Kosmic vs. Biblical Spirituality; 1 John 1:1
Since
the fall of man in Genesis 3 the human race has been continuously under
assault. We have been under assault because of our involvement as extensions to
the angelic conflict. As part of that Satan has a plethora of concepts,
philosophies, religions, ideas, rationales, which he continuously promotes
among the human race in order to deceive mankind, to blind our minds. That
involves thought, ideas, beliefs, and Satan is involved in blinding our minds
to captivate the human race and to destroy the witness of believers. John
writes this first epistle to church age believers who are threatened with false
teaching coming from those who at one time had been associated with the
apostles and with truth, those who had at one time had known doctrine and were
squared away doctrinally and are now teaching pseudo systems of spirituality
which threatens the spiritual life of these believers to whom John is writing.
There
are a lot of parallels to what was being taught in that day in terms of false
doctrine and what is being taught today. This comes under the general category
for the most part of the cosmic system. Christians throughout the church age
have been under assault from the outside and from the inside—internally within
the church. The external assault that come from the world or the cosmic system
are seen mirrored and reflected back and echoed by strange doctrines, new
theological developments and concepts that are promoted within Christianity and
under the guise of spirituality, Christianity and the truth. So it is vital for
Christians to be able to spot these deceptions so that we are not taken in by
false doctrine, so that we are not distracted from the spiritual life, and so
that our fellowship is not broken. The main idea in 1 John is the concept of
fellowship and the one thing that comes across that just ought to smash every
modern Christian right between the eyes is that John is saying that it is false
belief that that breaks fellowship with God, not simply wrong behaviour. John’s
emphasis throughout this epistle is going to be more on the wrong beliefs that
produce wrong behaviour than the wrong behaviour or sin itself.
So
for believers in the church age we are assaulted from the outside and from the
inside. The outside assault comes from what the Bible calls the world. The
Greek word for world is kosmos and
it has to do with an orderly systematic arrangement of something. God is
looking at this from the fact that Satan has various systems of pseudo-truth
that he uses to influence, distract and deceive the human race. This is a major
theme in the first epistle of John. In 1 John 2:15 John writes NASB
“Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If
anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Worldliness is ideological, it has to do with the way we think. That, of
course, culminates in certain actions but the emphasis is kosmos is thinking. [16] “For all that
is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful
pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. [17] The world is
passing away, and {also} its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives
forever.” In 1 John 3:13 he writes NASB “Do not be surprised,
brethren, if the world hates you.” This emphasises the fact as a believer we
are going to be in conflict with cosmic thinking. It is a war. What we think is
antithetical to what the world thinks. In James 3:13-15 worldly thinking is
identified as earthly, natural [PSUCHIKOS]—related
to the soulish man not the spiritual man—and
demonic, i.e. it is the same kind of thinking that Satan has, it is rooted and
grounded in arrogance. There is going to be a battle, there is a conflict that
rages between the way a Christian is supposed to think and the way the world
wants us to think. 1 John 4:5 NASB “They are from the world;
therefore they speak {as} from the world, and the world listens to them.”
It
is important for us as believers to be able to identify worldly concepts, the
basic ideological trends of our age. First of all, mysticism.
Mysticism is the idea that ultimate knowledge and authority, how I know what is
true, is confirmed by my intuition, that somehow I know it when I hear it, I
will intuitively grasp it; I know that this is God because of my experience.
