1 John 1:1-2:11 by Charles Clough
Series:1 John
Duration:50 mins 12 secs
© Charles A. Clough 2014
Charles A. Clough
1 John Series
Lesson 14 – Review of the Preamble
12 Jan 2014
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org
I’m going basically review where we’ve been and get back to flow of John’s argument here so we can then go into some new material next week.
(Opening prayer)
We’re going to get back to this slide [Slide 2] that we show again and again because it’s a map of how all thinking occurs. It doesn’t matter what country. It doesn’t matter what language. It doesn’t matter male or female. It doesn’t matter about upbringing. We are made and designed by God to construct the way we think this way. These are the layers I call my four-layer cake here. When you tamper with the two low layers here, when you deal with the change in metaphysics—just another example of another word for reality—your view of reality.
The second layer is your view of truth—how it exists, how you come to know it. Everybody has a view there. It’s not like this is some philosophy thing. Everybody is answering this question. What is your view of reality? What is your view of truth? And, the third layer up is what is your view of proper conduct? These are all interrelated. They’re not separate things.
Then up at the top you have your social issues, your political issues. Today unfortunately we live in society largely due to the secular education for the last fifty or sixty years that teaches us not to think through logically, not to think of these basic questions. The reason that secular education has to do that … I’m not arguing that they’ve failed in their job with their presuppositions of a neutral public education. By definition they can’t deal with these questions because if they dealt with these questions, they would have to discriminate one worldview against another. So, if you’re going to be not discriminating, the only way you can solve that problem as a teacher is to not deal with the problem.
So, we avoid this issue. By constantly avoiding it in first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, high school, middle school, college—by constantly avoiding these things, we’re used to not thinking about them. Unfortunately to deal with the Word of God and the gospel, we have to think about them, because the Word of God and the gospel are thinking about them.
That’s one of the problems we have to constantly go back to. Every group, every society—we circle those two bottom ones because that’s why in the Old Testament the major sin is idolatry. We kind of kiss it off and walk by.
When we hear the word idolatry we think, “Well, they made old statutes and sphinx and those kind of things back then and we don’t do that today, so we don’t have a problem with idolatry.”
Well, yes we do. Idolatry is a statement of how man constructs the answer to reality and the answer to truth. So we’re just as embedded in idolatry now as we ever have been. That’s the problem.
By falsely answering these two questions, then that contaminates everything above it. We think of a building. When you construct a building, the foundation is one of the key issues. Get the foundation measurements wrong for the foundation or build it out of the wrong materials and you’ve got a problem structurally. So, anybody that thinks of a house, thinks of a building …
Jack’s building the Social Security building down in Baltimore. They had to spend a lot of time and money on the foundation of that big building because everything else hangs on that. So, you get that picture in your mind. That’s what we’re talking about here.
That’s why you can’t deal with these questions up here if you can’t deal with the questions down here. That’s why we’re so ill equipped to deal with these other issues and why our discussions are so trivial in the media, blogs, Twitter, and so forth. John confronts that.
Next slide please [Slide 3]. These are those three questions. So again, when you see this map, ask yourself when we read 1 John—how does John answer these questions? If you’ll keep disciplining your thinking in peppering the text of Word of God with these three questions over and over and over, it forces you to observe in the text the power of the Word of God.
It unleashes the power of the Word of God because now you’re getting answers where you realize, “Wow, if I’m reading this correctly this puts me at total odds with 90 percent of my education. The kind of answers I’m getting out of the text here put me in a tremendously powerful conflict with the world around me.”
So, in the metaphysical—what is reality? It’s the Creator/creature distinction. That is fundamental. You can’t answer the question about what reality is if you don’t start with the Creator/creature distinction.
NKJ Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created …”
He preexisted the universe.
Then we have the truth question. How do we get that? Because, it’s anchored. It has to be anchored in omniscience. We’re finite. A finite mind cannot create an absolute truth. We have to have an infinite mind necessary to construct any universal or any absolute truth. So we just have to do that. And, the only other answer is out here.
Ethical is God’s holiness. His character defines the rule of proper conduct. This is His universe. He created it. We’re His property. We are created for Him. His character sets the standard for conduct rules. Conduct rules cannot be created by a human authority. They can make laws. They can make regulations; but they can’t make an ethically based conduct.
