3.18 - Christian Heart Assurance
Chapter 18 Christian Heart Assurance (1 John 3:19-24)
Probing of the Uneasy Conscience—Double Ground of Re-assurance—Love, Faith’s Saviour—Love, the Touchstone of Knowledge—“We shall persuade our Hearts”—The Scrutiny of God—Assurance by the Spirit’s Witness—Peril of Mysticism—Grammatical Ambiguity in verses 19, 20—The Apostle warning, not soothing—Grounds for Self-reproach—Christian Assurance and Prevailing Prayer—God’s Favour toward Lovers of their Brethren.
―—―♦———
Herein we shall know that we are of the truth,
And before Him shall assure our hearts;
Because, if our heart condemn us—because God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all!
Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, we have confidence toward God,
And whatsoever we may ask, we receive from Him;
Because we keep His commands, and do the things pleasing in His sight.
And this is His command:
That we believe the name of His Son Jesus Christ,
And love one another as He gave us command.
And he that keepeth His commands, dwelleth in Him, and He in him.
And herein we know that He dwelleth in us,—from the Spirit that He gave us.
―—―♦——— THE test laid down in 1 John 3:17 above was such as to show whether a man’s Christianity is matter of talk and sentiment or of heart-reality; whether he “loves in word and tongue” or “in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18). Having thus set his readers on self-examination, the Apostle knows that misgivings will arise in the minds of some of them—a suspicion as to the truth and depth of their life in Christ, that is not altogether ungrounded. He goes on to probe the uneasy conscience, framing his words in 1 John 3:19-21 in a manner calculated at once to encourage the self-distrustful whose heart could not accuse them of callousness, and to alarm the vain and self-complacent (such as the Laodiceans sternly rebuked in the Apocalypse), who were wrapped up in their wealth of knowledge and of material goods, while in miserable destitution of the true riches. The grounds of Christian assurance form, therefore, the topic of this section of the Epistle. While stating the grounds of assurance in the first and last clauses of the paragraph (1 John 3:19, 1 John 3:24b), St John points out to the Christian man the bearing on his relations to God of the absence or presence of heart assurance; the effect of the former is intimated in 1 John 3:20, and that of the latter is more largely dwelt upon in 1 John 3:21-24a.
I. It is St John’s manner to strike the key-note at the outset, and to resume it in some altered enriched form at the conclusion of each passage. The “Herein” (ἐντούτωγινώσκομεν) of 1 John 3:24b, accordingly, takes up the “Herein” of 1 John 3:19 (ἐντούτῳγνωσόμεθα):81 here lies the double basis of the settled believer’s confidence towards God. This is found (1) in the consciousness of an unfeigned brotherly love shown in generous self-forgetting acts—the former ἐντούτῳ gathering up the sense of 1 John 3:16-18; and (2) in the well-remembered and abiding gift of the Holy Spirit—the latter ἐντούτῳ being explained by the definition which follows, “from the Spirit that He gave us.” Our Apostle thus affirms the essential two-fold fact of the Christian consciousness, that inner conviction of the child of God concerning his sonship which the Apostle Paul described in the classic words of Romans 8:15 : “The Spirit Himself beareth joint witness with our spirit, that we are children of God.” St John puts the two testimonies in the reverse order, proceeding from the outward to the inward, from the ethical to the spiritual, from effect to cause and fruit to seed (compare 1 John 3:9 above). First, the practical and human evidence of loving deeds; next there is discovered, lying behind this activity, the mystical and Divine evidence supplied by the indwelling of the holy Spirit of Jesus Christ.
1. There is in the loyal believer a reassuring discernment of his own state of heart, the honest self-consciousness of Christian love.
“Lord, thou knowest all things—thou knowest that I love thee”: thus the chastened and sore heart of Peter “assured” itself beneath the searching eye and under the testing challenge of his Lord (John 21:17). In some matters St Peter’s self-knowledge had been wofully at fault; but he was sure of this as of his own existence, that he loved Jesus Christ, and he was sure that the Lord knew it. There was comfort and restoration in the fact that Jesus questioned him on this, and not on other points where his answer must have been that of silence or bitter shame. So every Christian man who faithfully loves Christ and His people and lays himself out for their service, may gather a store of arguments against doubt, a fund of cheerful satisfaction in his faith, which no intellectual furnishing will supply.
