2.11 - The Old and New Commandment
Chapter 11 The Old and New Commandment
Teaching of last Paragraph familiar to Readers—“The Commandment” Christ’s Law of Brother-love—St John harps on this String—The Breaker of the Christian Rule—The Sin of Hatred—Its Course and Issue—The Scandal it Creates—Life in the Light—The Commandment of Love Old as the Gospel—Old as Revelation—Old as the Being of God—New as the Incarnation and the Cross—“New in Him, and in You”—The Novelty of Christian Brotherhood—Dawn of the World’s New Day.
―—―♦———
Beloved, it is no new commandment that I write to you,
But an old commandment which you had from the beginning;
The old commandment is the word which you heard.
Again, it is a new commandment that I write to you:
Which thing is true in Him,—and in you;
Because the darkness is passing, and the true light now shineth.
He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in the darkness even till now;
He that loveth his brother, abideth in the light,
And no occasion of stumbling is in him;
But he that hateth his brother, is in the darkness,
And he walketh in the darkness, and knoweth not where he is going; Because the darkness hath blinded his eyes.
―—―♦——— THE keeping of God’s commands, it was shown in the last paragraph, is the test of a real knowledge of Him; this criterion distinguishes the true from the false “gnostic,” or man of knowledge. In “the word “ of God His commandments have their recognized expression, and in “the love of God” their sovereign principle. The example of Jesus Christ is the pattern of obedience to them, which we Christians are bound to copy. All this is perfectly familiar; the Apostle almost apologizes for the reiteration of these elementary matters, which Gnostic sophistry had rendered necessary. “In this insistence upon practical obedience as the proof of your knowledge of God, and on the centring of all duty in love, I am setting before you nothing new; I am telling the old story, and repeating the old commandment from the lips of Jesus. You heard it when the Gospel first reached you long ago; it has been sounding in your ears ever since.”
“The commandment” here intended can be none other than Christ’s law of love for His disciples—that which our Lord singled out amongst the Divine precepts to stamp it for His own by saying, “This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I loved you (John 15:12); this ordinance is the touchstone of all the rest. It is the commandment of our Epistle, and recurs six times in its five chapters; 1 John 2:9-11 of this paragraph are occupied with it. To the duty of love the writer challenges his “beloved” (1 John 4:7, 1 John 4:11), —so addressing the readers for the first time in his letter. Some interpreters find the ἐντολή of 1 John 2:7-8, in the command to follow Jesus, gathered from 1 John 2:6. They argue that the foregoing rather than the following context supplies the basis of this sentence; if it were merely a question of contextual sequence, their preference would be justified. But the point of St John’s appeal lies in the fact that the commandment he means is a well-known rule, the ever-sounding order of the day for those to whom he writes; it is a precept which will occur of itself to the readers, needing no definition or preamble. There was but one law of the Christian life of which this could be assumed; and this was, not the general obligation to copy the pattern of Jesus, but the express direction coming from His lips, that those who believe in Him should love one another. The obligation “to walk as He walked,” enforced in the last verse, suggests and leads up to “the old” and “new commandment” of 1 John 2:7 and 1 John 2:8, which is argued upon in 1 John 2:9-11.
“Love one another” was, moreover, the watchword of St John himself, the saying characteristic of him and which gained him his title of “the Apostle of Love,”—“no new commandment” certainly to those reared upon his teaching. The story goes that in age and feebleness, when no longer equal to his public ministry, the Apostle John would have himself carried in his chair by the young men into the assembly, and while all listened reverently, he would look round on them and breathe out the words, “Little children, love one another!” After this had occurred repeatedly, someone asked him, “Why, father, do you always say this to us, and nothing more?” “Because,” he replied, “it is the commandment of the Lord; and because when this is done, all is done.” The great commandment of the Gospel—old and not new, old and yet new—the alpha and omega of the rule of Christ, could be none other than the Christian law of brother-love.
It may be convenient to reverse the order of St John’s exposition in this passage, and to fix our attention first on the contrasted positions of the breaker and the keeper of Christ’s commandment outlined in 1 John 2:9-11, and then on the contrasted aspects of the law itself—its antiquity and its novelty—signified in 1 John 2:7 and 1 John 2:8. By this means we may throw into greater relief the salient features of the paragraph.
