Something Old, Something New
Introduction: I have an immense amount of respect for this Apostle who was willing to call it like he saw it—not mincing words, not worrying about whether others agree with him, refusing to compromise his black and white stand on the Gospel. Perhaps he could speak boldly as he does because he was in his 90’s. There’s something about growing old that helps you realize you have nothing to lose.
We have been looking at the three tests of whether a person is a true Christian—the theological test, the moral test, and the social test. We encountered the theological test in the opening verses of chapter 1: Do you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God? In other words, do you believe the Gospel? If not, nothing else matters—you are not a Christian.
The second test, the moral test, was strongly hinted at in the rest of chapter one and the opening verses of chapter 2 but will appear again in several places, and that is: Is your belief in Jesus accompanied by a transformed life, a life that acknowledges the reality of sin but deals with it persistently through confession and leaning on the advocacy of Jesus Christ? If not, then your belief is phony and nothing else matters. You are not a Christian.
Today we come to the third test, the social test: Is your belief in Jesus and in the Gospel and your claim of a transformed life accompanied by a transformed love for other believers? If not, then your profession of faith is phony, your professed morality is impotent, and nothing else matters. You are not a Christian.
Please understand, as Josh has made abundantly clear, the Apostle’s purpose in these hard-hitting passages is not to create doubt in the minds of true believers; it is not to pit them against one another and create an exclusive club of insiders who look down their spiritual noses at all those who don’t quite measure up. His purpose is actually to generate true assurance of salvation in the genuine people of God, but he refuses to offer assurance to those who shouldn’t have it!
You see, there are four possible spiritual states a person can be in.
1. One can be a true believer but lack assurance of salvation.
2. One can be a true believer and enjoy assurance of salvation.
3. One can be an unbeliever and not give a rip about salvation.
4. One can be an unbeliever but have false assurance of salvation.
Another way of expressing these categories is:
1. Security without assurance.
2. Security with assurance.
3. No security and no assurance.
4. No security with assurance.
Clearly #2 is the ideal state, the one God desires for His children and the one which John’s epistle was written to promote. #1 is a sad state in the same sense that hypochondria is sad. A hypochondriac fails to enjoy his good health because he always thinks he’s sick, but he may still live a long life. A true believer without assurance also fails to enjoy the abundant life God intended for him but he will still spend eternity with God.
Which is the worst of these four states? Well, the person in #3 is on his way to hell, so that’s bad, but he shouldn’t be surprised; he didn’t believe in heaven anyway. On the other hand, #4 thinks he’s going to heaven. He has made great sacrifice, given away lots of resources, tried hard to be good, spent much time serving others, and was likely given assurance by his religious mentors, only to find out in the end that it was all for naught. Now that’s tragic!
But frankly, friends, much of American Christianity is leading to, or at least enabling religious people to reach, state #4. In fact, I believe even some well-meaning evangelicals have unwittingly contributed to this sad state of affairs with careless theology and faulty methodology. You know, it’s easy to be critical of other faiths for being blind guides to the blind, but it’s harder to be self-critical, to examine those in our own camp. But maybe that’s where we need to look first.
Many of you have received evangelism training at some point—from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Campus Crusade for Christ, or Evangelism Explosion, maybe even in our own church. You may have been introduced to some common jargon, like the phrase “pray to receive Christ.” Where do you find that phrase in the Bible? There are many biblical terms that describe the salvation process—believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, receive Christ, repent and believe, be born again, etc. But I don’t know anywhere the NT speaks of praying to receive Christ. One doesn’t have to pray to receive Christ. One has to believe to receive Christ. Now that can be expressed in prayer but it isn’t necessary.
You say, well that’s just semantics. I don’t think so. The danger is that many come to equate their salvation with the saying of a prayer, in much the same way that others equate it to walking an aisle or raising a hand at a revival meeting. They rest their assurance on the prayer, or the walk, or the raised hand rather than on Jesus. They look back to that event and consider themselves home free.