“Love never faileth”—never makes shipwreck of the faith that embarks on her adventures. When after years of Christian profession skepticism takes hold of a believer, it will often be found that his heart had grown cold to his brethren; he has forsaken their assemblies, he has turned his eyes away from their needs; he has been oblivious of the claims of his Church and his human fellows. If he “loveth not the brother whom he hath seen, he cannot love God whom he hath not seen” (1 John 4:20); and he has probably ceased to love God, before he ceased with assurance to believe in Him. When the reason is harassed with doubt or the conscience troubled for old sin now seen in its darker meaning, it is time for the heart to go out afresh in works of pity toward the needy and “to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.” Let the distressed man strengthen and draw closer the ties that link him to his kind, and his heart will come home to itself fraught with a new joy and peace in believing. Of the difficulties of the Christian intellect it may often be said, Solvitur amando. “We know that we are of the truth,” not because we have struck down in the sword-play of debate the weapons of unbelief, or entrenched ourselves behind the artillery of a powerful dogmatism or within the bulwarks of an infallible Church, but when we “love in deed and truth.” A true love will scarcely spring from a false faith. If faith works by love, it lives! There may be a degree of error, of confusion of thought, defect of knowledge, infirmity of character attending such a faith; it may know little how to assert itself in argument, how to conceive and express itself in terms of reason, but if it loves much there is the core and heart of truth in it. The Church’s martyrdoms and charities have been at all times and everywhere the practical evidence of her Divine character, and the clearest mark of her unity underlying so many divisions; they supply a legitimate and needed reassurance to herself. The Apostle writes “We shall know,”—-setting up his fortress against the future assaults of doubt in the continued fight of faith. This line of evidence was calculated to bring comfort to many of the first readers. False prophets were abroad amongst them, men who boasted a greater knowledge and a finer spiritual insight than themselves (1 John 4:1). They raised subtle questions of religious philosophy, baffling to simple-minded folk. They threw doubt on the ordinary assumptions of faith; they insinuated distrust of the Apostle’s competence to guide the movements and the researches on which the Church was called to enter by the progress of the times (see 1 John 4:6; 2 John 1:9; and Chapter 11, Chapter 19). It required, they said, profounder reasoning and a larger intellectual grasp than most Christians had imagined, to understand God and the world and to “know” indeed that one is “of the truth.” New prophets had been raised up for the new age; “knowledge,” and not “faith,” is the watchword of the future; the simple Gospel of Peter and John must be wedded to the metaphysic of the great thinkers and restated in terms of pure reason, if it is to satisfy man’s higher nature and to command universal homage.
All this, pronounced by men of philosophic garb and prestige, who yet named the name of Christ and posed as interpreters of His doctrine and mission, was calculated to make a powerful impression upon Greek Christianity. Already rival Gnostic communities were in existence outside the Apostolic Church (1 John 2:19), which claimed to hold the rational theory of Christianity and to represent the true mind of the Lord. The prophets of this movement found their hearers amongst catholic believers, and strove incessantly to “draw away the disciples after them.”
