2.08 - Fellowship In The Light Of God
Chapter 8 Fellowship In The Light Of God
(1 John 1:5-10) The Gospel a Message about God, proposing Fellowship with God—The Old Gods and the New God—The God of Philosophy—The Incubus of Idolatry—God as pure Light—Light a Socializing Power—One Light for all Intelligence—Blindness to God the mother of Strife—Cleansing through the Blood of Jesus—Three Ways of opposing the Light of God.
―—―♦——— And this is the message which we have heard from Him, and
announce to you:
That God is light, and darkness in Him there is none.
If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in the darkness,
We lie, and do not the truth.
But 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
cleanseth us from all sin.
If we say that we have no sin,
We deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us:
If we confess our sins,
He is faithful and just, that He may forgive us our sins and cleanse us
from all unrighteousness.
If we say that we have not sinned,
We make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.
―—―♦———
RELIGION, as the Apostle John conceived it, consists of two things: true knowledge of God, and fellowship with God and with each other in that knowledge. To fellowship with God in His Son Jesus Christ, the writer has summoned his readers (1 John 1:3-4). For such communion the facts of the Gospel have laid the foundation. To establish and perfect His communion with men is the end of all the disclosures which the Father has made of Himself to us “from the beginning”; to realize this communion is “eternal life.”
St John’s Gospel, therefore, is, above all things, a message about God—to wit, “that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” When the Apostle says that this was the message which he had “heard from Him” (from Christ), it does not appear that the Lord Jesus had at any time uttered these precise words and given them as a “message.” St John was not accustomed to rehearse the sayings of Jesus Christ in a formal and mechanical way. But everything that he had heard from his Master, everything that he had learnt of Him, everything that Jesus Christ Himself was, seemed to him to be crying out: “God is light, God is light; and in that light there is fellowship for men.”
Let us put ourselves in the position of those who heard Christ’s message from John’s lips, the converted idolaters of the Asian cities. His readers, most of them, were reared in heathenism. They had been taught in their youth to worship Zeus and Hermes (Acts 14:12), Artemis of the Ephesians (Acts 19:34), Bacchus of the Philadelphians, Aphrodite of the Smyrnaeans, and we know not how many besides—gods stained, in the belief of their worshippers, with foul human vices, gods so evil in some of their characteristics that St Paul justly said concerning them: “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and not to God.” They had gods that could cheat and lie, gods licentious and unchaste, gods spiteful and malignant towards men, quarrelsome and abusive towards each other. They had been accustomed to think of the Godhead as a mixed nature, like their own, only on a larger scale—good and evil, kind and cruel, pure and wanton, made of darkness and of light. Now, to hear of a God who is all truth, all righteousness and goodness, in whom there is no trickery or wantonness, no smallest spice of malice or delight in evil, no darkness at all—a God to be absolutely trusted and honoured—this was to the heathen of the Apostle’s mission an amazing revelation. Their philosophers, indeed, conceived of the Divine nature as exalted above human desire and infirmity. But the philosophic conceptions of Plato or Plutarch were too speculative and ideal to affect the common mind; they were powerless to move the heart, to possess the imagination and will. These enlightened men scarcely attempted to overthrow the idols of the populace; and their teaching offered a feeble and slight resistance to the tide of moral corruption. False religions can be destroyed only by the real. The concrete and actual is displaced by the more actual, never by abstractions. It was faith in a living and true God, in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as the supreme fact of the universe, the enthroned Almighty and All-holy Will bent upon blessing and saving men, that struck down the idols, that transformed society and reversed the stream of history; not belief in “the Divine” as the highest category of thought, as the Substance behind phenomena, the unknown and unknowable depositary of the collective powers of nature. Such ideas, at the best, shed but a cold, glimmering light on the path of daily toil and suffering; they proved themselves nerveless and pithless, all too faint to encounter the shock of passion and to master the turbulence of flesh and blood. Not in the name of Pythagoras or Plato did the Greek find salvation.