But even more troubling to me is how we were taught to push the new convert immediately toward assurance of salvation. Perhaps we were instructed to ask the person who has just prayed a prayer of profession, “Where is Jesus now.” If he or she said, “I guess He’s in heaven,” we were told to respond, “No, he’s in your heart.” And if he asked, “How do I know?”, we were told to respond, “Is God a liar? Didn’t he say in Rev. 3:20, ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door I will come into him and eat with him and he with me.’”?
Or we were told to ask the inquirer, “Where are you going when you die?” If the person would answer, “Well, I hope I’m going to heaven,” the appropriate response would be, “You don’t have to hope so, you can know so, because 1 John 5:13 says, ‘I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.’”
Now I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I believe Rev. 3:20 and I believe 1 John 5:13, but I think those verses are being misused when we employ them to try to generate assurance in the heart of one who has just said a prayer professing faith in Christ. After all, 1 John 5:13 comes at the end of this epistle, long after the Apostle has stressed the theological, the moral, and the social tests of true Christianity. Assurance doesn’t have to be forced or contrived; it comes naturally when the convert truly believes in Jesus as the incarnate Son of God, when his life is transformed, and when his love is transformed. Where do those tests appear in our traditional evangelistic methods? Well, it’s hard to find them. Thankfully, they do play a prominent role in some more recent evangelistic training, like The Way of the Master.
Now I want to be careful here. I am sensitive to a comment from one evangelist who was criticized for his methodology. He protested, “My imperfect way of evangelizing is better than the critic’s failure to share his faith at all.” That should give us pause and produce some careful self-evaluation, but wouldn’t it be even better to be passionate about winning the loss and be thoroughly biblical about the methodology we use?
All of that is introductory and somewhat extraneous to my sermon, but I’m not going to charge any extra for it. My focus today is on the social test of our faith–do we love one another? Please open your Bibles to 1 John 2:3-11, p 1021 in your pew Bibles. As we read, I want you to look for three identical phrases, Whoever says . . ., because those phrases are going to reveal our outline this morning. Please stand if you are able for the reading of God’s Word. 1 John 2:3-11:
And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. 4 Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, 5 but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: 6 whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
7 Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. 8 At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. 9 Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. 10 Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. 11 But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.
As I mentioned, the three “whoever says” statements provide us with a helpful outline for this text:
Whoever says ‘I know him’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar.
Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk as Jesus walked.
Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness.
Two of these statements are negative while the middle one is positive, but all three are designed to help us determine whether we have passed the social test of true Christianity.
John opens his presentation of the social test by scratching where most religious people itch: “By this we know that we have come to know him.” Isn’t that the principal question posed by all religions—how do we come to know God and how can we know that we know Him? The Greeks generally assumed that one comes to know God through human reason. The mystery religions so popular in the first century taught that God is known through divine encounter. The Jews taught that God must be known through revelation—that is, He has to reveal Himself.
But before we decide how we come to know God, we have to determine what it means to know God. For John, knowing God is far more than knowing facts about Him or even being able to recognize His fingerprints in the world or in people’s lives; it is knowing him personally and enjoying daily fellowship with Him. How does that happen, and how do we know it has happened to us?
John has a very simple answer to our question: “By this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments.” Not if we prayed a prayer, not if we have walked an aisle, but rather if we keep his commandments. Now that may sound more like the moral test more than the social test, but that depends upon what he means by “commandments.” Is he talking about the Ten Commandments and our need to be obedient to God’s moral laws? Probably not.
You see, John uses the term “command” 14 times in this short letter. Whenever he uses it in the singular it always refers explicitly to Christ’s command that His followers love one another. Most of the time when he uses it in the plural the context indicates the same thing. The only place where this is in question is right here in 2:3-4. However, I believe that even here the term “commandments” probably refers specifically to the commandments Jesus addressed in Matthew 22 when a lawyer tried to trip Him up.
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Evidence that this is what John has in mind is found in 3:23, where we read his explicit definition of commandment: “And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.” Of course, there is no contradiction between obedience to the Ten Commandments and loving one another. Perhaps both are intended, but the latter is clearly the focus of the rest of our passage.
