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1 JOHN

THE PASTOR’S AIM

1 John 1:1–4

What we are telling you about is that which was from the beginning, that which we heard, that which we saw with our eyes, that which we gazed upon, and which our hands touched. It is about the word of life that we are telling you. (And the life appeared to us, and we saw it, and testify to it; and we are now bringing you the message of this eternal life, which was with the Father and which appeared to us.) It is about what we saw and heard that we are bringing the message to you, that you too may have fellowship with us, for our fellowship is with the Father and with Jesus Christ, the Son. And we are writing these things to you that your joy may be completed.

EVERYONE who sits down to write a letter or gets up to preach a sermon has some object in view. The intention, and the hope, is to produce some effect in the minds and hearts and lives of those to whom that message is addressed. And here, at the very beginning of his letter, John sets down his aim in writing to his people.

(1) It is his wish to produce fellowship with the community and fellowship with God (verse 3). The pastor’s aim must always be to bring people closer to one another and closer to God. Any message which encourages and leads to division is a false message. The Christian message can be summed up as having two great aims – love for one another and love for God.

(2) It is his wish to bring his people joy (verse 4). Joy is the essence of Christianity. A message whose only effect is to depress and to discourage those who hear it has stopped half-way. It is quite true that often the aim of the preacher and the teacher must be to awaken a godly sorrow which will lead to a true repentance. But, after the sense of sin has been produced, men and women must be led to the Saviour in whom sins are all forgiven. The ultimate note of the Christian message is joy.

(3) To that end, John’s aim is to set Jesus Christ before them. One great teacher always used to tell his students that their one aim as preachers must be ‘to speak a good word for Jesus Christ’; and it was said of another great man that, wherever his conversation began, it cut straight across country to Jesus Christ.

The simple fact is that, if we are ever to find fellowship with one another and fellowship with God, and if we are ever to find true joy, we must find them in Jesus Christ.

THE PASTOR’S RIGHT TO SPEAK

1 John 1:1–4 (contd)

HERE at the very beginning of his letter, John sets down his right to speak. It consists in one thing – in personal experience of Christ (verses 2–3).

(1) He says that he has heard Christ. Long ago, Zedekiah had said to Jeremiah: ‘Is there any word from the Lord?’ (Jeremiah 37:17). What people are interested in is not someone’s opinions and views, but a word from the Lord. It was said of one preacher that first he listened to God and then he spoke to men and women; and it was said of John Brown, the eighteenth-century minister of the Scottish town of Haddington, that, when he preached, he often paused as if listening for a voice. True teachers are those who have a message from Jesus Christ because they have heard his voice.

(2) He says that he has seen Christ. It is told of Alexander Whyte, the great Scottish preacher, that someone once said to him: ‘You preached today as if you had come straight from the presence.’ And Whyte answered: ‘Perhaps I did.’ We cannot see Christ in the flesh as John did; but we can still see him with the eye of faith. As J. G. Whittier’s hymn ‘Immortal love’ has it,

And, warm, sweet, tender, even yet

A present help is he;

And faith has still its Olivet,

And love its Galilee.

(3) He says that he has gazed on Christ. What is the difference between seeing Christ and gazing upon him? In the Greek, the verb for to see is horan, and it means simply to see with physical sight. The verb for to gaze is theasthai, and it means to gaze at someone or something until something has been grasped of the significance of that person or thing. So Jesus, speaking to the crowds of John the Baptist, asked: ‘What did you go out into the wilderness to look at [theasthai]?’ (Luke 7:24); and in that word he describes how the crowds flocked out to gaze at John and wonder who and what this man might be. Speaking of Jesus in the prologue to his gospel, John says: ‘We have seen his glory’ (John 1:14). The verb is again theasthai, and the idea is not that of a passing glance but of a steadfast searching gaze which seeks to discover something of the mystery of Christ.

