2.10 - The True Knowledge Of God

Chapter 10 The True Knowledge Of God

(1 John 2:3-6)

Elements of Fellowship with God—Connection of Ideas in 1 John 2:1-6—Danger of providing for Sin in Believers—Loyalty the Test and Guard of Forgiveness—What is keeping of Commands?—What the Commands to be kept?—Good Conscience of Commandment-keeper—Falseness of Knowledge of God without Obedience—Knowledge translated into Love —Love the Soul of Loyalty—“Perfecting” of God’s Love—“The Commandments” and “the Word” of God—Communion passing into Union with God—Mutual Indwelling—Jesus the Example of Life in God—The Features of His Image.

―—―♦——— And in this we know that we have come to know Him:
If we keep His commandments.
He who saith, I have come to know Him, and keepeth not
His commandments,
Is a liar, and in him the truth is not;
But whosoever is keeping His word,
Verily in him the love of God bath been perfected.
In this we know that we are in Him:
He who saith that he abideth in Him,
Is bound, even as He walked, so to walk also himself.

— 1 John 2:3-6        

―—―♦———

THE fellowship with God, which St John conceives as the purpose of the Christian revelation, now resolves itself into knowledge (1 John 2:3) of and love to God (1 John 2:5), with commandment-keeping for its test (1 John 2:3-5), and a fixed abiding in God for its result (1 John 2:5-6), while the walk of Jesus supplies its pattern and standard (1 John 2:6). The goal of fellowship with God has been in view throughout and already preoccupies the mind of the reader. So that when at this point the writer speaks of “having known Him,” of “keeping His commands” or “His word,” of “being in Him,” “abiding in Him,” there should be no doubt that “God,” or “the Father,” is meant by the pronoun,³⁵ although “Jesus Christ” (1 John 2:1-2) is the nearest grammatical antecedent, and is therefore by some interpreters assumed under the αὐτόνκ.τ.λ. of 1 John 2:3-6. But the predicates παράκλητος and ἱλασμός, given to Christ in the foregoing verses, assigned to Him a relatively subordinate, mediating position; “the Father,” before whom the Advocate pleads and to whom “the propitiation” is offered remains the commanding presence of the context. Hence when, at the close of this paragraph, “Jesus Christ the righteous” has to be referred to again (in 1 John 2:6), a distinct pronoun is employed; He is brought in as ἐκεῖνος, ille, that (other) one; compare 1 John 3:3, 1 John 3:5, 1 John 3:7, 1 John 4:17.³⁶

Fellowship with God is the true end of man’s existence (1 John 1:3). This comes through “the life” that “was manifested” in Jesus, God’s Son (1 John 1:2), but manifested in conflict with its opposite as “light” confronting and revealing “darkness” (1 John 1:5 ff.). Sin is “the darkness,” even as “God is light”; sin is the death of man’s life of fellowship with God. This cause has severed mankind from God everywhere. 1 John 2:2 completed the circle of thought which set out from 1 John 1:5, since it brings “the whole world” under the scope of that “propitiation” rendered by Jesus Christ, our righteous Advocate, which removes the bar put by man’s sin against his communion with God, which restores the Divine light to a world estranged from God and ignorant of Him. With the former circle of ideas rounded off (1 John 1:5-10, 1 John 2:1-2), St John’s mind according to its manner takes a wider circuit concentric with the first (1 John 2:3-17), setting out again from the original point. In the first movement of this new flight the primary conception of the Epistle is taken up again, with a change of accent and expression, viz. that of the opposition of light and darkness raised by the Gospel message. 1 John 2:3-5 are parallel to 1 John 1:6-7; but the second representation, both on its positive and negative sides, is more explicit and matter-of-fact than the first: “fellowship” opens out into “knowledge” and “love”; “walking in the light ’’ is translated into “keeping God’s commands”; of the man who in the former instance “lies” and “does not the truth,” it is now said that “he is a liar and the truth is not in him” his false act has grown into a fixed state. In the “walk” of Jesus Christ (1 John 2:6), the ideal of “walking in the light” (1 John 1:7) is realized in historical fact and seen in its loftiness and beauty. The general connection of thought is unmistakable. 1 John 2:3-6 do not continue the strain of 1 John 2:1-2, which carried on the thought of chapter 1 to the climax reached in περὶὅλουτοῦκόσμου; the “and” of 1 John 2:3 looks beyond the foregoing context to the fundamental saying of 1 John 1:5, “that God is light,” of which the writer has now to make a practical and searching application. The links of association in St John’s writings are curiously crossed and interlaced. The more simple his language and obvious the grammatical relation of his sentences, so much the more difficult to trace in its finer movements is the interplay of his thought.