Now in verse 4 we come to the first of the three “whoever says” statements: “Whoever says ‘I know him’ (that is, I know God) but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” The point is this:
No claim of knowing God has any validity if the person making that claim does not obey his commandment to love his fellow-believer.
On the contrary, he is a liar and has no relationship to the truth. Those are tough words. First of all, I think we have to understand that the author has in mind ongoing disobedience, not a single act of disobedience. The tense of the verbs he uses make that clear. We will never arrive at a point of sinlessness this side of heaven. But it’s the one whose life is characterized by disobedience, by lovelessness, who is called a liar. But he says more. He adds, “and the truth is not in him.” I think that means that we should not go to such a person for truth but rather to another source.
When I was in seminary in the 60’s one of the most popular evangelical preachers was a man from Houston. He was a very gifted communicator and had a lot of his theology right; after all, he was a Dallas Seminary graduate. He knew Greek and Hebrew and he let you know it. But the man knew little about love. He would excoriate church members who didn’t dot all their I’s and cross all their t’s as he did. He refused to visit anyone in the hospital because “that’s not a pastor’s job.” Here’s what Paul said in 1 Cor. 13:2: “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” I think the Apostle John would say to the followers of this man, “Look elsewhere for truth.” The fact is, as I observed many members of that church over the years, their lives were more broken after attending than they were before they started.
But John’s tone is not entirely negative. In verse 5 he makes the same point positively by stating the converse: “whoever keeps his word (i.e., whoever loves his fellow-believer) in him truly the love of God (or for God) is perfected.” Again the tense of the verbs is important, as John is talking about ongoing obedience, a life characterized by love for the brothers. The point seems to be that our professed love for God is proved to be real when we obey his command to love one another.
The end of verse 5 makes a second affirmation about our knowledge of God: “By this we may know that we are in him.” This is an advancement on verse 3. There we learned how we can know that we know God. Here we are informed about how we can know that we are in him, that is, organically connected to Him. And then he offers his second “whoever says” argument: “Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.” Let’s state this second argument this way:
No claim of being connected to God has any validity if the person making that claim does not walk in love as Jesus walked.
You see, Jesus is not just our advocate and our substitute, as we learned last week in the opening verses of chapter 2; He is also our example. We have no right to claim to be in Him or to pawn ourselves off as His disciples if we do not follow His example. Clearly there are some ways in which it is impossible for us to walk as Jesus walked. We can’t live without sin; we can’t raise the dead; we can’t die on the cross for the sins of the world. But we can love as Jesus loved, and frankly, I think that’s exactly what “walking as Jesus walked” means here. No doubt even that is a formidable task, and none of us can do it perfectly. But this should be our bent, our goal, our intention.
Now before offering us the third of his “whoever says” arguments the Apostle gives us a brief interlude, a treatise on the commandment that is uppermost in his mind. It comes in the form of a paradox—the old commandment that is new.
Interlude: The old commandment that is new. (7)
“Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. At the same time, it is a new commandment.”
John opens this section with the term “beloved,” or “dear friends.” This is the first of six times he uses this term. Though some of the things he has to say will be difficult for them to hear, he wants them to know that he has great affection for them. You know, it’s always a lot easier to hear the truth from someone who loves us than from a stranger or someone whose genuine concern is in doubt.
John identifies the commandment he has in mind as “not new” but “old” yet, at the same time “new.” As we try to unravel his meaning, let’s ask first, in what sense is this commandment old?
It is old chronologically. It not only goes back to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, but long before the time of Jesus. One can go all the way back to the Pentateuch, the books of the Law of Moses, where in Lev. 19:18 it says clearly, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.” And when you combine that with Deut. 6:5, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might,” you have the Great Commandment almost exactly as Jesus stated it in Matthew 22. So the commandment John is talking about is as old as revealed religion. But, second, it is also old in their experience.
It is old in their experience. John continues in verse 7, “The old commandment is the word that you have heard.” They were converted under the Gospel message, and both Jesus and the Apostles made it clear that the Gospel is not just a string of theological affirmations; it must be fleshed out in love for one another. The command to love is the heart and soul of the message they heard and believed. Nevertheless, John also acknowledges that the commandment to love is in some sense new.
