Doctrine of the Christian's Walk
We are studying one of the most important metaphors in
scripture for understanding the entire spiritual life: how a believer grows
from spiritual infancy to spiritual maturity. Real life, in the spiritual life,
doesn't begin until we begin to get some spiritual maturity under our belt. The
same way it happens in life. The goal in life if you talk to a ten or twelve year old is to be treated like an adult and to live like an
adult, they recognize that. The same thing is true in the spiritual life. And
yet I am amazed at how many believers I run into who seem to just be happy with
the fact that they are going to go to heaven and have no concept of what it
means to grow or advance to spiritual maturity so that you can really begin to
live, operate, and benefit from all the incredible assets God has given us for
living the spiritual life. And I am amazed at how many pastors don't understand
this and teach it as well.
It is not easy to try to tear apart some of these
passages in scripture and to understand how these things work together and what
the dynamics are, so we are taking time in our study of Galatians to really get
a handle on this subject in Galatians 5 starting at verse 16, which is the
spiritual walk.
Walking by means of the Spirit is the command at the
beginning of Galatians 5:16. It is a present active imperative
which means this is to be the standard operating procedure for the
believer's life. Sometimes people get the idea that the key issue in the
spiritual life is rebound. You get that idea as a young believer, that the key
issue is confession and forgiveness, because you are living out of fellowship
so much and carnality tends to be the rule of the day for the baby believer.
You are just so glad that you have confession and can get back into fellowship,
and five minutes later you need to use it again. We are all thankful for that.
But making sure you are in fellowship is not the goal of the spiritual life.
The goal of the spiritual life, according to this passage in Galatians 5, is to
maintain that fellowship. And that is expressed by the metaphor, walking by
means of the Spirit. It is the day by day, step by
step, moment by moment dependence upon God the Holy Spirit as the energizing
power and enabler in the spiritual life.
We are taking a look at all the passages related to
walking and I want to review a couple of things.
We started off by saying that walking by the Spirit is
related to the doctrine of sanctification. Sanctification is based on the Greek
word HAGGIOSMOS which means to be set apart, from the verb HAGGIAZO. Sanctification is used in three senses in scripture and we need to keep
these distinctions. The phase one, phase two, phase three concept
is so important for understanding different aspects of the spiritual life. We
are saved from the penalty of sin in phase one. That is also called positional
sanctification. Because at the moment of faith alone in Christ alone we are
identified with Jesus Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. According
to Romans 6:1-4, we are indeed positionally separated
from the power of the sin nature, which is the basis for phase two.
Phase two: We are no longer slaves to the sin nature. That
means that as a believer you now have the option of not living under the power
of the sin nature.
Every unbeliever lives under the power of the sin
nature. They have no other option. They are either producing from the area of
weakness in terms of sin, personal sin, overt sin, sins of the tongue, mental
attitude sins, or they are producing from the area of strength in terms of
human good. But they can only produce from the sin nature because there is no
other option, no matter how moral they are, no matter how establishment
oriented they are, no matter how wonderful they are, no matter what nice personalities
they have, no matter how much fun they might be to be around, they are still
operating exclusively from the sin nature and they have no other options. As a
believer you have an option and the mandate is not to exercise the option of
living under the power of the sin nature. It is not until phase three that we
are saved from the presence of the sin nature and this is called ultimate
sanctification.
So we have three phases of sanctification. We have
positional sanctification in phase one. Phase two is experiential or
progressive sanctification. Sometimes we wonder how progressive that is in our
lives. But ultimately, when we are face to face with the Lord we have ultimate
sanctification in phase 3.
Then we saw that the metaphor of walking operates on a
couple of different principles in terms of Greek grammar. They are expressed by
the preposition EN, and the grammatical category is that EN takes the dative of sphere. Another word that might
help you understand this is realm. We are to walk in a certain realm. And
there a various passages that talk about the realm in which the believer is
supposed to walk. We are to walk in the realm or in the sphere of light, not in
darkness. This is covered in Romans 13:13, Ephesians 5:8, and 1 John 1:6. We
are not to walk in the realm, or sphere of darkness. We are to walk in newness
of life, in the sphere of this new life we have as a result of our
identification with Christ. All of these spheres, terms, en plus the dative of sphere, relate to
the bottom circle, this is our experiential reality. These categories are based
on the ultimate reality of the top circle, which is our positional reality. We
are to walk in the sphere of love. We are to walk in the sphere of good works.
We are to walk in the sphere of wisdom. We are to walk in the sphere or realm
of truth.