One has to bear in mind that there are two parties to a letter; an epistle is a dialogue. We have to put ourselves in the place of writer and readers alternately, and to imagine at each step of the argument or appeal what the latter would think or say, while we listen to what the former is saying; we must endeavour to read their rejoinders, and possible misunderstandings, between the lines and to see how the writer anticipates and deals with them as he proceeds. From the side of this other party to the letter, a line of connection is apparent between 1 John 2:1-2, and 1 John 2:3-6, which is wrought in with the main and substantial association binding the latter paragraph to 1 John 1:5. The Apostle has admitted the possibility of a lapse from grace in one or other of his “little children”; he has shown that for this lamentable case relief is afforded by the intercession of Christ (1 John 2:1-2). But this is a provision of which the antinomianism of the human heart may take base advantage. The tempted Christian, on hearing what St John has just written, might say to himself: “There is hope for the backslider; then I am not lost if I backslide! God is a merciful Father; Christ died to expiate all sin, and is my Intercessor. If under the storm and press of evil I should yield, His hand will be stretched out to save me. I may stumble, but I shall not utterly fall.” How natural, and how perilous, such a reflection would be. It was the like inference that St Paul had earlier to combat amongst the first Gentile disciples (Romans 6:1): “Let us continue in sin, that grace may abound”; God delights in forgiveness, since the propitiation for sin has been offered by Jesus Christ —a little more to forgive can make no difference to Him! This danger attaching to the gospel of free pardon for sinners—a liability especially great in the case of half-trained converts from heathenism—led the Church to surround with so much terror, and to prevent by the strongest fence of discipline, the contingency of relapse after baptism. The possibility of such abuse of his message of sin-cleansing through the blood of Jesus was doubtless present to St John’s mind. For this reason his doctrine of obedience and practical holiness follows, with keen insistence, upon that of the remission of sin. As St Paul makes sanctification the concomitant of justification and works of love the proof of a saving faith, so with St John commandment-keeping is the test of knowledge of a sin-pardoning God. A penitent backslider, like Peter, will be forgiven but Peter was not a calculating backslider. He did not argue to himself, “Jesus is infinitely kind; God is an indulgent Father, who will not be implacable toward a weak man so fearfully tried; I may risk the sin!”—and then rap out the denial and the shameful oath. Such an offence would have been immeasurably worse than that committed, and quite unlikely to be followed by a speedy, sincere repentance. Deliberate transgression, on the part of one who presumes on God’s mercy and discounts the guilt of sin by the value of the Atonement, is an act that shows the man to be ignorant of God and to have no true will to keep His commands. There is more hope of a reckless, prodigal transgressor than of him.