The problem with mysticism is that not once in history has God ever acted in a
way that is not confirmable and verifiable by external data. So if people say
God spoke to them, how do they know it was God? Whenever God spoke to the prophets
in the Old Testament He gave them a sign by which they would know that He had
indeed spoken in space-time history. It wasn’t just liver-quiver. Mysticism is
the core concept underlying the entire realm and web of ideas that has come to
be known as new age thinking. Then there is secularism, humanism, and
rationalism. Then there is the influence of moral relativism, that there are no
absolutes. Pragmatism, a deadly infection in Christianity: what works must be
right, e.g. if I go out and use whatever techniques I can come up with and I
build a church of 5000 it must be the work of God. Just because it works
doesn’t make it right. A right thing done in a wrong way is never right. Then
in our culture as a whole we have to deal with postmodern thinking. Postmodernism
is basically the idea of empiricism and rationalism that grew out of the
enlightenment, and is a rejection of rationalism and everything that the
enlightenment in the 19th century stood for, and so the path to
truth is through inner impression, experience, there is no truth, everybody has
their own truth and every truth is equal—that is called multiculturalism
and its emphasis is on cultural diversity. Postmodernism goes hand in hand with
mysticism and the new age movement. All of these external forces pressure the
church so that there are developments of all kinds of new concepts of the
spiritual life and Christianity.
A
definition from Boston University: “We could really see religion as the modern
world adapting faith as it sees fit…” It is conforming to the world, the cosmic
system adapting faith it is, not doctrine transforming the world. “… scaling back its dogmatic edges and replacing intolerance
with flexibility…” Intolerance now is juxtaposed to flexibility; intolerance is
now the great, horrible sin in our modern society; it has shifted its meaning
from meaning that you will allow someone have another view and respect their
view without attacking them but you don’t affirm their view. In the modern
definition of intolerance to be tolerant you not only have to allow somebody to
have an alternate view but you have to approve of it. If you don’t approve of
it as well then you are intolerant. Replacing intolerance with flexibility
means everything can be right. “… The result is religion lite, something
strongly influenced by the needs of the self. The “needs of the self” is the
dominant force in the spirituality boom. People are looking at the role that
spirituality can play in making them a better, more effective and more
fulfilled person…” Psychologised religion!
“Jesus
scholar” (the group of scholars who get together once a year with their razor
blades and go through the Gospels and try to decide which verses were actually
spoken by Jesus—about five or six verse so far, the rest were just invented
by the apostles!) states: “We live in a time when the traditional truth claims
of religion are deeply suspect. People maybe too aware of the relativity of
everything, that every statement of truth is ultimately a human product
conditioned by various historical contexts.” This is as postmodern a statement
as you can find! What he is saying is that every statement of truth isn’t
truth, it is just something conditioned by the environment at that time. We can
ask the question, then: is that statement true? Hasn’t his statement been
conditioned? If it has been it is a meaningless statement, so why did he open
his mouth? What we are pointing out is that the human viewpoint position
ultimately reduces to logical inconsistencies, fallacies, and it doesn’t work
in the real world. For him to utter a statement he has to deny the basic
presuppositions of his statement. He goes on to say: “The danger of such an
approach (the modern approach of spirituality) is it produces a spirituality
mainly associated with the needs and satisfactions of the individual. Attaining
a certain level of spiritual awareness, then, becomes a kind of consumer item:
‘I’ve got what I want materially and spirituality too.’” What it leads to is
spiritual narcism.
This
is not new, the same kinds of things were going on in the ancient world at the
time that John wrote this epistle, and what was happening was that there were
believers who had come out from their apostolic association, who had been
taught the truth and had believed the truth but no longer taught the truth.
They had succumbed to the ideas, the thought world that surrounded them. The
cosmic system is like this envelope that we live in, like water is to a fish
and air is to us. We live in air, we don’t see it or fell it, are never aware
of it, but it surrounds us and is part of everything that we do. That is the
way the ideas in the cosmic system are. We all grew up in a situation where we
were raised, educated and influenced by cosmic thinking. We pick up on these
things because they are attractive to our sin nature and we use them because
they make life work. The two common assumptions that underlie all of this sort
of deception are, first of all, that doctrine really doesn’t work, it really
can’t help us solve our problems, and that if we really want to solve our
problems we have to have a more warm, nurturing, caring emotional environment
where we relate to other people. But that is not what the Bible says. The Bible
says it starts with doctrine. That is the key. Belief affects the behaviour,
not the other way around. The second assumption is the concept that doctrine
isn’t sufficient, it’s not enough, that doctrine alone isn’t what I need to
solve the problems in my life, I need something more.