(4) He says that his hands actually touched Christ. Luke tells of how Jesus came back to his disciples, when he had risen from the dead, and said: ‘Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have’ (Luke 24:39). Here, John is thinking of those people called the Docetists who were so spiritually minded that they insisted that Jesus never had a flesh-and-blood body but was only a ghost in human form. They refused to believe that God could ever degrade himself by taking human flesh and blood upon himself. John here insists that the Jesus he had known was, in truth, a man who came among them; he felt there was nothing in all the world more dangerous – as we shall see – than to doubt that Jesus was fully human.

THE PASTOR’S MESSAGE

1 John 1:1–4 (contd)

JOHN’s message is about Jesus Christ; and of Jesus he has three great things to say. First, he says that Jesus was from the beginning. That is to say, in him eternity entered time; in him the eternal God personally entered our world. Second, that entry into the world was a real entry; it was real humanity that God took upon himself. Third, through that action there came to men and women the word of life, the word which can change death into life and mere existence into real living. Again and again in the New Testament, the gospel is called a word; and it is of the greatest interest to see the various connections in which this term is used.

(1) More often than anything else, the gospel message is called the word of God (Acts 4:31, 6:2, 6:7, 11:1, 13:5, 13:7, 13:44, 16:32; Philippians 1:14; 1 Thessalonians 2:13; Hebrews 13:7; Revelation 1:2, 1:9, 6:9, 20:4). It is not a human discovery; it comes from God. It is news of God which men and women could not have discovered for themselves.

(2) Frequently, the gospel message is called the word of the Lord (Acts 8:25, 12:24, 13:49, 15:35; 1 Thessalonians 1:8; 2 Thessalonians 3:1). It is not always certain whether the Lord is God or Jesus, but more often than not it is Jesus who is meant. The gospel is, therefore, the message which God could have sent to men and women in no other way than through his Son.

(3) Twice, the gospel message is called the word of hearing (logos akoēs) (1 Thessalonians 2:13; Hebrews 4:2). That is to say, it depends on two things – on a voice ready to speak it and an ear ready to hear it.

(4) The gospel message is the word of the kingdom (Matthew 13:19). It is the announcement of the kingship of God and the summons to render to God the obedience which will make us citizens of that kingdom.

(5) The gospel message is the word of the gospel (Acts 15:7; Colossians 1:5). Gospel means good news; and the gospel is essentially the good news about God.

(6) The gospel is the word of grace (Acts 14:3, 20:32). It is the good news of God’s generous and undeserved love for all; it is the news that we are not saddled with the impossible task of earning God’s love but are freely offered it.

(7) The gospel is the word of salvation (Acts 13:26). It is the offer of forgiveness for past sin and of power to overcome sin in the future.

(8) The gospel is the word of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:19). It is the message that the lost relationship between human beings and God is restored in Jesus Christ, who has broken down the barrier which sin had erected.

(9) The gospel is the word of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:18). At the heart of the gospel is the cross, on which is shown to all the final proof of the forgiving, sacrificing, seeking love of God.

(10) The gospel is the word of truth (2 Corinthians 6:7; Ephesians 1:13; Colossians 1:5; 2 Timothy 2:15). With the coming of the gospel, it is no longer necessary to guess and feel our way in life, for Jesus Christ has brought to us the truth about God.

(11) The gospel is the word of righteousness (Hebrews 5:13). It is by the power of the gospel that we are enabled to break from the power of evil and to rise to the righteousness which is pleasing in the sight of God.

(12) The gospel is the health-giving word (2 Timothy 1:13, 2:8). It is the antidote which cures the poison of sin and the medicine which defeats the disease of evil.

(13) The gospel is the word of life (Philippians 2:16). It is through its power that we are delivered from death and enabled to enter into life at its best.

GOD IS LIGHT

1 John 1:5

And this is the message which we have heard from him and which we pass on to you, that God is light, and there is no darkness in him.

IT is certainly the case that our individual characters will be determined by the character of the god whom we worship; and, therefore, John begins by laying down the nature of the God and Father of Jesus Christ whom Christians worship. God, he says, is light, and there is no darkness in him. What does this statement tell us about God?