I. The man that breaks the Christian rule is “he who . . . hates his brother” (1 John 2:9, 1 John 2:11), as the man that keeps the Christian rule is “he who loves his brother” (1 John 2:10). Of the former it is declared that he “is in the darkness,” even while he “says that he is in the light,” so that “he walks in the darkness,” and consequently “knows not where he is going” (1 John 2:9, 1 John 2:11): the way and the end of life, the path he is taking and the goal he is making for, are both hidden from him; and while he misses his own way, he hinders others by setting offences in the road for them (σκάνδαλον . . . ἐστὶνἐναὐτῷ, 1 John 2:10). Of the latter—of him who obeys and copies Christ in serving God and man by love—the counter-assertions are made, explicitly or implicitly, at each point: “he dwells in the light,” and nothing in him makes others stumble (1 John 2:10); he walks on a lighted pathway, to a visible and assured goal (1 John 2:11).
St John deals in plain and broad antitheses—light and darkness, love and hate, righteousness and lawlessness, eternal life and death. He knows nothing of the nuances and intermediate shades, in which modern thought with its analytical subtlety and critical irresolution habitually works (compare p. 52). His ideas are severe and massive; they exhibit in their construction the classical purity of line and directness of movement. There burns under the calm surface of his speech a lambent fire too intense for passion, and a flood swells in him too deep for turbulence. His “lover” and hater (ἀγαπῶν, μισῶν) are the child of God and of the Devil respectively (1 John 3:8-11), the embodiments of heaven and hell upon this earth; they represent the two fundamental parties of mankind, the elementary factors to which the Apostle would reduce all the antagonisms existing in the soul and in society (compare Chapter 17). But the character defined in 1 John 2:9 is no abstract type, no mere impersonation of the bad element in humanity. St John has an actual personality in view —the sort of man confronting him in the schismatics of the day, whom discerning readers will identify by the description: “he that says he is in the light, and hates his brother.” This is the boaster of 1 John 2:4 over again: “he that says, ‘I have known God,’ and does not keep His commands” (see p. 140). The first part of the previous definition is generalized (by way of recalling the great axiom of 1 John 2:5), while the second part of it is specialized: to “have known God” is to be in the light”; to “hate one’s brother” is to break all “the commandments of God” in one. The bitter, prating religionist, who would serve God with a busy intellect and unquiet tongue out of a cold heart, knows not his own sin; in his vaunted knowledge he is the most deceived of men (see 1 John 1:8-9). “Vain talkers and deceivers” of this kind, who deemed themselves the “progressives” of the day (2 John 1:9), swarmed about the Churches of Asia, men puffed up with the pride of religious culture and full of scorn toward those who kept to the ways of a plain, old-fashioned faith. Their contempt for fellow-believers proved them to be “in the darkness” though they deemed themselves possessors of a higher light. God, who “is light,” in being so “is love” (1 John 1:5; 1 John 4:8). To St John’s mind, there is a flat contradiction between walking in the light, or knowing God, and hating a brother; for hatred is spiritual darkness, and “blinds the eyes “of those walking in it. Not from above but from beneath comes the message that the new teachers bring, since they set at naught “the old commandment” of love; not out of a clearer light, but out of a miserable darkness do the voices speak that are charged with so much arrogance and anger. The verb μισέω, is broader than our word “hate,” covering, in St John’s vocabulary, the whole range of feeling opposed to “love” (ἀγάπη). Neutrality, a poise of mere indifference, is impossible, as the Apostle conceives things; one likes or dislikes, one is moved to sympathy or antagonism toward every personality one meets. And to be in contact with a Christian brother, a child of God, and yet to cherish ill-will towards him, is to show the lack of a Christian heart: not to love “the brother whom one has seen” is to fail in love to God the Unseen (1 John 4:20 f.), whose Spirit dwells in that rejected child of His. The term “brother” has a strict significance in St John’s vocabulary. Neither here, nor elsewhere in the New Testament, does ὁἀδελφός signify “the brother-man”—though the doctrine of human brotherhood is rooted in the New Testament; nor is it synonymous with ὁπλησίον (the neighbour) of our Lord’s story “of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:1-42. The affinity of character that links the Christian brother to God his Father (1 John 3:1-2, 1 John 3:9, 1 John 3:24, 1 John 4:13, 1 John 4:20, 1 John 5:2, etc.), is