Then we come back to this view that we’ve seen again and again. There are only two kinds of answers, so this is a relief in one sense. We don’t have to know 57 different philosophies or anything else. All answers to those three questions fall into one of two categories. So, we don’t have to be students of every school and denomination or every philosopher or every religion.
If we have this map in our minds, this enables us to come to any religion, any philosophy, any worldview and find out what it is because now we know what questions to ask that worldview. When we come to religion XYZ, we remember. These are three basic questions. What are the answers that this religion or worldview gives to basic questions? This is kind of an internal quiz methodology that you can use to think these things through.
The bottom-line here besides these big ideas—here are the big ideas. These are the tremendous things that separate the Bible from our surrounding culture. It’s these ideas that you can’t be neutral about. No one can be neutral. This is the fallacy again of a secular education that thinks you can be neutral. You can’t be neutral. You have to come down on one side or the other.
One of my sons is having a dialogue with his congressmen over this issue of discrimination. He had written a letter to the congressman and got one of the boiler plate things that you always get back from the congressman every time you ask him a question.
The question said, “Well, I am for ending discrimination in marriage.”
Now that sounds so high and ethical. So my son deconstructed it and sent him back a letter.
“Congressman, you are not ending discrimination in marriage. You are changing the targets of whom you discriminate against. Before you were discriminating against the homosexual agenda. You have discriminated against that by law. Now you’ve changed the law and you discriminate against Christians who want to live out their Christian faith in their business. So, don’t tell me you’re ending discrimination. You can’t. Any law discriminates. It discriminates against those who keep the law and those who disobey the law. So, don’t come up with this jazz about you’re going to end discrimination. You can’t end discrimination. You can’t any more end discrimination than you can end breathing because you need oxygen.”
So this is one of the fallacies.
“Well, I’m going to end discrimination.”
And everybody says, “That’s so good!”
It’s ridiculous! The question to ask is which kind of discrimination are you ending? But that’s never asked. So that’s what I mean by the fact that the conversations up at that social political level are very, very trite and trivial, and frankly irrational because we’re not coming to grips with the basics.
John has his argument in 1 John 1:1–4. He’s going to have a flow here. He’s building his entire letter on the biblical worldview. It’s not going to make sense to anybody that comes to this text with a worldly worldview. So, he starts out and he gives you verses one and two. He says this is sharing eternal life.
What I want to do for review purposes today is in your handout we go through the concepts of John because concepts are the things we use to think with. We can’t get to answers if we don’t think toward the answers. What we want to do here is we want to understand what John means when he uses these words.
The first concept that we have to come to grips with is not what we think he’s saying; but what does John mean when uses the word eternal life. He uses this word in a slightly different way than Paul.
Now John is not in conflict with Paul. Paul is emphasizing the future. When he speaks of eternal life, he’s talking about how we affect our eternal life by our behavior. So, Paul’s looking forward in time when he uses eternal life. John however is thinking about something a little different. John is thinking about the possession of eternal life here and now. We trust in Jesus Christ and we get life now.
So now we have to say, “Well, what is this life that we get?”
Well, it’s not perfect health. We still are mortal beings in fallen bodies. We still get sick and die. So that can’t be the eternal life that we are getting. What is the eternal life that we’re getting? He defines it in his Gospel in several places. But here if you’ll notice in verse 2, he gives us his view of eternal life.
He says:
NKJ 1 John 1:2, “the life was manifested, …”
The life, the life I’m talking about—eternal life.
“and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life.”
And here’s the clause. This clause gives you a clue on how he is very particular about what this eternal life looks like.
He says
NKJ 1 John 1:2, “the life was manifested, …”
So historically we saw it. It was revealed in Jesus.
“and we have seen, and bear witness,”
Present tense. Which, by the way, the word “bear witness” or testify tells you what when you hear someone say, “Well, the church had its own kind of spin. These men were thinking these things up and we question the inerrancy of Scripture.”
What moral problem, what moral ethical problem, does that view immediately present? Think of yourself. You’ve been on jury duty. Here’s somebody in the stand testifying. What’s the issue that the lawyers are going after the one who’s testifying? What’s the issue in the courtroom when that happens? Is he telling the truth? If he’s up in the witness stand and he’s trying to testify, that’s critical for the decision-making going on in the court. So, if this really is testifying, the verb testify connotes the fact that I must be asserting the truth.
Furthermore, the Christians who are writing the New Testament are Jewish people and in Judaism you have Ten Commandments. What’s the ninth commandment? Anybody know the 9th commandment?