(1) It tells us that he is splendour and glory. There is nothing so glorious as a blaze of light piercing the darkness. To say that God is light tells us of his sheer splendour.

(2) It tells us that God is self-revealing. Above all things, light is seen; and it lights up the darkness round about it. To say that God is light is to say that there is nothing secretive or furtive about him. He wishes to be seen and to be known.

(3) It tells us of God’s purity and holiness. In God, there is none of the darkness which cloaks hidden evil. That he is light speaks to us of his white purity and stainless holiness.

(4) It tells us of the guidance of God. It is one of the great functions of light to show the way. The road that is lit is the road that can be seen clearly. To say that God is light is to say that he offers his guidance for the path we must tread.

(5) It tells us of the revealing quality in the presence of God. Light is the great revealer. Flaws and stains which are hidden in the shade are obvious in the light. Light reveals the imperfections in any piece of work or material. So, the imperfections of life are seen in the presence of God. As the poet and hymn-writer J. G. Whittier wrote,

Our thoughts lie open to thy sight;

And naked to thy glance;

Our secret sins are in the light

Of thy pure countenance.

We can never know either the depth to which life has fallen or the height to which it may rise until we see it in the revealing light of God.

THE HOSTILE DARK

1 John 1:5 (contd)

IN God, says John, there is no darkness at all. Throughout the New Testament, darkness stands for the very opposite of the Christian life.

(1) Darkness stands for the Christless life. It represents the life that people lived before they met Christ or the life that they live if they stray away from him. John writes to his people that, now that Christ has come, the darkness is past and the true light shines (1 John 2:8). Paul writes to his Christian friends that once they were darkness but now they are light in the Lord (Ephesians 5:8). God has delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of his dear Son (Colossians 1:13). Christians are not in darkness, for they are children of the day (1 Thessalonians 5:4–5). Those who follow Christ shall not walk in darkness, as others must, but they will have the light of life (John 8:12). God has called the Christians out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).

(2) The dark is hostile to the light. In the prologue to his gospel, John writes that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5). It is a picture of the darkness seeking to obliterate the light – but unable to overpower it. The dark and the light are natural enemies.

(3) The darkness stands for the ignorance of life apart from Christ. Jesus summons his friends to walk in the light so that the darkness does not overtake them, for those who walk in the darkness do not know where they are going (John 12:35). Jesus is the light, and he has come that those who believe in him should not walk in darkness (John 12:46). The dark stands for the essential lostness of life without Christ.

(4) The darkness stands for the chaos of life without God. God, says Paul, thinking of the first act of creation, commanded his light to shine out of the darkness (2 Corinthians 4:6). Without God’s light, the world is a chaos in which life has neither order nor sense.

(5) The darkness stands for the immorality of the Christless life. It is Paul’s appeal to men and women that they should cast off the works of darkness (Romans 13:12). Because their deeds were evil, people loved the darkness rather than the light (John 3:19). The darkness stands for the way that the Christless life is filled with things which seek the shadows because they cannot stand the light.

(6) The darkness is characteristically unfruitful. Paul speaks of the unfruitful works of darkness (Ephesians 5:11). If growing things are deprived of the light, their growth is arrested. The darkness is the Christless atmosphere in which no fruit of the Spirit will ever grow.

(7) The darkness is connected with lovelessness and hate. If people hate one another, it is a sign that they walk in darkness (1 John 2:9–11). Love is sunshine, and hatred is the dark.

(8) The dark is the home of the enemies of Christ and the final goal of those who will not accept him. The struggle of Christians and of Christ is against the hostile rulers of the darkness of this world (Ephesians 6:12). Persistent and rebellious sinners are those for whom the mist of darkness is reserved (2 Peter 2:9; Jude 13). The darkness is the life which is separated from God.