1. Here then is the sign that sin is forgiven and cleansed away; here the manifestation of a changed heart dwelling in fellowship with God. The keeping of His commandments is the test and pledge of an abiding knowledge of the Father. “This is the love of God,” the Apostle virtually writes in 1 John 2:1-29:(as in 1 John 5:3), “that we keep His commandments,” and in 1 John 2:3, “This is the knowledge of God, that we keep His commandments” (comp., for St Paul, 1 Corinthians 7:19; Romans 2:13; Romans 8:4). A sentimental love and a theoretic knowledge are equally vain, because they are both without obedience, like the “faith without works” which St James rejected barren” and “dead in itself ” (1 John 2:14-26). The equation of knowledge, love, and commandment-keeping is completed when we add to the two propositions just quoted a third, which is found in 1 John 4:7, “Every one that loveth . . . knoweth God.” The “keeping” that is meant is the habit and rule of the man’s life. This is indicated by the (continuous) present tense in the forms of τηρέω that are used (compare 1 John 3:24; 1 John 5:3, 1 John 5:18) in distinction from the Greek aorist (“if anyone fall into sin”) of 1 John 2:1 above, which suggested a single and, it might be, incidental wrong-doing. For example, confession of Christ was the bent of St Peter’s whole life, to which the denial in Caiaphas’ hall was the lamentable exception. Moreover, “keeping God’s commandments” is not simply doing what they prescribe, as men will obey perforce rules with which they have no conformity of will; it signifies observant care, as of one keeping a safe path or a cherished trust. So Christ “kept His Father’s commandments, abiding in His love,” and “kept in the Father’s name His own which were in the world” (John 15:10; John 17:12); so the Apostle Paul would have the Ephesians (Ephesians 4:3) “keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Such heedful observance pays honour to the command, holding it sacred for its own sake and for the Giver’s, and “esteeming all His precepts concerning all things to be right.” A rational fellowship with God includes harmony with His law; for this is no string of arbitrary enactments, but the expression of God’s own nature, as that bears on human conduct and looks to see itself imaged in the character of men. It is impossible for the man who really knows God—His awful holiness, His all-encompassing and all-searching presence, His infinite bounty and tender fatherliness—to behave as a commandment-breaker. “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin againstGod?” the tempted man exclaims, who has set the Lord always before him. Knowing God, men cannot at the same time practise sin, any more than with open eyes in the daylight a seeing man can stumble as if in darkness.

If it be asked what were the commandments of God whose keeping the Apostle expects from his disciples, they must be found in the moral law of Israel, as that was expounded by Jesus Christ and reduced to its spiritual principles. The majority of the readers were converts from Paganism of the first or second generation, who had made acquaintance with Divine law through the Scriptures of the Old Testament. The Apostles used the Ten Commandments as the basis of ethical instruction to catechumens and to children (see Romans 13:9, Ephesians 6:2, etc.). So the Church has wisely done ever since. But the Commandments of Moses were comprehended and glorified in the two precepts of Jesus (compare Romans 13:8-10), on which, as He declared, “hang all the law and the prophets”; for in love to God and man they find their centre and vital spring.

Such settled, steadfast obedience to God’s rule in human life is evidence to the obedient man that he has gained a knowledge of God, and has tasted of eternal life: “Hereby (to use the language of 1 John 3:19), we shall know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our heart before God”; and so it stands in this passage “Hereby we know that we know Him.” The same evidence St Paul stated in his own way, when he wrote, “If by the Spirit you are mortifying the deeds of the body, you shall live; for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are God’s sons” (Romans 8:13-14). The Christian obedience of love is a token to the world—to “all men” (John 13:34-35)—of a true discipleship; but it is proof to the disciple himself first of all, and he has full right to the comfort afforded by this witness of the Spirit of Christ in him. “Hereby we know,” says St John in another place (1 John 3:24), “that He abideth in us, by the Spirit which He gave us.” The Lord Jesus alone possessed this assurance without defect or interruption; He could say, “I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in His love”; “I do always the things that please Him.”