NKJ Exodus 20:16, “You shall not commit perjury …”
So, if the apostles in fact are Jewish monotheists subscribing to the 9th commandment and they claim to be testifying and they’re creating falsehood, we’ve got a moral problem within the Jewish community. This is kind of a high crime here.
So, he says:
NKJ 1 John 1:2, “… and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was …”
Look at this clause or phrase. This phrase—where was this? See eternal life. It was with the Father, meaning that this eternal life comes out of the Trinity. This eternal life is something we are sharing with whatever is going on between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Well, they don’t have physical bodies. The Son does now. But what would have been going on before Jesus was up topside with the Father and Holy Spirit? It was their personal relationship. The Father was eternally loving the Son. The Son was eternally loving the Father. The Father was loving the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was loving—six or seven different relationships going on within the Trinity. That is what John is talking about when he’s talking about eternal life.
Now you say, “Well, how do we share that? That’s a divine characteristic.”
Well, it is. What does Genesis 1 tell us about how we were created? We are created in the image of God. Since we are created in God’s image, we have some capability, some built-in creation capacity to share that relationship.
(Question)
The question is: did Christ create us with that purpose in mind? The answer is given by a church father, Tertullian. In one of his commentaries Tertullian is dealing with problems in his day in church history. And Tertullian says—he has this great word picture—“When God was in Genesis and He stooped down to work with the earth He was looking down the corridors of time when He would have to incarnate Himself in this being.”
So that tells you about the human being is sufficiently designed, designed with sufficient capacity to reflect this. Of course, we get boogered images of this because we’re all fallen beings and we all have our sins and our warts. But when we are resurrected, that’s when we’ll see the full design emerge. People will say, “Wow!”
See the worldview that we got here. You’re not getting that in your secular education. You’re not getting that in the culture. It’s not on Discovery Channel. It’s only in the Word of God where you discover these kinds of things. So that’s eternal life.
Then, in 1 John 1:3–4—fellowship. That’s the next concept. Fellowship is what I share and since we already know the thing that we are sharing is eternal life and yes you can’t share it unless you’re saved. That’s true. But for John the concept of fellowship is a concept that has to do with our sanctification.
If you think in the terms of the Christian life, there are three parts. Again, this is an aid to vocabulary, an aid to thinking. Justification, sanctification, and glorification—those are the theological terms for that. Some teachers have taught, and this is simple—phase 1, phase 2, phase 3 of salvation. John is talking about phase 2. He is talking about from the time we are saved until the time we exit this life. During this time, we have fellowship. The problem in the book is John is writing because if you turn to chapter 2 and you look at verse 28. This is one of the pivotal verses we’ll see later on.
NKJ 1 John 2:28, “And now, little children, abide in Him, that when He appears, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming.”
Okay, hear the verb shrink away from him? There’s a threat that John is talking about. It is that when we are not in fellowship with God we are not, so to speak, increasing the quality of our life such that if Christ were to appear we would be ashamed. He’s talking to believers. This is not unsaved people. This is all believers.
So, there is a threat. The threat is, as we will see, as we move further in the book, the threat is that by adhering to the false teachers, by getting deflected and screwed up with what these people are teaching, you’re going to harm the quality of your own eternal life and be ashamed before Christ. This is why this is a serious issue for John. It’s not just, “Well, I can be in fellowship or not.” It’s the fact that he’s saying this has implications when we are finally judged by Christ for our life, what we did with what He gave us. That’s going to be the argument.
Now we come to 1 John 1:5–7 and we deal with the light and darkness issue. In the light and darkness thing, we look at the arguments that we’ve covered so far and in 1 John 1:5 through 1 John 2:2 he’s talking about fellowship with the Father. Remember John is very much a Trinitarian. We have nuances to our fellowship with God, our fellowship with the Son, our fellowship with the Holy Spirit. There are nuances here. He starts with the Father. With the Father he’s emphasizing the Father’s nature, the Father’s integrity, because this is the anchor. Going back to the chart, the anchor here is the Creator/creature distinction. We’re answerable. His nature determines things.
So if we can have the next slide please [Slide 4]. Here’s the flow of John’s argument. Right here, we haven’t gotten to 1 John 2:12 yet, but we started that. We’ll get to that next week. But notice in this section, fellowship with God the Father at His holy integrity. That’s our contact point with the Father. That has implications which he’s now going to deal with in verses 5 through the end of chapter 1.