THE NECESSITY OF WALKING IN THE LIGHT

1 John 1:6–7

If we say that we have fellowship with him and at the same time walk in darkness, we lie and are not doing the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus Christ is steadily cleansing us from all sin.

HERE, John is writing to counteract one heretical way of thought. There were those who claimed to be specially intellectually and spiritually advanced, but whose lives showed no sign of it. They claimed to have advanced so far along the road of knowledge and of spirituality that, for them, sin had ceased to matter and the laws had ceased to exist. Napoleon once said that laws were made for ordinary people but were never meant for the likes of him. So, these heretics claimed to be so advanced in their thinking that, even if they did sin, it was of no importance whatsoever. In the later years of the second century, Clement of Alexandria tells us that there were heretics who said that it made no difference how people lived. The second-century theologian Irenaeus tells us that they declared that truly spiritual people were quite incapable of ever being affected or harmed by sin, no matter what they did.

In answer, John insists on certain things.

(1) He insists that, to have fellowship with the God who is light, we must walk in the light, and that, if we are still walking in the moral and ethical darkness of the Christless life, we cannot have that fellowship. This is precisely what the Old Testament had said centuries before. God said: ‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy’ (Leviticus 19:2; cf. 20:7, 20:26). Those who would find fellowship with God are committed to a life of goodness which reflects God’s goodness. The New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd writes: ‘The Church is a society of people who, believing in a God of pure goodness, accept the obligation to be good like him.’ This does not mean that we must be perfect before we can have fellowship with God; if that were the case, all of us would be shut out. But it does mean that we must spend our whole lives in the awareness of our obligations, in the effort to fulfil them and in penitence when we fail. It will mean that we must never think that sin does not matter; it will mean that the nearer we come to God, the more terrible sin will be to us.

(2) He insists that these mistaken thinkers have the wrong idea of truth. He says that, if people who claim to be specially advanced still walk in darkness, they are not doing the truth. Exactly the same phrase is used in the Fourth Gospel, when it speaks of those who do what is true (John 3:21). This means that, for Christians, truth is never only intellectual; it is always moral. It is not something which exercises only the mind; it is something which exercises the whole personality. Truth is not only the discovery of abstract things; it is concrete living. It is not only thinking; it is also acting. The words which the New Testament uses along with truth are significant. It speaks of obeying the truth (Romans 2:8; Galatians 3:7), following the truth (Galatians 2:14; 3 John 4), opposing the truth (2 Timothy 3:8) and wandering from the truth (James 5:19). There is something that might be called ‘discussion-group Christianity’. It is possible to look on Christianity as a series of intellectual problems to be solved, and on the Bible as a book about which illuminating information is to be gathered. But Christianity is something to be followed, and the Bible is a book to be obeyed. It is possible for intellectual superiority and moral failure to go hand in hand. For Christians, the truth is something first to be discovered and then to be obeyed.

THE TESTS OF TRUTH

1 John 1:6–7 (contd)

AS John sees it, there are two great tests of truth.

(1) Truth is the creator of fellowship. If men and women are really walking in the light, they have fellowship with one another. No belief can be fully Christian if it separates people from their neighbours. No church can be exclusive and still be the Church of Christ. Anything that destroys fellowship cannot be true.

(2) Those who really know the truth are each day more and more cleansed from sin by the blood of Jesus. The Revised Standard Version is correct enough here, but it can very easily be misunderstood. It runs: ‘The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.’ That can be read as a statement of a general principle. But it is a statement of what ought to be happening in the life of every individual. The meaning is that, all the time, day by day, constantly and consistently, the blood of Jesus Christ ought to be carrying out a cleansing process in the life of the individual Christian.

The Greek for to cleanse is katharizein, which was originally a ritual word, describing the ceremonies and washings and so on that qualified an individual to approach the gods. But, as religion developed, the word came to have a moral sense; and it describes the goodness which enables people to enter into the presence of God. So, what John is saying is: ‘If you really know what the sacrifice of Christ has done and are really experiencing its power, day by day you will be adding holiness to your life and becoming more fit to enter the presence of God.’

