12 - The Preamble Continued: Fellowship with the Father and the Son Distinguished from Fellowship with the Holy Spirit **New**

© Charles A. Clough 2013

Charles A. Clough
1 John Series

Lesson 12 – The Preamble Continued: Fellowship with the Father and the Son Distinguished from Fellowship with the Holy Spirit

11 Dec 2013
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org

We’re looking at the form of this epistle. That’s where we’re breaking it down. We have the prologue in the first four verses. Then from 1 John 1:5 to 2:11 you have the preamble. What we’re doing here is we’re tracking just the way epistles or letters were written at this time in history. We’re simply arguing that John followed this code of semi-standard approach to writing an epistle.

If you’ll open your Bibles; and we’ll start with a word of prayer.

“Our Father, we’re thankful for you to illuminate our hearts. We know this epistle is that of one of the disciples, one of the apostles who was closest to Jesus. So, we pray that you would through your Holy Spirit illuminate our hearts to the text and have us understand a little bit more from how John pictures You—how he describes You and how he basically shows us Your triune nature for we ask this in the Savior’s name. Amen.”

We’ve looked and here’s the slide [Slide 2] of the thing that I’ve shown you before—the nature, person, and personality. That’s a triunity among human beings. This was documented from Dr. Nathan R. Wood’s discovery of these triunities in the universe. This particular triunity is about people. Remember that what Wood points to is there are three aspects of people. There’s a person’s nature. There’s the person that’s observable—physically existing in history where we’re talking and interacting with. Then is the effect of that person—what we call the personality—what his affect is on other people.

So, Wood—on this slide [Slide 2] I show you the seven truths that are true of the biblical God’s Word—how it pictures the triunity. What he did is he simply described these seven characteristics found in the text of the Bible. Then he looked around to see if there were parallels in people. I won’t belabor this because we’ve covered it before; but the triunity of nature, person, personality­—they’re all one because you can’t separate any of them. They are all part of the person. Each one of these aspects has to do with the entire person. That’s what makes it a triunity.

So anyhow we want to follow this as we look through the preamble because it’s very interesting how John starts in 1 John 1:5 down to 2:2. He is talking about the Father.

He says:

^NKJ 1 John 1:5, “This is the message that we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.”

Clearly the emphasis on darkness and light—again notice John’s antithetical style here. The emphasis on light is a revelation of God’s character­—His holiness, His righteousness. When he discusses this, he’s talking about how we confess our sins, the dirt in other words, the darkness that we have because we’re this side of the fall. We have a sin nature; and we sin in thought, word, and deed. That’s sin because it’s a violation of God’s standard. This is important to start here in our relationship with God.

^NKJ 1 John 1:5, “… God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.”

That’s important, particularly is it important in our time because we have a lot of dialogue going on about social justice. From what I’m seeing and listening to, most of the people who talk aimlessly about social justice; they don’t seem to show any evidence that they’ve thought through about how you define justice. By what standard do you define justice? It’s all relative to how I think things ought to be or how the latest Gallup Poll thinks what things should be. So, we are back to the same ol’ same ol’.

If you deny the Creator/creature distinction, if you deny that there are two levels, two kinds of existences—that there’s one eternal existence of God the Creator of all and His creation which is a temporal existence. It’s not self-contained. It’s the Father’s. Once you deny that, you really lose any sense of a transcendent standard of justice. By transcendent remember we’re talking about a standard that is over and above all humanity so that it’s a standard for everyone. That’s an absolute standard in contrast to the latest Gallup Poll.

Here in the first part you remember, we dealt with fellowship with God the Father means holy integrity. I think I remember going through Psalm 51 there just briefly with you. That’s the confession psalm of David. You remember how David in verse 4 of Psalm 51 says:

^NKJ Psalm 51:4, “Against you and you only have I sinned and done evil in your sight.”

David is fixated upon God’s character. It’s a violation of God’s character. Even though murder and adultery were involved, those are forms of violating God’s character. Yes, it did harm to people—certainly that. But when it comes to what is sin; it is a violation of God’s character.

