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1 John 2:15-17 by Charles Clough
Series:1 John
Duration:49 mins 23 secs
© Charles A. Clough 2014
Charles A. Clough
1 John Series
Lesson 18 – The Purpose: Am I Following Trusting the Strategy of Envelopment as an “Indirect Strategy” to Resist the Cosmos?
09 Feb 2014
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org
Today we’re going to finish up the section from 1 John 2:15–17, which is the section on the cosmos. But again, not to lose the forest for the trees, particularly with this epistle because people have said 1 John has no inner organization to it. It just seemed to be random writing. We want to review to capture the flow in this epistle. So let’s turn to 1 John 1; and we’ll skim again through, concentrating on the flow toward the passage that we want to finish today.
(Opening prayer)
We’ve looked at the sections of John and clearly it’s talking about fellowship; and fellowship is not the same word as salvation in the sense of getting saved. Fellowship is that which consists of our relationship with the Lord after we’re saved until we die. There’s a time gap in there. If we can divide the salvation plan in three parts—part one, part two, part three. Part one [phase 1] is when we trust the Lord. That’s the moment of regeneration. Part 2 or phase 2 extends from that moment until the time we die. Phase 3 is our eternal existence in Heaven.
Those three phases of salvation actually have different protocols and different ways of living. So, John is concentrating on the fellowship aspect—that is from the time we are saved until the time we die. What happens in that time interval? He addresses that. As we’ve said over and over and over again and we’ll say it again that the vocabulary that this man is using in this letter, that vocabulary actually is not original to John. When you read for example Paul’s writing the New Testament, that’s Paul’s vocabulary.
Scholars have observed that John is using the very vocabulary Jesus used. That’s why some have speculated John was one of the younger men who was working with Jesus and as often young men do, they tend to mimic somebody they really appreciate. John appears to speak and write with the vocabulary he learned from Jesus.
With this epistle, the vocabulary he’s using is very clearly the vocabulary of Jesus in the Upper Room Discourse. From the Gospel of John chapter 14, chapter 15, chapter 16—those three chapters contain all the key words in this epistle. That means again that this was addressed to believers. There were no unbelievers at the Upper Room Discourse. Judas Iscariot had left, so it was 100 percent believers that were being addressed by Jesus.
John starts out in 1 John 1:1–4. Again, verse 1 as I prayed as we opened today, verse 1 of this epistle is so important because it claims we are face-to-face with an eyewitness. John goes to the extent as we have said. Look at the verbs. There are four verbs here in this verse. If you track these four verbs, they’re all verbs of eyewitness. Look at the first one.
NKJ 1 John 1:1, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life–”
There’s the ear gate. We’ve heard Jesus. Jesus spoke in Koine [Greek]. He probably spoke in Aramaic. So whatever it was, Aramaic or Greek, John said, “I heard Him. I heard Him in my language.”
Jesus is God Incarnate and He partook of a human body and He partook of human language and He could be heard.
Then look at the second verb. After he says we have heard, what’s the next verb? We have seen. Then he adds just to emphasize the point:
“we have seen”
“which we have seen with our eyes”
It’s not we’re seeing by somebody else’s eyes.
Then look at the third verb.
“which we have looked upon”
The Greek word here is a word which means to gaze for an extended period of time, to study. So it’s not just a casual “I just saw something.” This is something I watched this and I watched Him and I watched Him and I watched Him.
Then the fourth one—look at this one. How many senses does John say he used? The eye gate, the ear gate, and the sense of touch. We touched Him. We handled Him. We shook hands with Him. We hugged Him. That’s so important. That sets the tone of the entire epistle. We are here in the year 2014 talking to a person or having him talk to us in this piece of literature, a man who lived in AD 30. That’s the time crunch; and that’s the time collapse. So we’re taking back then.
Then we have said as we’ve gone through this from 1 John 1:5–2:2 we have this discourse. In this discourse John, remember he’s thinking in terms of the Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From 1 John 1:5–2:2, the emphasis is on the Father and upon His nature. That’s why, notice in verse 5, what he says. He says:
NKJ 1 John 1:5, “… that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.”
In the Greek language there’s a tack on to this sentence—no, none at all. John is fighting with something in the culture that’s bothering these Christians. So we have to infer there must be something where they’re compromising the idea of moral purity and holiness because John is making a point in 1 John 1:5. He says there are no impurities in God.