So
the epistle of John hits us with this strong emphasis on the reality of
doctrinal absolutes: that we can know certain things and they are true, and the
solution to the problems in life are based on the absolute truth of God’s Word.
He further goes on to say that fellowship with the apostles is based on
doctrinal agreement with the apostles. Fellowship with the apostles is based on
agreement with their doctrine. If you can’t have fellowship with the apostles
you can’t have fellowship with Christ. That is the logic. The only way to have
fellowship with Christ is to have right doctrine; wrong doctrine means no
fellowship. It is not just behaviour, it is belief, and that is what was being
attacked at that time.
We
must understand what John means by fellowship. It is not a matter of social
interaction, it is not a matter of having fun times, dinner together, going out
and having a good time or just simply enjoying good conversation with other
believers. That is not what the Bible means by fellowship. What the Bible means
by fellowship is the behaviour and activity that is specifically centred and
under girded by doctrine, by a relationship with Christ where even the subject
of conversation is doctrinal. Over against society that is immersed in
relativism John asserts that we can know things absolutely, and that gives us
confidence. Thirty-six times John uses one of the two Greek words for
knowledge. So a major theme in the epistle is on what we know, and this then
gives us confidence. Four times John asserts that we can have confidence is our
knowledge. 1 John 2:28 NASB “Now, little children, abide in Him, so
that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in
shame at His coming.” 1 John 3:21 NASB “Beloved, if our heart does
not condemn us, we have confidence before God.” “Heart” is the mental function
of our soul where doctrine resides, and if the doctrine doesn’t condemn us we
can have confidence before God. 1 John 4:17 NASB “By this, love is
perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day
of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world.” 1 John
5:14 NASB “This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if
we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.” Therefore as believers we can
know certain things that are true and have confidence in that knowledge. The
Bible, biblical truth, is not based on the subjective, shifting sands of
subjective impressions, experiences, emotions, psychological theories or
sociological methods, but on the correct understanding of God’s Word. John is
saying that right belief produces right behaviour which culminates in maximum
happiness. Joy is the end product of the spiritual life. But to get to that
point we have to start with right belief that then produces right behaviour,
and only then will we ever get to the goal of having the maximum happiness that
Jesus Christ promised.
Reduced
to a formula: The filling of the Spirit + knowledge of doctrine + application
of doctrine = maximum happiness. That is the only way we can get to stability,
contentment and maximum joy in life. But if it stops with knowledge of doctrine
and it never eventuates in changed thinking and changed behaviour then all it
is is an intellectual trip which is tantamount to Gnosticism.
We
have to understand the purpose for this epistle. There are four purpose
statements in the epistle. The first is 1 John 1:4 NASB “These
things we write, so that our joy may be made complete.” What we will see as we go
through our verse by verse analysis is that each purpose statement comes at the
conclusion of that section. Fellowship and the message of eternal life is the
subject of the first three verses, and he is writing that so that our joy may
be complete. The next purpose statement is 1 John 2:1 NASB “My
little children, I am writing these things [1:5-10] to you so that you may not
sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the
righteous.” The next purpose statement is 1 John 2:26 NASB “These
things I have written to you concerning those who are trying to deceive you.”
There is a warning to those in this epistle to those who have “gone out from us
but were not of us” and who were deceptive. That statement governs the section
from 2:18-2:24. The last purpose statement, which relates to salvation and
knowing that we are saved, only covers the section from 5:6-5:12.
One
of the major problems that John is dealing with in this epistle is that there
is opposition. There is a threat to the congregation. They
are being threatened by false teachers and false doctrines, and that if
they follow those false doctrines it will break their fellowship with the
apostles because it will be a false doctrinal system. What we see here is the
seed of what later became in the Roman Catholic Church apostolic succession.