When we get into this first section, I tried to emphasize that John is looking at fellowship with God the Father in terms of His nature. His nature is unseen. That’s revealed in the Word of God. But nevertheless, the primary starting point in a relationship with God is we have to deal with His nature. That isn’t going to change; and we can’t change it.

Then we have the second thing that we’ve discussed, the second aspect, in 1 John 2:3-8. That is fellowship with God the Son. How do we have fellowship with God the Son? Well, John of course, lived in that historical moment when God the Son was incarnate and walked the planet—walked around the country of Israel, ate with the disciples, talked with the disciples, slept with the disciples, and shared experiences with the disciples. So here we have a visible person in contrast to the Father who is never visible. John insists that later in the epistle.

^NKJ 1 John 4:12, “No man has seen God at any time.”

So the Father, as far as our relationship with Him sends our relationship with His unseen nature. But now when we come to God the Son it’s a little bit different. You’ll notice and we covered this last time in 1 John 2:3 to 8. The issue there is if we want to say we know the Son, we’d better be sure that we are keeping His commandments.

Now the very fact that commandments are raised here refers to the fact that He talked so that you could hear Him and have discussions with Him and listen to His speech. So now the relationship with the Son is what the Son has taught us, what the Son has revealed about the unseen Father. It was the Son who was visible, not the Father. So now we have to think about the relationship with Him. Remember Jesus saying—it’s on the handout here under #2.

“Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in Me?”

Notice the locative use here.

“I do not speak on my own authority but the Father who dwells in Me does the works.”

So, he’s making two claims here. Not only does God speak through Him, but God works through Him. The unseen Father is in other words revealing Himself in space-time history. He’s doing it two ways. He’s doing it by speaking through the Son at that historical moment; and He is doing it with works through the Lord Jesus Christ in these various miracles. So, we covered that.

Again, if you have your Bibles, turn to John 14:10 and you’ll see the kind of verse that shows this. In John 14:10 he says:

^NKJ John 14:10, “… I am in the Father and the Father in Me. The words that I speak to you I speak not of Myself but the Father that dwells in Me and He does the works.”

John 14:10 is very important. We have to think about what he is saying here. Jesus is arguing, presenting you might say, that what he is talking about that is physically and audibly heard by the disciples standing nearby when he speaks; that speech, the content of it, is coming from God the Father. So, you have God the Father communicating to us through His Son who takes on human form and dwells among us.

Again, John I think is moving in this preamble from one member of the Trinity to another. You see he’s not defining it in theological terms; but he’s moving through the way we relate to each one of the persons of the Trinity. So again, fellowship with God the Father centers on His nature, His character. Fellowship with God the Son is—are we listening and obeying His commandments. Do we have a passion to learn His commandments? It centers on the revelation of the Son that He gave historically. Of course, that’s in the four Gospels. So, it’s paying attention to what he has spoken.

This is why again following on the handouts; you see 1 John 2:8—where remember what we said last time?

^NKJ 1 John 2:8, “There is a new commandment I write unto you true in Him and in you because the darkness is passing away and the true light is shining.”

I made a point last time that what you have here is a statement of what historically was the moment of enlightenment to the human race.

Now later on in unbelief we have him speak of the Age of the Enlightenment in the 1600s and 1700s and so on. From the biblical point of view the Enlightenment preceded that time by well over a millennium. The Enlightenment came historically to the planet Earth at the point of the incarnation. That never happened before. It hasn’t happened since. It was an amazing moment when God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, took upon Himself human form, spoke with people, walked around with people and showed us what eternal life looks like in three dimensions.

Again, John points to that in John 1:9.

^NKJ John 1:9, “That was the true light which gives true light to every man coming into the world.”

It’s bigger than just light for the salvation of people. It’s a light that is the foundation of all epistemology, all knowledge. Remember Colossians, did I mention that last time? In Colossians 2 Paul makes the point that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom. You’ll notice there’s no adjective modifying wisdom there.