Here indeed is a great conception. It looks on the sacrifice of Christ as something which not only atones for past sin but also equips people in holiness day by day.

True religion is the means by which every day we come closer to one another and closer to God. It produces fellowship with God and fellowship with other people – and we can never have the one without the other.

THE THREEFOLD LIE

1 John 1:6–7 (contd)

FOUR times in his letter, John bluntly accuses the false teachers of being liars; and the first of these occasions is in this passage.

(1) Those who claim to have fellowship with the God who is altogether light and yet who walk in the dark are lying (verse 6). A little later, he repeats this charge in a slightly different way. The one who claims to know God and yet does not keep God’s commandments is a liar (1 John 2:4). John is laying down the blunt truth that those who say one thing with their lips and another thing with their lives are liars. He is not thinking of those who try their hardest and yet often fail. ‘A man’, said the writer H. G. Wells, ‘may be a very bad musician, and may yet be passionately in love with music’; and we may be very conscious of our failures and yet be passionately in love with Christ and the way of Christ. John is thinking of those who make the highest possible claims to knowledge, to intellectual superiority and to spirituality, and who yet allow themselves things which they know very well are forbidden. Anyone who claims to love Christ and deliberately disobeys him is guilty of a lie.

(2) The one who denies that Jesus is the Christ is a liar (1 John 2:22). Here is something which runs through the whole New Testament. The ultimate test of any of us is our reaction to Jesus. The ultimate question which Jesus asks every one of us is: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ (Matthew 16:15). Confronted with Christ, we cannot but see the greatness that is there; and anyone who denies it is a liar.

(3) Anyone who claims to love God and at the same time hates another person is a liar (1 John 4:20). Love of God and hatred of others cannot exist in the same person. If there is bitterness in someone’s heart towards any other, that is proof that that person does not really love God. All our protestations of love to God are useless if there is hatred in our hearts towards anyone.

THE SINNER’S SELF-DECEPTION

1 John 1:8–10

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, we can rely on him in his righteousness to forgive us our sins and to make us clean from all unrighteousness.

If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

IN this passage, John describes and condemns two further mistaken ways of thought.

(1) There are some people who say that they have no sin. That may mean either of two things.

It may describe people who say that they have no responsibility for their sin. It is easy enough to find defences behind which to seek to hide. We may blame our sins on our upbringing or on our genes, on our environment, on our temperament or on our physical condition. We may claim that someone misled us and that we were led astray. It is a human characteristic that we seek to shuffle out of the responsibility for sin. Or it may describe people who claim that they can sin and come to no harm.

It is John’s insistence that, when people have sinned, excuses and self-justifications are irrelevant. The only thing which will meet the situation is humble and penitent confession to God and, if need be, to other people too.

Then John says a surprising thing. He says that we can depend on God in his righteousness to forgive us if we confess our sins. On the face of it, we might well have thought that God in his righteousness would have been much more likely to condemn than to forgive. But the point is that God, because he is righteous, never breaks his word; and Scripture is full of the promise of mercy to all who come to him with penitent hearts. God has promised that he will never despise the contrite heart and he will not break his word. If we humbly and sorrowfully confess our sins, he will forgive. The very fact of making excuses and looking for self-justification shuts us out from forgiveness, because it blocks our way to penitence; the very fact of humble confession opens the door to forgiveness, for those with penitent hearts can claim the promises of God.

(2) There are some people who say that they have not in fact sinned. That attitude is not nearly so uncommon as we might think. Any number of people do not really believe that they have sinned and rather resent being called sinners. Their mistake is that they think of sin as the kind of thing which gets into the news. They forget that sin is hamartia, which literally means a missing of the target. To fail to be as good a father, mother, wife, husband, son, daughter, employee or person as we might be is to sin; and that includes us all.

In any event, anyone who claims not to have sinned is in effect doing nothing less than calling God a liar, for God has said that all have sinned.