St John’s apologetic runs upon the lines of St Paul’s retort to the intellectualists of Corinth: “You say, ‘We have knowledge’? Very possibly: knowledge puffs up; it is love that builds up. If any man presumes on his knowledge in the things of God, he shows his ignorance; he has everything to learn. But if he loves God, God knows him for His own” (1 Corinthians 8:1-3). From the same standpoint St John writes: “Every one that loves is begotten of God, and knows God. . . . He that abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:7, 1 John 4:16). The emphasis with which the Apostle applies this criterion and the manner in which from beginning to end he rings the changes upon this one idea, in the light of the polemical and defensive aim of the letter, can only be understood on the assumption that the class of teachers whom he opposes were wanting in Christian qualities of heart, while they abounded in dialectical ability and theosophical speculation (see p. 63). It was an alien spirit and ethos that they would have brought into the Church; their temper vitiated equally their doctrine and their life. This St John will proceed to show in the subsequent section of the Epistle, 1 John 4:1-6. The expression “that we are of the truth” (ἐκτῆςἀληθείας), St John had used in 1 John 2:20-21, saying that those who “have the anointing from the Holy One” (see Chapter 14) and “know the truth,” know also that “no lie is of the truth.” Truth—not lies—is the offspring of truth. Real love to God and man in us—for “in this we know that we are of the truth”—is the product of its reality in God; its genuineness of character proves its legitimacy of birth. Behind this wondrous new creation of human kindness and tenderness, of unbounded self-surrender and unwearied service to humanity, which the Apostolic Churches exhibited, there is a vera causa. Only the recognition of a true Father-God, so loving men and making sacrifice for them as the Gospel declares, could account for the moral phenomenon to which the Apostle points and of which the readers themselves form a living part. The love that had awakened and sustained in hearts once cold, selfish, impure, a response so powerful, is no illusion. This response should prove, even to those who had not directly heard the summons of the Gospel, the existence of the Voice of grace to which it made reply. The grand example of this phrase is the declaration of Jesus before Pilate: “Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice” (John 18:37). As much as to say, “The true heart knows its King when He speaks.” There was something deep in the heart of Pilate, though he stifled it, that answered to this challenge; it would hardly have been given to a man wholly callous and insusceptible. The two tests of true-heartedness—John’s test and his Master’s—coincide; to love our brethren, and to honour and trust the Lord Jesus Christ, are things concomitant: nowhere is such love to men found as in the circle of Christ’s obedience. Behind both lies the truth—the true being of the Father who sent His Son to win our faith, and who gives the Spirit of whom souls are born into the love of God and man. “This,” St John writes at the end, to crown his witness,—“this is the true God and eternal life” (1 John 5:20). The Christian certainty, as it faces hostile speculation, is a conviction of the truth of God revealed in the message and person of Jesus Christ; but it has another side and aspect. Looking inward, it confronts conscience and the accusations of past sin. True love can meet the scrutiny of God, as well as the questionings of men. Turning this way St John adds: “And we shall assure our hearts before Him (before God)”— καὶἔμπροσθεναὐτοῦπείσομεντὰςκαρδίαςἡμῶν (1 John 3:19). The rendering of this sentence has been disputed; but the conflict of interpretation is now fairly decided. The verb πείθω has usually for its object some clause stating the fact, or belief, of which one is persuaded. Such an object is wanting here; for “that God is greater than our hearts” (the clause which follows, 1 John 5:20), is not a truth brought home to us by loving our brethren and relieving their wants (1 John 3:16-18). There is nothing in that to prove God’s superiority to “our hearts,”—nor is this a fact that needs proof. The ὅτι of 1 John 3:20 is the because of reason, not that of statement; 1 John 3:20 does not supply the content or matter of persuasion, but gives the reason why such persuasion (or assurance) of the heart is needful. The words “we shall persuade our heart,” in this connexion, contain a complete sense by themselves; or, to put the same thing in other words, the object of the thing required by πείσομεν is implicit and goes without saying—it is suggested by the words ἔμπροσθεναὐτοῦ (before Him), which bring the soul trembling into the presence of the Searcher of hearts: “We shall, on each occasion when the heart is assailed by accusing thoughts, convince ourselves on this ground that we are approved in His sight; thus we shall overcome our fears, and approach God with the lowly confidence of children accepted in His Son.” The παρρησία with which faithful and loving Christians will meet Christ at His future coming (see 1 John 2:28; 1 John 4:17), may be entertained now before God the ever-present Judge; the one confidence is cherished on the same ground as the other, and is in effect identical with it. Such a “persuasion” the Apostle Paul argues in Romans 5:1-2; Romans 8:14-17, and Ephesians 3:12, when he seeks to inspire Christians with filial trust toward God and urges them to “boldness of access” in coming to the Father’s presence. The above-defined elliptical use of πείθω, with the meaning “soothe” or “reassure,” is rare but well-established in Greek literature. An instance parallel to this occurs in Matthew 28:14: the Jewish rulers say to the soldiers who had watched at the grave of Jesus and dreaded the consequences of His escape, “ If this come to the Governor’s ears, we will persuade (satisfy) him (scil. that you are not to blame), and rid you of care.” St John’s mind is dwelling not on the judgement, but on the constant scrutiny of the heart by the Omniscient (ὁθεὸς . . . γινώσκειπάντα), before whom our sin testifies against us; thinking of His perfect knowledge and unerring judgement, each man is compelled in shame and fear to say, “My sin is ever before me.” “Love out of a pure heart” makes reply to this accusing voice, and restores to us “a good conscience” in the sight of God (compare 1 Timothy 1:5). In this consciousness the Apostle Paul could write to the Philippians, living habitually as he did in the light of the Judgement-throne: “God is my witness, how I long after you all in the yearnings of Christ Jesus” (Php 1:8). The man who could thus speak, who lived daily under the constraint of the love of Christ, needed no other proof that lie is in Christ. Doubt of this would never cross his mind, any more than one doubts from waking to sleeping whether one is alive.