the underlying assumption which justifies this test of a spurious Christian knowledge (1 John 5:4). The phrase ἕωςἄρτι (till this moment: usque adhuc, Vulgate),43 coming at the close of the verse, describes, with a touch of reproachful surprise, the darkness in which these mis-likers of their brethren are, as continuing unbroken though “the true light” is shining around them (1 John 2:8) and while they congratulate themselves on being the most enlightened! Throughout they have remained in the darkness of sin, and are so at this moment, since their heart is untouched by the love of God or man. Such were the “false prophets,” whom St John will shortly denounce (in 1 John 2:18 ff., and 1 John 4:1-6), who “went out from us because they were not of us”; the root of the matter was never in them. The three clauses of 1 John 2:11 indicate, beside the state of the cold-hearted professor of Christianity, the course and the issue of his life: he “is in darkness, and he walks in the darkness, and he knows not whither he goes.”44 If he “walks in the darkness,” it is because he “is in the darkness”: his conduct matches his character; he cannot act otherwise than he is, or walk in any region other than that where his habitation lies. His acts of hostility and expressions of repugnance toward Christian brethren reveal the gloom of his spirit, the alienation from God and goodness in which he dwells. And with all his knowledge, he sees nothing of the doom coming upon him; he has no idea whither his self-conceit, and the animosity that he indulges toward men better than himself, are leading him. Such lack of foresight comes of living “in the darkness” of sin against God. He thinks himself on the highway to perfection. He affects to rise by ambitious speculations and communion with exalted minds above the common herd of men to the infinite source of light and being. But while he seems to mount, he is morally sinking. His sails are filled with the breeze of heaven, but the malignant hand upon the rudder steers him to the shores of perdition. Amid Christian enlightenment and rich in privilege and talent, one thing he lacks—a loving Christian heart; for want of the one thing needful, the best that he possesses is turned to its meanest and worst. The Apostle writes in 1 John 3:15, “Every one who hates his brother is a murderer”; and Jesus had declared, “He who says to his brother, ‘Thou fool!’ is liable up to the measure of hell-fire!” (Matthew 5:22). The man supposed by St John forgets these warnings, or misses their bearing on himself; he does not in the least perceive whither his evil heart tends, with what ruin for himself and mischief for others, the seeds of malice in his soul are charged. No man is in greater spiritual peril than the self-complacent intellectualist, the Pharisee of culture; and no man, commonly, is less open to reproof.
“Because the darkness has blinded his eyes”45 the fumes of pride, the dust of conflict, the mists of speculation and opinionativeness obfuscate the conscience; they will shut out from minds otherwise strong and clear the elementary truths of religion, and the plain distinctions of right and wrong. St John ominously recalls the words spoken by Jesus in His last appeal to the Jews (John 12:35): “Walk as you have the light, lest the darkness overtake you; and he that walks in the darkness, knows not whither he goes.” Little did the Jewish people dream of the sequel to their rejection of Jesus Christ, of the downfall to which their self-righteousness and “odium humani generis” were hurrying them. St John’s contemporaries had been witnesses to the result, which stands as history’s severest rebuke to religious pride and inhumanity. Let them read the lesson of the ruins of Jerusalem.
There lies in 1 John 2:10 another accusation against the unloving Christian professor. While he hastens to his own fall, he strews hindrances in the path of others; it is by way of contrast that St John writes of the lover of his brethren, σκάνδαλονοὐκἐστὶνἐναὐτῷ,—“Not in him,” but in the other, “there is offence.” Every schism is a scandal. Every ill-tempered or cynical professor of religion, every irritable, churlish man who bears the name of Christ, blocks the path of life for those who would enter. The spiteful story or base insinuation, the hasty and unjust reproach, the look of aversion or cold indifference, the explosion of anger, the act of retaliation, the mean advantage taken of a neighbour, is another stone of stumbling thrown into the much-hindered way of God’s salvation. The unbeliever finds excuse to say, “If this is your Christian, I prefer men of the world. If conversion produces characters like that—better remain unconverted!” “Offences,” Jesus once said, “must needs come; but woe to him through whom they come!” To remove them, and to combat their pernicious effect, is amongst the Church’s constant, and her hardest tasks.
