come on the world, and it has never settled well; you always see this. And as Christians we are the irritants of civilization because we believe in the exclusivity of this truth; that either you believe that Jesus is Christ, is who He is, or Jesus Christ is a liar. So many people think they can get away by saying Jesus, I believe Jesus was a good person. A good person doesn’t go around claiming He’s God, and that’s why C. S. Lewis said either Jesus was who He claimed to be or He was a lunatic; those are the only conclusions you can come to because Jesus’ claims about Himself are so stunning that to say that he was merely a good man is an absolute indefensible position. Either you come the conclusion Jesus was who He claimed to be or He’s a nut case; one or the other is the only options you have. And that makes people uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable before I became a Christian, I assure you of that.

In verse 11, 12 and 13, the conclusion of this, let’s go to verse 13, “These things I have written to you who believe on the name of the Son of God,” notice, it is written to believers, “that ye may know that you have eternal life, and you may continue to believe in the name of His Son.” Then he immediately goes to prayer; what does it mean to believe in the name of His Son?” Verses 14 and 15 tell us, “believe in the name of His Son” and he means that we have “confidence that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.” In context what are we asking? For help in keeping His grievous commandments. See this all fits together in this argument.

[15] “If we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we asked of Him.” There’s a confidence there, and the lowliest, humblest Christian has this confidence. I’m told by a friend of mine who has ministered in the Islamic world for his entire lifetime, he says one of the things that they have noticed, just in the normal village life, is when a Muslim couple sees a Christian couple and the Muslim couple is having illness in the family, where a child is sick, sometimes they will go down the street and talk to this Christian couple and say would you pray for them. Now isn’t that interesting; why? They don’t like the Christians but why is it they always ask that little Christian couple to pray for their child when the child is sick? Somehow they know that there’s a confidence that that couple have with God or they wouldn’t be asking for prayer help. So this confidence here is a confidence that John says is {?} in essence.

Now we come to the third and last section, if you’ll look on the outline, two verses. And these are the sections where John deals with pastoral issues, and he’s going to deal with the pastoral issue of one of the touchiest things, what do you do when you see a believer sinning? How do you handle that one, and this is an outgrowth of this whole thing. To show you that John was a pastor and not just an apostle up on a pedestal, let me tell you about a little story that tells you about how John was. I’ve given you about four stories from history on what we know of the apostle John.

Eusebius, Irenaeus and Clemet all stated this story, so we’ve got three church fathers who tell this story of John. They all stated that John lived in the reign of Trajan, which began January of AD 98, so now think about that, that puts John in his nineties for sure. According to Jerome, he was finally overtaken by a crippling illness, which shows you, by the way, that the gifts of healing, miraculous gifts of healing petered out throughout the apostolic age. He was overtaken by a crippling illness. Even then he insisted on literally being carried into the church in the arms of his disciples and taken to the front of the congregation where he managed to say, “Little children, love one another.” Some of his disciples asked as to why he went to such trouble to be carried in, carried out, when he had to little to say. Here’s what John said: It is the Lord’s commandment and if this alone is done it is enough. When death drew near John directed his disciples dig his grave outside the city limits. As the sun was setting one evening he asked to be carried to his grave; signing himself with the cross he prayed, “Be thou with me, Lord Jesus Christ.” He gazed at his disciples and said “Peace be to you, my brethren,” and he went to be with his Lord. What a way to die.

So here he is now, in verses 16 and 17 dealing with a touchy, touchy situation, and here’s another hard test. He says, “If anyone sees his brother sinning a sin which isn’t to death, he will ask, and he will give him life for those that commit sin not to death. There is a sin to death; I don’t say you should pray for that. [17] All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not to death.” Now what on earth is that about? Again, it goes back to the New Testament. He is talking about the fact that God disciplines His children and it is possible for believers to sin and for God to take us home. He’s a parent, he wasn’t raised on Dr. Spock; the parental concept of childrearing in the Scriptures is that {?}, and it can be some deep discipline, and we have two instance of this and I’ll give you the references because our time is shot here, so let me give you two references where you can see the sin to death. One is in Acts 5:1-11 with Ananias and Sapphira. A second one is 1 Corinthians 11:29 and 32, the communion passage. In both cases you have death, physical death among believers for a particular kind of sin. It seems that both these passages deal with a sin that formerly and publicly embarrasses the Church; so the communion is one of them in Corinth, that was happening, and it also happened in Acts 5 where you had some people on a fund raising deal were trying to impress people with how much they gave and they had phony books. And so the apostle Peter just went after them; this wasn’t Wall Street, it was just phony books in the Church, and God dealt with it and He dealt with it very severely. You know, everybody else sitting there watching phony books people get zapped, they went wait a minute, I’d better check mine and it was a good lesson.