2. But the confidence toward God cherished by the believer who walks in love, is not self-generated nor acquired by any process of reflection. The facts on which it rests had a beginning external to the soul. The “well of water springing up” within the Christian heart and the Christian Church and pouring out in so many streams of mercy and good fruits, has a source of replenishment lying deeper than man’s own nature. The Apostle completes the Christian assurance, and traces it to its spring in the testimony of the Holy Spirit, when he adds: “And in this we know that He (God) dwells in us, from the Spirit which He gave us” (1 John 3:24). Since the Holy Spirit is of God, and is God indeed, to have Him in the hears to have God dwelling in us—the Spirit is God immanent (μένειἐνἡμῖν); and to possess Him is surely to “know that God dwells in us,” forasmuch as “the Spirit witnesseth,” as the Apostles Paul and John both say (1 John 5:6 f., Romans 8:15 f.). He is no abstract influence or effluence from God,—a voiceless Breath; but He “searches the deeps of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10), and the deeps of the heart that He visits. He “teaches,” He “declares” things present and to come—the things of Christ and the things of the conscience (John 14:26; John 15:26; John 16:13); He “speaketh expressly” (1 Timothy 4:1); He “testifies” as He finds and knows. “The Spirit that is of God” knows whence He comes and whither He goes, and He witnesseth of each to the other: He “cries” sometimes (as St Paul experienced) “in groanings unspeakable,” yet heard by the Heart-searcher, from the depths of the soul to God (Romans 8:26-27). But before such crying, by Himself entering and tenanting the heart He makes it known that God is there. The abstract statement of the former ground of assurance, “we are of the truth”—a form of assertion common to all schools of thought claiming philosophic or religious certainty—is now exchanged for a more specific conception, by which truth translates itself into life: “we know that God dwells in us.” Thus intellectual conviction unfolds into a personal appropriation of the Divine by the human. The two make acquaintance and hold communion in the recesses of the heart, where God finds man and man knows God; for the believer in Jesus Christ and lover of his kind “dwells in God, and God in him” (1 John 3:23-24).
St John affirms in this connection once more the disciplinary element in Christian experience; he never allows us, for many paragraphs, to get away from the plain ethical conditions of fellowship with God: “he that keeps His commandments (compare 1 John 2:3-5, 1 John 2:7ff., 1 John 2:29; 1 John 3:4 ff.; 1 John 5:2 f., 1 John 5:18), dwells in God and God in him.” Union between God and the creature is possible only on terms of the latter’s obedience; and the path of obedience is marked by the fence of “the commandments.” St John knew the perils of mysticism; his own temperament would put him on his guard against this. Here lay, to many minds, the fascination of the Gnostic theory: this system promised an absorption in the Divine, to be gained otherwise than in the hard way of self-denial and practical service and by attention to the troublesome details of “the commandments.” The latter were identified by the new teaching with a coarse Judaism, with the realm of perishing matter and “the carpenter God” of the Hebrew Scriptures and the superseded covenant of works. Men who held themselves, as those emancipated by knowledge and enjoying the freedom of sons of God, to be above the level of commandment-keeping, fell far below it into carnal sin; and the raptures of a mystic love were not unfrequently associated with antinomian licence. Such symptoms were marks, to St John’s mind, not of the Spirit of truth that God gave His people through Jesus Christ, who is a “spirit of discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7), but of “the spirit of Antichrist” and “error” (1 John 4:3, 1 John 4:6). This spirit the Apostle detected in the pseudo-prophecies and immoral propaganda of Gnosticism.