Another way in which this same Greek preposition is
used is to indicate the instrument or means by which this walk is accomplished.
There are two means. We have by means of faith and faith is directed toward the
word of God. Faith is not faith in itself. Faith is the trust, the application
of reliance upon the principles and promises of the word of God known as bible
doctrine. 2 Corinthians 5:7, "we are to walk by means of faith and not by means
of sight". And Galatians 5:16-25, "we are to walk by means of God the
Holy Spirit".
And then there is another Greek preposition. Now when
I emphasize this, I had Greek professors who used to say that the most
important words in the Greek are the prepositions and the particles, because
that gives the flow and very crucial information in the scriptures. KATA indicates a norm or standard, which is to govern the
believer's life. This is very similar to the concept of realm. We are to walk
according to the norm and standard of the Holy Spirit. Walk according to the
norm or standard love and not according to the norms and standards of the sin
nature.
The basis for the believer's walk, as we saw last time
in or study of Romans 6, is our positional identification with Jesus Christ
which we covered in Romans 6:1-4. Ephesians 5:8 says
the believer is to walk in the sphere of light. What exactly does that mean? We
began to look at that last week and this is crucial to understand. I want to
summarize it and review it again because it is so important to understand where
we are going. We didn't quite get there last time, I spent most of the hour
setting us up for understanding 1John 1, and then when we got there we ran out
of time. So I want to go back there and bring you up to that position in terms
of a reminder.
Ephesians 5:8 says: "you
were formerly darkness". There
we have the imperfect tense. You were continuously, in your former life as an
unbeliever, darkness. This is talking about the fact that as unbelievers we are
born in darkness and we live in darkness. This is our position. This is so
important to understand. If we don't understand the distinctions between
positional reality and experiential reality we are going to get very confused
when we get into some passages of scripture. That is why I am belaboring the
point. Because I know and I have friends and seminary
classmates who confuse the two continuously. So we have to make sure we
make this distinction. And see that the scriptures make this distinction, that
is the important thing, what does the scripture say. "You were formerly
darkness and now", now in this present life, "you are light in the
Lord". We don't have a verb here, it is ellipsized,
but the emphasis is on the present reality, "you are light in the Lord",
present active imperative, "walk as children of light".
This is our identification, because of our son ship in
Christ we are children of light and we are commanded to walk like that. That
seems to imply that you can take the option not to walk as a child of light,
you can take the option to walk as a child of darkness and we need to see if
that is true. Light represents absolute perfection in scripture, the holiness
of God. We saw last time in 1Timothy 6:16 we are told that "God dwells in
unapproachable light" and in 1John 1:5 that "God is light and in Him
there is no darkness at all". When
we look at what scripture describes as what happens to us at salvation, we are
told that we become sons of light. This phrase is a Hebraism, a Hebrew idiom
that is brought over into the Greek, sons of light.
In Hebrew, if you were describing someone's character
you would use a phrase that they were the son of
something. If they were a deceitful person you would say they
were a son of deception. If they were an encouraging
person as Barnabas was, you would call them a son of encouragement. If they
were an honest person they would be a
son of honesty. It does not indicate derivation,
the emphasis is on the final noun in the phrase, the object of the preposition
because that describes the character of the person. If someone was a
destructive person or if you were going to indicate the perversion of their
character they were the son of Belial.
In John 12:36 Jesus says
"While you have the Light believe in the Light". He is referring to Himself as absolute
perfection, as absolute righteousness. "In order that you may become
sons of light. These things Jesus spoke and He departed."
We believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and at that moment
we become sons of light. We are transferred positionally
into light according to 1 Peter 2:9, "you are a chosen race, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession that you may be
proclaimed the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His
marvelous light". Once again it is positional. We have been called from one status,
darkness, into another status, light. Acts 26:18: "to open their eyes so
that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to the
dominion of God." This is a salvation context so it is talking about
moving from one realm into another realm. "In order that they may receive
forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by
faith in Me".
And then Colossians 1:13: "for He delivered us
from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved
Son." We are born in
the domain of darkness and at the moment of salvation we are transferred into
the kingdom of light where we receive the title sons of light. But that doesn't
mean we live consistent with that position. That becomes clear from looking at
Romans 13:12 where Paul says: "The night is almost gone", a reference
to the imminency of the rapture, he thought it would
be at any moment, that Christ would come back, so he says, "the night is
almost gone and the day at hand. Let us therefore", conclusion, if the Lord could come back
at any moment then we ought to change the way we live, "let us therefore
lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light."