So, John condemns those who believe that they are so far advanced in knowledge and in the spiritual life that sin for them has ceased to matter; he condemns those who evade the responsibility for their sin or who hold that sin has no effect upon them; he condemns those who have never even realized that they are sinners. The essence of the Christian life is first to realize our sin and then to go to God for that forgiveness which can wipe out the past and for that cleansing which can make the future new.

A PASTOR’S CONCERN

1 John 2:1–2

My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin. But, if anyone does sin, we have one who will plead our cause to the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. For he is the propitiating sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.

THE first thing to note in this passage is the sheer affection in it. John begins with the address: ‘My little children’. Both in Latin and in Greek, diminutives carry a special affection. They are words which are used, as it were, with a caress. John is a very old man; he must be, in fact, the last survivor of his generation, maybe the last man alive who had walked and talked with Jesus in his days on earth. So often, age gets out of sympathy with youth and acquires even an impatient irritableness with the new and freer ways of the younger generation. But not John; in his old age, he has nothing but tenderness for those who are his little children in the faith. He is writing to tell them that they must not sin; but he does not scold. There is no edge in his voice; he seeks to love them into goodness. In this opening address, there is the yearning, affectionate tenderness of a pastor for people whom he has known for a long time in all their wayward foolishness, and whom he still loves.

His purpose in writing is to prevent them from sinning. There is a twofold connection of thought here – with what has gone before and with what comes afterwards. There is a twofold danger that they may indeed think lightly of sin.

John says two things about sin. First, he has just said that sin is universal; anyone who claims never to have sinned is a liar. Second, there is forgiveness of sins through what Jesus Christ has done, and still does, for men and women. Now, it would be possible to use both these statements as an excuse to take sin lightly. If all have sinned, why make a fuss about it, and what is the use of struggling against something which is, in any event, an inevitable part of the human situation? Again, if there is forgiveness of sins, why worry about it?

In response to that, John, as the New Testament scholar B. F. Westcott points out, has two things to say.

First, Christians are people who have come to know God; and the inevitable accompaniment of knowledge must be obedience. We shall return to this more fully; but, at the moment, we note that to know God and to obey God must, as John sees it, be twin parts of the same experience.

Second, those who claim that they abide in God (2:6) and in Jesus Christ must live the same kind of life as Jesus lived. That is to say, union with Christ necessarily involves imitation of Christ.

So, John lays down his two great ethical principles: knowledge involves obedience, and union involves imitation. Therefore, in the Christian life, there can never be any suggestion that sin should be taken lightly.

JESUS CHRIST OUR FRIEND AND DEFENDER

1 John 2:1–2 (contd)

IT will take us some considerable time to deal with these two verses, for in the New Testament there are few other verses which so concisely and clearly describe the work of Christ.

Let us first set out the problem. It is clear that Christianity is an ethical religion; that is what John is concerned to stress. But it is also clear that human beings are so often an ethical failure. Confronted with the demands of God, they acknowledge them and accept them – and then fail to keep them. Here, there is a barrier erected between us and God. How can we sinners ever enter into the presence of God, the all-holy? That problem is solved in Jesus Christ. And, in this passage, John uses two great words about Jesus Christ which we must study, not simply to acquire intellectual knowledge but to gain understanding and so to enter into the benefits of Christ.

He calls Jesus Christ our advocate with the Father. The word is paraklētos, which in the Fourth Gospel the Authorized Version translates as comforter. It is so great a word and has behind it so great a thought that we must examine it in detail. Paraklētos comes from the verb parakalein. There are occasions when parakalein means to comfort. It is, for instance, used with that meaning in Genesis 37:35, where it is said that all Jacob’s sons and daughters rose up to comfort him at the loss of Joseph; in Isaiah 61:2, where it is said that the function of the prophet is to comfort all who mourn; and in Matthew 5:4, where it is said that those who mourn will be comforted.