“From the Spirit” (ἐκτοῦπνεύματος) that God “gave us”—rather than “by the Spirit” (τῷπνεύματι: so in Romans 8:13 f., Galatians 5:16, Galatians 5:18)—“we know” all this, as St John puts it; for the assurance of the Christian believer rises from this source and begins from this time. Its origin was on the day of Pentecost. In the case of Christ’s first disciples, the gift could be traced, more exactly, to the hour when at His first appearance after the resurrection the Lord Jesus “breathed on them, and said unto them, Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). In writing ἔδωκεν (“He gave”), the Apostle points to the definitive bestowment of the Holy Spirit on the Church (compare Luke 24:49; Acts 2:33, Acts 2:38; Acts 15:8 f.; Acts 19:2 ff.; Galatians 3:2 f., etc.), the birth-hour of Christendom; he does not say δίδωσιν (“gives”), as though describing a continuous gift (compare John 3:34, 1 Thessalonians 4:8). It was then that the exalted Christ “baptized” His people “in the Holy Spirit and fire.” This was the nativity of the Christian consciousness; and it can have no repetition, since the life then originated knows no decease. It is rehearsed whenever any man or people is “baptized into Christ Jesus.” The Lord repeats in dispatching His disciples, one or many, on their life-mission the command, “Receive the Holy Spirit: as the Father hath sent me, I also send you.”
Such a specific new birth, such a “giving” and “receiving” of the Holy Spirit, takes place in every instance of spiritual life, whether the occurrence be distinctly realized or not. From this moment onwards, “the Spirit witnesseth along with our spirit”—each witness living for and in the other. The Holy Spirit constitutes the universal consciousness of the sons of God. Our sense of the Divine indwelling, and all the assuring signs and works of grace, issue from Him who is the supreme gift of the Father, crowning the gift of His grace in the Son; and the Spirit’s fruit is known in every gracious temper and kindly act and patient endurance of a Christian life.
II. The central part of the paragraph in 1 John 3:20-23, lying between the two grounds of assurance we have considered, remains to be discussed. It presents the contrasted cases arising under St John’s doctrine of assurance: “if our heart be condemning us” (1 John 3:20),—the contingency of self-accusation; and “if our heart be not condemning us” (1 John 3:21),—the contingency of self-acquittal. The consequences of each condition are drawn out—in the former instance in broken and obscure words, by way of hint rather than clear statement (1 John 3:20); on the other hand, the happy effects of a good conscience toward God are freely set forth in the language of 1 John 3:21-23.