What is the implication here? The implication is that
we are still producing the deeds of darkness and there
needs to be a transformation. Let's look at this in a little more detail. Paul
says: let us
lay aside and here we have the aorist middle subjunctive of the verb APOTITHEMI. This word is used sometimes as removing clothing, it
means to put away, put out of the way, to remove, to take off. The imagery here
is of someone changing clothes, taking off one set of clothes and putting on a
set of armor. It is in the subjunctive mood, the mood of potentiality. It is
sometimes used in certain constructions to emphasize a certain type of command
and this is called a hortatory subjunctive. Hortatory refers to the fact that
it is an exhortation or a mandate and the subjunctive mood is used in order to
emphasize that it is a potential. And that potential is going to be activated
by your volition. Your volition is what determines whether or not this action
takes place. God is not going to make the decisions for you, the Holy Spirit is
not going to override your volition, you have to make
decisions regarding the application of doctrine in your life. It is not just
automatic, it is not just 'let go and let God'.
The Christian life is not a passive life,
it is an active life in terms of your volition. It is passive in the sense that
you are going to allow God to work in your life, but you have to make certain
decisions and applications, God is not going to override your decisions. That
is the emphasis of the subjunctive, and it functions as an imperative. The
middle voice indicates that the believer participates in the results of the
action. He is not only the performer of the action but participates in its
results. Remember, in English there are two voices, the active voice and the passive
voice. Active means the subject performs the action of the verb. In the passive
voice, the subject receives the action of the verb. In Greek you have something
quite different. The middle voice not only means the subject performs the
action but benefits from the results of the action. Sometimes it is called a
reflexive voice. It doesn't always have that implication but that is its
primary implication. So the middle voice here indicates that not only do you
make the decision to take off, remove the deeds of darkness, but
you benefit from the results. This word is used in a number of passages some of
which we have already studied and is, in some sense, tantamount to the whole
concept of confession, but it moves beyond confession to post confession
application of doctrine.
Ephesians 4:22 says: "in
reference to your former manner of life", that is your life as an unbeliever
operating under the power of the sin nature, "lay aside the old self." This is a
mandate now to take off, remove, this is the same word, APOTIHEMI, lay aside or remove the old self, that which
characterizes your former manner of life as an unbeliever, "which is being
corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit." This also implies
something we are going to be dealing with. And that is that as an unbeliever
you had one nature. By nature we mean a capacity to sin, and that capacity to
sin we call the sin nature. But as a believer you now have two natures. You
have the capacity to sin, which is called the old self, the old man, and then you
have the new man, which is all that you are in Jesus Christ based on the assets
God has given you.
Sometimes the conflict between the old man and the new
is characterized as the battle between the flesh and the spirit as we will see in
our passage in Galatians 5. There is a continuous conflict between the sin
nature and the new man. The issue is that you have to make decisions to not
live according to the old man and to lay aside those activities, which calls
for active, proactive choices on the part of the believer.
Ephesians 4:25 "Therefore, laying aside
falsehood",
it is the same idea, removing falsehood from the life, "speak truth
each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another'. APOTITHEMI means to lay aside, remove, take
off falsehood.
Colossians 3:8: "But now you also, put them all
aside": it is the same word, APOTITHEMI, and then we have a list of various sins and the first
three are mental attitude sins, "anger, wrath, malice." These are
clearly representative, it is not an exhaustive list
it includes everything from bitterness to jealousy, to envy to revenge
motivation. I am amazed at how many people give themselves over to mental
attitude sins which become the dictate of their lives
and the prime motivator of their lives and over the course of time, if you do
this, it will destroy your soul. It will destroy everything in your life and
you will end up being miserable, and it is self-induced misery because you have
made the choice to let your mind dwell on these mental attitude sins.
The second two sins in the verse, "slander, and
abusive speech from your mouth", represent sins
of the tongue which we will take up in James more detail when we return after
the conference.
Hebrews 12:1 "Therefore, since we have so great a
cloud of witnesses surrounding us", that is a reference to the fact that
we have a testimony in the angelic conflict and historically in terms of the
Old Testament heroes, "let us also lay aside [APOTITHEMI] remove, every encumbrance and the sin which so easily
entangles us". Every encumbrance refers to any distraction, not necessarily sin,
but anything in your life, no matter how great it is, no matter how wonderful
it might be, no matter how good it might be in some context.