Paul is not saying, “Well, it’s religious wisdom that’s in Jesus.”

No, Paul is saying there is wisdom—unqualified wisdom. There are all kinds of wisdom because the incarnation philosophically is the basis of all knowledge. It’s the communication of truth that creates this man so that as finite creatures we discover God’s truths. We don’t invent truths. We discover truths. That goes back to the Creator/creature distinction in Genesis 1:1.

So, the Father’s nature becomes visible through the incarnation so we can observe it. Again, think of the handout.

Norman Geisler in his book Conversational Evangelism, which by the way is a nice book to help us converse with our neighbors or people we run across, that we develop a relationship with. How do you converse with people? So, what he says—and this is a very interesting point. He challenges unbelievers to answer this question. If you were near death and you met all the great religious teachers—that would include Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, etc.  If you were near death and you met all the great religious teachers and asked them what happens after death and they gave conflicting answers, whose advice would you take? This is a very thought-provoking question. We’re all going to die. Death is universal.

So also, therefore universal is what happens after death. Do we just rot in the ground with worms? Or is there a material component to us that follows and continues to exist after death? If you ask Buddha, did Buddha rise from the dead and come back? No. If you ask Confucius what happens after death, did he die and come back? No. If you ask Mohammed, what happens after death—did he die and come back? The answer is no. So, among all the religious teachers of the earth, only one guy came back after He died, and gives us a clue about what happens after death. That’s the Lord Jesus Christ. So, if you can think and remember Geisler’s challenge here, then—very useful for you to open conversations and cause a little serious thinking.

Okay, all that again you can see in the handout—that’s all review and introduction.

Now what I’m going to do is we’re going to do is finish the preamble; and now we’re going to go and observe how John develops this scene now. We’ll see that basically he’s arguing about the fellowship that we have with God the Holy Spirit. Remember the triunity. We have nature, person, and personality. God the Father—it’s His nature that defines the whole relationship with Him.

Then the Son is the Person who’s actually physically seen in history. Then we have the Holy Spirit who affects and influences people radiating into history the effect of the incarnation. Just as people made an impression and have an effect that we call personality; so the triune God—He has His influence after Jesus—died, rose again, and ascended to Heaven. So, He’s not present now. But, he left an influence. So that’s the whole Upper Room Discourse in the Gospel of John. He’s going to send a Comforter. The Comforter is going to build the church.

Let’s look at what He says. Verse 9, he opens. He opens with his faith.

^NKJ 1 John 2:9, “The who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in darkness until now.”

What he’s saying there is­—remember—he got through saying there’s an enlightenment. There’s a new commandment here. The darkness is passing away. The true light is already shining.

So, if somebody says, who’s a professing Christian, “Well, I am the light,” but he has a problem with one of his brothers in the faith—basically, he resents his brother. He’s got a really disturbed relationship that is going on here. So, if he says he’s in the light; but he’s having this conflict with another believer what John says is he’s in darkness up to now. What he’s doing now is he’s shifting the focus of our concerns over to how we relate to other believers.

This is important because we have enough splits in local churches—we have enough feuds going on even in any given church. Every pastor knows we have rough relationships going on within that congregation. So, if you think about what John is doing here, John is very repetitive. Remember this false claim

^NKJ 1 John 2:9, “The who says he is in the light and hates his brother …”

Remember back in 1 John 1:6 where he’s talking about a relationship with the Father and he said:

^NKJ 1 John 1:6, “Then if I say I have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness and light …”

Same sentence structure. This one in 1 John 2:9 he had the same previous identical sentence structure in 1 John 1:6. You remember in 1 John 2:4 the same kind of thing.

^NKJ 1 John 2:4, “The who says he is in the light and doesn’t keep the commandments of the Lord … is a liar.”

So, first person in chapter 1 denies that by his life because he’s walking in darkness. He under cuts his own verbal testimony. Same thing in verse 1 John 2:4. If a person shows no allegiance or concern about obeying the commandments of the Lord Jesus, then don’t tell me that you know Him. You don’t know Him.