All that has been said of the “hater” holds in the inverse sense of “the lover of his brother.” Not only “is he in the light,” he “abides in” it (1 John 2:10), making his domicile there and growing into familiar and congenial relations with it. The light that “now shines” (1 John 2:8) about him, pervades his soul and conforms him to its nature; it illuminates for him life and death, things present and to come, with the meaning and the glory which the manifestation of God incarnate has given to man’s finite existence. Safe himself, by the daily services of love the Christian makes the way of life safer and easier for his fellow-travellers, not treading it alone but drawing others after him. He keeps step in his march with the great brotherhood of those who in the love of Christ and the Father have evermore “one heart and one way.”
II. Now we return to 1 John 2:7-8, to the double aspect of the law itself, whose operation we have viewed in the contrasted types of character that are produced under it. The commandment of love is not new, but old; again, it is new while it is old.
1. “Beloved, I am writing to you an old commandment” (1 John 2:7)—how old? The rule of Christian love is at least as old to the readers as their first hearing of the Gospel: “the old commandment is the word which you heard.” It is part of “the message which we [Apostles] heard from Him and report unto you” (1 John 1:5). The essence of the Gospel was breathed into the law of brotherly love; this constitutes, in substance, “the word” which the first heralds of Christ proclaimed. St John is an aged man, and has been at Ephesus for well-nigh a generation; the Church in his province had a history before his coming. Many of the readers of his letter had been brought up within the Christian fold, and under the Apostle’s pastorate; the image of Christ and the thought of “the brotherhood” blended with their earliest memories. Christianity and its law of love were no untried novelty, no fresh invention, like the Gnostic rules and speculations that were coming into vogue; they were of long standing in this region by the end of the first century, and in the circle where this late-surviving Apostle of Jesus Christ presides. He has nothing to impart to his readers, or to impose upon them, other than that they have known and held from the beginning. Naturally, as it is with old men, St John’s thoughts turn to the past; standing upon the ground of the Church’s settled faith and practice, he challenges innovators, and lays a stern arrest on men who, as he puts it in his short letter to the Lady Elect, “go forward and abide not in the teaching of Christ” (2 John 1:9). To ourselves also his precept sounds as “the old commandment” which we “had from the beginning,” “the word” which we “heard” at a mother’s knee or from a father’s reverend lips. With the command, “Little children, love one another,” the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ visited our childish hearts at life’s morning hour. But to us the old command comes with an antiquity vastly extended and enhanced. For the older of the Apostle’s readers, the commencement of the Gospel and the commencement of their own Christian experience were conterminous; they “had it from the beginning,” and “heard it” so soon as it was spoken. In our case a wide interval exists between the two. Christianity has behind it now the tradition, not of two, but of sixty generations; its origin carries us back to a remote beginning. “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” is the chain which runs through twenty centuries and binds the modern to the ancient world; it has knit the peoples and the ages into brother-hood. The corporate life of Christendom—flawed and imperfect, yet real and deeply working—supplies the surest bond of humanity; this commandment is its central cord. The love of Christ is the focus of history. The train of blessing that has constantly followed on obedience to this rule, the peace and progress and moral order it secures, the spiritual treasures of a Christianly governed home and commonwealth, accumulating as they descend, are witness that the law of Christ is the guarantee of human happiness; it has laid down the ultimate, and only possible, basis for the federation and socialization of mankind. “Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid.” Christ’s principle of brotherly love may be traced working age after age in the ascent of man, through the growth of knowledge and the spread of freedom and the widening of human intercourse. It has provoked to war against it, for rebuke and overthrow, the powers of darkness—pride, sensuality, greed, the treachery and cruelty and immeasurable selfishness of the carnal mind that is enmity against God. In the diffusion of Christ’s Spirit, in the proclamation and practice of His simple law illustrated by His divine example, the light “shines” more and more widely “in the darkness,” and the darkness resents and repels it in vain (John 1:5). But if the commandment is so old as this, if it comes from the fountain-head of the Gospel and is operative wherever the life of Christ is known among men, it must be older still. Christianity was a revelation, not an invention. Nothing that is of its essence was really new and unprepared. Its roots are in the Old Testament; its principles were “hidden in God who created all things” (Ephesians 3:9). The Only-begotten issued “from the bosom of the Father” (John 1:18), bringing this law for God’s children. He came to show what God eternally is, and what in His eternal purpose men are bound to be. “Before