So there’s that emphasis. This is God’s nature. We’ve said as we’ve skimmed through 1 John 2:2 into our relationship. This is why in 1 John 1:9—skip down to verse 9 and you’ll see that’s what he wants us to do. This is the reality test. The greatest reality for us as believers is the nature of God. It’s not the latest Gallup Poll. I don’t personally care what the latest percent of people think and what they believe. That’s irrelevant. What we should care about is what our God thinks and His nature. This is what Paul says in Romans 3:
NKJ Romans 3:4, “… let God be true but every man a liar.”
That’s the answer to the Gallup Poll. Paul is saying there, even if 100 percent of people disagree, it’s ultimately irrelevant. What’s relevant is the character of God. So this sets us with the thing that we have to come into harmony with. That’s why he says in 1 John 1:8 just prior to 1 John 1:9—what does he say we’ve done if we say we have no sin? We what? We deceive ourselves. We’re living in fantasyland. The biblical view of reality is God’s character. Denial of that character—that’s fantasyland.
Our culture is exactly reversed. The culture says that religion is a fantasy; but we are living in the real world where there’s good and evil and so forth and so on. So that’s walking in the light.
Then in 1 John 2:12–14, as we started in that, there’s a triad again in the text where he says:
NKJ 1 John 2:12, “I write to you, little children, Because your sins are forgiven you for His name's sake.”
[Slide 2] What I’ve done here is to say that … the relationship with the Father is one of a child. It’s childlike. So, before the Father’s nature we all, no matter how old we are as adults, in that relationship we function much as children do. We’re coming to our heavenly Father, our daddy. This is His character. You think of the prodigal son and so forth that way.
We come to the second one now. Now our relationship with the Son … That begins in 1 John 2:3–8. Notice again to review. Look at verse 3. 1 John 2:3 is saying:
NKJ 1 John 2:3, “Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.”
The first verb “know” is used twice, but it changes tense. The first verb occurrence “by this we know” is present tense. That is, we know it now. The second time you see the verb “know” that is a perfect tense. What is the difference between a perfect tense and a present tense? The present tense is “I am”. A perfect tense means “I have come” or “I have done this”. The way this verse reads—by this we now come to know Him. So this is evaluating our state of fellowship.
NKJ 1 John 2:3, “Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.”
That leads us to our relationship to God as the Son is a little different relationship to God as the Father. The Father has never become incarnate. He’s never been observed. It’s the Son that’s observed. So the Son’s observations and what He’s taught us, those are commandments. That’s the Bible. That’s the revelation of the Scriptures. So our relationship with that is as John says later in verse 13, it’s like a father perspective.
Now what’s the difference between a child and father? The father has a larger perspective. He’s lived longer. Teenagers of course go through this stage we’ve all gone through this phase. Their parents are idiots from the time they’re 15 to the time they’re 30. But by the time they are 30, our parents become very brilliant again. Why is that? That’s because we’ve made mistakes.
I’ve often said to younger people that the only difference between younger Christians and older Christians is s that we adults banged our heads against the walls more times than you have. If you listen to us, we can save you some bruises. So the father has a longer perspective. That has to do interestingly with our relationship with the Son.
John says here in verse 13,
NKJ 1 John 2:13, “I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.”
Now what’s that? That’s talking about the Son. The Son, remember how John starts his Gospel?
NKJ John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
That’s the Second Person he’s talking about from the beginning. Now how do you know He’s from the beginning? What beginning of what? The beginning of Creation? The beginning of revelation? That would imply what he’s saying here is:
NKJ 1 John 2:13, “I write to you, fathers,”
That is to you believers. In your relationship with the Son, it’s a relationship through the whole corpus of revelation. We think too often of Jesus just as New Testament. But Jesus is the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, that was operational in the Old Testament. Jesus is YHWH. YHWH is the manifestation in the Old Testament of the Father. The manifestation of the Father is the Son. So, it’s the word that is in the Old Testament as well as the Word Incarnate in the New Testament.
When he says:
NKJ 1 John 2:13, “I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.”
Putting these two things together, our relationship with the Son—our relationship with Jesus—we respect His commandments. That’s the word “keep”—respect, focus on. We respect His commandments as though He’s the God of the Old Testament. We respect Him.