The reader of the Greek will note the play upon the verb γινώσκω in 1 John 2:3, which has no exact parallel in the New Testament³⁷: γινώσκομενὅτιἐγνώκαμεναὐτόν. Thecontinuous, or inceptive, present in the governing verb (recurring in 1 John 2:5) is followed in the dependent sentence—so again in the fourth verse—by the perfect tense signifying a knowledge won and abiding (cognovimus, Vulgate)—“a result of the past realized in the present” (Westcott: see his note ad loc., and compare 1 John 2:13-14; 1 John 3:6, 1 John 3:16, 2 John 1:1, John 8:55, John 14:9, John 17:7, for this emphatic tense-form). The Authorized Version, in rendering the sentence “We do know that we know Him,” almost reverses the relation of the two tenses, while the Revised Version leaves the difference unmarked and distinguishable only by the stress of the voice to be placed upon the second know. St John’s meaning is, “We perceive (we are finding out and getting to know) that we have known God,—that we exist in God” (1 John 2:5). There is a growing discernment by the Christian believer of his own estate and of the Divine knowledge imparted to him through Christ, a sounding of the depths of God within himself and a “knowing of the things given us by God in His grace” (1 Corinthians 2:12), which brings to him, as his faith ripens, a profound thankfulness and security. In this peace of God, whose tranquillity the Apostle knows, he would have his readers at rest and satisfied.

Doubtless St John, in prescribing the above test for professors of the knowledge of God, had in view the Gnostics of his day, the men of the “knowledge falsely-named “ (1 Timothy 6:20), who when he wrote had become numerous and formidable (compare pp. 61-64). These teachers resolved the knowledge of God into metaphysical ideas; they made communion with God a matter of abstract contemplation and methodized symbolic observances, to which moral principles and the authority of revealed truth were made subordinate in their systems. They claimed on the ground of their speculative insight, and the “mysteries” reserved for their initiates, to be exclusive possessors of “the truth.” They vaunted themselves the enlightened and emancipated, raised by their superior knowledge above the simple Christian who walks by faith and knows not “the deeps” (Revelation 2:24) of Divine wisdom. With such pretenders confronting him and seducing his flock—the “antichrists” and “false prophets” whom he bans in 1 John 2:18 and 1 John 4:1—the Apostle sets up this mark—the same that his Lord prescribed for the detection of their like, “By their fruits ye shall know them”: “He that says, I know God, and keeps not His commands, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” A low morale, due to the subtlety that confounds moral distinctions or the cleverness that trifles with them, is the nemesis of intellectual pride.

“In him the truth is not”—in the man claiming acquaintance with God while he lives as a violator of His law. “The truth” lies remote from those who “profess that they know God, but by their deeds deny Him” (Titus 1:16). Truth consorts with men of lowly heart, such as make no boast of their knowledge but in love to God “keep His word” (1 John 2:5). Of two sorts of men the Apostle declares that “the truth (of Christ, of the Gospel) is not in” them—the Pharisaic moralist who declines all confession of sin (1 John 1:8-9), and the immoral religionist who would make communion with God compatible with sin. These hypocrites the Apostle of love denounces in language recalling that, quoted by himself, which our Lord used of “the devil”: “In the truth he standeth not, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh the lie, he speaketh out of his own; for he is a liar, and the father thereof” (John 8:44). So near does this self-conceit lie to the source and beginning of all falsehood; so fatally does a religious profession without the ruling sense of right and duty undermine the innermost truth of a man’s being.