If there is something in your life that is preventing
you from getting doctrine on a regular basis, it is a distraction from your
spiritual life, and you need to remove it. That is what is meant by every
encumbrance. The imagery here is that of a track runner running a race and he
wants to remove anything and everything that hinders him from running the race
as quickly as he can. "Lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so
easily entangles us". Not only the distractions which may or
may not be good, they may be very enjoyable activities in life, or hobbies, but
yet, they distract us from the spiritual life. And secondly, sin, those
favorite wonderful sins that we like to indulge in where our area of weakness
really finds its forte and we are very comfortable with those sins. We are to
lay aside those sins because they easily entangle us and then: "let us run
with endurance", [HUPOMONE—persistence] "the race that is set
before us",
moving from the imagery of walking to the imagery of running.
Then James 1:21 uses APOTITHEMI again, "Therefore, putting aside", removing,
taking off that layer of clothes, the carnality, "putting aside", the New
American Standard translates is all filthiness, but we saw in our study of
James it should be translated "the wickedness that sin is and in humility
receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls". And that is
phase two salvation, not phase one salvation, talking about the fact in the
course of the believers life he is to be removing the
act and deeds of the sin nature from his life. This is not done through the
power of the flesh, it is not done as an act of morality, but it is done in the
power of God the Holy Spirit. Remember, anything the unbeliever can do is not
part of the spiritual life. The unbeliever can be ethical, moral and have great
integrity so that is not simply what the spiritual life is. The spiritual life
is uniquely the product of the Holy Spirit. It is a supernatural way of life
demanding a supernatural way of execution.
And finally, to understand APOTITHEMI, 1 Peter 2:1:
"Therefore, putting aside, or removing, all malice and all deceit and
hypocrisy and envy and all slander." Now the interesting thing is that just as James 1 sets
it up as a prerequisite, there it is used as a participle of intended
circumstances which gives you the prerequisite for fulfilling the mandate, the
mandate in James 1:21 was to receive the word, so you have to lay aside the sin
in order to receive the word. If you are operating in carnality under the power
of the sin nature then you are just going to be engaged in an academic exercise
and there is not going to be any spiritual reception of truth. Peter 2:1 is
saying the same thing. Therefore first put aside all the malice, hypocrisy,
envy and slander, that begins with confession. But it
means staying in fellowship afterwards and then, as "newborn babes, desire
the sincere milk of the word". So this is a prerequisite. It doesn't mean you
have to reach sinless perfection, or stop sinning in your life, before you can
take in the word. That is not what it is saying. It is saying that at the time
you are taking in the word you need to get into fellowship and stay in
fellowship.
From all of this we have seen that there are two
absolute states that are defined in scripture. One is light and the other is
darkness. They are given other terms: the Holy Spirit is in one realm, the flesh is in another realm. Grace
is in one realm, law is in another realm. Faith
is in one realm, works is in another realm. You are in one or the other, not
both. You can't be a little bit spiritual and a little bit carnal. You can't
operate on a little bit of works and a little bit of grace. You are either
operating on one or the other. Light and darkness are absolutes,
you are in one or the other. Part of the issue here is fellowship. In
2Corinthians 6:14 Paul asks the question, "what
fellowship has light with darkness?" The implication is none. And the
member of the Trinity specifically related to fellowship is God the Holy Spirit. 2Corinthians
13:14: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the
fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all."
Then we have to ask the question, what effect does sin
have on the Holy Spirit? If God is light and in Him no darkness can dwell, and
there can be no fellowship between darkness and light, then whenever we commit
a sin of any category, no matter how great, no matter how small, it still
violates the righteousness of God. Remember, God is +R, absolute righteousness.
What the righteousness of God rejects, the justice of God must condemn. The
definition of sin is any infraction, anything that violates the character of
God. Some people, when they think of sin, they think of the most heinous awful
acts they can imagine. But the bible says that a sin is any act or thought that
violates the revealed will of God or character of God. This includes mental
attitude sins, sins of the tongue, and various overt sins, and many things
people think aren't quite so bad. Remember all it took in the garden was to eat
a piece of fruit, a fairly innocuous act but it violated the mandate of God and
that caused the entire human race and creation to fall under the curse of sin.
What the righteousness of God rejects the justice of
God condemns. At the cross God the Father, in justice, poured out all the sins
of humanity on Jesus Christ. So that Jesus Christ paid the penalty for sin and
God's justice and righteousness were satisfied which provided the basis for the
salvation of the human race. So, at the point of salvation, when you exercise
faith alone in Christ alone, the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ is then
imputed, or credited to the account of the believer. He is still experientially
–R, but he has positional +R. He is in the light but he may not be living
in the light. As soon as he sins he is going to violate God's righteousness which is going to have an impact on his
fellowship with God because God cannot have fellowship with darkness. And it is
going to impact his relationship with God the Holy Spirit. It is called
quenching the Holy Spirit in 1Thessalonians 5:19.