What John is saying is that apostolic succession is based on truth. If you
don’t have apostolic truth there is no apostolic succession. Apostolic
succession in the first three centuries of the church was a succession of
doctrine, an agreement with apostolic doctrine, not the idea that one man put
his hand on the other and passed it on from person to person. That became the
aberration and it probably had its roots in the pre-Gnostic heresy that we
begin to see as a problem here in 1 John.
Who
were the opponents, the adversaries? Who were the defectors who now threaten
the stability of the church? One solution has been a well-known pagan at that
time by the name of Cerinthus. He was born in Egypt
and was raised as a Jew, and he was the leader of a group of Christians who had
Gnostic tendencies. Gnosticism is not really a problem yet; Doceticism
is just beginning. The earliest literature we have documenting Gnosticism comes
from about 150 AD. 1 John was
written about 85-90 AD. So Gnosticism does really come on the scene as a
full-blown system for another fifty or sixty years. But in the context of the
ancient world there are a lot of ideas floating around that later come together
into the Gnostic system. So it is not really correct to say that the problem
that John is dealing with here is Gnosticism or Docetism
because they haven’t really developed. But certainly some of the ideas in those
systems were prevalent at this time. Cerinthus was so
hostile to John that Eusebius tells the story that at one time John was in a
bath house in Ephesus and learned that Cerinthus was
in there, and John got up and ran out screaming the building would collapse
because the enemy of truth was inside. We don’t know if that is true or not but
that is the legend. Cerinthus is viewed as a major
opponent here but what we know of Cerinthus and what
he taught does not completely stack up with what John emphasises in 1 John. Cerinthus denied the virgin birth—typical of Gnosticism.
Gnosticism rejects the material presence of God. Docetism
means to appear; Jesus didn’t really take on flesh, He just appeared to. All of
this comes out of a background of Platonism where matter (material things) is
evil and the spirit is good. So by definition God could not become flesh
because if God became a man with physical properties he would become tainted
with sin; if God suffered, then He couldn’t be God. Therefore it had to be just
an appearance and so God doesn’t really become flesh. So there is an attack on
the incarnation, the virgin conception and birth. Their idea was that Jesus was
just the most prudent, wise teacher of all time. He believed that Christ’s
spirit descended on Him at His baptism and then departed from Jesus during His
time in Gethsemane, so that the human Jesus died but Christ never suffered and
never was there during the growing up period of Jesus’ life.
John
does emphasise some doctrines that relate to that. He emphasises that Jesus is
the Son of God, which is the title of His deity. He emphasises that Jesus was
incarnate and He was Christ in human flesh from the virgin birth. The point of
all of this is that the system that comes along and says that the spirit of
Christ just came on Jesus during those three years of His ministry is a denier
of the fact that the entire life of Christ was a life of perfection which
qualified Him to go to the cross. Therefore it is a subtle attack on the
sufficiency of Christ because we know that Jesus grew and matured and handled all
the problems of life. He was sinless but He did it all through the filling of
God the Holy Spirit which sets the precedent for the spiritual life of the
church age. If He is not fully God and is just some spirit that descended on
Him for His ministry and wasn’t there when He suffered on the cross, then Jesus
couldn’t be setting the precedent for the spiritual life in the church age.
There is no qualification for Him to go to the cross and all that happens on
the cross is a human being dies and there is no deity present, so therefore
there is no salvation. So we see the assault is very subtle.
When
we look at this epistle there ate ten things that are denied by the false
teachers.
The
problem with denying the reality of the incarnation is that in the incarnation
Jesus Christ establishes the precedent for living the spiritual life. it is in the incarnation that Jesus Christ demonstrates
eight of the ten stress-busters. He doesn’t have to demonstrate confession
because he never sinned. He showed that through the filling of the Holy Spirit
man can face and surmount any adversity or problem in life. That is the
sufficiency of doctrine. If you reject the incarnation then basically what you
are doing is attacking the foundation not only for salvation but for the entire
spiritual life. That is why the thrust of 1 John is not about salvation, it is about the spiritual life.