Fellowship,
Walking, and Abiding; 1 John 2:6
1
John 2:6 NASB “the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to
walk in the same manner as He walked.” John adds a principle to what he has
already said. He talks about knowing God, about loving God, but now he is going
to pull in another key word to describe this active, ongoing experience of
relationship of the believer. It begins, “the one who says.” In the Greek it is
an articular present active participle of lego
meaning “the one who says.” “Abides” is translated into an English finite verb,
but it is not a finite verb in the Greek, it is an infinitive. It is a present
active infinitive of meno. It
means to stay, to remain, to abide. So in the infinitive it should be
translated to remain or to abide, not as a finite verb as “he abides” because
there is no subject here. So it is just simply to claim: “the one who claims to
abide in Him.” To claim to know Him and to claim to abide are synonymous ideas.
The one who claims to abide “ought himself to walk in the same manner as He
walked.”
Let’s
go back and look at the steps that have been developed. As John is expanding
his ideas he starts off with fellowship in 1:4, 5, goes to walking in 1:6, goes
to knowing in 2:3, 4, goes to personal love for God in 2:5, goes to “in Him in
2:5, then he goes to abide in 2:6. Then he goes right back to walking. The
point is that these are all related ideas. He is using every word in his
vocabulary in order to encompass the idea of our personal walk and relationship
with Jesus Christ on a day to day basis.
In
1:5-10 there are three things that John emphasises. First, claiming to know God
is parallel to walking in the light, verse 4. In 1:6 John says, “If we say that
we have fellowship with Him and {yet} walk in the darkness, we lie and do not
practice the truth.” So there is a connection. The person who lies and doesn’t
practice the truth in 1:6 is claiming to have fellowship, and the person who
claims to know Him in 1:4 is a liar and doctrine is not in him—same
thing. So that means that knowing God and fellowship are correlated items in
this passage. Second, not keeping commandments, the emphasis of 2:3-6, is
parallel then to walking in darkness back in 1:6. That would mean that keeping
commandments is parallel to walking in the light. That gives us a conclusion,
therefore, that enjoying fellowship and walking in the light develop our
knowledge of God and the barometer, the self-test, is our obedience to divine
mandates.
1
John 2:6 NASB “the one who says he abides in Him…” Abide is a
magnificent word and has become a major battlefield in the whole area of
understanding salvation and the spiritual life. Why is that? It is because
there are those who want to take 1st John, as well as a well-known
passage in John 15, as relating to believer versus unbeliever. For example, how
do you know if you are a believer? If you abide and keep His
commandments. If you don’t abide and you don’t keep His commandments you
are not a believer. So for those folk abiding becomes a functional equivalent
or semantic equivalent to the word “believe.” So we have to find out if the
word “abide” is a synonym for believe or does it mean something else?
In
English the word “abide” means a) to put up with or tolerate. That doesn’t fit
the context here at all; b) to wait patiently for something; c) to be in store
for or to await something; d) to withstand; e) in an intransitive sense it
means to remain in a place, and that is close to our Greek meaning in meno. But what we should note is looking
at these meanings that none of them listed here are what any of us would think
of as synonyms for believe. If we look abide up in a thesaurus we will not find
believe listed as a synonym.
Furthermore
we have to look at some passages to see how Jesus uses the word. It is
interesting that the word meno is
used 118 times in the New Testament. Fifty of those usages are by the apostle
John—42%. If John is going to use the word meno or to abide 50 times in the Gospel of John, do we think
it is an important doctrine in John? He is going to be beating us over the head
with this throughout most of his epistle. This is a major theme, and that tells
us that the main idea is fellowship and that abiding is a critical aspect to
the whole concept of fellowship. Furthermore, if abide means believe then we
ought be able to somehow substitute those two words, and that doesn’t work.
John
6:56 NASB “He who eats My flesh and drinks
My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” What is the meaning of that? Some people
simply take that as accepting Christ. Well of that is accepting Christ then
abiding equals believing.