The word quench means to
suppress. In the immediate context it was written in the time before the New
Testament was completed and believers were warned not to suppress the Holy
Spirit and not to treat prophecy lightly. Well, nobody is a prophet today and
nobody is prophesying today. What we have is the entire Canon of Scripture,
Bible doctrine. Today you begin to suppress the Holy Spirit when you reject or
treat doctrine lightly. In other words, when you decide not to apply doctrine
and to live in the power of the sin nature you are suppressing the Holy Spirit.
Let's look at the parallel. You have a sin nature, it
is not the source of sin. It is the source of temptation. It presents the temptation
to your volition and you can chose positively toward the sin nature and decide to yield to the temptation or you can chose
negatively to reject the sin nature. The source of sin is your volition. On the
other hand, if you are under the filling of God the Holy Spirit He is going to
be reminding you of the doctrine in your soul. Assuming you have learned
doctrine and there is doctrine stored in your soul, then there is something for
the Holy Spirit to work with. He is going to be continually bringing doctrine
to our minds, to encourage us to apply it, and once again the issue is our
volition.
The Holy Spirit does not override our volition, He influences us in the same way that the sin
nature tempts us. One of the problems we have left over from an older
generation is that the filling of the Holy Spirit was sometimes referred to as
the control of the Holy Spirit. Control is a bad word because what is He
controlling? Is He controlling your volition? No. This idea has its roots in
the Higher Life Movement, the Victorious Life Movement, that
came out of the late nineteenth century as it led to the concept, let go and
let God. And even today you hear that, I saw it on a bumper sticker the other
day. It is the idea that somehow, if I become totally
passive God is going to work through me. And of course, that never works and
people end up becoming very frustrated, constantly trying to find some gimmick
to get them into that emotional state where they feel like they are having a
relationship with God. The issue is our volition, whether or not we are
choosing to obey God and apply doctrine or reject God and choose to yield to
the testing of the sin nature. When we say no to the Holy Spirit we are
suppressing the Holy Spirit.
Ephesians 4:30 uses an anthropopathism to describe how the Holy Spirit responds to
this: "we grieve the Holy Spirit." An anthropopathism
is a compound word, ANTHRO meaning man and PATHOS, a Greek word meaning emotion. It is attributing to God a human emotion which He does not actually possess, in order to
understand the purposes, policies and acts of God. Remember, God is not a man
that He should lie, or repent. The same thing happens
in terms of physical attributes and those are called anthropomorphisms. MORPHE means form. When scripture talks about the hand of
God, the eye of God goes to and fro continually throughout the earth that is
using anthropomorphism. The Jews had a very visual, physical way of expressing
anger. Literally it means the nose burns. So when the bible says that God is wrathful,
sometimes it uses the imagery of the nose burning but that does not mean that
God has a physical nose. It is an anthropomorphism. We
grieve the Holy Spirit and this term is used to teach us that we have violated
the perfect righteousness of God and our relationship with God the Holy Spirit
has now been abrogated temporarily until that violation is dealt with.
This sets us up for understanding 1John 1 and the
importance there. Turn your Bibles to 1 John and we will have a summary
treatment of 1 John 1 and see how it relates to the doctrine of walking. Remember
our subject, we are walking by means of God the Holy
Spirit. We saw in Ephesians 5 that walking by means of the Holy Spirit is
walking in the light. That is the background for getting into 1John 1. Walking
in the light is tantamount to walking by means of the Holy Spirit according to
Ephesians 5. We are not done with Ephesians 5 and I hope to get back there this
morning.
1 John 1:1: "What was from the beginning, what we
have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched
with our hands, concerning the Word of Life". John is emphasizing the fact that they are giving
personal, accurate testimony regarding the life and work and witness of Jesus
Christ.
1 John 1:2: "and the life was manifested, and we
have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the
Father and was manifested to us". He wants us to get the point that this
is an eyewitness account.
1 John 1:3: "what we have seen and heard we
proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed
our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ". Part of his
theme in the epistle is fellowship.
1 John 1:4: "These things we write, so that our
joy may be made complete". Joy is part of our relationship and specifically our fellowship
with God the Father. That is why when David sinned and then he confessed his
sin in Psalm 51, after confessing his sin he prays to the Father, "restore
to me the joy of my salvation". When you are in carnality you do not have the
inner happiness of God, you do not have the joy of your salvation and you can
only have that when you are in fellowship and walking by means of God the Holy
Spirit.