Since the providence of God has laid upon the English people so much responsibility for the heathen world, we should attempt to realize what heathenism means and is. We must understand the incubus that it lays upon mankind, the frightful mischief and misery of soul entailed by vile notions about God. To have untruth, cruelty, wrong imputed to the government of the universe, involved and imbedded in the Divine nature itself, to have the Fountain-head of being contaminated—what evil can there be so poisonous to society, so pregnant with all other evils, as this one? To own a treacherous friend, a thankless child, is wounding and maddening enough—but to have a wicked god! Nothing has ever given such relief to the human mind as the announcement of the simple truth of this verse. To see the sky washed clean of those foul shapes, to have the haunting idols, with their wanton spells and unbounded powers for evil—those veritable “demons”—banished from the imagination and replaced by the pure image of God incarnated in Christ, and to know that the Lord of the worlds seen and unseen is the Father of men, and is absolute rectitude and wisdom and love, this was to pass out of darkness into marvelous light!
Such was the impression that our religion made then, and makes now upon minds prepared to receive it amongst the heathen. God appeared in a character new and unconceived before, and realistic in the highest degree. Man’s nature was invested with a glory, his destiny lighted up with a splendour of hope, that was overwhelming in its first effects. The Pagan world had become to multitudes like a prison-vault, stifling and filled with shapes of terror. But the door opens, the shutters fall, the sunshine and sweet breath of heaven stream in, and the prisoner’s heart breaks for very joy! Hence the exultant note of the New Testament, the keen and eager sense of salvation that fills its pages. It is the joy of daybreak after fearful night, of health after deadly sickness, of freedom after bondage. Such is the gladness you may send, or yourself carry, to yon Pagan sitting afar off in darkness and the shadow of death. A like gladness comes to ourselves when, behind the shows and forms of religion, we gain a sight of what the great, good God really is. Then the day-spring from on high visits us; “for God who said, Light shall shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts.”
1. So far our course in the reading of this passage is clear. But when we pass from the negative to the positive, from the consideration of what God is not to ask ourselves what He is, as viewed under the symbol of “light,” we are lost in the immensity of the Apostle’s thought. This is one of those infinite words of the Bible, which have a meaning always beyond us, however far we track them. The declaration, God is light, stands by the side of other pregnant sayings: God is love, God is spirit, and (in the Epistle to the Hebrews) God is fire. That “God is love” is a second definition found in this Epistle (1 John 4:8). Of the two this is the more comprehensive, as it is the fundamental assertion. Love is one thing; light is the blending of many things in one. God is love; but love is not everything in God (compare Chapter 20). Light, as we are now learning better than before, is a subtle and complex element, full of delicate, beautiful, and far-reaching mysteries. In the Divine light there is an infinite sum of perfections, each with its own separate glory and wonderfulness, and all centring in the consummate harmony, the ineffable radiance and splendour of the Deity.
We might say, with Westcott, that “Physically light embodies the idea of splendour, glory intellectually, of truth; morally, of holiness.” Combining these aspects of the truth, we arrive at the interpretation that God is light as He shines upon us in the beauty of His holiness, His manifested righteousness and love. Light signifies purity, truth, goodness; as darkness signifies foulness, falsehood, malice. There was plenty of these latter in the heathen gods; there is none of them in ours. He is all love, all rectitude, all goodness and truth, and nothing in the least degree contrary thereto. And these qualities do not so much belong to God, or distinguish Him and constitute His nature; they are constituted by His nature; they emanate from Him. Their existence in moral beings, and our power to conceive of them and to recognize them, “come down” from Him, “the Father of lights” (James 1:17). Nor does the Apostle’s message simply declare that there are these luminous qualities in God, but that they are manifested to us. God is not only shining yonder, amongst the infinitudes, in His “light unapproachable”—in the burning depths of an insufferable glory; He has flung His heavens open, and shed Himself upon us. This metaphor speaks of the God revealed in Christ, of Immanuel, God with us! “I am come,” said Jesus, “a light into the world.” His coming was “the message.” In the Incarnation ten thousand voices spoke; as, when the rays of dawn strike upon the sleeper’s window, they say, “Day is come, the sun is here!” God whose glory is above the heavens, is shining here amongst us, upon the dullest and poorest earthly lot—shooting the glances of His love and pity into the eyes of our heart. “He gives the light of the knowledge of His glory, in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). There is nothing quiescent, nothing grudging, self-confined, exclusive about light. It is penetrating and diffusive, self-communicating yet self-asserting, streaming through the worlds — the all-piercing, all-informing, all-quickening and gladdening element of the universe. Such is God manifest to mankind in Jesus Christ.