When a million people, 2 or 3 million people were sitting there at the base of Mt. Sinai and they heard in Hebrew the ten words—not a 2,500-page piece of legislation that nobody read before they voted on it. We’re talking here about ten words—ten. That was the core of an entire national constitution all done in ten words, ten sentences. That’s how efficient that communication was.
Those ten words are sufficient from which to derive every single piece of social policy. All it takes is the very corps of ten words, the ten words which are no longer legally allowed in courtrooms.
So here we have the relationship with the Son as a daddy. To have a relationship with the Son we need to keep His commandments. To keep His commandments we have to know what the commandments are. His commandments are the very words of God, which includes the Old Testament.
Then finally in 1 John 2:9–10, he doesn’t mention the Holy Spirit in verses 9–10. He mentions loving the brethren. We said when we worked through this that you’ll notice that he’s not talking about loving the world. God loves the world. He died for the sins of the world, yes. This is a particular kind of love. It’s a loyalty to other believers.
Later when in 1 John 2:13–14 he speaks of our relationship with the Holy Spirit, our relationship to the Holy Spirit as a young man, warrior age, with others in common danger.
So here we have the body of Christ and our loyalty is to one another as believers because all of us are living in a world that is intensely hostile to everything we believe. So, we’re like soldiers.
It’s a good military analogy because in a combat unit—that is until we had Benghazi. In a combat unit when you’re under fire, you’re covering for your buds. You don’t allow the enemy to capture your wounded and dead brother or sister. So, there’s an intense loyalty in that situation. That’s the same kind of thing he’s talking about here. That kind of loyalty comes about when you’re in hostile territory.
So that’s why if you’ll look in chapter 2—notice in verse 14 how he addresses the young men. He says:
NKJ 1 John 2:14, “I have written to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I have written to you, young men, Because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, And you have overcome the wicked one.”
Clearly there’s a conflict going on here. From Satan’s point of view and the principalities and the powers of this world, every one of us who has trusted in Jesus Christ is an insurgent. We are in essence core rebels against the cosmos. Now the cosmos is in rebellion against God. These are the nuances that John has spoken of.
On the handout you’ll see at the very top of it, there’s the outline. There’s the schema of John’s argument. John does have an argument. Remember we’ve said when we started this Epistle one commentator wrote that very misogynistic. He says John writes likes a woman thinks—no order to it.
Very demeaning to women, of course. Women think. They think more intuitively than we men do. Men think very linearly. There is a difference. Men and women, contrary to the unisex culture, men and women are wired differently literally in the neurons of our brains. The neuronic pattern in a woman’s mind is different from that of a man. That is by God’s design because it takes both of our perspectives to understand this world’s system.
That’s why children are brought up pre-wired as it were for a mommy and daddy. Where a mom or a dad are absent from the home, it is very difficult for a single parent to raise a child because they’re either a man or they’re a woman and there’s not another man or woman around, so the child doesn’t see the interaction of how a woman thinks and how a man thinks. That’s part of growing up. John keeps that in order.
What we want to do is look now at 1 John 2:15–17. He’s already talked about 1 John 2:12–14. The resistance begins with our area of strength. You don’t go into conflict from an area of weakness.
Today, if he can make it, Mike is going to be here. This man is dying right now from cancer. It’s going to be a very sobering moment if he comes in here at the end of the service to say good-bye. When you deal with that kind of a situation people, it’s not human speculation that you can use. You’re dealing with death and death is an abnormality brought in by the Fall of Adam. It’s something for which no one outside of the Scripture has an answer.
On a non-Christian basis, there is nothing beyond the grave—period. Nothing. You dissolve. From the Christian point of view and only from the Christian point of view, do you have the hope of the resurrection. There is a clear-cut difference. The road parts. You have to go to the right or the left. You don’t have a choice to go down the middle anymore.
So at this point now John’s going to say we have to resist from an area of strength. In 1 John 2:12, 13, and 14 you see how some of you have translations where you’ll see that the translators have almost translated your Bible like it is poetry. I’m looking at the New King James. When the New King James people did their translation, they kind of put those three verses in almost poetry. I’m not sure why they did that; but they did.