1 John 1:5: "This is the message we have heard
from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no
darkness at all". This starts off with what we have already seen, that God is
perfect righteousness and cannot have fellowship with darkness at all. John is
going to use three conditional clauses to represent different responses to God
in the life of believers. This is a third class condition
which emphasizes potentiality, maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
In 1 John 1:6 the third class condition presents the
condition as uncertain of fulfillment. In other words, you might say this, or
you might not say this. It treats this as though it is a likely happening.
1 John 1:6 "If we say that we have fellowship
with Him", so here is the claim, somebody comes along and claims to have
fellowship with God. They claim to be walking with the Lord and John says,
"If we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and
do not practice the truth".
What is he saying here? First of all, we have seen
that we are positionally in the light. We become a
son of light at the moment of salvation. So walking in the light has to do with
a step-by-step process and progress. It is different from a status
which is in the light. There are those who teach that walking in the
light or walking in darkness are terms for the believer or unbeliever. But we
have seen that that is completely erroneous. Walking in the light and walking
in darkness are terms that have to do with the moment by
moment life of the believer in terms of his spiritual life.
"If we say on the one hand that we have
fellowship with Him and yet we walk," that is we conduct activity in
carnality, operating in the power of the flesh, we are in darkness, "we
lie and do not practice the truth." The word for practicing the truth here
is the Greek word POIEO and it means to do, to make, to practice, to apply.
This is the word that we say over and again in James 1:21 – 2:26, and
there we translated it apply because it had to do with the application of
doctrine.
The second word of this phrase, "do not practice
truth", is
the Greek word ALETHEIA, meaning truth, absolute truth, not
relative truth. This is comparable to doctrine; this is John's terminology.
When John uses that word he is talking about absolute truth. We are going to
see this more and more in our study the gospel of John. Walking in the truth is
tantamount to walking in accordance with divine mandates. What we call bible
doctrine. In essence, what John is saying here is what James is saying in James
1-2. "If we say that we have fellowship with Him yet walk in the darkness,
we lie and do not apply doctrine". In other words, we are out of fellowship.
There is a contrast in 1 John 1:7: "but if we
walk in the light", a clear indication that the believer can either walk
in darkness or walk in the light. "But if we walk in the light as He
Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of
Jesus His son cleanses us from all sin".
There are two observations I want to make here. We have studied
the doctrine of the blood so we know, number one, that blood is an analogy or
metaphor for the spiritual death of Jesus Christ on the cross. Remember, when
God told Adam, "the day you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil, you will die", they did not die physically. They died
spiritually. When Jesus died on the cross as our substitute, it had to be a
death in kind. There are two penalties for sin. Penalty number one for sin is
spiritual death, eternal separation from God the Father. Separation from God
the Father in time, if not dealt with by response to the gospel "believe
in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved", results in eternal
condemnation. Penalty
two has to do with the consequences in time. This falls under the category, "whatsoever
a man sows, this he shall also reap".
It is the negative consequences in time that are the result of sin. When
Adam and Eve sinned they died spiritually, penalty one, but everything in life
was cursed and they lived in a fallen environment from that point on suffering
the curse of sin and that was penalty two, two different realms. This is
important to understand and if you don't understand this you will get lost in 1
John 1.
As a result of this God is going to deal with this in
two different ways. The spiritual death of Jesus Christ on the cross is a
judicial death. God judged Him judicially on the cross by imputing our sins to
Him. Jesus Christ remained sinless. "He who knew no sin was made sinless
for us". Jesus
Christ never sinned. He never became a sinner. He always maintained His perfect
righteousness on the cross, but our sins were imputed to Him on the cross so
they are not His experientially but they are His judicially. The word used to
describe this by theologians is not only judicial but
forensic. Forensic is that which has to do with judiciary criminality. His
punishment is called a forensic punishment.
There are two kinds of punishment going on here, the judicial
forensic punishment at the cross which dealt with
spiritual death and the experiential consequences or penalties in time. 1 John1:7 says, "If we walk in the light as He Himself is in
the light we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ his
Son cleanses us from all sin". There we have a present active indicative of
the verb KATHARIZO which means to purify or to cleanse. It is the word that is
used in the Septuagint to relate to all the cleansing that took place in the
temple before the priest could go into the presence of God. Because this is in
the present tense some people will come along and say that this is the standard
operating procedure and if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ you will
always be cleansed from sin so you don't ever have to do anything about it.