Now here is the third claim. The third claim has to do in terms of one’s relationship between brothers. So, think about this. Why is this important? Why does it show particularly something about the Holy Spirit? Well, if you have a believer, one believer, obviously because he’s a believer God has done something in his life. Try to picture it here on the slide [Slide 3], with the Holy Spirit to acknowledge His influence upon believers.

I tried to construct another slide [Slide 4] here. You’ll see stick figures. The point is the Holy Spirit—if you’ve got two believers; then the Holy Spirit is involved with both of those believers. So, what John does is he’s saying if I am a believer—the Holy Spirit’s working in my life—and I have a problem with another believer and the Holy Spirit is working in his life; one or the other of us is out of fellowship with the Spirit. Because, if we were in fellowship with the Spirit, we would have the same basic appreciation for each other.

Now there’s a practical thing here. Remember the thing in James about be quick to hear and slow to speak. These kinds of cases sadly probably very slow to hear and quite quick to speak. You reverse, change up, the admonition.

The thing also to notice here since John has already made a point that there’s an enlightenment that started with the incarnation. It didn’t start in the 1600s. It started at the turn of the millennium AD 30.

So how then does this love that Jesus says is new—remember the Upper Room Discourse. Remember this whole epistle is an exposition of the Upper Room Discourse. John refers to vocabulary and so forth.

Jesus teaching about love is enshrined in chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 of the Gospel of John. If you read that carefully, you’ll see that he says, “I’m telling you there’s a new thing called love that I want to see you folks have among yourselves so that the world will understand and be convicted that this is a movement of God.”

Now how does this love that Jesus introduces in the Upper Room Discourse—how is it different from the Old Testament in “love your neighbor” and so forth. Think back through what we’re doing with it. In the prologue of this epistle, John says that there is a new quality of life that first became visible to humanity with the incarnation. So, remember we’ve got a new thing here. This was not true in the Old Testament. They had no clear revelation that the New Testament occurred with the incarnation.

So, what does that new life show? What did the disciples do when they saw Jesus communicating as He did often in the presence with the Father, what did they discern? What did they conclude? Well, they concluded that the Trinity—the Father and Son less so the Holy Spirit as far as they’re thinking—the Father and the Son have this little personal relationship going on. Because both of them are eternal, this relationship was going on for all eternity.

This is why folks; you may feel disadvantaged when the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Muslims happen to come to the door, or you meet them socially in some setting.

You feel like, “Gosh, I can’t explain the Trinity.”

It’s so simple, their message is that God is God. There is the one personal God and so forth.

Well, if we think a little bit more deeply I want to point out to you if God doesn’t have multiple personhoods, if there’s no Trinity, the question to ask and see how people can answer is—if I have a solitary personal God how can that solitary personal God exercise love? What would be the object of the love of a solitary deity? The only answer possible is he would have to create a creature to love, sort of like a pet that we love.

But if that’s the case, then doesn’t it follow that if God has to create something external to Himself to love, now He has a finite object for His love and in one sense He is dependent on that external finite subject, that object. So, if you don’t have the Trinity, you wind up with a solitary deity. That’s true of uniformitarianism, Islam, Allah, Jehovah Witnesses, that kind of thing. What you wind up having is you really don’t have a fully functioning personal God because solitary people don’t have relationships with any other person.

So, this idea that we have to be embarrassed about the Trinity is actually reverse. Solitary people who believe in a solitary deity have to be embarrassed because they have a situation where you do not have a fully functioning personal deity. Again, it goes back to the Bible. The Bible tells us this stuff because God wants us to know Him. He wants us to enter into a personal relationship with Him

So, when we become believers, John 3:16:

^NKJ John 3:16, “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son …”

Then 1 John 5 we have eternal life. The point is when we believe we acquire the quality of life shared within the Trinity for all eternity. It’s that love that is expressible within the social relationships of multiple believers. So that’s what Jesus is talking about.