2. Passing from 1 John 2:4-5, we find knowledge transformed by a sudden turn into love. Since the latter verse is the formal antithesis of its predecessor, and the clause “but whoso keepeth His word” takes up again the former protasis “he that keepeth His commands,” one expects the parallel apodosis to run “in him is the knowledge of God.” But the writer is not content with this logical continuation of the sentence; for “knowledge” he substitutes “love of God,” and the bare “is” (ἐστίν) he replaces by the richer predicate “hath been perfected” (τετελείωται). From this it appears that while commandment-keeping, is the test of a genuine knowledge of God, love is its characteristic mode. The man who truly knows God, does not make much of his knowledge; he is not in the habit of saying, like the Gnostic, “I have found out God,” “I know all mysteries and all knowledge,” “I have fathomed the depths of Deity”; he shows his love to God by steadfast obedience to command, and in this obedience love has its full sway and reaches its mark. In this quiet exchange of ἀγάπη for γνῶσις St John assumes all that St Paul has so powerfully argued in 1 Corinthians 8:1-13 and 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, concerning the emptiness of a loveless knowledge. Knowledge must be steeped in love, the science of Divine things transfused with charity, or it loses its own virtue of truth; it becomes purblind and colour-blind, it stumbles and misguides others. While St Paul habitually contrasts the two powers, and in writing to the Corinthians, who were affecters of philosophy, appears to belittle knowledge in magnifying love, St John rises above this opposition; he exalts knowledge by making it one with love, and in fact uses the rival terms as interchangeable. He can conceive no knowledge of God without apprehension of His love (1 John 3:1; 1 John 4:7-16), and no love toward God to compare with that awakened by the knowledge of His love revealed in Jesus His Son. To say that one knows God (such a God as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ) and that one loves God, is in effect one and the same thing; and the man who says the former without demonstrating the latter by obedience, betrays his own falsehood. That love to God means keeping His commands, goes almost without saying. For, indeed, the first and great commandment is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.” All other commands depend on this, and presume in man this disposition of love to his Maker and Lawgiver. Love to God is the sum of religion, as the love of God is its source. This affection can, therefore, admit of no divided and partial sway—it demands “all the heart, and all the mind, and all the soul, and all the strength”; it cannot acquiesce in any arrested development, in any crooked or stunted growth of our moral nature. It makes for perfection; and it works to this end along the lines of commandment-keeping. “Whosoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has been perfected;” it is brought to its ripe growth and due accomplishment in character and life. “Truly”—verily and veritably—this is so with him who is faithful to God’s word; while the disloyal man “is a liar” when he pretends to seek perfection, or professes communion with the God whom he does not serve in love.

St John’s bold word, “is perfected,” must not be evaded nor softened down. Here, and in 1 John 4:12 (“His love is in us, made perfect”), he enunciates a doctrine of “perfect love,” of full sanctification—a devotion to God that is complete as it covers the man’s whole- nature and brings him to the realization of his proper ends as a man, a love that is regnant in the soul and suppresses every alien motive and desire. The statement, it should be observed, is hypothetical; it is one of principle, and stands clear of all defeats of experience and defects in the individual. The point of the Apostle’s assertion is not that love to God “has been, perfected” in this or that Christian saint—though in himself and in others like him this condition was, to all intents and purposes, attained; but that wherever “God’s word” is verily “kept”—is apprehended, cherished, and held fast in its living import—there, and there only, “the love of God is perfected.” No more perfect love to God can be imagined, none that reaches a higher range and a richer development than that which comes of the keeping of God’s word, than that which is fed on Scripture and finds there its root and nourishment.³⁸

Obedience is the school of love’s perfecting. For love’s sake we obey rule, and by obeying learn to love better. Love reaches no height of perfectness in any family without commands to keep and tasks to do; where all is ease and indulgence, selfishness grows rank. There is a kind of strictness fatal to love; but there is another kind, which is its guardian and nurse. The most orderly households are, in general, the most affectionate, while the ill-governed teem with bickering and spite.

Very significantly, the keeping of God’s commandments” (1 John 2:3-4) has now become the “keeping of His word.” The former are concentred, and yet broadened out, in the latter. The ἐντολαί are a part of the Divine λόγος, of that whole utterance in which God has declared Himself to men. It is because they come as “God’s word,” the expression of His gracious will, and in the shape of His word articulate through human lips, that the commandments are effective and executive; under this form they come to possess the soul, they seat themselves by a resident and congenial power within the nature of the child of God. Six times in this Epistle the phrase “keeping His commandments” is repeated; only in this instance do we read of “keeping His word.” In John’s Gospel, and on the lips of Jesus, the latter expression predominates; He speaks habitually of “the word,” or message, that He brings from God; the term “commandment(s)” our Lord uses only in His final charge (John 13:34; John 14:15, John 14:21, John 15:10), in giving specific, new injunctions to His disciples. In the intercessory prayer of the Saviour (John 17:6 ff.), commending His disciples to the Father’s protection, He describes them as those who “have kept thy word” and in consequence “have now come to know that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are from thee.” For the saving knowledge of the things of God conveyed by Christ is contingent on, and of a piece with, the cherishing and practising of God’s word.