Whenever you sin just realize and have faith that God is going to cleanse you,
that the blood of Christ cleanses you continuously and you don't have to do
anything else. In other words, you never have to confess your sins. That is
what they are saying.
But what about 1John 1:9? That is two verses later. So John would be
contradicting himself if he meant in verse 7 that you don't have to confess
your sin anymore. Why would he say in two verses later
that you need to confess your sin? What we realize
here is that 1 John 1:7 is dealing with spiritual death consequences, phase one
consequences. This means that when you receive
positional sanctification and are in a positional reality with Jesus Christ,
that is an eternal relationship and you can never lose it.
Paul said in Romans 8:38-39, "For I am persuaded
that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor
things present nor things to come, 39 nor height nor depth, nor
any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord". We have an eternal relationship with Christ which cannot be broken. Yet we sin. Five seconds
after you put your faith alone in Christ alone, you looked across the
congregation and you saw someone who had insulted you, and immediately you
became angry again and you sinned. Did you die spiritually? No, you don't die
spiritually because spiritual death has been taken care of on the cross. You do
not die spiritually again, Jesus Christ's blood continuously cleanses you so
that forensic application of the blood of Christ, meaning His spiritual substitutionary death on the cross continually cleanses you
from the moment of faith alone in Christ alone until you are absent from the
body and face to face with the Lord and minus the sin nature. 1 John 1:7 is
talking about the continual effect of the death of Christ in terms of never
having to deal with consequences of spiritual death ever again. That cannot
happen to you as a believer, you cannot lose your salvation. Once saved, always
saved.
Verse 8, "if we say", maybe we will, maybe we won't,
"that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves". In other
words, there is no such thing as perfection in the spiritual life, every
believer is going to continue to sin, to some degree or another, and if you are
saying you have no sin you are operating on arrogance and self-deception and
the truth, bible doctrine, is not in you. You are not operating on doctrine, you are operating outside the bottom circle. Truth
is not in you, you are in carnality, denying the fact
that you are a sinner.
In contrast, "if we confess", HOMOLOGEO, which means to
admit or to acknowledge your sins, it doesn't mean to feel sorry for your sins,
it is a legal term. When you go into court it does not matter how you feel
about whether or not you should have gotten that ticket or whether or not you
killed that person. It doesn't matter whether you regret it or whether you are
glad you did it and you would kill them again it you had the opportunity, when
you stand before the bar of justice and the judge says guilty or not guilty,
and you say guilty, whether you are glad or sad you have made the same
statement. Your attitude may affect the penalty, it
may affect your punishment and a number of other things. In the spiritual life,
if you are glad about it, a millisecond later you are probably rehearsing it in
your mind again with joy so you haven't been in fellowship very long and it
hasn't done you much good. But the idea of confession is not that you have to
feel guilty about it, feel sorry for it, that you have to impress God with how
you feel about it, that is nothing more than works. It
simply means to admit, acknowledge your sin and God is faithful and just to forgive
us our sins. This means there are two categories of forgiveness. One category
of forgiveness has to do with what happens at the cross, there is judicial or
forensic forgiveness that is ours continuously because we are in union with
Christ, we have positional truth, we cannot lose that.
But then there is experiential forgiveness, related to
phase two and the use of 1John 1:9 and is related to phase two consequences.
Those consequences, in time related to the sins we commit. The believer cannot
sin with impunity. Just because we are saved does not mean there are no
consequences in time. If you commit murder you can be found guilty in a court
of law and you can be sentenced to death, and the bible teaches capital
punishment as part of the Noahic covenant and as long
as you see a rainbow in the sky after it rains, then the mandate that whoever
sheds man's blood, By man his blood shall be shed. That is still in effect. In
other words, capital punishment goes when the rainbow goes. But until then we
are to carry out capital punishment. God, in His omniscience, did indeed know
that men were fallible and would make mistakes in judicial procedure and that
human beings would imprison and find guilty and execute innocent people. But
that did not stop God from mandating that we are to carry out the procedure. So
the people that are a little too soft and a little too scared that people might
make a mistake have absolutely no ground to stand on without committing
blasphemy. Because if they think, God wouldn't do that, then they are forcing
God into their concept of God and that is blasphemy. Scripture says we have to
have capital punishment.
So even if you are a believer and you commit murder,
you are subject to all the consequences of that sin. But ten seconds after you
commit that murder, you can exercise 1 John 1:9 and you are forgiven, and in
terms of spiritual consequences, now you are going to have a certain amount of
suffering but that suffering is going to be converted into suffering for
blessing instead of suffering for discipline. This is what happened with David.