2. Now it is evident that the knowledge of God in this character, wherever it extends, creates fellowship. Light is a social power. It is the prime condition of communion, knitting together as by the play of some swift weaver’s shuttle the vast commonwealth of worlds and setting all creatures of sense and reason at intercourse. With the daylight the forest awakes to song, and the city to speech and traffic. As the household in winter evenings draw round the cheerful lamp and the ruddy firelight; as the man of genial nature, rich in moral and intellectual light, forms about him a circle of kindred minds won by his influence and learning to recognize and prize each other, so the Lord Jesus Christ is the social centre of humanity. He is the only possible ground of a race-fellowship amongst us,—the Divine Firstborn and Elder Brother of the peoples. Christ is the love and wisdom of God in human personality, and therefore “the light of the world.” This connection of thought is self-evident, so that in 1 John 1:6 the Apostle can pass without explanation from the idea of light to that of fellowship. For what communion can there be “in the darkness”? Is not sin the disruption of all society, human and divine? When God said, “Let there be light,” He said, Let there be fellowship, friendship — a commonwealth of thought and joy amongst all creatures. Along the path of light eye runs to meet eye, heart leaps to kindred heart.
It is a thought full of awe and full of joy, that in the light of God we share with God Himself,—“if we walk in the light, as He is in the light.” God is light, and God is in the light. He sees and acts in no other light than that of His own being; in the same light men may see and act. God creates around Him a light-sphere, wherein all holy souls dwell and “walk” with Him. Each planet subsists and moves in the same light as the sun from whom light proceeds, holding fellowship with the lord of day and with its brother planets, in a universe formed by the solar effluence. Even so in the spiritual realm. There is one sun in the sky; there is one God in the universe,—one centre of rational and moral life for all creatures, one source of love and truth from everlasting to everlasting; He “filleth all in all, and worketh all in all.” The light that pours in fiery tide from the heart of the sun, and that gleams on the cottage window and sparkles in the beads of dew, and glances on the mountain peak, and on the globe of Neptune at the far edge of the planetary world, is one light, bringing with it one life and law. The sun is in that light: so is the dancing mote, and the fluttering insect, and the laughing child, and the whirling, rushing globe. God is in the light: so is my believing soul and yours, so the spirits of Abraham and Isaac and all the just made perfect; so the bright squadrons of the angels and the tenants of the farthest outpost stars; so the vast body of the universal Church. There is one reason, one love, one righteousness for all intelligences—one Name to be hallowed, one Will to be done, “as in heaven so on earth,” one Father-hand that holds the stars in their courses and holds thy soul in life. “With thee,” says the Psalmist to his God, “is the fountain of life; in thy light we see light.”
It is this light of God that alone makes possible a true and enduring fellowship amongst men. “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we keep fellowship with one another”—i.e. with our fellows also walking in the light (1 John 2:9-11; 1 John 3:10-12, 1 John 3:23-24, 1 John 4:7-13). It often appears that religious interests divide men, while secular interests and material pursuits unite them. Christ once said that He had come to “bring a sword” and to “set men at variance” (Matthew 10:34-36). How many blood-stained pages of history confirm this presentiment. But this is a transitional state of things. After all, no community has ever held together or can subsist in perpetuity without the religious bond. Fraternity means a common paternity. God is a partner, tacit or acknowledged, to every sound agreement amongst men. The use of the sacrifice and sacrament in compacts and of the oath in public declarations, notwithstanding their abuse, witnesses to this truth. The Eternal God is the rock and refuge of human society. The material and moral laws forming the framework of the house of life are “the everlasting arms underneath” and around us, which nurse and carry us, and fence us in with all our quarrels like birds in the nest, while they hold us to the heart of God.
It is therefore through ignorance of God that men and nations fight each other; in the dark we stumble against our fellows, and rage at them. In the light of Christ’s true fellowship we gain the larger human views, the warmer heart, that make hatred and strife impossible. Quarrels in the Church, due to causes that are often petty and ignoble in the extreme, are pursued with a peculiar rancour, just because those engaged in them are fighting against the God of peace and resist a secret condemnation. In such contention the bitterness of a heart not right with God finds vent and discharges upon others its spleen, the suppressed indignation due to the evil in itself. Envy, contempt, backbiting have their root in unbelief; irreverence towards God breeds disregard for men. So far as we see and feel what God is, we shall grow humble and tender towards our kind.
