02.01.06. 1John 3:13-24 The Church and the world- Love and hate
§ 6. 1 John 3:13-24 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD — LOVE AND HATE
St. John’s thought is still running on the hatred of the Church on the part of the world which the brethren are to expect. They cannot wonder that it should be so, because they have passed right out of that old world— that world of death — into a new world — the world of life. And the evidence to ourselves of having passed from the one world to the other is that we find ourselves loving all our brethren in the new fellowship — actively loving all sorts of men and women whom naturally we should have disliked and avoided. Now, inasmuch as love is the only evidence of our really belonging to the Church, it is of the greatest importance^ that we should not be deceived as to our possessing it. Negatively it can be known by its being utterly incompatible with hatred of any one of our brethren. Hatred in principle is the same thing as murder: it is murder in the heart; and the spirit of murder utterly excludes from the true or eternal life, of which it is the essence of the Church to be possessed. Positively, the love of the brethren must be unlimited in degree and extent. As shown to us in Christ it meant the surrender of His life for us, and in us, too, it must be nothing less — we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But also — and here it can be more frequently tested — it must extend to all the common needs of life. It is idle for any one to profess to have the love of God in him if, when he sees his brother in want of anything, he does not supply his necessities out of his store of this world’s goods, but closes to him the avenues of his heart in selfishness. For love is not a matter of words, nor is the tongue its proper instrument, but it is practical and real. But when the genuine motive of our life is this sort of love, then we know that we belong to the truth — that is the real world, the world of God— and though we are very far from perfect, yet in whatever respect we feel our conscience condemn us, we shall reassure ourselves that we are right with God, because God, who is greater than our hearts and who knows everything, assures us of our standing-ground before Him by the genuine utter love which is our motive. And if we are not selfcondemned) if we can thus rightly reassure our conscience, we can stand boldly before Gk>d to speak freely to Him; and we can depend upon it that He will grant all our requests, because we keep His commandments and do what pleases Him. And His commandment is twofold. It is a commandment of belief — that we should believe the revelation of Himself that He has given in Him whom we must own as Son of God, Jesus the Christ. It is also a commandment of practice — that we should love one another in will and act, just as He bade us. And there is no mistake about it — he who thus observes God’s commandments shares in God’s life. God abides in him and he abides in God. The evidence to ourselves of this divine indwelling is that we are conscious that He has given us His Spirit.
Marvel not, brethren, if the world hateth you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.
Hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath the world’s goods, and beholdeth his brother in need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how doth the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither with the tongue; but in deed and truth. Hereby shall we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our heart before him, whereinsoever our heart condemn us; because God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, we have boldness toward God; and whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do the things that are pleasing in his sight. And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, even as he gave us commandment. And he that keepeth his commandments abideth in him, and he in himAnd hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he gave us.
1. The two worlds. — If we consider such a passage as this attentively, the experience which it represents cannot but astonish us. As we have seen, St. John paints experience very black and very white in the sharpest contrast. On the one hand, there is the experience of “the world’’ — a world made up of “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life”: a lawless world — a world of death — the world which the devil rules. He fearlessly paints it in these black colors, as also St. Paul does, as if there were no doubt that his readers would acknowledge that they had so found it. On the other hand, sharply distinguished from it, is the new world into which they have passed by an unmistakable act of transition — the world for which Christ both sets the example of true living and provides by His sacrifice the all-sufficient redemption from the old tyranny of sin and inbreathes by His Spirit the power of the new life. And of this new life the supreme and summary test is the “love of the brethren.”
About the true quality of their love St. John would have them examine themselves narrowly. But granted that it is genuine and unmistakable, he would have them— in spite of all suggested scruples of conscience suggested by their failures and sins — trust it utterly as the sufficient evidence of their fellowship with God; for where genuine love is, God is. And though his language suggests «the need of admonition and the possibility of a hypocritical profession of Christ, yet there is no mistaking his fearless appeal to experience. The thing was, as He says, “true [or real] in Christ and in them.’’ It is a realized experience. There is a sentence from George Meredith’s preface to The Tragic Comedians in which he speaks as if this sort of pure love did not exist among men, “Love may be celestial fire before it enters into the system of mortals.
It will then take the character of its place of abode, and we Have to look not so much for the pure tiling, as for the passion.” St. John’s experience asserts the contrary. He would have us utterly repudiate this slander on the capacity of humanity for the highest and best.
