Importance of the Incarnation; 2 Jo 9
The main issue in 2 John
seems to focus on the body of the epistle from the fourth verse down through
the eleventh verse. In vv. 4-6 the focus in on walking in
truth. Truth is a key concept in the epistle, along with the idea of
walking. Truth is mentioned in verse 1 twice, verse 2 and verse 4. We are to
walk according to truth, “in truth.” There is this interconnection between
truth as absolute truth and truth also as that which is embodied in the person
of the Lord Jesus Christ: “I am the truth,” John 14:6. He gave a new
commandment t love one another and the fulfilment of that commandment to walk
in that love for one another is not divorced in this passage from the correct
understanding of who Jesus Christ is. Love that is commanded in the New
Testament is a love that is articulated by Jesus Christ in terms of what He did
on the cross. He said we are to love one another “as I have loved you.” So to
understand love we must start at the cross. We have to start from the
Scriptures in our definitions. It is always the Bible that provides the
starting point. When we come to the Scriptures the Bible is going to define for
us the parameters of any discussion about any subject. When we go outside of
those parameters then what we are relying upon is autonomous or independent
human reason or experience and we are assuming that apart from revelation we
can come up with some sort of absolute truth. This absolute, of course, is an autonomous
absolute truth and then we invariably use that to come back and evaluate the
Scriptures.
2 John 1:9 NASB
“Anyone who goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not
have God; the one who abides in the teaching, he has both the Father and the
Son.” John has already introduced in verse 7 introduced the theme that many
deceivers had gone out into the world who do not admit or acknowledge Jesus
Christ as coming in the flesh. The verb in v. 9 translated “who goes too far”
is the Greek proago [proagw] which means to be out of bounds, it has the idea of
departure, to go forth to seed, to go too far. Here it has the idea of going
outside the bounds of truth. proago
here is a present tense participle. It actually begins with the pronoun pas [paj], “all,” and then an articular relative participle,
“who goes too far and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ.” We have an
example here of what is called the Granville-Sharp rule where there are two
nouns (in this case the participles as a noun) governed by one article and
linked by a conjunction, and that shows that the two are connected and
represent the same person. They transgress, go out of bounds, violate the standard of God by not abiding in the doctrine
of Christ. The word translated “abide” is meno
[menw], and we have seen the word used again and again and
again in John’s writings to relate to the idea of staying in fellowship with
God. So this is not talking about salvation, it is talking about the believer
in his post-salvation life. This is describing the believer who is out of
fellowship and the believer who has rejected what the Scriptures teach about
Jesus Christ.
When we look at the word proago, which means to go out of bounds,
go to far, or to transgress or violate a standard, it
was one of the favourite words of the Gnostics. It also has other ideas such as
to lead forth, to go before, to exceed, and in Gnosticism they thought that
they had the secret knowledge or special insight into the ultimate reality in
the universe, and one of their key words to express this was proago. They were the leaders, the ones
going forth, they were at the cutting edge of human
thought. So John picks up this verb and uses it in a sarcastic sense, that
whoever goes forth or transgresses are really not going forth and are not
really at the leading edge of anything; in fact, they are actually going out of
bounds and violating the truth of who Jesus Christ is. This reflects the same
problem, then, as we have now when people reject the sufficiency of Scripture.
The biggest problem we have in the church today is not that people don’t
believe in the infallibility of Scripture or in the inerrancy of Scripture but
among those who allegedly believe in the inerrancy and the infallibility of
Scripture and reject the sufficiency of Scripture. So what they are constantly
trying to do is to add something to Scripture. They are constantly impressed
with the products of human thought and they seek to reconcile the Bible to
those products of human thought.
So what we have here is
the expression that whoever goes out of bounds and does not remain in the
doctrine of Christ, does not remain with an orthodox Christology, “does not
have God.” What exactly does John mean by this, that he does not remain in the
teaching of Christ? This is what the Scriptures teach about the person of Jesus
Christ. “Teaching” is the Greek word didache
[didaxh] which is all that has been revealed through the
Scriptures about Jesus Christ. The genitive of christos
[xristoj] indicates the content of the doctrine. Then he says
that the person who does not abide in the teaching of Christ, the orthodox
teaching of the Scriptures, does not have God. This doesn’t mean he is not a
believer. For example, 1 John
He then goes on to give
the flip side of the principle: “the one who abides in the teaching, he has
both the Father and the Son.” That is, he can remain in fellowship. The point
is that no one can maintain fellowship with God who has a wrong Christology. We
can’t advance in the Christian life by being out of bounds doctrinally. Being
in fellowship is momentum; abiding in momentum. Abiding in Christ is staying in
fellowship. This builds momentum so that we can advance toward spiritual
maturity. But the believer who fails to maintain an orthodox view of the
Scripture becomes impressed with some external system that is adding something
to Scripture—whether it is evolution, sociology, psychology, etc. When that is
added to Scripture it always destroys Scripture. This was the problem with
Gnosticism, it claimed to have something for everyone.
In the early church this
was a problem for the first 500 years of Christianity—dealing with the impact
of Greek thought on the church and on the person and work of Jesus Christ. The
first major problem that came along was the problem of Aarianism.
Arius taught that there was a time when Christ was
not: God is eternal but Christ was actually a creature. The modern version of Arianism is the so-called Jehovah’s Witness.
Hebrews 4:14 NASB
“Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the
heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.” Don’t give up
on the unique doctrine of the incarnation of Christ. [15] “For we do not have a
high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been
tempted in all things as {we are, yet} without sin.” We have a high prist who
can fully identify with every situation that we go through in life because He
is fully human. If He just appeared to be human then we don’t have a God who
can identify with us at all, and there is no basis for relationship or
fellowship. What makes it possible in Christianity for man to have fellowship
with God is that we have a God who incarnates Himself
as a man, and so in one person there is the creature and the creator united
together in the deity and the humanity of Jesus Christ. If that is not true
then there is no basis for any kind of fellowship with God, no basis for any
real connection with God. Hebrews 5:7-9 NASB “In the days of His
flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears
to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety.
Why Jesus had to be a man
1. He had to be a man to generate real historical
righteousness. He had to produce real righteousness by the genuine volitional
act of a real human being. The New Testament revelation requires that real
humanity produce real historical righteousness as the basis or qualification to
go to the cross. It is that generation of creaturely righteousness through a
human Saviour that is imputed to man so that we can be saved.
2. Priestly qualification. He can’t be a priest without
being human; He can’t be a mediator without being human.
3. To be our representative as the second Adam. He can’t
be a second Adam without being fully human.
4. His absolute revelation of God. Jesus had to be God so
that when we see Jesus we see God. If he is just a man then He doesn’t present
to us what God is like. He is the full expression of God, according to John
chapter one.
5. He had to be fully man to fulfil the Davidic covenant.
Philip Schaff makes the following comment about the importance of understanding the
full incarnation of Christ:
“Regarding half-Docetic
incarnation the church could not possibly accept such a view of a mutilated and
stunted humanity of Christ, despoiled of its loyal head and such a merely
partial redemption as this inevitably involved. The incarnation of the Logos is
His becoming completely man. It involves, therefore,
the assumption of the entire undivided nature of man, spiritual and bodily,
with the sole exception of sin; which, in fact, belongs not to the original
nature of man but has had entered from without.” So to be a redeemer Christ must also be fully man.