Then with Christ, the fellowship with the Son, he emphasizes our point of contact with the Son has more to do with what He told us to do, keeping His commandments. Then, very interesting, here is what the contact point with the Holy Spirit seems to be, John thinks, in terms of what the Holy Spirit’s doing in our fellow believers. We’ll see that.
So right now we’re dealing with the light and the darkness and if we can have the next slide [Slide 3]. This goes back to a fundamental position about the Bible. Again, there is no neutrality here. You have to take sides. You’re on one side of the fence or you’re on the other side of the fence. In our view of good and evil in the Bible, there is a tremendous difference from the pagan view. The pagan view is locked in concrete to the fact that good and evil will be ever present. There is no relief within unbelief for salvation from evil. You go to the Hindu views. You go to the people who have really thought this through as unbelievers.
They’ll tell you. Bertrand Russell—what does Bertrand Russell say in 1903? Here’s the leading mathematician of the 20th century speaking, and he says, “All of humanity’s achievement will be extinguished in the vast death of the solar system.”
There is no relief from natural and human evil on an unbelieving basis.
My mother used to tell me that, “Well son, you’ve made your bed, now you sleep in it.”
That’s the way that people decide. If we want to reject the Scriptures and reject Jesus; okay, you have the freedom to do that; but that’s your destiny. That’s what you have to live in. Very pleasant worldview, isn’t it? From the Christian point of view we are radically different. We have a God from eternity to eternity that is unchangingly immutable good. He’s never compromised. His nature is never compromised.
Then we have the Creation, the created good. Then we have the Fall here. That little interval between the act of Creation and the act of the Fall proves that evil is not necessary to Creation. It shows that you can conceive of a material reality with human bodies as ours are with no sickness, no disease, and no evil. That is conceptually possible because it existed once, briefly; but it did exist between the time of Creation and the time of the Fall.
(Question)
That’s a question Mike asking about—was Jesus’ body corruptible. That’s a whole other deep topic because of the fact in Hebrews it says:
NKJ Hebrews 4:15, “… but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.”
But how could He be tempted in all points as we if He didn’t share hunger and so forth? Obviously His body must have been fundamentally different because He didn’t have a sin nature. And, He gave His life up. The answer would tend to be—you can’t generalize about Him being exactly like us that way. He was like us though enough so that His temptations were real. That has to be protected because if Jesus’ temptations were not real, then He’s not the model of the Christian life. He doesn’t get off the hook because He was God. He had to suffer just like we have to suffer. The big thing here is and this is people—we get apologetic as Christians.
“Oh, you believe in Heaven and Hell.”
Well, of course I do. Got any other solutions to good and evil? It’s precisely our belief in Heaven and Hell that gives us this eternal quarantine between good and evil that will never fall again. That’s why we have a Lake of Fire. That’s why we have resurrection unto damnation as well as resurrection unto salvation or unto redemption.
There are two resurrections here. Everybody gets resurrected. The question is what kind of resurrection are we talking about? It’s necessary. It’s part of a whole package deal here. You don’t get a solution to good and evil. Right now, good and evil coexist just like down here. The difference is it’s bracketed between the time of the Fall and the time of the judgment.
So, in our biblical worldview we have hope. We have hope that one day things will be metaphysically different because God’s salvation package and good and evil will be perpetually separated once again.
So, we have that. That means that reality and now we come back to this question. That’s why if you follow in the handout, reality—remember this is a basic question everybody asks this; everybody answers this. Maybe sloppy answers, but everybody answers this. A child begins to answer this. Why when a little child—and you’ve all had the experience as parents—what’s one of the first things they do?
“That’s not fair Mommy?”
Well, that’s interesting. How come the kid has a conscience that’s already working? Here you have a child philosophically naïve as can be and they’re already talking about moral absolutes. They’re already judging their reality.
“Mommy, it’s not fair.”
Well, that’s good news that they’re doing that. I mean it can be kind of pesky for parents. But the point still is that that’s good news that in that little child, the circuits are working. They are right. There is a universe. The debate is whether that was unfair or not. But the fact of unfairness is good news. Conscience is working—fully functional child. That’s the background of evil.
Next slide. We come back to the fact that when we answer reality that way, then we get different answers. In the outline you follow. What John’s position here is is that we’re the Creator/creature thing, order doesn’t spontaneously arise out of chaos. We’re not in an eternally suffering situation. Our knowledge is different. Our knowledge base is different here. Why is it different? Because we have revelation. Man is created as a namer.