When David sinned with Bathsheba, you have adultery, the cover up, all kinds of
mental attitude sins and arrogance, a conspiracy to get Uriah murdered, this
whole complex of sins that were part of that. Even though God commuted the
death penalty because David committed a couple of sins that were punishable by
death according to the Mosaic Law, God intervened. Not a human judge, God
intervened and said, we will not apply the death
penalty this time. It was God's law, therefore He had
the right to make that decision. God said, the sentence is commuted, but David,
you will pay for it four fold. And David paid for it for the rest of his life.
He went through horrible events in his family. The child that was the product
of the adulterous relationship died, one of his sons committed incest with one
of his daughters. Another son, in order to execute vengeance for that, killed
the incestuous brother. Later, his favorite son Absalom lead
a rebellion against David and in the process Absalom was killed. David did not
get off scot free.
But because he confessed his sin, in Psalm 51 and was
back in fellowship, suffering for discipline was converted into suffering for
blessing. He was able to handle all that discipline on the basis of doctrine
and the faith rest drill so he could convert discipline into blessing and
advance spiritually on the that basis. Even though you still have consequences
you are forgiven spiritually and discipline is converted to suffering for
blessing. Don't confuse these two: phase one penalty and phase two penalty are
forgiveness one and forgiveness two. Forgiveness one has to do with verse 7,
and forgiveness two is experiential forgiveness on a day to
day basis in terms of our spiritual walk with the Lord Jesus Christ.
This has to happen because we are to walk in the light and when we walk in the
darkness something has to take place in order to transfer us back from that
experiential walking in darkness to walking in the light. That is done through
1John 1:9.
Let's go back to our passage in Ephesians 5 and start
tying some of these things together. We saw last time that there are various
absolute states mentioned here. We have the mandate in Ephesians 5:8 to
"live as children of light". Ephesians 5:9 gives
the consequences of walking in the light "for the fruit light consists in all
goodness, righteousness".
The result is: "light produces every kind of good". The goal of all
of this is the transformation of character. It is designed to produce in us the
character of Jesus Christ. That is the end result. The fruit of the light is
comparable to the fruit of the Holy Spirit as we will
see in this parallel between Ephesians 5 and Galatians 5.
Then we see a reminder of rebound or confession in
Ephesians 5:14, "awake sleeper and rise from the dead", that
is temporal death or carnality. Ephesians 5:15 "Therefore be
careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise". The unwise is the
fool in carnality, the wise is the believer operating on doctrine.
Ephesians 5:16 "making the most of your time,
because the days are evil."
Ephesians 5:17 "So then do not be foolish, but
understand what the will of the Lord is". It is either one or the other. It is
not a little bit of one and a little bit of the other.
Culminating in Ephesians 5:18 "And do not get
drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit".
So here we see that once we see that there are these
two states, light and darkness, and we have wisdom and foolishness, we have walking by means of the Spirit and the works of the flesh,
we have grace and law. We have walking by means of
faith and works.
Now we have a new concept. The new
concept called filling, the filling of the Holy Spirit. What exactly is this?
And how do we understand this? The term in the Greek uses the instrumental
dative of means. We are to be filled by means of the God the Holy Spirit. The
verb here is PLEROO. It means to fill up a deficiency. Well, what is that deficiency? The
deficiency is the vacuum in our souls caused by a lack of doctrine. What are we
filled with? The phrase, "filled with the spirit", is somewhat
ambiguous. Does that mean that the Spirit Himself fills us up, that He is the
content of the filling? That would have to be expressed in the Greek with the
genitive because the genitive expresses content. The dative expresses means.
The Holy Spirit is the dynamic that fills us with something.
We are going to have to take a little more time on
this and I am going to hit the high point right now. We are filled by means of
the Spirit and the content of the filling is doctrine. This is found in
Colossians 3:16 "Let the word of Christ richly dwell
within you".
So the Holy Spirit is the means and the content is
doctrine. And the result is going to be given by a descriptive genitive using
the Greek adjective PLERES. You can see there is a similarity in the root, it comes from the same root as PLEROO. And there is another Greek word that comes in here,
the verb PIMPLEMI. This word also has to do with being filled and they
are translated the same way in the English, yet they are two different word in the Greek and they refer to two different kinds of
filling. Failure to recognize that has lead to some real problems and confusion
in different points and so we are going to have to come back next time, in two
weeks and we will finish this aspect of our study of walking by the Spirit by
understanding what it means to be filled by means of God the Holy Spirit.