the mountains were brought forth or ever the earth and the world were framed,” God was wisdom, and God was love. The commandment is grounded in His changeless being. God could not create, could not conceive, such creatures as ourselves otherwise than as designed to love Him and each other. Creation and redemption are, parts of one order, and animated by one soul. The commandment, in its absolute basis and beginning, is old as the creation of the race, old as the Love and fatherhood of God. Jesus rested it upon this foundation, when in bidding His disciples be “kind to the evil and unthankful” He said, “Ye shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48, Luke 6:35). The relation of the child of God to its eternal Father imposes on it this consummate ideal. When the Apostle reminds his children that they “had” this commandment “from the beginning,” his backward gaze penetrates to the absolute starting-point. St John sees everything sub specie aeternitatis. “That which was from the beginning” is the title of his Epistle; it is the “eternal life “ manifested in Jesus Christ and communicated through Him to men, of which he thinks and writes throughout (compare 1 John 1:2 and 1 John 5:20). “From the beginning” (ἀπ’ἀρχῆς) might, to be sure, have a limited reference given by the context, as, e.g., in 1 John 2:24 below and in 1 John 3:11 and 2 John 1:6, where it qualifies “you heard.”46 But with no such limitation in the sentence, one presumes that St John is reaching back to the unconditioned “beginning”; this presumption is strengthened by the recurrence of ἀπ’ἀρχῆς in the absolute sense in 1 John 2:13-14 below.
It is with a meaning therefore, and by way of distinction, that the Apostle attaches to “the commandment which you had from the beginning” a parallel definition, “the word which you heard.” The second statement brings the readers down to the historical and subjective origin of the commandment which, in respect of its objective and absolute point of departure, they “had47from the beginning” (compare 2 John 1:5). Rothe’s comment on the sentence goes more deeply into St John’s thought than Westeott’s: “’From the beginning’ points us back to the first clause of the Epistle—‘you had from the beginning’ that which was from the beginning.’” When the Apostle says later, in explaining the newness of the command, that “the darkness is passing by and the true light now shines,” manifestly its oldness is the antiquity of that which existed long ago: the light was there, the command existed in principle; only the darkness eclipsed it and made it to be as though it were not. Of Christ’s great ἐντολή, as of Himself (John 1:10-11), it may be said: “It was in the world, and the world knew it not; it came unto its own, and its own received it not.”
2. 1 John 2:8 turns the other side of the shield: “Again, it is a new commandment that I write to you.” The old Apostle has still the eyes of youth. New buddings and unfoldings, the fresh aspects of primitive and well-worn truth, he is quick to recognize. The teaching of his Gospel, so marvellous in its philosophic scope and adaptation to the Hellenic mind when considered as the work of a Galilean Jewish author, is evidence of this. He knows how not merely to vindicate the old against the new, when the new shows itself impatient and irreverent, but how to translate the old into the new, and to discern the old in the new under its altered face. This is, after all, the proper way to guard the old; it is the genuine conservatism. If St John lives out of the past, he lives in the present, and for the future. To say “I write no new but an old commandment,” could not be the Apostle’s last word about Christ’s law of love. He had seen so many new creations born of the word which “was from the beginning”; a world of young and eager life was in the Churches that stretched east and west before his eyes, and were filling the face of the world with new fruit of the Kingdom. To him change was even more in evidence than identity; the progress was as manifest as the persistence of the truth. St John had watched the profoundest spiritual revolution which the world has experienced. A new heaven and earth were in the making for mankind; and the law that governed this creation, though old in its origin as the being of God, was new in its operation as the character of Jesus Christ—old as the thought of the Eternal, new as the cross of Jesus, or as the latest sacrifice of a life laid down for His love’s sake. That which is old as one looks up the stream of time and travels backward to the springs, is new at each point as one goes down the current. The commandment is old as that out of which the present has grown, new as that by which the past is done away and in which the future is germinally hidden; old to the eyes of memory and faith, new to the eyes of prophecy and hope; old as a potential, new as a dynamic energy; old in its intrinsic nature, new in its gradual and incomplete developments; old as the ever-shining sun, new as the daybreak; old as creation, new as individual birth. The antiquity of the law of love St John left to speak for itself; its novelty he explains in the second clause of 1 John 2:8. “Which thing is true (ὅἐστινἀληθές) in Him and in you”—where the neuter relative pronoun refers not to the ἐντολή (which would have required in Greek a feminine, as in 1 John 2:7), but to the principal sentence as a whole, to the fact that the old commandment is, notwithstanding, new. And its newness is twofold; in the Head and in the members of the Body of Christ, in the Vine-stock and in the branches.