We have assumed that “the love of God” (ἡἀγάπητοῦθεοῦ) signifies the love that the keeper of His word has for God—not contrariwise, the love which God has for him. The drift of the context carries us to this reading of the phrase; the same relationship of the noun to its genitive appears in 1 John 2:15, and 1 John 5:3; John 14:15, John 14:31 illustrate from the words of Jesus the inevitable sequence by which the Christian keeping of commands follows upon love toward the Commandment-giver. In 1 John 4:9 of the Epistle the context points just as decisively the other way; there “the love of God” is that which God manifested in the sending of His Son to save us; with St Paul too the adjunct “of God” (or “of Christ”) qualifying “love” is always a subjective genitive. Nothing is gained by forcing the latter sense upon this passage; nor in 1 John 4:12 (“His love”), where the same ambiguity arises, and is decided by the same considerations. The middle course adopted by Haupt and Westcott, who try to balance the subjective and objective constructions against each other, does not commend itself in either text. To paraphrase “the love of God” as “Divine love, love such as God feels”—not distinctly either that felt by God or toward God—is to introduce a vague and confused, as well as exceptional rendering of a familiar phrase, and to drop the link of transition from the knowledge (“I have known Him,” 1 John 2:4), to the love of God (1 John 2:5), in which the force of the argument lies.³⁹ The “perfecting” of our love to God by “love to one another,” described in 1 John 4:11-14, is tantamount to its “perfecting” by the “keeping of God’s word”; for the message which St John has received and constantly repeats, culminates in this, “Beloved, let us love one another” (see Chapter 11 and Chapter 20).

3. In both the above passages of the Epistle (1 John 2:5-6, and 1 John 4:11-14), to the love of God which fulfils itself in the keeping of His word, a great and immediate reward is assigned: abiding in God is the result of the true knowledge of Him,—of the knowledge, that is, which is one with love and approves itself by obedience to command. “ In this we know that we are in Him” (1 John 2:5b)—namely, in the consciousness that we lovingly “keep His word” and “know Him” in very deed (1 John 2:3, 1 John 2:5a); by the like token, it is said in 1 John 4:13, that “we know that we abide in Him.” This constitutes the “communion” of man with God at which the whole Gospel aims (1 John 1:3, 1 John 1:5). Nay, it is more than communion, it is union. This Divine κοινωνία is not the intercourse of two separate personalities external to each other, but of the finite knowledge and love with the infinite, that is at once immanent to it and transcendent, the fellowship of the seeing eye with the light that fills the universe, of the spark of kindled being with the eternal Source, of the floating atom with the limitless sea and sum of life, which is pervaded and enfolded by the loving will of God. The soul finds itself, in the consciousness of self-surrendering love toward God, occupied, encircled, and upheld by Him. And in this recognition the human heart for the first time enters into and properly feels its own existence: “In this we perceive that in Him we exist “⁴⁰ (compare Acts 17:28). “Existing in Him” (1 John 2:5) becomes in 1 John 2:6 (compare 1 John 4:13) “abiding in Him” “abiding in God” is existence in God perpetuated; it is union made restful and secure. Abiding is one of St John’s key-words, learnt in its spiritual use from his Master (John 8:31; John 14:10, John 15:4 ff.); in this idea the aged Apostle’s experience and disposition of mind show their stamp.⁴¹ His life has long been hid with Christ in God. His thoughts never move out of God, nor fix on any object in which God is not seen and His presence and direction realized. God is at the centre of every desire, at the spring of every impulse; God fills the circumference of outlook and of aim. God is “all things and in all” to the soul that loves Him wholly, that lives in the atmosphere and walks by the light of His word. As it comes to this conclusion, at the end of 1 John 2:5 St John’s thought doubles back on itself, to repeat, in amended and ampler form, the statement of 1 John 2:3. “Herein we know”—not simply (1 John 2:3) “that we have known God” (as the Gnostic loved to say), nor “that we love God” (as the Christian prefers to and as the former part of 1 John 2:5 leads one to expect the Apostle’s saying)—but “that we are in Him.” The writer’s mind moves in ever-widening circles, giving to the same substance incessantly new shapes and colours. Knowledge of God (1 John 2:3-4) is restated as “love of God” in 1 John 2:5a; and where “love of God” might have been repeated, this gives place in turn to the idea of “being” and “abiding in God.” The “fellowship” of 1 John 1:3 divided itself into knowledge and love (1 John 2:3-4), and these recombine in the enriched conception of a union through which the human spirit finds its home, its ground and sphere of being in the Divine. The thought of man’s abiding in God is complemented in the parallel context by that of God’s abiding in him (1 John 4:13, 1 John 4:16); for God tenants the believing and loving soul, while He enfolds it. The bird is in the air; but the air too is in the bird, filling breast and wings and lifting it to soar in the kindred element. This correlative truth of God’s fellowship with men does not here come into view, since St John in confuting the false pretenders to religious knowledge, is concerned with the marks of the Christian state as these appear from the human and experimental side. Of this state there are three tokens: obedience and love toward God, resulting in A conscious being and dwelling in God; and these three are one.⁴²