1. The connection of 1 John 3:19 and 1 John 3:20 affords one of the few grammatical ambiguities of this Epistle. It is an open question as to whether the first ὅτι of 1 John 3:20 is the conjunction that or because (for A.V.), or is the relative pronoun, neuter of ὅστις (ὅτι, complemented by ἐάν (for ἄν) of contingency82 (ὅτιἐάν = whereinsoever R.V.); and whether the verses should be divided, respectively, by a full stop as in the Authorized Version, or by a comma as in the Revised. This as to the point of verbal form. In point of matter, the question is Does the Apostle say “God is greater than our heart and knows all “by way of warning to the over-confident and self-excusing, to those tempted to disregard their secret migivings; or by way of comfort to the over-scrupulous and self-tormenting, to those tempted to brood over and magnify their misgivings? This is a nice problem of exegesis; and the displacement of the first of these alternatives by the second (R.V.) without a recognition of the other view in the margin, does not represent the balance of critical opinion. We retain the construction adopted by the older translators, without much hesitation. The stumbling-block of this interpretation is the second ὅτι, which on this view is grammatically superfluous (and is accordingly ignored by the A.V.); there is no occasion to repeat the particle after so short an interval.83 Moreover, while other conjunctions are apt to be resumptively doubled in a complex sentence, no other example is forthcoming of such repetition in the case of ὅτι (“that” or “because”). If this has actually happened here, it must be supposed that the duplication of ὅτι (because God is greater, etc.) is due either to a primitive error of the copyists lying behind the oldest text, or to an inadvertence of the author, who thus betrays the mental perturbation caused by the painful supposition he is making. In writing, as in speaking, it happens now and then that under the weight of some solemn or anxious thought the pen hesitates, and a word is unintentionally repeated in the pause and reluctance with which the sentence is delivered. On the other hand it must be insisted, as against the construction adopted by the Revisers, that the grammatical subordination of 1 John 3:20 to 1 John 3:19 makes up an involved sentence, awkward in itself and of a type unusual with the writer; a sentence, too, that leaves much to be read between the lines in order to bring a connected sense out of its entanglements. The fact of God’s superiority to the heart and His perfect knowledge thereof does not, on the face of it, explain why love to the brethren should reassure the anxious Christian against self-accusation. Westcott’s paraphrase, in quoting which we will bracket the words read into St John’s text (upon the Revised construction), shows how lamely the writer (ex hypothesi) has expressed his meaning, and that he has left the essential points to be supplied by the interpreter; “The sense within us of a sincere love of the brethren, which is the sign of God’s presence within us, will enable us to stay the accusations of our conscience, whatever they may be, because God [who gives us this love, and so blesses us with His fellowship] is greater than our heart; [and He], having perfect knowledge, [forgives all on which our heart sadly dwells].” This exposition is subtle, and contains a precious truth. But a real peril lies in the method of self-assurance which the Apostle is thus supposed to suggest—the tendency to set sentiment against conscience. One may say: “I know I have done wrong. This act of deceit, this bitter temper or unholy imagination, my heart condemns. But I have many good and kind feelings, that surely come from God. My sin is but a drop in the ocean of His mercy, which I feel flowing into my heart. Why should I vex myself about these faults of a weak nature, which God, who knows the worst, compassionates and pardons! “The danger of extracting this anodyne from the text is one that, if it existed, the Apostle must have felt at once, and would have been careful in the context to guard against. On the other view, when we identify the two ὅτι’s and separate the first from ἐάν, the grammatical construction is simple and obvious and the connection of ideas sufficiently clear. The ἐάν καταγινώσκῃ of 1 John 3:20 and the ἐάνμὴκαταγινώσκῃ of 1 John 3:21 present, precisely in St John’s manner,84 the two opposite hypotheses involved in the situation—that of our heartcondemning or not condemning us in respect of love to the brethren. The former of these suppositions St John was bound to make very seriously. The case he supposed in 1 John 3:17-18, above, that of a pretender to the love of God wanting in human compassion, was not imaginary (see 1 John 4:20; compare 1 John 1:6). In several places the Apostle shows himself apprehensive of a vain assurance in some of his readers that would reconcile the heart with sin, of a light and superficial satisfying of the conscience. That anyone should “persuade his heart” in this way, is the last thing he would desire or permit. At each step he balances encouragement with caution; he cheers and humbles alternately. The condition of the Church indicated by the Epistle, is a troubled one; we see love and hatred, light and darkness, in conflict even within its pale. Real ground existed for self-condemnation on the part of some amongst St John’s little children, while there was ground for rejoicing in most of them. And when he supposes “our heart condemning us,” the tense of the verb (ἐάν καταγινώσκῃ) makes