Here’s a little thing that I’ve mentioned to some students who take environmental courses. If you want to infuriate the professor, make the assertion that nature was created for man. Watch the reaction because modern environmentalism says man was created for nature. Man is supposed to take care of nature.
Well yeah, he is supposed to take care of nature; but that’s because he’s created for God. God tells him to create nature, take care of it. There’s the difference. See! This difference pops up all over the place. Nature was created for man. Man is the namer and the manager of nature. Nature is not to manage man. Man is to manage nature.
This cuts right into the whole issue of environmental regulations today. It’s not that we’re against environmental regulations; but when they’re so stupid where they penalize people like a UCLA study that says don’t have kids because they’re going to add to the CO2 load of the atmosphere. We’ve got a problem there.
We say, “No, have as many kids as you want. Genesis 1 says be fruitful and multiply so I’m going to be fruitful and multiply, CO2 or not.”
The Lord will take care of that; but God tells us to be fruitful and multiply. We’re not supposed to stop production population-wise because of some environmentalist alarmist. In fact, the earth is not being overpopulated.
Somebody did a calculation. You could take every person in the world today—all the billions of people—put them in an 18 foot by 18 foot square and they’d all fit in the state of Kansas. So come on, the world is not overpopulated. Just drive out to the plains of North America and you can see it’s not overpopulated. The reason you have serious problems of overpopulation is not due to lack of resources. It’s political corruption.
Remember when Erin Wilson gave her paper here three of four missionary conferences ago? I pestered her for two years to give her essay. She won an award from the Wall Street Journal when she was in college out here. Erin had done an essay. The title of her essay was “When Medicine Turns to Poison, a Story of Aid to Africa.” She did a tremendous work in that paper—did a lot of research. The end result of her paper was—she had a great quote from Economist Magazine.
With all the western nations giving billions and billions of dollars to Africa, only 20 cents of every dollar ever wound up with the people. Do you wonder why there’s poverty in that? It has nothing to do with lack of resources. They have plenty of natural resources. Do you know who knows that Africa has natural resources right now? Do you know who’s buying up the natural resources right now? China. Chinese aren’t going in and buying into Africa because there are no resources there. They know darn well there are plenty of resources there.
Another illustration—Nigeria is producing all kinds of oil. So has North Dakota. Which one has poverty and which one has peace? They have the same resources don’t they? What’s the difference between North Dakota and Nigeria? Corruption.
So, the sob story that we are suddenly running into poverty is nonsense. We’re running into corruption. That’s the problem. North Dakota has a stable government influenced by historical Christianity. Nigeria is sitting there with Islam and paganism; and they’re having all kinds of problems. Is the oil different in Nigeria than it is in North Dakota? Of course not.
(Question)
Mike was just pointing out a financial news report how there are dying civilizations right now on the planet. I have a Japanese daughter-in-law. Her nation has such a poor birth rate that they will probably never recover economically. Japan is dying because they refuse to have children.
China is in another odd way for years and years … Only a PhD or a dictator could be this stupid. In China they had a rule that said you could only have male babies. So, girl babies were chucked. Every time you see Laura and Mike Devine with the three little Chinese girls. You know all three little Chinese girls were Chinese throwaways. Look at what Laura and Mike are doing with three Chinese throwaway girls. And guess what. Now China has a problem. They don’t have enough girls to marry their guys. Ooh! That’s a tough problem, isn’t it? See that’s the consequences of political stupidity. Then we blame it somehow on humanity. It’s not humanity. It’s just stupid people.
So, John is talking about sin here. In 1 John 1:5 he’s saying he has three things about sin, three responses. Next slide [Slide 3]—the three responses. The first response is in verse 8. Here the Father’s nature is perfect light in whom there is no darkness.
But then John says:
NKJ 1 John 1:8, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”
So, there’s the end of any arrogance that we can possibly have about our moral character. He says:
NKJ 1 John 1:8, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,”
This is why the Bible has these passages over and over again and we use them.
We’re having communion today and one of the things that we usually read at our communion service is 1 Corinthians 11. If you turn there to 1 Corinthians 11:28 … Churches back in the days when we had more liturgies … those of you who come out of a Catholic background you’re familiar with liturgy. Episcopalian background or Lutheran background—you’ve been there. Liturgies can become dead because you recite them all the time and get used to them. The men who set up many of those liturgies were godly men and they were trying to in the [church] services have people understand that you don’t come waltzing into the presence of God without an awareness of your sin.