He — and in this he claims to speak for the Church as a whole — has found men capable of the fellowship of real love. The love which St. John describes is no doubt potentially universal. No doubt St. John would assent to the universal extension of love which St. Peter’s second Epistle suggests — from “love of the brethren” to “love” universal. But St. John is only speaking of love within the limited circle of believers. “The brethren” means certainly those only who have confessed Christ and been baptized into His fellowship. This has been already made plain. Now, to become a Christian when St. John wrote was to enter a society viewed with intense suspicion and hatred in contemporary society-though it provoked also an unwilling admiration. It was to run the risk of calumny and persecution The reality of the sacrifice involved in entering it kept the Church relatively pure. Not that Christians were perfect; but that they responded to moral discipline and to the appeal of sacrifice as to what was obviously expected of them. Within the sacred circle temporal provision could fearlessly be made for all men, because, speaking generally, the brethren could be trusted. “Charity" in the sense of alms-giving, did no harm, but good. It was the practical and voluntary expression of a real community of goods. It is, therefore, desperately hard to apply the principles of St. John to a state of society in which the world and the Church have become wholly fused; in which it costs nothing to profess Christianity— indeed, it rather costs something to withhold the profession—in which accordingly there are vast masses of nominal “brethren” whose membership counts for nothing in their lives and who respond not at all to the appeals of membership. In other words, we have a world to deal with of which St. John had no experience— a world which cannot be dealt with either as if it were really Christian or as if it were not more or less deeply leavened by the Christian tradition.
Here I will do no more than point out the difference of the situation. If I were to attempt to indicate how the difference has arisen and what is the way of return, I should be going too far beyond the function of the expositor.
Meanwhile, within the personal relationships into which life every day introduces us we have abundant opportunities of testing ourselves — whether we do really set our wills to “love the people we do not like”—whether our love is practical and effective and unlimited— whether we are ready to respond to every legitimate human claim.
2. Love without faith. — We must ask the question, what would St. John say to genuine love divorced from right belief or from membership in “ the brotherhood ’’? He does not write as if he knew of its existence. He does not suggest the existence of pure, disinterested, self-sacrificing love in the non-Christian world, or among the heretical sect who had broken away from the Church and the faith of the Incarnation. He speaks as if the true love were always the accompaniment of the right faith; and he speaks of each by turns as in the highest degree essential. He does indeed contemplate a right faith (so far as mere intellectual confession goes) which does not show itself in love, and we know what he thinks of it (see 1 John 2:4, 1 John 2:9, etc.). But what would he say to a genuine love divorced from its normal spring and motive in a right faith? We really cannot say. We should most eagerly desire to be able to ask him and to know his answer. For us the problem is so common-to find the genuinely Christian character where intellectually there is nothing but doubt and even denial. We can but think that St. John would hold to the principle which underlies all his thought that, inasmuch as God is love, so where love is God is; and that He who inspires it will crown its exercise with the vision of Him whence it came, if not in this world then beyond it. As bur Lord says, “He that doeth his will shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.”
Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that St. John gives us no clear indication of his mind in this matter. He certainly states absolutely that “if ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one also that doeth righteousness is begotten of him.” (1 John 2:29). He certainly would have every one who lives by love, reassure himself that he is ’’of the truth’’ and has God on Ms Bide and is possessed by His Spirit (1 John 3:19-20). He says without qualification, “If ye love one another, God abideth in us, and His love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). On the other hand, he is assured that “he that knoweth God heareth us [i.e. listens to the faith of the Incarnation]. He who is not of God heareth us not” (1 John 4:6), and ’’ He that confesseth the Son [i.e. the Son of God as come in the flesh in the person of Jesus] hath the Father also, and whosoever denieth the Son the same hath not the Father,” nor, it is implied, “the eternal life” (1 John 2:23-25). St. John, in fact, is convinced that the true life and the intellectual acknowledgement of Jesus as Ohrist and as Son or Word of God go together, and that where the intellectual acknowledgement is absent or denial is made, there the roots of the true life are cut.
3. It is worth noting the names under which St. John the aged addresses his disciples to whom he writes. In 1 John 2:1 he calls them “my little children,” which expresses at once his fatherly relation to them and their immaturity, needing guidance and teaching and strength; again and again (first in 1 John 2:7) he calls them “beloved” which needs no comment; in 1 John 2:12-14 he addresses them from different points of view as at once “little children,” “fathers” because of the wisdom, and “’young men” because of the spiritual strength given them in Christ; again and again (1 John 3:18, etc.) he calls them “little children’’; and in 1 John 3:13 “brothers,” expressing their spiritual equality with himself. There is a wealth of meaning in these various names.
4. On the general assurance, “whatsoever we ask, we receive,” see below on 1 John 5:14, where it is repeated with the explanatory addition “according to His will.”
5. To “believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ” is a significant phrase. The name means all that is revealed in His person, and the three names, “Son,” “Jesus,” “Christ,” express His divine and human natures and His mission.
We note that here the commandment of God is declared to be twofold — right faith in Christ’s person, coupled with love of the, brethren. Obedience to God’s commandments ensures the mutual indwelling of God in the disciple and the disciple in God, and the evidence of this is found in the gift of the Spirit. So the essence of true religion is viewed in manifold aspects.