the supposition the more alarming: it is put in the Greek present of continuity, and implies not a passing cloud but a persistent shadow, a repeated or sustained protest of conscience. This is no mere misgiving of a sensitive nature jealous of itself, to be justly dispelled by the reassuring consciousness of a cordial love to the brethren. Nay, it is the opposite of such assurance; it is condemnation upon the vital, testing point. The man aimed at in 1 John 3:20, if we read the passage aright, is one who does not “know” by St John’s token that he is “of the truth”; his heart cannot give him such testimony, but “keeps accusing” him on this very account. He knows that he has “loved in word and tongue” more than “in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18) and “shut up his compassions” from brethren in distress (1 John 3:17), if he has not positively indulged the hate which brands men as murderers in the sight of God (1 John 3:15). Since his own ignorant and partial heart condemns him, let him consider what must be the verdict of the all-searching and all-holy Judge. The argument is a minori ad majus, from the echo to the voice echoed, from the forebodings of conscience to the Supreme Tribunal and the sentence of the Great Day. Even when a man’s heart absolves him, he may not for this reason presume on God’s approval: “I know nothing against myself,” writes St Paul, “yet not on this ground am I justified. But He that trieth me is the Lord” (1 Corinthians 4:4). How much more must one fear, when conscience holds him guilty! Little or nothing is read into the passage, when it is thus construed under the light of the foregoing context. The stern discrimination made in 1 John 3:15-18 between the lover of his brethren who has passed into life and the hater who abides in death, was bound to come to a head in some such conclusion as this, by which the latter is virtually cited to God’s judgement-seat. The principle applied is that set forth by our Lord Himself in the great Judgement-scene of Matthew 25:1-46,—viz. that deeds of true human charity warrant the hope of admittance into God’s eternal kingdom, while the absence of them awakens the darkest fears.
2. The relief with which St John passes from the supposition “if our heart condemn us” to its opposite, is shown by the compellation “Beloved” (used before in 1 John 2:7; 1 John 3:2: both passages of high feeling), with which he turns to address the body of his readers. The sentence “Beloved, if our heart condemn us not,” marks the glad escape from the thought of condemnation clouding 1 John 3:20; we pass from shadow into sunlight. After the brief warning in 1 John 3:20 against a false peace—against soothing and doctoring the conscience, when it warns us that our hearts are not right with our brethren—the Apostle returns with emphasis to the reassuring strain of 1 John 3:19, to expand it into the exultant testimony of 1 John 3:21-22. In almost any other writer the transition would have been marked by the conjunction δέ (but); to St John the Hebrew idiom is more natural, which simply apposes its contrasts without link-words.85
While self-reproach for heartlessness toward men raises fear of God’s displeasure, self-acquittal on this ground, if justified, reflects in the heart God’s approving smile. This approval, the logical complement of “If our heart condemn us not,” is stated, not directly but by its two manifest consequences, in 1 John 3:21b, 1 John 3:22a “We have confidence (or freedom) toward God, and whatsoever we ask we receive from Him.” The reasons given in 1 John 3:22b for this confidence and assurance of answers to prayer, recall us to the great condition of commandment-keeping, on which St John loses no opportunity of insisting; they lie in the fact that “we keep His commandments, and do the things pleasing in His sight.” The loyal, loving heart is sensible of God’s approbation, and has experience of His gracious response to its petitions. Once more, the commandments are summarized in brotherly love (1 John 3:23; compare 1 John 2:1-11); but to this is prefixed the duty, in the fulfilment of which love to one’s brethren has its beginning and best incentive “that we should believe the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another as He gave us commandment.” We thus find a twofold sign of God’s favour Award the true Christian man (1 John 3:21b, 1 John 3:22a), and a twofold ground for this continued favour in the man himself (1 John 3:23).
(1) There accrues to the heart that loves its brethren an habitual παρρησίαπρὸςτὸνθεόν,86 the earnest of at which the faithful servant of Christ will realize at His glorious coming (1 John 2:28). This “confidence toward God” is the reflection from the soul of God’s abiding peace (compare Romans 5:1 f.), the “freedom” of happy children who have access always to the Father, speaking to Him with a trustful heart and no longer checked and chided in His presence.
(2) Here lies the secret of successful prayer,87 which was revealed by our Lord to His disciples (John 15:7): “If you abide in me and my words abide in you, whatever you will, ask, and it will be done for you.” The prayers are always heard of those who have the mind of Christ, who love the Lord’s work and are one with Him in spirit. They ask the things He means to give (see p. 401). The Spirit of Christ prays in them; they cannot ask amiss or fruitlessly. They plead truly in Christ’s “name” (compare John 15:16),—in His character and on His behalf, who has no interests but those prompted by God’s good-will to men.