But that is neither the most common nor the most literal sense of parakalein; its most usual meaning is to call someone to one’s side in order to use that person in some way as a helper and a counsellor. In ordinary Greek, that is a very common usage. Xenophon, the Greek historian (Anabasis, 1:6:5), tells how the Persian emperor Cyrus the Younger summoned (parakalein) Clearchos into his tent to be his counsellor, for Clearchos was a man held in the highest honour by Cyrus and by the Greeks. Aeschines, the Greek orator, protests against his opponents calling in Demosthenes, his great rival, and says: ‘Why need you call Demosthenes to your support? To do so is to call in a rascally rhetorician to cheat the ears of the jury’ (Against Ctesiphon, 200).

Paraklētos itself is a word which is passive in form and literally means someone who is called to one’s side; but, since it is always the reason for the calling in that is uppermost in the mind, the word, although passive in form, has an active sense, and comes to mean a helper, a supporter and, above all, a witness in someone’s favour, an advocate in someone’s defence. It is also a common word in ordinary secular Greek. The Athenian statesman Demosthenes (De Falsa Legatione, 1) speaks of the persistent requests and the party spirit of advocates (paraklētoi) serving the ends of private ambition instead of the public good. Diogenes Laertius, who wrote on the lives of the Greek philosophers (4:50), tells of a caustic saying of the philosopher Bion. A very talkative person sought his help in some matter. Bion said: ‘I will do what you want, if you will only send someone to me to plead your case [that is, send a paraklētos], and stay away yourself.’ When the Jewish scholar Philo is telling the story of Joseph and his brothers, he says that, when Joseph forgave them for the wrong that they had done him, he said: ‘I offer you an amnesty for all that you did to me; you need no other paraklētos’ (Life of Joseph, 40). Philo tells how the Jews of Alexandria were being oppressed by a certain governor and were determined to take their case to the emperor. ‘We must find’, they said, ‘a more powerful paraklētos by whom the Emperor Gaius will be brought to a favourable disposition towards us’ (In Flaccum, 968 B).

So common was this word that it came into other languages just as it stood. In the New Testament itself, the Syriac, Egyptian, Arabic and Ethiopic versions all keep the word paraklētos just as it stands. The Jews especially adopted the word and used it in this sense of advocate, someone to plead one’s cause. They used it as the opposite of the word accuser, and the Rabbis had this saying about what would happen in the day of God’s judgment. ‘The man who keeps one commandment of the law has got to himself one paraklētos; the man who breaks one commandment of the law has got to himself one accuser.’ They said: ‘If a man is summoned to court on a capital charge, he needs powerful paraklētoi [the plural of the word] to save him; repentance and good works are his paraklētoi in the judgment of God.’ ‘All the righteousness and mercy which an Israelite does in this world are great peace and great paraklētoi between him and his father in heaven.’ They said that the sin offering is a person’s paraklētos before God.

So, the word came into the Christian vocabulary. In the days of the persecutions and the martyrs, a Christian called Vettius Epagathos ably pleaded the case of those who were accused of being Christians. ‘He was an advocate [paraklētos] for the Christians, for he had the Advocate within himself, even the Spirit’ (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 5:1). The Letter of Barnabas (20) speaks of evil men who are the advocates of the wealthy and the unjust judges of the poor. The writer of 2 Clement asks: ‘Who shall be your paraklētos if it be not clear that your works are righteous and holy?’ (2 Clement 6:9).

A paraklētos has been defined as ‘one who lends his presence to his friends’. More than once in the New Testament, there is this great conception of Jesus as the friend and the defender of men and women. In a military court-martial, the officer who defends the soldier under accusation is called the prisoner’s friend. Jesus is our friend. Paul writes of that Christ who is at the right hand of God and ‘who intercedes for us’ (Romans 8:34). The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of Jesus Christ as the one who ‘always lives to make intercession’ (Hebrews 7:25); and he also speaks of him as appearing ‘in the presence of God on our behalf’ (Hebrews 9:24).

