02.01.10. 1John 5:13-17 Fellowship in the eternal life and prayer for others .
§ 10. 1 John 5:13-17 FELLOWSHIP IN THE ETERNAL LIFE AND PRAYER FOR OTHERS
St. John defined the motive of his choice of incidents for his Gospel in the words (John 20:31), ’’These things have been written that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name.” So now he says of this Epistle that he has written it that they who believe in the name of the Son of God may know that they are in actual enjoyment of eternal life, the life which no earthly blows can shake or empair. And this eternal life is a life of fellowship with God, and carries with it such freedom of speech and freedom of approach towards God that whatever we ask according to His will He hears us. Thus we know that His receiving and giving effect to such petitions of ours is so certain that we can rely upon what we have asked for as already in our possession.
St. John then applies this to intercessory prayer — to prayer in particular to which we are moved by the sight of sins committed by one of one brethren in Christ. In this regard St. John draws a distinction. As under the Old Covenant grave and deliberate sins had death for their penalty, while lighter sins of carelessness, ignorance, or sudden passion could be dealt with by the sacrificial system of the community, so is it now, only with a change in the nature of the death involved. There are mortal sins possible among Christians — that is, sins so deliberate and defiant as to cut off those who commit them from all fellowship in the eternal life and plunge their souls into death. (This awful passage from life to death would lie in the nature of the sin; but, where open and known, the sin would be marked outwardly and visibly by excommunication — cutting off the guilty person from the fellowship of the Church.) Now, prayer for others seeks for them a divine gift, such as, according to God’s will, postulates human response. The dead soul gives no such response. St. John then, though he does not actually forbid us to pray for souls thus dead in sin, does say that when he speaks of intercession for sinners he is only thinking of those who are still alive spiritually, i.e. still responsive to the movements of the Spirit. When such people sin — as we may say, when they are overtaken by sin or betrayed into sin against the real bent of their will— we may be confident of obtaining life for them from God; a renewal of the life which sin has more or less interrupted.
These things have I written unto you, that ye may know that ye have eternal life, even unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God. And this is the boldness which we have toward him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us: and if we know that he heareth us whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions which we have asked of him. If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and Ood will give him life for them that sin not unto death.
There is a sin unto death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not unto death.
1. “Ye have eternal life.” — This thought is deep in the mind of St. John. No doubt, as he says in the next verse that we already “have” the things we faithfully ask for according to God’s will, though we have them not yet in experience or enjoyment, so about eternal life — lie would recognize that there is a sense in which eternal life is still future and is to be associated with the resurrection (see John 5:24-29). But the main thought on which he insists is that it consists not in any external satisfaction or rewards, but in the fellowship of the soul with God, and that this fellowship in the life of God is to be actually realized now. ’’Eternal Life” in St. John is practically the equivalent of “the kingdom of God,’* which is a phrase he seldom uses.
2. Prayer. — The end of our being is to have fellowship with God. “The life of man is the vision of God.” Doubtless it is in order to train us for such fellowship and not in order to inform God of our needs — for ’’your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him” — that God, according to the testimony of our Lord, has made so much to depend on prayer. Our Lord affirms the need of prayer — “Ask, and it shall be given unto you” — and constantly instructs His disciples that it must be urgent and importunate; just as He assumes the necessity of work and of the thought and courage which is required for good work: for only “the workman is worthy of his hire”; only “He that reapeth receiveth wages and gathereth fruit’’; “The night cometh when no man can work.” There are, in fact, multitudes of good things intended for us, and through us for others, in the providence of God, which will never be ours unless we work for them.
Equally certainly there is an abundant store of good things intended for us, and through us for others, which will never be ours unless we faithfully and importunately pray for them. So our Lord taught His disciples by word and example. But He also taught His disciples another lesson — that the efficacy of prayer depends on its being in accordance with what we know to be the will of God — as St. John here says, “according to his will.” And it was the will of God which our Lord came to make men understand. This lesson He taught in various phrases: ’’If ye abide in me and my word abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto you”; “Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name [i.e. as representing me and my intention, and not as expressing your own selfish desires] it shall be done unto you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name.” The object of prayer, we learn, is not to persuade God to do something different from what He had intended, but to free His hand to do His will — that will which can only be done for free men by their co-operation. This recognition of an immutable will of God, expressed in the laws of nature and in the whole spiritual world, is not meant to enslave us but to free us.
Nature, we have learnt, can be controlled, but only by being obeyed. So long as we approach nature in the light of our own whims and ideas, we can get nothing from her. She remains stubborn and irresponsive. When we reverently and submissively study her laws and correspond with them, we can use them for our purposes. So it is in the spiritual world. This lesson is taught most plainly in the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer and in the order of those petitions. The beginning of effective prayer is to abandon our selfish and short-sighted schemes and desires, and concentrate our whole will and desire upon the kingdom of God and the fulfilment of the Father’s will. Thus there is given to faith so great a certainty of ultimate fulfilment— even as the prayer of Christ Himself is at last to be heard and His kingdom to come — that it can be said to have already what it asks for; but that crowning mercy nevertheless it never can receive without the persistent asking, for the law of God’s action upon us is to demand such correspondence.