“The secret of Jehovah,” the Old Testament said, “is with them that fear Him.” St John had discovered that this secret also rests with those who love their brethren. No veil hangs between them and the Father’s face. Their prayers are prophecies of what God will do; for “every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God” (1 John 4:7). “Whatsoever we ask we receive of Him”—the Apostle is not formulating a theological principle, but telling his experience—“because we keep His commands and do the things pleasing before Him.” Now there is nothing which better pleases God, who is love, than to see His children live in love toward each other. And nothing more quickly clouds one’s acceptance with the Father, and more effectually hinders his prayers, than churlishness and strife. When our hearts condemn us on this score (1 John 3:20), we have much to fear from God; when they condemn us not; we have everything to hope. “The Father Himself loveth you,” said Jesus once to His disciples, “because you have loved me and have believed that I came out from the Father” (John 16:27). The terms on which the Apostle guarantees to his readers God’s abiding favour—viz. faith in Christ’s name, and mutual love,—are tantamount to the above; for true love to, Christ, and love to His own in the world, are the same affection; He and His Church are one to the love born of faith, as they are one to the hate born of unbelief (John 15:18-25).
In laying down the ἐντολαί of God, the keeping of which keeps us in the way of His good pleasure, St John gives to the idea of “commandment” a surprising turn, anticipated in the bold saying of John 6:29: “This is the work of God, that you believe on Him whom He sent.” Can faith then be commanded? is this, after all, a work of law? In St Paul’s theology, “faith” and “works” are radically opposed, and serve to represent the true and false ways of salvation. Right and just “work” or “works,” as he views the matter, are the consequence of faith and by no means identical with it (1 Thessalonians 1:3; 2 Thessalonians 1:11; Titus 3:8). St Paul’s thought was ruled by the antithesis of the legalist controversy, in which “works” done under command meant self-wrought and would-be meritorious human doings. For St John this contention is past; indeed he had never made it his own, as the Apostle of the Gentiles was compelled to do. That God requires men to believe was a common-place with both Apostles; St John’s ἐντολή (command) is not essentially different from St Paul’s κλῆσις (calling),—the summons sent to mankind in the Gospel, demanding from all nations the “obedience of faith “ (Romans 1:5). With this imperative the Lord Jesus opened His commission, when He “came into Galilee preaching the good news of God, and saying, Repent, and believe in the good news.” Faith cannot be commanded as a mechanical work, a thing of constraint; it is commanded as the dutiful response of man’s will to the appeal of God’s truth and love. Hence “the commandments” resolve themselves into “the commandment” (αἱἐντολαί of 1 John 3:22 = ἡἐντολή, 1 John 3:23: two in one), “that we believe the name of His Son Jesus Christ and love one another.” The phrase is not “believe in,” or “on, the name” (εἰς, ἐν, ἐπί), as commonly, but “believe the name:88 the Name has something to say; it bespeaks the nature and claims of Him who bears it, and utters God’s testimony concerning His Son. God asks our credence for the record that is affirmed when He designates Jesus Christ “My Son.” He bids all men yield assent to the royal titles of Jesus and set His name above every other in their esteem and confidence. Such faith in the Lord Jesus Christ always works by love, and carries with it of necessity the result already described—the specific matter of Christian law: “that we love one another, as He gave us command” (see John 13:34, etc.). The verbs “believe” and “love” are here, according to the preferable reading88b (πιστεύσωμεν, ἀγαπῶμεν), in different tenses—the former in the aorist pointing to an event, the latter in the present tense signifying a practice. As Westcott puts it, “The decisive act of faith is the foundation of the abiding work of love.” The keeping of this double law, of faith and love, ensures that mutual indwelling of God and the soul which is the essence of religion, for “The man that keeps His command dwells in God, and God in him” (1 John 3:24a). Faith, as Christ and all His Apostles teach, is the channel of this intercourse; it forms the link of an eternal attachment between the soul and its Maker.