But now we come to the thing we’ve been working on for weeks—1 John 2:15, 16, and 17. We’ve gone through pretty much verse 15. We’ve talked about the fact that we’ve moved on to the area of evaluations, verse 15.
NKJ 1 John 2:15, “Do not love the world or the things in the world.”
Notice the word “love” there. The word love is not a romantic use of the word love. It’s a loyalty use of the word love. It’s the same kind of use that in the Old Testament they say:
NKJ Deuteronomy 6:5, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
It’s the love in ancient Near Eastern treaties where pharaoh would say to vassal kings and smaller nations—and we have these documents. “Do you love me?” Pharaoh wasn’t a homosexual here. He wasn’t soliciting that kind of attention. But when pharaoh was asking a country to love him, he was talking about being loyal him. We still use that word that way. We say love of country and so on.
NKJ 1 John 2:15, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”
Clearly there are only two objects. There are only two options here. John is writing this to believers. Either we love the world or love the Lord at any given moment in our life. We can switch. We confess our sins. We get in fellowship. Fine. We love the Father. Then we go off the track. Then we love the world. We oscillate back and forth between loving the Father and loving the world. But this gets back to “am I responsible to an inner feeling”? [Slide 3] This is the first part of loving the world where he says:
NKJ 1 John 2:16, “For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world.”
Remember we went through the word “world”. The word is cosmos in the Greek. Cosmos is order. You have to be careful because cosmos in some passages of the Bible simply refers to the order of Creation. God didn’t create a chaos. He created something orderly.
Our bodies are designed in an orderly fashion. History is designed with order. What John is using here is he’s talking about order after the Fall. He’s talking about the moral dimension of history. He refers to it by cosmos and not chaos. There’s an order to evil. That’s what he’s trying to communicate. Evil is a product of intelligence. Evil is not unintelligent.
The very use of the word cosmos connotes about evil that there is a system; there’s an evil system. The first component is the lust of the flesh. Our bodies are fallen. You see this. Perhaps the easiest way of seeing this is think of an addiction. People can be addicted to medicine. People can be addicted to all kinds of things.
The point in addictions is that the chemistry of our bodies—the hormones, the serotonin that goes on, and the pleasurable moments that come, are chemicals in our brains. Those chemicals have no conscience to them. The chemical equations and the electrical circuits in our minds have no moral factors. You can write the equation out and there’s not any term in the equation that has to do with morals. The chemistry works regardless of whether a person is addicted, or he isn’t addicted.
So the question is, let’s take pleasure, the feeling of pleasure. That feeling of pleasure can be chemically promoted by drugs. It can also be chemically promoted by your mind—our minds begin enjoying things and in some mysterious way that nobody knows—how does the mind influence the brain? From an atheist materialist point of view there is no such thing as mind. There is only a brain; there are only chemical reactions. But we Christians know there is more than that. There is a mind, a soul that acts on the chemistry of the brain.
So, the pleasurable chemical reactions in the brain can be caused by a pill, some substance, or it can be caused by thoughts. That’s the way we’re designed. But the problem is the hormones don’t care whether it’s a bad thought or an addictive chemistry or it’s a good thought—dwelling on the Lord and being happy about those things.
The idea here is that the flesh by itself doesn’t have any moral discernment. We have to provide the moral discernment. Just because you get a chemical high is not saying that everything’s good. You have to interpret your feelings and that’s what this flesh thing is all about. It’s interpreting the feelings, judging them, evaluating them. Is this pleasure that I’m experiencing, is this of God or is this of the world?
The call here is love not the flesh, the lust of the flesh. It can’t be trusted. So that’s why we’re saying basically here—am I managing my flesh or is it managing me?
The self-evaluation tool is—am I responding to an inner feeling in order to violate God’s design? It’s a mental test.
Now we come to the second one, the lust of the eyes. Now God is aesthetic. God is an artist, as we’ve said. You can look at creation and know God is an artist, can’t we? Look at the way He has designed things like the fish.
I gave you an example. My son when he was in Okinawa in the Air Force, for pleasure he’d go off the water around Okinawa. It’s one of the cleanest ocean waters there is. You can go down underneath the water with a camera and a light and see all kinds of gorgeous fish. They’re down pretty deep so they’re not usually coming to the surface, so nobody gets a chance to see them.