So in 1 Corinthians 11:28 we read:
NKJ 1 Corinthians 11:28, “But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
29 “For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.
30 “For this reason many are weak and sick among you, and many sleep.”
Now that last clause is talking about consequences. It talks about health consequences. It’s fascinating that the Scriptures do that a lot. You can see it in Psalm 32
NKJ Psalm 32:1, “… Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, Whose sin is covered.”
This is David talking from personal experience.
NKJ Psalm 32:2, “Blessed is the man to whom the LORD does not impute iniquity, And in whose spirit there is no deceit.
NKJ Psalm 32:3, “When I kept silent,”
In other words, he was here, and he was basically denying that he had to deal with his sin. He says:
NKJ Psalm 32:3, “When I kept silent, my bones grew old …”
Of course, we know medically we know that the bones are the source of your blood. They’re the source of stem cells. They’re the source of all kinds of things. So he’s saying:
“my bones grew old”
In other words, they were rotting. In other words, “My health is going downhill.”
NKJ Psalm 32:3, “When I kept silent, my bones grew old Through my groaning all the day long.
4 “For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me;”
Now if that isn’t describing a health problem, I don’t know what is. Then he says the same thing in Psalm 139. That psalm is the warning about this. This is one of the verses that is often cited in those old liturgies. I think the Lutheran Church had this. The Episcopalian Church had it. The Roman Catholic Church has had this.
NKJ Psalm 139:23, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me, and know my anxieties;
24 “And see if there is any wicked way in me, And lead me in the way everlasting.”
That was considered to be fundamental to worship. You don’t worship God without self-examination because you’re coming to One who is all light and in whom is no darkness at all. So that’s the first reaction.
The response to the enlightenment—presuming now we’ve advanced, now we’re going to do a self-examination. 1 John 1:9 is fundamental. That’s why in those ancient liturgies there was always a confession. Now we would debate how the confession was done. But, at least it was a confession.
NKJ 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
That’s God’s grace. You’ll notice the terms of forgiveness are not pledges. The terms of forgiveness are not contingent upon us being good boys and good girls and claiming that we’re going to do great things for God to get forgiven. All it is is acknowledging that we are sinners. Then:
“He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins …”
(Question)
Joel brings up the theological side of this. This is not psychotherapy for our feelings. There is a deeper issue here. Joel just introduced the thought that now comes up in 1 John 2:1–2. Look what happens in verses one and two. Read verses one and two and think about what a psychiatrist would say about verses one and two.
Here’s somebody that has a problem. They’re going to psychotherapy and there’s a big discussion about this and that and my mother dropped me on my head when I was a baby and so I’m excused and so forth. We’ve got all this stuff; but when we deal with the fact that we’ve got a sin problem here—it comes in all varieties. It could be mental attitude sins. It could be overt sins, behavior. Okay, we confess our sins. 1 John 1:10 says if the Holy Spirit puts His finger on something in our lives and we try to excuse ourselves, we’ve got a problem. But now look at verses one and two of chapter 2. Here we go topside.
Now the issue is, he says:
NKJ 1 John 2:1, “… these things I write to you, so that you may not sin.”
But he said:
“And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
2 “And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins …”
Anybody know what the word “propitiate” means, the content of that word? Satisfy. Who is it we’re trying to please? Ourselves or God? Well, if He is light in whom there is no darkness at all, we have to please Him. But, how do we as sinners please Him? We need something that pleases Him, and the only thing that pleases Him is perfect righteousness. Where do we get that but Jesus Christ?
So verses one and two give that 5th dimension. We don’t live just in four dimensions—space: length, width, height, and time. We live in a five-dimensional universe whereas this unseen realm that we know very little about but going back to what Joel brought up, over and over in Scripture the theme in the fifth dimension ultimately is not even redemption. The theme is doxological defense of God’s character.
Satan is never going to be saved. The angels aren’t saved. Redemption doesn’t happen in the fifth dimension. Redemption only happens down here.
Well, what’s going on there? That’s part of the creation, the universe. There is a doxological argument that is going on in Heaven all the time between Satan, which means the accuser, who is constantly accusing God of the way He is running the world and he’s nitpicking things; and he’s bringing case after case after case to attack the integrity of God’s character.