4. Finally, verse 6 sets up the standard of the life of Divine fellowship furnished to mankind in Jesus Christ. That knowledge of God by which the soul dwells in Him, belonged to one amongst men in perfect measure. In Him, if in no other, “the love of God has been perfected” by the constant keeping of His word: “I have kept my Father’s commandments,” said Jesus, “and abide in His love” (John 15:10). Hence Jesus claimed in His debate with “the Jews” to possess the knowledge of the Father lacking to them, the want of which made all their professions futile. “It is my Father,” He protested, that glorifieth me, of whom you say that He is your God, and you have not known Him” (compare 1 John 2:3-4 above). “But I know Him; and if I should say, ‘I know Him not,’ I shall be like you, a liar; but I do know Him, and I keep His word” (John 8:54-55). The secret of the Lord was with Jesus, when the spiritual guides of His people had altogether lost it. A gracious, loving temper, lowly purity of heart, calm, clear insight into the will of God—these were evidence in Him, signally wanting in His impugners, of the intimacy with the Father in which He lived and wrought. If He was in this respect a true witness, the Jewish leaders who challenged Him were liars.

Now St John, in meeting the antinomian sophistry of his later days, sees the situation of Jesus and the Rabbis of Jerusalem reproduced. These men also “say” of God, “I have known Him” (1 John 2:4); they “say that they abide in Him” (1 John 2:6); their aspect of wisdom and authority impose on simple minds. “But look at their lives,” the Apostle says: “do they walk as He walked?”

It is a formidable criterion that the Gospel supplies to prove the title of those who come in. Christ’s name; its application they cannot escape. “I have left you an example,” our Master said, “that you should do as I have done unto you,”—“by this shall all men know that you are my disciples”: if this example be not followed and the trend of our life bears in a direction other than that of His, men are justified in drawing the opposite inference. The example may be misapplied through narrowness or ill-will a formal and mechanical construction is put upon it, when the imitation of Jesus is made to consist in the reproduction of circumstantial details and traits of the Blessed Life determined by His social environment and His personal mission. The essential character of the “walk of Jesus” and it’s—exemplary power are often missed in the attempt to realize its superficial features. But with all the difficulties and limitations attaching to the use of this model, it remains the perfect pattern of a holy humanity, the creed rendered into flesh and blood,—breathing, walking, living, dying, rising again. In this actualized form the true life stamps itself upon the disciples of Jesus Christ; they cannot hold His faith as notional believers, by way of mere mental assent and conventional observance, if indeed they believe in the Word made flesh, in the life of God lived out through the soul and body of a man! It is impossible for a sane and sincere mind to accept the doctrine of Jesus without the responsibility of following the walk of Jesus. By this touchstone St John exposed the grandiose pretensions of contemporary Gnosticism; by it the true and the false Gospel are normally to be distinguished. That type of faith is nearest the faith of Jesus, which produces in the greatest number and of the finest quality men who “walk even as He walked.”