(1) “New in Him”: for the coming of God’s Son in our flesh gave to love a scope and compelling force unknown before. The personality of Jesus Christ, His character, doctrine, works, above all His sacrificial death, revealed the love of God to man, and revealed at the same time a capacity of love and obligation to love in man, of which the world had no previous conception, and that were beyond measure astonishing in the given moral conditions and under the circumstances of Christ’s advent. “Herein is love,” writes St John, pointing to the Incarnation and the Cross, “herein have we known love” (1 John 3:16; 1 John 4:10)—as though one had never known or heard of love before! so completely did this demonstration surpass antecedent notions on the subject and antiquate earlier examples. The commandment was put upon another footing, and was clothed with a fresh and irresistible power. In His teaching Jesus had recast the ancient law of Israel. He drew out of the mass of inferior and external precepts the golden rule and the two-fold duty of love to God and man; He appealed by all He said upon men’s obligations to each other, to the primeval law of humanity “written in the heart,” retracing its effaced characters and re-awakening the affections native to man as the offspring of the Father in heaven. His life and walk restored to the race its lost ideal, and presented to all eyes “the new man” reconstituted after the image of God. His death crowned His life’s work, and perfected His own filial character. But thedeath of the cross accomplished more than this; it gave to the law of love an authority new in its kind, a vicarious and redeeming efficacy. “Born under” this “law” and yielding it a perfect obedience, Jesus Christ reconciled the world to God; in so doing He generated a force which enables and constrains sinful men, now released from condemnation, to “keep the commandments” of God and to “fulfil the just demand of the law” (Romans 8:4). Christ’s disciples follow their Lord’s example by the virtue of His atonement; they “walk in love as Christ also loved them, and gave Himself up for them, an offering and sacrifice to God for an odour of fragrance.” It was the cross that sent them forth to breathe Christ’s love into the world, and “to lay down their lives for the brethren.” “He died for all,” writes the other theological Apostle, “in order that the living no longer to themselves should live, but to Him who for them died and was raised” (2 Corinthians 5:15); and living to Christ means living for the brethren on whose behalf He died, for the body of which Christ is Head (see, e.g., 1 Corinthians 8:9-13; 1 Corinthians 12:12 ff.). The cross of Christ reconciles Gentile and Jew “in one body” to God; the fire of His passion fuses together natures the most hostile and remote (see Ephesians 2:11-22; Colossians 3:9-14). “The new covenant in His blood” is a covenant of amity and alliance for all who enter its bonds and share the peace with God which it secures. This was “true in Christ,” in point of fact as well as principle. The peace on earth heralded by the angels’ song at the Nativity was realized in a multitude of Christian societies now planted through the Roman Empire and spreading from the Mediterranean shores—each of them the centre of forces of goodwill and charity, new-leavening a world where men had been “slaves to manifold lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hating one another” (Titus 3:3). The philadelphia of the followers of the Crucified was the most noticeable thing about the new movement; this was the outstanding characteristic dwelt upon both by its apologists and critics. “See,” they said, “how these Christians love one another! “It was the peculiar mark fixed by the Master for His society: “In this shall all men know that you are my disciples (John 13:35). In the oldest Christian document, the letter of St Paul to the infant Church of Thessalonica, this feature of the young community is noted with the liveliest satisfaction: “Concerning brotherly love you have no need that one write unto you; for indeed you do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia” (1 Thessalonians 4:9 f.); in the second Epistle he thanks God, in the first place, “for that your faith groweth exceedingly, and the love of each one of you all toward one another aboundeth” (2 Thessalonians 1:3). It behoves all Christian teachers to put this foremost among the “notes of the Church and the tokens of apostolical descent.