This is why the salvation of Jesus Christ is crucial. It’s also why we Christians down here have to follow the Word of God because we don’t know what’s going on. We’ve got an instruction manual here, an instruction manual written by someone who knows what’s going on in the fifth dimension. So, we have to pay attention because we don’t know what’s going on in the fifth dimension. All we know is things like—I give you that Bible reference in the handout—things like Luke 22 where you can read and see Jesus was overhearing a conversation going on up there before the throne. He warns Peter.
“Hey Peter, Satan is talking about you and he wants permission to go after you. So I pray for you,” Jesus said, “so that after the trial, after you screw up and do all the rest of the stuff, you’ll recover. Your faith won’t end; and you’ll be serving the Lord.”
What’s that dialogue all about? I mean wouldn’t we be shocked if Jesus came to us and said, “An hour ago Satan was talking to Us about you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you—before God.”
“Before the God of the universe? I was in the conversation?”
“Yeah.”
That’s what Luke 22 is saying. That kind of stuff goes on. How do we conceive of that? Very, very difficult.
Then he goes on. This is fellowship with the Father. We said last time—we talked about “we know Him” in verses three to five in your outline. John 14:10—that is the issue with Christ is are we keeping His commandments? The word we went through keeping meaning “honor His commandments”—what we said …
Next slide [Slide 4]. We’re down here in verses three to eight, fellowship with the Son over His commandments. Next slide [Slide 5]. This is what the historians do and this is what we can’t do. You read some novel, some religious novel about something—what’s out there now on the bestseller list, or you see a program on Discovery Channel or something like that. Here’s what they do to Jesus. They separate the historical Jesus and some of them who are very magnanimous will agree that He existed (nice of them to agree to that)—that He existed some time in the first century; but then when they talk about Christ, notice the word Jesus Christ. Christ is the religious interpretation of who this Jesus was.
Their argument inevitably is the church put a spin to the Jewish carpenter. So they separate the human being Jesus from this divine Christ. These two are separated. But the point is that we don’t. And that’s what John says. We keep His commandments as if the Father was speaking those same literal words. So this is why John 14:10 says:
NKJ John 14:10, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works.”
“I am giving those disciples Your words.”
That’s the impact of this section of John. Do we accord the authority of Jesus’ literal words as though God Himself, the Father, would speak as He did at Sinai? That’s honoring Christ. That’s what it means there to keep His commandments.
Then finally that last section—go back one slide [Slide 4]—that last section nine to ten - the Holy Spirit is never mentioned here. But if you look at those verses, notice where he says in verse 9:
NKJ 1 John 2:9, “He who says he is in the light,”
That is, he claims to be in fellowship.
“and hates his brother, is in darkness until now.”
We said last time—we went through that. The idea here is the Holy Spirit has invested time and work in a believer. Now we may not like that person. The personality of that person may grate us. That person may have sin patterns that are offensive to us because our sin patterns are over here. Their sin patterns are over there. We can get spiritual king of the mountain going saying, “Well, my sin isn’t as bad as your sin,” kind of thing.
No. Sins are there. Personality conflicts are there. The idea here is that the Holy Spirit has regenerated that person. The Holy Spirit is working with that person. Are you as one who in whom the Holy Spirit is also working; are you on the same team? Yes, he’s a sinner. God accepted him just like He accepted you, like He accepted me. So are we going to be concerned with him because both that person and me, we both live in a hostile universe under fire? If you’ve been in the military, you know what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the fact you don’t let your buddies down.
Want to go see a movie? Go see Lone Survivor. You get a sense of the fact that when guys are shooting you, don’t go off and leave your buddies. That’s why one of the great problems we’ve got today, one of the crises, is this Benghazi thing because if somebody gave the command of standing down to help rescue those people under fire, that is a break in the precedent of the United States of America that has never been seen before. You don’t tell soldiers whose buddies are dying that you can’t go rescue them.
That’s the thinking of political idiots. That is not the thinking of people who know what real combat is like. So that’s the issue here. The Christian thing in these last few verses the fellowship of the Holy Spirit is being loyal and faithful and helping out your buddies because they are under fire like you and me. We’re under fire. That sums up the thing on 1 John review.
Next Sunday we’re going to start new material and get now into the conflict. All this has been John telling us how to stay in fellowship. This is basic training, how to use your weapon. Now he’s going to move into the area of combat itself.
(Ending prayer)