3. Intercessory prayer. — In accordance with what has just been said, the spirit of the truest intercessory prayer is defined by St, Paul —speaking of the intercession of the Spirit in the body of Christ — as “in accordance with God on behalf of saints’’ — that is, on behalf of consecrated persons who are moving in correspondence with the Spirit, Thus if we take the intercessory prayers of the New Testament — our Lord’s great prayer and St. Paul’s prayers for his converts — we see that they are prayers for the perfecting of those already in correspondence with God, The principle which our Lord enunciates — “I pray not for the world, but for them whom thou hast given me” — appears generally in the other examples. The normal action of intercessory prayer, then, is within the responsive body. From it there flows within the body so rich and united a life that those outside are impressed and won. So here St. John speaks about intercessory prayer as prayer for the cleansing and recovery from incidental sins of those who are still responsive to God and living the true life. As for those who, by deliberate apostasy, hand themselves back to the world of darkness and death — we cannot help thinking of those leaders in error whom St. John describes as antichrists — he does not say that we should pray for them. He does not forbid it. It is for instance, very hard to suppose that St. John did not pray for the young man in the story Clement tells of him, who had been guilty of the most flagrant apostasy from Christ and become a leader in outrageous crimes, whom the bishop to whom he had been entrusted described as “dead— dead to God." It is very difficult, I say, to believe that St. John did not pray for him as soon as ever he heard of his sad case, before he so lovingly and bravely sought and won him. But he does tell us that this is not the normal action of intercessory prayer.
I am quite sure we need to-day to learn the lesson afresh. We are apt to pray somewhat tepidly and perfunctorily for the perfecting of the faithful. We take their customary sins for granted. And it is just those of whom St. John says, “I do not say that ye should pray for them.” for whom we pray most urgently. We seem to regard this even as the normal kind of intercessory prayer — practically reversing the order of the New Testament. I am sure this subject will bear much thinking of. The normal action of intercessory prayer is, according to the teaching of the New Testament, within the circle of those who are living in actual response to the movement of the Divine Spirit.
4. Sins unto death and sins not unto death. — This distinction is, no doubt, based upon the Old Testament. I will explain what I mean by setting before my readers a passage from the late Dr. A. B. Davidson, Theology of the Old Testament, partly for the pleasure of quoting from so admirable a book. A distinction is drawn in the Old Testament, as has been seen, between sins of ignorance and inadvertence and sins done with a high hand or of purpose... The former class embraced more than mere involuntary or inadvertent sins. The class comprehended all sins done not in a spirit of rebellion against the law and ordinance of Jehovah — sins committed through human imperfection, or human ignorance, or human passion; sins done when the mind was directed to some end connected with human weakness or frailty, but not formally opposed to the authority of the lawgiver. The distinction was thus primarily a distinction in regard to the state of mind of the transgressor. In point of fact, however, it was convenient to specify in general the offences which belonged to the dass of sins done with a high hand, and upon the whole they were the sins forbidden by the moral law.No doubt in certain circumstances even these sins, if committed involuntarily, were treated as sins of error, and the penalty due to them was averted by certain extraordinary arrangements; as, for example, when a murder was committed by misadventure, the manslayer was allowed to flee to a city of refuge. Otherwise, the consequence of his deed would overtake him in the ordinary penalty attached to such an offence, which was death.
Corresponding to this distinction among offences was another. Only sins of ignorance were capable of being atoned for by sacrifice. The class of offences said to have been done with a high hand were capital, and followed by exclusion from the community. The sins of error on ignorance could be removed by sacrifice and offering. In other words, the Old Testament sacrificial system was a system of atonement only for the so-called sins of inadvertency... [It] belonged to the worship of the people of God concerned as truly His people, believing in Him and in fellowship with Him. And it was a means of maintaining this fellowship, of equating or removing the disturbances which human frailty occasioned to the communion.” On the other hand, “high-handed” sins “threw the offender outside the space within which God was continuously gracious. There was no sacrifice for such sins. The offender was left face to face with the anger of God.
We need not consider Low far this theory of the Jewish law was realized in fact. At any rate, the distinction of high-handed sins which are “unto death” (or its equivalent excommunication) and sins of error and weakness lies very deep in the Old Testament, and St. John reaffirms it. Doubtless with him the distinction is viewed mainly as it is in the heart of the sinner and in the moral nature of things. But we see already in St. Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians, that, as under the Old Covenant, so under the New, certain kinds of sin were to be regarded as “high-handed” and flagrant acts of apostasy, and visited with excommunication. The Christian Church thereby, like the Jewish, handed over the offender to the judgement of God among “those without,” though it had the advantage of the older Church in having as assurance of reconciliation for the penitent.
And, doubtless, St. John had in his mind, when he reaffirmed the distinction between mortal Bins and those not mortal, the primitive system of Church discipline. His is one of the profoundly sacramental minds by which the co-ordination of the inward and the outward, the moral and the ecclesiastical, can never be forgotten, and he would tolerate no disparagement of what is external as such. Nevertheless, if we bring to mind the history of the terms ’’mortal” and “venial" in connection with the confessional, and recall certain famous Provincial Letters — which once written can never be forgotten — I think we shall feel how much the Church needs a St. John in almost every age to keep recalling its outward dealing with sins as they appear to the inward tribunal of spiritual truth.