The subject of the sentence “He walked” (ἐκεῖνος) is, in grammatical propriety, another person from that just named (ἐναὐτῷ, “in Him”). The argument is not that if one dwells in Christ one must walk in Christ (as, for instance, in Galatians 5:25), but that if one dwells in God, one will walk like Jesus. Jesus Christ is the pattern of the true life in God. It is not consistency with ourselves, conformity of practice and profession, that the Apostle enjoins, but conformity of both to Jesus Christ. If you abide in God, you will love God and keep His word, just as the Lord Jesus did; your knowledge will thus prove itself to be of the same order and to have the like contents with the human knowledge of the Father that Jesus possessed, out of which He lived His life amongst men. As He held His earthly existence consciously in God and for God, so it should be with those who profess His faith, who present to the world His Gospel and represent Him on its behalf. At later turns in the Epistle the writer commends two features of the walk of Jesus in particular to the imitation of his readers. In 1 John 3:3 its purity—the chastity of soul in the Holy One, that shrank from contamination with a delicate and instinctive repugnance. This positive purity, which goes beyond the mere cleansing from sin, this richer and finer strain of goodness, shone throughout the walk of Jesus Christ; and He breathes it, with His Spirit, into those who walk with Him.

Again, in 1 John 3:16 the crowning act of the earthly course of Jesus is adduced for imitation: “In this we have come to know love, in that He for us laid down His life; and we ought for the brethren to lay down our lives.” Both here and there obligation is laid upon us (ὀφείλει, ὀφείλομεν); the duty is something that we owe (see Luke 17:10); it is our personal clue to God and to our brethren, under the relations in which we are placed to both by Jesus Christ. There is more incumbent on us in the following of Jesus than the copying of an example; it is the discharge of a debt. We do not simply see the beauty of Christ’s self-devotion, the ideal purity of His spirit and life, and set ourselves for our own sake, out of admiration and aspiration, to the task of reproducing His lineaments. We are no volunteers, or amateurs, in the quest; necessity is laid upon us, and we are not free to act otherwise.

Every step of that lovely “walk” of Jesus was taken toward the goal of man’s redemption by His blood; those who walk in His way aim at His end and mark. By treading this pathway to the end—a continuous course of self-sacrifice, self-inanition—Jesus Christ has established His claims upon us and become “our Lord”; we are not our own any more—we “were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20). To state the same principle in St Paul’s words, “He died for all, that the living should no longer live to themselves, but to Him who for their sakes died and rose again”—to this kind of walk “the love of Christ constraineth us” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15). The career of Jesus Christ does not afford His brethren merely an exterior copy, but an interior compulsive and assimilative force. Christ is to be “formed in” us, and till this is accomplished the Apostles “travail in birth” over their children (Galatians 4:19). Only through experience of the cross are genuine Christians fashioned and made; when we are “conformed to the image of God’s Son,” we truly “keep the word of God,” and “love is made perfect with us, that we may have boldness in the day of judgement, because as He is we too are in this world” (1 John 4:17). The true knowledge of God is seen in the love of God; and the true love of God is seen in the obedient walk of His Son Jesus Christ, in His perfect purity and self-devotion to God and men. Let those who profess Divine knowledge, demonstrate it by such a life. This is the sum of the paragraph we have considered.