The tremendous thing about Jesus is that he has never lost his interest in, or his love for, men and women. We are not to think of him as having gone through his life upon the earth and his death upon the cross, and then being finished with us. He still bears his concern for us upon his heart; he still pleads for us; Jesus Christ is the prisoner’s friend for all.

JESUS CHRIST THE ATONING SACRIFICE

1 John 2:1–2 (contd)

JOHN goes on to say that Jesus is, as the Authorized Version has it, the propitiation for our sins. The word is hilasmos. This is a more difficult picture for us to grasp fully. The picture of the advocate is universal, for we all have experience of a friend coming to our aid; but the picture in propitiation is less familiar. It comes from sacrifice; and, to understand it, we must explore the basic ideas behind it.

The great aim of all religion is fellowship with God, to know him as friend and to enter with joy, and not fear, into his presence. It therefore follows that the supreme problem of religion is sin, for it is sin that interrupts fellowship with God. It is to meet that problem that all sacrifice arises. By sacrifice, fellowship with God is restored. So, the Jews offered – night and morning – the sin offering in the Temple. That was the offering, not for any particular sin but for all people as sinners; and, as long as the Temple lasted, it was made to God in the morning and in the evening. The Jews also offered their trespass offerings to God; these were the offerings for particular sins. The Jews had their Day of Atonement, whose ritual was designed to atone for all sins, known and unknown. It is with that background that we must approach this picture of propitiation.

As we have said, the Greek word for propitiation is hilasmos; and the corresponding verb is hilaskesthai. This verb has three meanings. (1) When it is used with a person as the subject, it means to placate or to pacify someone who has been injured or offended, and especially to placate a god. It is to bring a sacrifice or to perform a ritual whereby a god, offended by sin, is pacified. (2) If the subject is God, the verb means to forgive, for then the meaning is that God himself provides the means whereby the lost relationship between him and the people concerned is restored. (3) The third meaning is allied with the first. The verb often means to perform some deed by which the taint of guilt is removed. People sin; at once they become tainted by sin; something is needed which, to use the scholar C. H. Dodd’s metaphor, will disinfect them from that contamination and enable them once again to enter into the presence of God. In that sense, hilaskesthai means not to propitiate but to expiate – not so much to pacify God as to disinfect from the taint of sin and by that means make people once again fit to enter into fellowship with God.

When John says that Jesus is the hilasmos for our sins, he is, we think, bringing all these different meanings together into one. Jesus is the person through whom guilt for past sin and defilement from present sin are removed. The great basic truth behind this word is that it is through Jesus Christ that our fellowship with God is first restored and then maintained.

We note one other thing. As John sees it, this work of Jesus was carried out not only for us but for the whole world. There is in the New Testament a strong line of thought in which the universality of the salvation of God is stressed. God so loved the world that he sent his Son (John 3:16). Jesus is confident that, if he is lifted up, he will draw all people to him (John 12:32). God desires everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4). It would indeed be a bold person who would set limits to the grace and love of God or to the effectiveness of the work and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Truly, as F. W. Faber’s hymn has it, ‘the love of God is broader than the measures of man’s mind’; and in the New Testament itself there are hints of a salvation whose arms are as wide as the world.

THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

1 John 2:3–6

And it is by this that we know that we have come to know him – if we keep his commandments. He who says: ‘I have come to know him’ and who does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in such a man. The love of God is truly perfected in any man who keeps his word. This is the way in which we know that we are in him. He who claims that he abides in him ought himself to live the same kind of life as he lived.

THIS passage deals in phrases and thoughts which were very familiar in the ancient world. People talked a good deal about knowing God and about being in God. It is important that we should see where the differences lay between the Gentile world in all its greatness and Judaism and Christianity. To know God, to abide in God and to have fellowship with God has always been the quest of the human spirit, for St Augustine was right when he said that God had made us for himself and that our hearts were restless until they found their rest in him. We may say that, in the ancient world, there were three lines of thought in regard to knowing God.