Under these conditions, as we gather from the last clause of verse 7, it comes to pass that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ wins its full and decisive power over our evil nature: “The blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin.” Through continued fellowship with God and men, the cross of Christ gains increasing mastery within us. On the one hand, fellowship in the Divine light brings a deepening sense of sin, demanding a renewed confession and an ampler pardon; the old repentance and faith are convicted of shallowness, in the clearer knowledge of God. At the same time, we find that the atonement is not the means only, it is the end of our righteousness in Christ; it supplies the ideal of our service to God and man 1 John 3:16, and Ephesians 4:32, Ephesians 5:1-2), while it is the instrument by which we are recovered for that service. The cross of Jesus is the alpha and omega of salvation. We do not pass by it, as we enter the way of life; we have to lift it up and bear it with us to the end. “The blood of Jesus” is sprinkled on the conscience to rest there; it melts the heart, and melts into the heart. His death-blood, if we may so say, becomes the life-blood of our spirits. It sinks-into the nature, wounding and healing, burning its way to the quick of our being, to the dark springs of evil, until it reaches and “slays the dire root and seed of sin.” The sacrifice of Christ is the principle of our sanctification, equally with our justification.
Accordingly, in 1 John 1:9 we find the “cleansing from sin” of 1 John 1:7 (compare p. 67), opening out into its two elements of forgiveness and moral renewal. Both turn upon one condition (the subjective condition, as the atonement is the objective ground of salvation), viz. the acknowledgment—the continued acknowledgment (ὁμολογῶμεν present tense)—of personal sin, which is nothing else than the soul’s yielding to the light of God’s holy presence: “If we confess [go on to confess] our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” In this confession penitence and faith meet. With St John we are “cleansed from all sin,” when with St Paul we are “conformed to the death” of Christ and “know the fellowship of His sufferings” (Php 3:10). This thorough cleansing, the immaculate perfection of the believer crucified with His Lord, is the crown of a life of walking in the light. The above is not a process carried on in isolation, by the solitary fellowship of the soul with God: “We have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us.” There is a deep meaning in that “and.” Christian fellowship and Christian perfection are things concomitant. Our social and individual salvation must be wrought out together. The goal is one to be sought for the Church, not the mere self—for us, not simply for me.
3. It is possible, however, to resist the light of the knowledge of God in Christ and to refuse the fellowship which it offers to us. And this resistance takes place in two ways: in the way of hypocrisy (1 John 1:6), or in the way of impenitence (1 John 1:8 and 1 John 1:10). These fatal methods of dealing with religious light are marked out by three parallel sentences, each beginning with the formula, “If we say,” as stating things which we may say, but which can never be. They constitute a triple falsehood, committed in the sheltering of sin. In these various modes, “we lie and do not the truth,” or “we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us,” or (worst of all) “we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.”
Light is a kindly, but often an acutely painful thing. There are conditions of mind in which every ray of Divine truth is pointed with fire and excites a fierce resentment. The “arrows of the Almighty” burn and rankle in the rebellious spirit. The light searches us out, and shows us up. “If I had not come and spoken unto them,” said Jesus of the Jewish Pharisees and priests, “they had not had sin: but now they have no excuse for their sin” (John 15:22). With Him light came into the world, and men preferred darkness. The preference is their condemnation. St John had seen this preference take a cowardly form in Judas, and a defiant form in the Jewish rulers.
(1) We may oppose the light of God treacherously, by pretending to accept it while nevertheless we hold fast our sins: “If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness”—like the thief who bare the bag and who stole out at night from the suppertable of Bethany and the spectacle of Mary’s “waste” of love, to say to the priests, “What will ye give me, and I will betray Him unto you?” The hypocrite is one who has been in the company of Jesus and has seen the light, who knows the truth and knows his own sin,—knows at least enough to be aware of his double-dealing. And while practising his sin, he professes fellowship with God! The holy Apostle does not stand on ceremony with this sort of man, or palter with the deceitfulness of the human heart; he gives him the lie direct: “If we say this,” he cries out, “we lie, and do not the truth.” In such words one sees the flash of St John’s swift lightning; one perceives why the Master called him and his brother James Boanerges, sons of thunder—the thunder not of brazen lungs but of a passionate heart. But the Apostle will not separate himself ever from such a one as this. He had known a traitor amongst the Twelve. He puts his supposition in the first person plural; he speaks as if such a state were possible to any of us,—possible to himself! At the table of the Last Supper he had said with the rest, when the treason was announced, “Lord, is it I?” Which of us can claim to have been always true to the truth of Christ? It is easy to “say” this or that; but how hard to “do the truth,” to put our best convictions into act and practice! Yet there is an infinite chasm between Judas and John, between the studied deceit of the canting professor of religion and the self-accusings of the scrupulous believer, whose loyalty finds flaws in his best service.