(2) “Which is true,” the Apostle testifies to his disciples, “in Him, and in you”! The fact that God’s law of love is kept, that a new bond of affection is formed amongst men and a new gravitation draws the scattered elements of life together, is evident in the case of these Christian men as it had been in Christ Himself. It means much that St John should couple “Him” and “you” in this sentence and put the pronouns into the same construction. How many amongst ourselves, Christ’s present servants, could bear to be put in this juxtaposition? of what Church could it be affirmed without qualification, concerning the law of love to the brethren, “Which is true in Him, and in you”? In this double truth there is a deep distinction—as between the root and the branches, the full fountain and the broken streams, which need constant replenishment. But in principle the identity holds good for all who are in Christ. The law that ruled His being rules theirs. The fires of His passion have thrown a spark into each of their souls, kindling them to something of the same glow. The prayer of Jesus Christ for His discipleship, as it should endure and witness unto the world’s end, is fulfilled by such participation: “that they may all be one, even as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee,” and “that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:23, John 17:26). Just so far as this affirmation respecting St John’s little children “is true” in Christians, the true Christianity propagates itself and bears its healing fruit throughout the world.
The coming of this new love, that had given bright evidence of its efficacy in the Christian society, St John explains in 1 John 2:8b; he refers it to “the message” which Christ brought from God, and which His Apostles are announcing everywhere (1 John 1:5). The true life springs from “the true light” (τὸφῶςτὸἀληθινόν48ἤδηφαίνει). the light of the Gospel the new way of love is revealed and made racticable. St Paul in using this figure gave another turn to the same thought; he affirmed the social results of the Gospel to be the outgrowth of its religious conceptions, when he wrote, “The fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth” (Ephesians 5:9). The ethical and theological are inseparable as life and light, as fruit and root (compare pp. 63-64). The morals of Paganism were the product of its idolatry (see Romans 1:18-32)—of “the darkness” which St John sees “passing off”49; Christian morals, the purity and charity of the Apostolic Church, sprang from the ideas of God and of His relations to men derived from Jesus Christ.
“Already shineth” (ἤδηφαίνει) is a questionable emendation by the Revisers of the older rendering “now.” “Already” marks, in English usage, a present antithetical to some future—so soon as this; as though the Apostle meant; “The true light shines even now, while the darkness still strives against it; a brighter day is coming, when its light will flood the world and the whole sky will be aflame with the glory of God.‘It is beginning to have its course’” (Westcott). This thought, however true, and the predictive connotation this rendering reads into ἤδη50 are out of place in the given connexion. Ἤδη looks back as readily as forward; it denotes a present contrasted either with future or past51; in the latter reference it signifies by this time, now at length. This may be the rarer sense of the adverb, but it is a perfectly legitimate sense, and is imported here by the contrast of “old and new” dominating the paragraph. A new day is dawning for the world. At last the darkness lifts, the clouds break and scatter; “the true light shines” out in the sky; the sons of light can now walk with clear vision, toward a sure end.
Once besides the Apostle John has employed this phrase; where he writes in the prologue to his Gospel, “There was the true light (τὸφῶςτὸἀληθινόν) ... coming into the world.” There, as here, his gaze is retrospective; and he describes the advent of the Word as that of a light long veiled (existing ages before the Baptist’s day) but now piercing through all obstruction. Now at last! “The mystery hidden from the ages and generations—hidden away from the ages in God, who created all things” (Colossians 1:26; Ephesians 3:9—comes to birth. The hour of the new creation has struck; the Voice has sounded, “Behold, I make all things new!” To what splendour the great day may grow, St John does not suggest, or speculate. “The Son of God is come; we have eternal life in Him” (1 John 5:11-13, 1 John 5:20): this conviction fills his mind and brings him perfect satisfaction. He has lived through a day of new creation; he has “seen the kingdom of God come in power” (Mark 9:1). The religious world of his childhood and that of his age—what a gulf lies between them, a contrast between the old and the new within his lifetime the more marvellous the more he reflects upon it. Enough for him that the darkness passes and the true light mounts the sky. He is as one who decries the morn in the east, after a long tempestuous night; he has seen the sun climb the horizon, and is sure of day. The old Apostle is ready to say with Simeon, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”