He says in the Upper Room, “Look, you have observed the tight relationship I have with my Father. God has the kind of love you guys need. You’ll further notice that I have acted.”

Love acts. Love is not a feeling of serotonin sloshing around in our brains. This is a misconception we have today—that love is just a feeling. Love is not a feeling. Love is an action.

So that’s why we can say as John 3:16 says:

^NKJ John 3:16, “God loved the world in this way …”

He gave His only Son. It was an act that God performed. So, the idea then is that we should be doing good things to each other in the church.

So, we come to verse 10—see John in verse 9 there’s a false claim. This guy is saying that he’s walking in the light but he hates his brother. The answer is no. He’s lying to you. You’re not walking in the light if he’s hating his brother. So, let’s delve into this a little bit better.

In verse 10:

^NKJ 1 John 2:10, “The brother abides in the light and there is no cause for stumbling in him …”

You’ll notice that this idea of stumbling. So clearly if we do not have a good relationship with another believer, we are doing damage to ourselves. We have to backup and think about this. The picture that John is giving us is cause of stumbling is one of a trap that’s set along some location. The idea that John has, the picture he’s trying to draw is that we’re walking along in darkness and we’re not going to see the trap and we’re going to fall into the trap. But if we walk in the light, we’ll see the trap and we’ll walk around it.

Well, what is the trap? The trap is the damage that occurs when we resent or ignore the Word of God in a fellow believer.

Remember the slide [Slide 4], you see these two guys here. The Holy Spirit has worked in both; but one of these guys, the guy on the right, has a relationship problem with the Holy Spirit. He is angry for some reason or resents for some reason the work of the Holy Spirit in this other person.

In John, later on in chapter 3, he gives a great illustration out of the Old Testament with Cain. Cain was ultimately angry with God. By the way—why this Cain illustration in Genesis 4 is important. It’s the first homicide in history. Often, I try to point this out to people involved in police work and in legal work is that in Genesis 4 you’ve got a clear picture of criminal behavior. Cain’s problem starts not with his brother Abel. His problem is vertical.

His problem is with God because God has said to Cain, “I do not accept the way you are coming to worship Me. You do not have valid worship activity.”

He challenges that. Cain gets mad. He wants to define the relationship he has with God his way. We can’t do that. God is the one who defines our relationship with Him. Cain gets angry so he wants to strike out at God. Well, he can’t strike out at God directly so he picks the nearest target, the nearest thing that is closely aligned with God, which is his brother. He slits his brother’s throat; and we have the first homicide in history.

The point here is that when that happens, the problem is in the person who’s doing the hating, the person who has the problem. Sometimes it’s in both believers. The point that I’m making here is that John goes on to explain what he’s talking about by using the Genesis 4 illustration.

We’re running out of time here; but if you’ll just understand that these verses that are talking about interpersonal relationships of believers involve necessarily the Holy Spirit was working in the believer. So, that’s why I conclude in this prologue or the preamble that we have a situation where we have fellowship with the Holy Spirit in the sense that we have—how shall I say this—we have fellowship with what the Holy Spirit is doing in other believers around us. We have to be cognizant of the fact that just as the Holy Spirit has worked in our life; he’s also working in another believer’s lives. Before we judge, before we get bent out of shape; just pause, hold up, be careful to listen before you speak. Understand that you don’t know—we don’t know our own hearts let alone the heart of someone else. So, it’s not saying that we ignore doctrine, that we ignore behavior; but it is saying that we have to have a compassion toward other believers because the Holy Spirit is in them like He is in us. It may be rough going in that person; but we have to be careful it’s not rough going between him and us on our side of the fence.

Well, we are running out of time so we’re going to dispense this time with the preamble and get going with the rest of the epistle.

“Father. we thank You for the time together this morning. We thank You that we have this text in front of us. We pray that as we read this and reflect upon it and read it some more and reflect upon it; You will open our hearts to who You are and how we can have a better relationship with You. We ask this in our Savior’s name. Amen.”