It is new in emphasis. Love was certainly not absent in the OT period, but it may be safe to say that it was not the focus. The focus was on God’s holiness and the need of God’s people to be obedient to His law. Jesus never minimized the importance of holiness or obedience, but it is only fair to see that he placed an entirely new emphasis on love in his teachings, and the Apostles followed suit. In fact, they taught constantly on the subject. We’re all familiar with the love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, but the themes of that chapter are all found in many other places in the NT. A quick glance at a concordance will show literally hundreds of references to love among believers.
It is new in example. Verse 8 goes on, “Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and you.” In the OT the truth about love was taught clearly enough but it was not modeled very well. In Jesus, however, it was modeled perfectly. I like the way Warren Wiersbe expressed this:
“It is encouraging to think of Jesus’ love for the 12 disciples. How they must have broken His heart again and again as they argued over who was the greatest, or tried to keep people from seeing their Master. Each of them was different from the others, and Christ’s love was broad enough to include each one in a personal, understanding way. He was patient with Peter’s impulsiveness, Thomas’ unbelief, and even Judas’ treachery. When Jesus commanded his disciples to love one another, He was only telling them to do as He had done.”[i]
I’m encouraged to see that John goes on to indicate that at least some of his church members have also begun to model love well. He says, “the truth of this commandment is seen in him (Jesus) and you.”
It is new in the extent to which it reaches. The OT made it clear that God’s people are to love their neighbors, but Jesus went further by redefining “neighbor” as anyone who needs our compassion and help, irrespective of status or race. This would have been shocking to many Jewish people, for their rabbis viewed the sinner as a person whom God wished to destroy. “There is joy in heaven,” they said, “when one sinner is obliterated from the earth.” But Jesus was the friend of sinners and taught that “there is joy in heaven over one sinner that repents.” The rabbis taught, “The Gentiles were created by God to be fuel for the fires of Hell.” But in Jesus God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus alluded to this major change of perspective. He said in Matt. 5:43: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies.” Love became new in Jesus because he widened its boundaries until there were none outside its embrace.
Most of us are capable of showing love to those who are lovable. Even that is a challenge at times due to our natural selfishness, but we are generally pretty good at reaching out to those who are like us, those who are successful, those who have something to offer us in return. But Jesus spent the vast bulk of his time reaching out to the poor, the needy, the outcast, the broken, the hurting.
It is new in the lengths to which it goes. No personal opposition and no lack of response could turn Jesus’ love to hate. The Gospel of John records that “He came to his own but his own did not receive him.” Yet He wept over the city of Jerusalem and instead of calling down judgment from heaven on his executioners he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That is the length to which love will go.
In verse 9 we come to the third “whoever says” argument. “Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness.” Let me express it this way:
No claim of being in the light has any validity if the person making that claim does not love his fellow-believer.
The theme of light and darkness is a common one in John’s writings. In the first chapter of his Gospel, John refers to Jesus as the light that gives light to every man. Then in the first chapter of 1 John, verse 5 he stated, “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” A few verses later he writes, “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” Light is the realm God dwells in; darkness is Satan’s domain. Likewise, light describes the status of a true believer while darkness describes the status of the unbeliever.
The person John has in view claims to be in the light; i.e., he claims to be a believer basking in the sunshine of a relationship with God, but at the same time he hates his brother. That’s an oxymoron, says John. A person cannot be in the light and hate his brother at the same time.
Maybe we could bring this a little closer to home by asking some hard questions. Is there someone here at First Free you really can’t stand? Do you walk the other way when you see them coming down the hall? Do you seethe when you think about something that person said to you or did to you, or some decision he made that negatively impacted you? Do you secretly wish something bad would happen to that person? Let me broaden the question a little: Is there someone you can’t stand at the church you used to attend? I can’t help but think of all the church splits that have occurred in evangelical churches in the Wichita area and the ugly things that fellow believers say about one another in the wake.