But God sees them. God has these wonderful colors. Birds—you can see that—animals, flowers, plants. There are all kinds of color schemes in nature.
We as Christians look out at that. We see that color and our hearts should resonate with that because our Creator and Savior is an artist. Heaven is going to be beautiful. It’s going to have color in it. God could have created everything gray and it would have functioned fine. But He didn’t. He went to this effulgence and that’s why—I’ve never heard a theologian say this in all the listings of divine attributes; but my wife came up with the idea—why don’t you have an of effulgence? I think that’s great. God has an effulgent nature.
That is, He’s very generous with colors and artistry. So there’s nothing wrong with beauty. The problem is again because we see beauty, something that appeals to us, the danger we have is that we misinterpret the beauty, just like we misinterpret the feelings.
Let me give you an interesting example. Those of you who are old enough to remember back a decade or two ago—remember the TV series, The Cosmos. Carl Sagan of Cornell University would get on and he’d talk about the billions and billions of years. People used to make fun of the way he pronounced the word billions. He wrote a book called The Cosmos. He was one of Cornell University’s greatest well-liked professors on campus. He was a great teacher.
He was totally atheistic, materialistic, evolutionistic, anti-creationist. But he was a very good teacher. I had occasion, a graduate student that years and years ago under my ministry became a strict creationist, went on to get his doctorate in biology and headed up the Biology Department at Liberty University. He was on a textbook commission of some sort. He was telling me the story about Carl Sagan.
He said, “I sat next to Carl Sagan for hours in these committees about designing textbooks for college campuses.” He said, “What fascinated me about Sagan was this man saw the beauty of God in creation; but he couldn’t ascribe it to God. He ascribed it to the evolutionary process. What created such a good teaching motif to Carl Sagan was that he was stimulated by the beauty that he saw. He was genuinely appreciative of the beauty that he saw in nature. But he totally misinterpreted it as to source. So there’s an example of a valid aesthetic, a valid perception of God’s beauty, and a total inability to ascribe the cause of that beauty.
So. I say that the second evaluation is—am I responding to an externally attractive object that I want enough to disobey God’s Word? That’s coveting. That’s why in Matthew 5 when Jesus is talking about men looking on a woman lustfully, what He’s trying to do to the Pharisees was they were saying, “If I don’t physically commit adultery I haven’t committed adultery.”
What Jesus is saying is “Guys, integrate the 7th commandment with the 10th.” What was the 10th commandment? Thou shall not covet. That’s a mental thing. That’s not a physical behavior. That’s why Jesus said if you understand the 1st and 10th commandments that compels you to reinterpret the rest of those commandments as to speaking to the mental attitudes behind those behaviors. The Law could only evaluate behavior. It can’t evaluate mental attitude.
We were just talking before the class about what do you do with our modern legal definition of hate crimes? I think it’s a stupid definition. The idea of calling it a hate crime, a hate crime—what, have you got love crimes? Are we distinguishing between love crimes and hate crimes? What’s a love crime? Nobody has talked about love crimes.
Well if you haven’t talked about love crimes, why are you using the adjective hate crimes? All crimes are hate. You’ll see this and I’ll prove it as we get on further in the text because John later is going to deal with the first crime in history, the homicide. It was fraternal murder. This is the first crime in history.
When John is going to evaluate that, we’re going to see that all crime is hate. I mean the common thief. A thief is basically a lazy person that is angry at God because God structured the universe so that if I have to possess something, if I have to have any kind of wealth I have to work for it. I don’t want to work for it. It’s easier to steal it. All criminals, all thieves, are lazy people who hate work. So, all theft is a hate crime, isn’t it? This is what we do with the lust of the eyes.
Now we get to the pride of life. The pride of life is our arrogance to think that I’m master of my own fate, and am I so immersed in my plans that I have forgotten my creature status?
These are three kinds of self-evaluations that we just have to be alert to because it’s so easy to get off the tracks here and get seduced by the culture around us.
We want to finish this section, 1 John 2:17, because verse 17 gives you the optimism. It gives you the strength of viewing these. If you stopped at 1 John 2:16 you might get depressed because you know we are looking constantly at struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle. Isn’t there any kind of victory in all of this? So in verse 17 we have the victory side. Verse 17 says:
NKJ 1 John 2:17, “And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.”