Now we come to John’s conclusion, we’ve don’t this whole section now, this last main section, now we come to three things that he wants us to remember. This is John’s own conclusion. There’s three points so homileticians {sp?} always like three points. Now whether John studied homiletics I don’t know but here are the three. Verses 18, 19 and 20. Verse 18, “We know that whosoever is born of God does not sin,” it’s not talking about sinless perfection here, he’s talking about the regenerate nature, when we are in fellowship, He who abides in him sins not. It is impossible to be abiding in Christ and sin at the same time. It’s the same stuff Paul taught in Galatians 5. “But he who has been born of God keeps himself and the wicked one doesn’t touch him,” the word “touch” means grab, it means pull down, and it means that Satan, no matter how he can attack us, whether it’s like Job with sickness, whether it’s adversity, whether it’s financial reversal, whatever it is, there’s one thing about you, if you are a believer this morning, that Satan cannot destroy and that is your regenerate nature that you are going to carry into eternity, that makes you the you forever. Satan can do all he wants to to your flesh; he can do all he wants to to your family, but there’s one thing he can never destroy and that is what God the Holy Spirit has done in your life, and that’s one of the important conclusions of this epistle. This is what gives you that rock hard stability.

Point number two, “We know you are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.” That’s an indictments of the fallen Noahic civilization; the whole world lies {?} just kind of lying back, allowing themselves to be manipulated by the spirit of the antichrist that works in the background of history.

Third, “We know that the Son of God has come, and has given us an understanding,” the word dianoia [dianoia] there means a way of thinking. Notice it’s not feeling although, you know, we feel, but the emphasis is on how we think. “We know that the Son of God has come, and has given us a way of thinking, that we may know Him who is true,” the word “know” there is coming into a greater and greater knowledge of God, “and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.”

And then he ends with that enigmatic statement, it seems so discordant, it seems such an afterthought, we wonder what is this: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” What is he talking about; what does that have to do with the price of beans; how does that fit with the whole apostolic argument? Because he has just got through saying what? Look at the previous verse; the previous verse said “This is the true God and eternal life, so keep yourself from idols.” See, it’s a follow on to that verse; it just simply says that at any given time you and I can let the controlling influence be the real God of the Scriptures or a phony, something that we’ve constructed.

I’ll give you a conclusion, I’ll give you some “Mother Nature” in capitals. You see it all the time in textbooks. Why do we capitalize “Mother Nature” if we’re not deifying it; why is the capital letter there? I don’t understand. A global spirit, this is coming up in India now, a spirit of oneness, a global spirit of oneness; there’s going to be a oneness under Jesus some day but that’s not the spirit. Personal power strategies, you know, follow this technique and you can control and manipulate people. That’s not it, that’s not what this is saying.

John had to deal with Christians who were in the business world and in the business world in those days there were people who had to join craft unions, and when he would go to a business meeting of a craft union, if you belonged to the union you had to go along with all the idol ceremonies and so forth, you went to a restaurant, you went to the bar, you went some place else, and it would all be dedicated to the idols. And John says you’ve got a problem, and this did cause a lot of friction in the early world because the Christian business people and the Christian workers said huh-un, huh-un, I’ll do a good job for you but I’m not going to engage in that sort of stuff. Again, it was that irritant, why are you Christians always out of sync with everything else? Because the world is out of sync, not because of us.

Well, that’s the conclusion of John and we’ve looked at him and his epistle and Mike said that I’m supposed to give the benediction and I thought to give the benediction I would turn to hymn 468, I’m not singing it, don’t worry, but I do want to narrate the first stanza of this hymn; it’s one old Faith is the Victory kind of thing, but instead of looking at the chorus, here is what the verse says. “Encamped along the hills of light, Ye Christian soldiers, rise, And press the battle ere the night shall veil the glowing skies. Against the foe in vales below, let all our strength be hurled;” and by the way, there’s the high ground, remember we used the military illustration of one of the big keys in classic military strategy is always to capture the high ground, see, you’ve got it right here. “Against the foe in vales below, let all our strength be hurled. Faith is the victory we know, That overcomes the world.”