But before we excuse ourselves prematurely by denying that we hate anyone, it is important to observe that hating one’s brother does not necessarily imply getting red in the face, cussing him out, or threatening him with bodily harm. In the Bible the term “hate” often means simply to “love less.” For example, in Gen. 29:31 we read, “when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he gave her a child.” Now Leah was Jacob’s wife, but not his favorite wife. He didn’t hate her; he just loved her less than he loved Rachel.
There are many other examples of that usage of the term “hate.” I would suggest that many of the passages which speak of our hating our brother might well be interpreted as meaning to “love him less than we should” or “refusing to show our love.” If you’re like me, that’s much more convicting. I have never had much of a problem with active hate. But there are many for whom I fail to show love or whom I ignore because I’m too busy.
In verse 10, as is John’s custom, he follows up a statement with its converse. Having declared that a profession of faith without love reveals a life of darkness, he now makes it clear that a life of love reveals a life of light. “Whoever loves his brother abides in the light.” In other words, demonstrating love to others is evidence that the person so living has a life characterized by walking in the light. He is not a phony, not living a lie; rather he is a person of integrity and genuineness. And if he has passed the other tests, he is a true Christian.
Furthermore, “in him there is no cause for stumbling.” The idea of stumbling may be viewed in one of two ways. First, it may mean that the one who loves his brother will not cause others to stumble. This reminds us of Paul’s extensive teaching on how we should be willing to limit our liberty by love for our brothers, so we don’t cause them to stumble. Or second, it may mean that the one who loves his brother will not himself stumble. Both are true, but the latter is most likely the intention of John in this verse.
Dr. James Boice makes an intriguing suggestion in his commentary on these verses. He says, “John introduces the important idea that our love and hatred not only reveal whether we are already in the light or in the darkness, but actually contribute towards the light or the darkness in which we already are.”[ii] That is, the one who walks in the light has more light day by day. The one who walks in darkness is increasingly darkened. And that seems to be borne out in verse 11 says, “But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.” Do you see the progression? The one who hates rather than loves is viewed first as “in darkness,” then as “walking in darkness,” and finally he is “blinded by the darkness.”
When a man has hatred in his heart, his powers of judgment are obscured; he cannot see an issue clearly. Barclay put it well when he said, “No man is fit to give a verdict on anything while he has hatred in his heart.”[iii] It is not uncommon to find a person opposing a good proposal simply because he dislikes the person who made it. We see this constantly in Congress, as a certain segment of legislators feel duty-bound to oppose whatever the other party suggests just because it originated in the other party, but sadly, this also happens in the church.
I recall a man in our church in St. Louis who early on decided I was the wrong choice for pastor and opposed nearly everything I attempted to do. Some years later I was persuaded to lead a trip to the Holy Land and invited those who were interested to sign up. It wasn’t long before I heard through the grapevine that this man was wondering (out loud, of course) how much money the pastor was receiving under the table for sponsoring this trip. The fact is I wasn’t receiving any money. Though I had been offered free trips for myself and my wife as a reward for recruiting a group, I had chosen to pay all of my wife’s trip in order to keep the price down for the others. But his hatred (I don’t know what else to call it) caused him to assume the worst. Frankly, I think one of the most serious dangers in the church is when people begin to assume the worst about their leaders.
Conclusion: Friends, we criticize religious groups that stress the moral test above everything else—that the Ten Commandments or some other moral code must be kept. We rightly call them legalists and refer to their view as works salvation. We criticize other religious groups that stress the social test above everything else—that we must love one another. We rightly call them humanists and refer to their view as the Social Gospel. But frankly our greatest danger may be that we have championed the theological test above everything else–that one must simply believe the right things.
These three tests stand or fall together. We don’t have the option of emphasizing one to the exclusion of either of the other two. We must stand firm on the theological truth of the incarnation, the death and resurrection of Christ for our sins, but we must also affirm the need for a transformed life and the necessity of a transformed love. Only when all three of those are present will we enjoy both assurance and security.
DATE: January 26, 2014
Tags:
Assurance
Security
Commandments
Love
Light
Hatred
[i] Warren Wiersbe, Be Real, 54.
[ii] James Boice, The Epistles of John, 67.
[iii] William Barclay, The Epistles of John and Jude, 49.