Now this is the second time John has given this thing. If you go back to John 2:8, John is talking about the gospel. Notice what he’s saying.
NKJ 1 John 2:8, “Again, a new commandment I write to you, which thing is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away,”
Present tense: “is passing away”.
“and the true light is already shining.”
When we went through that we said in school you’ll hear the Age of Enlightenment. It began with Descartes and Emmanuel Kant. It began on continental Europe and they like to call that the Age of Enlightenment, as though everybody was in the Dark Ages before that, referring, of course, to Christianity. The Age of Enlightenment from the Christian point of view began with Jesus Christ. That’s what John is saying, isn’t he? The true light, the real light versus the false lights—the true light is the nature of the Father.
NKJ 1 John 1:5, “God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.”
“… who incarnated Himself. We’ve been able to hear it. We’ve been able to see it. We were able to gaze at it. We were able to touch it.”
John says now that’s the light that’s shining. Now he repeats himself in verse 17 except this time instead of talking about the darkness, he’s talking about the cosmos, the cosmos, the ethical organized schema of evil. It is passing away and the lust of it.
NKJ 1 John 2:17, “… but he who does the will of God abides forever.”
There’s a subtle warning here. The warning is that we want to be on the side of God and not waste our life in conformity with the world, because if we align ourselves, our energies, our time, and we let it be seduced and seductively shaped by the priorities of the world system; we don’t carry anything into eternity worth anything. The stuff we carry in eternity is what we have done in obedience to our Lord. That’s what he’s talking about here.
Practically speaking, what are the consequences? One of the ways of evaluating religion, philosophy, and belief systems is to ask about consequences. That is a good test, a good question. If you’re ever in doubt about something, ask yourself if I start here and follow the line of reasoning or this lifestyle, where’s the consequence? What’s the long-term consequence? That tells you. It’s the same thing as farmer raising a crop. What kind of fruit do we get?
I want to spend our remaining time understanding why John can say the world is passing away when you don’t see it happening.
A criticism that has been made about Christianity from its inception has been well, if Christianity is so great, how come we don’t see the world getting better and better? There have been Christians called post-millennialists that believe that’s the case.
Of course, in 2,000 years we haven’t seen any place—any place—on earth where Christianity was once established that went on and kept its allegiance to the Christian faith and got better and better and better.
What we have seen is Christianity occupying areas—like for example where was Christianity the most powerful in the first century, in the second century, third century? Geometrically, locally, politically—where was Christianity most powerful? North Africa. Is Christianity in North Africa today? No. Then we saw Christianity move across Europe. We saw it move into England, Germany, the sites of the Reformation. Switzerland—site the Reformation.
We saw it come to England. England was the place where Christianity started missions. Missionary work started from the U. K. What does the U. K. look like now? Go find some of the church buildings. They turned them into mosques. So certainly Christianity didn’t take over England and irreparably, unchangeably work better and better and better.
America—no country has had the light of our nation. No country has ever had the cluster of light that this nation has had. Look what’s happened in the last hundred years in our country. So clearly Christianity hasn’t made the U.S. better and better. It made it good at the beginning; but now we’re slowly dissipating the truth.
Missionaries tell us where the gospel is now going in the world. It appears to be going into southern parts of Latin America and also into the western parts of Southeast Asia. In the western part of China is the so-called house church movement. A very vibrant Christian faith is occurring in those areas.
When we look at human history how do we say to John the world is passing away and the lust thereof it. We don’t seem to see any kind of empirical evidence that that’s the case. I want to address that. I want to address that by turning to—if you’ll turn to the last Book of the Bible, Revelation 5.
Notice it’s Revelation 5, not Revelation 20. We’re not talking about the return of Christ yet. We’re still talking about what’s going on now in human history. In Revelation 5 John is transported into Heaven. In Revelation 5:1 he’s looking. He is being given an image. Where this image occurs we don’t know. It’s in the third Heaven somewhere at the throne room of God.
He sees a scroll and the scroll is rolled up tight and it has a seal on it. He’s looking for someone to break the seal. The idea there, by the way, is that begins judgment. That begins the final judgment in human history on this planet. But there is nobody qualified to break the seals.
John weeps and an angel comes to John and he says, “Don’t weep. Stay and watch.”