He who professes communion with God while he lives in sin—the dishonest man, the unchaste man, the malicious and spiteful man—what does his profession mean? He virtually declares that God is like himself! He drags the All-holy One down to the level of Pagan deities; he brings to the Christian shrine the worship due to Belial or Mammon. He sees God through the reek of his own burning lusts. Such an one might have fellowship with Zeus or Hermes, or Artemis of the Ephesians; but not with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,—no more than the bat or the night-owl holds fellowship with the mid-day sun! It needs clean hands and a pure heart to dwell in God’s holy hill. If we walk in darkness, then we are in darkness.
(2) There is a more open and radical mode of opposition to the accusing light of God,—by flat denial of one’s sin, by taking the attitude of a bold impenitence. This denial appears in two distinct forms: as a general denial of sin in principle, or as a particular and matter-of-fact denial of one’s actual sins. Such is the distinction that seems to lie in the carefully chosen expressions of 1 John 1:8 and 1 John 1:10: “If we say that we have no sin,” and “If we say that we have not sinned.”
St John had to do with a moribund Pagan world, in which, as in heathen life to-day, the moral sense was decayed and conscience reduced to the lowest terms. Hence in converted men and believers in Christ the sense of sin, that “most awful and imperious creation of Christianity,” could only be formed by degrees. Men might and did deny the reality of sin; by all kinds of sophistries and evasions they deceived themselves respecting its import and criminality. Not a few persons, it may be supposed, had espoused Christianity for intellectual or sentimental reasons, with very superficial convictions upon this head. Allowing the distinction of moral good and evil, they were slow to confess sin; they refused to admit an inherent depravity involving them in corruption and guilt. Their mis-doings were mistakes, frailties, venial errors,—anything but “sin.” That is an ugly word, and needless besides, —a bugbear, an invention of the priests! St John hastens to denounce these notions; they are self-delusion, the folly of men who extinguish the light that is in them, the ignorance of a shallow reason without the inward substance of truth (1 John 1:8). The denial of sin so familiar in naturalistic modern thought—the resentment so often met with against the word itself—is a revival, in some cases conscious and intentional, of Pagan sentiment, an express revolt against the authority of Jesus Christ. This error has deep roots, and has sometimes a strange recrudescence at an advanced stage of the Christian life. The man of “sinless perfection,” who imagines he has nothing left to confess, nothing that needs forgiveness, verily “deceives himself”; rarely does he deceive his neighbour on this point,—never his God. “The truth is not in him”: his moral convictions, his knowledge of the holiness of God, have not pierced to the heart of his iniquity. There is a superficial sanctification, serving thinly to cover a stubborn crust of impenitence, under which a world of pride and self-will lie hidden. As Rothe says: “In fellowship with Christ our eye becomes ever keener and keener for’ sin, especially for our sin. It is precisely the mature Christian who calls himself a great sinner.”
(3) The other form of impenitence stigmatized by the Apostle, is the most extreme and shameless: “If we say that we have not sinned”; and its consequence the most shocking “We make Him a liar!”
One may deny sin in general and fence a good deal upon questions of principle and ethical theory, who yet when the word of God comes to him as a personal message and his memory and conscience are challenged by it, will admit practically that he has sinned and is in the sight of God a condemned man. David had, doubtless, argued with himself and deceived his own heart not a little in regard to his great transgression; but the prophet’s home-thrust, “Thou art the man,” broke down his guard;” and David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD.” To contradict a general truth is one thing; to confront the personal fact is another. But when a sinner, with his transgressions staring him in the face and revealed in the accusing light of God’s word, declares that he “has not sinned,” what can be done for him, or said to him? The Apostle has only one resource with such a man: “God says that you have sinned, that you have broken the law of your being and incurred the penalty of exile from His presence, and brought on yourself moral ruin and misery. You say that you have done nothing of the kind. If you are right, God is wrong; if you are true, then God is false. You make Him a liar !” That is St John’s final protest.
Every one who refuses to bow down at the sight of the majesty of God in Christ and to make confession before that white, soul-searching splendour of holiness and love, before the final disclosure of human guilt and the Divine righteousness made in the spilt blood of Jesus, is doing this. He gives the lie to his Maker and Judge. Impenitence in men who have really known the Gospel, is the most callous insensibility, the most daring insolence, we can conceive.