Sure enough, along comes Jesus Christ and He is qualified to break the seal and then erupting is this music. Music, by the way, preceded men. Angels started music. Music is essential. Here we have verse 8.
NKJ Revelation 5:8, “Now when He had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each having a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.”
NKJ Revelation 5:9, “And they sang a new song,”
Those prayers of the saints, the incense, a picture of smoke coming from a pot. What that apparently is the stored prayers of Christians down through the centuries, prayers that have yet to be answered for the return of our Lord and the restoration of justice. Then it says—here’s why Jesus is qualified. Look at why He is qualified. Why missionaries don’t use this passage is beyond me.
“You are worthy to take the scroll, And to open its seals; For You were slain, And have redeemed us to God by Your blood Out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation,”
NKJ Revelation 5:10, “And have made us kings and priests to our God; And we shall reign on the earth.”
What is going on as far as representation of the human race that you see in these verses? What has Jesus done that qualifies Him to take the scrolls prior to the judgments? This has to have happened. There has to be drawn out of the human race people from where? Every tribe, every tongue, every nation.
So now let’s reverse engineer. Let’s go back and think—how can that take place if the gospel doesn’t go to every tongue, every people, and every nation? It can’t. It is in fact going out there to every people, every tongue. Missionary organizations using the latest computer technology to get the Bible translated into many of these tongues.
What is being accomplished here? It’s the completion of the body of Christ. That body group of peoples saved from every tongue, every nation. There has to be a body. For some reason God is saying—and I think it has to do with another title of Jesus that you see him using often in the four Gospels—“I am the Son of Man”. It’s an Adamic title.
So Jesus has to represent almost like we have a jury. Those of you who have been in a courtroom, been on a jury, the jury is supposed to be a representative, peer review of the people that are charged with a crime so that lawyers debate and argue about whether we should have you on the jury, you on the jury.
“Are you people that understand this particular person that’s being tried?”
Apparently before the judgments can come with the return of our Lord Jesus Christ to the earth, there has to be with Jesus an administrative corpus that represents the entire earth. Why? We don’t know all the details. We just know that has to happen.
So, I suggest to you that the world passing away—what it’s referring to is the calling out of people from every tongue, in every tongue, in every nation in order to complete the body. Then secondarily, not only is there a quantity issue, a quantification of the complete body, but also quality.
Church historians have noticed, and it’s a strange thing and nobody explains this, but church historians repeatedly have noticed that if you study the doctrinal debates from the year AD 100 all the way to the present and you organize the ideas—first this idea, then ... First hundred years, what were the debates all about? Jesus Christ’s nature and the doctrine of the Trinity.
Then you come forward in time and what were the debates about in the Middle Ages? They looked on the Cross to Jesus. The debate was—was that Cross an example of martyrdom to inspire us or was there something done objectively done on the Cross? The answer was something was objectively done on the Cross.
Then you come to the Protestant Reformation and the issue there was—how am I saved? Am I saved because the merits of Jesus are brought to me in the mass week by week by week, or is the entire lawful righteousness of Christ credited to my account instantly at the point of regeneration?
Now we come in our last 200 or 300 years and the debate is over the nature of the church versus Israel and where the future is. There appears to be a qualitative improvement in the body of Christ core doctrine. So, my answer to the question I raised:
NKJ 1 John 2:17, “And the world is passing away …”
… is basically talking about the fact that the body of Christ is being formed. In Heaven there is an expansion going on. It’s just down here where we live that we don’t see it because we’re moving along in time and we’re very localized, so we don’t get the big picture. But John did. After all, he saw division. The world is passing away because the body of Christ is being built soul by soul.
Here’s just a little thought for you, a thought experiment. Suppose you and your family, in the workplace, in the classroom—you’re having a discussion with some unbeliever and by the Holy Spirit working through you on that person, they become a Christian. I sort of suspect there’s going to be an incident with one Christian or group of Christians sometime in the future where they lead the last person to Jesus Christ. Bingo! The Rapture occurs. Did I cause that? It will be very interesting if you happen to be the person that led the last person that is to be the last person in the body of Christ to Him.
So, that’s the passing away. The sobering end to that is that he who does the will of God abides forever. In other words, doing the will of God is the fruit that abides forever for eternity.
(Closing prayer)