Expositor's Bible: The Epistles of St. John Part 23

a?t?se?, ?a? d?se? Est peccatum ad mortem: a?t? ???? t??? ?a?ta???s? non pro illo dico ? p??? ?a?at??. ut roget quis. Omnis est?? aa?t?a p??? iniquitas peccatum est: ?a?at??? ?? pe?? e?e???? et est peccatum ad ?e?? ??a e??t?s?? pasa mortem.

ad???a aa?t?a est??, ?a? est?? aa?t?a ??

p??? ?a?at??.

AUTHORISED VERSION. REVISED VERSION.

And His commandments And His commandments are not grievous. are not grievous.

For whatsoever is born For whatsoever is begotten of G.o.d overcometh the of G.o.d overcometh world: and this is the the world: and victory that overcometh this is the victory that the world, _even_ our hath overcome the faith. Who is he that world, _even_ our faith.

overcometh the world, And who is he that but he that believeth overcometh the world, that Jesus is the Son but he that believeth of G.o.d? This is He that Jesus is the Son that came by water of G.o.d? This is He and blood, _even_ Jesus that came by water Christ; not by water and blood, _even_ Jesus only, but by water and Christ; not with the blood. And it is the water only, but with Spirit that beareth witness, the water and with the because the Spirit blood. And it is the is truth. For there Spirit that beareth are three that bear witness, because the record in heaven, the Spirit is the truth.

Father, the Word, and For there are three the Holy Ghost: and who bear witness, the these three are one. Spirit, and the water, And there are three and the blood: and the that bear witness in three agree in one. If earth, the spirit, and we receive the witness the water, and the of men, the witness of blood: and these three G.o.d is greater: for the agree in one. If we witness of G.o.d is this, receive the witness of that He hath borne men, the witness of witness concerning His G.o.d is greater: for Son. He that believeth this is the witness of on the Son of G.o.d hath G.o.d which He hath the witness in him: he testified of His Son. that believeth not G.o.d He that believeth on hath made Him a liar: the Son of G.o.d hath because he hath not the witness in himself: believed in the witness he that believeth not that G.o.d hath borne G.o.d hath made Him a concerning His Son.

liar; because he believeth And the witness is not the record this, that G.o.d gave that G.o.d gave of His unto us eternal life, Son. And this is the and this life is in His record, that G.o.d hath Son. He that hath the given to us eternal life, Son hath the life; he and this life is in His that hath not the Son Son. He that hath the of G.o.d hath not the life.

Son hath life; _and_ he These things have I that hath not the Son written unto you, that of G.o.d hath not life. ye may know that ye These things have I have eternal life, _even_ written unto you that unto you that believe believe on the name of on the name of the Son the Son of G.o.d; that of G.o.d. And this is ye may know that ye the boldness which we have eternal life, and have toward Him, that, that ye may believe on if we ask any thing the name of the Son of according to His will, G.o.d. And this is the He heareth us: and if confidence that we we know that He heareth have in Him, that, if us whatsoever we ask any thing according ask, we know that to His will, He we have the pet.i.tions heareth us: and if we which we have asked know that He hear us, of Him. If any man whatsoever we ask, see his brother sinning we know that we have a sin not unto death, the pet.i.tions that we he shall ask, and _G.o.d_ desired of Him. If will give him life for any man see his brother them that sin not unto sin a sin _which is_ death. (There is a sin not unto death, he shall unto death). There ask, and He shall give is sin unto death; not him life for them that concerning this _sin_ am sin not unto death. I saying that he should There is a sin unto make request. All death: I do not say unrighteousness is sin, that he shall pray for and there is sin not it. All unrighteousness unto death.

is sin: and there is a sin not unto death.

ANOTHER VERSION.

And His commandments are not heavy, for whatsoever is born of G.o.d conquereth the world: and this is the conquest that hath conquered the world--the Faith of us. Who is he that is conquering the world, but he that is believing that Jesus is the Son of G.o.d?

This is He that came by water and blood--Jesus Christ: not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood. And the Spirit is that which is ever witnessing that the Spirit is the truth.

For three are they who are ever witnessing, the Spirit and the water and the blood: and the three agree in one.

If we receive the witness of men the witness of G.o.d is greater; because the witness of G.o.d is this, because (_I say_) He hath witnessed concerning His Son.

He that is believing on the Son of G.o.d hath the witness in him, he that is not believing G.o.d hath made Him a liar: because he is not a believer in the witness that G.o.d witnessed concerning His Son.

And this is the witness, that G.o.d gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath the life, he that hath not the Son of G.o.d hath not the life. These things have I written unto you that ye may know that ye have eternal life--ye that are believing in the name of the Son of G.o.d! And this is the boldness which we have to Himward, that if we ask any thing according to His will, He is hearing us: and if we know that He is hearing us, we know that we have the desires that we have desired from Him. If any man see his brother sinning sin not unto death, he shall ask, and _G.o.d_ shall give him life--(I _mean_ for those who are not sinning unto death). Not concerning this _sin_ am I saying that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is sin not unto death.

DISCOURSE XI.

_BIRTH AND VICTORY._

"And His commandments are not grievous. For whatsoever is born of G.o.d overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of G.o.d?"--1 JOHN v. 3, 4, 5.

St. John here connects the Christian birth with victory. He tells us that of the supernatural life the destined and (so to speak) natural end is conquest.

Now in this there is a _contrast_ between the law of nature and the law of grace. No doubt the first is marvellous. It may even, if we will, in one sense be termed a victory; for it is the proof of a successful contest with the blind fatalities of natural environment.

It is in itself the conquest of a something which has conquered a world below it. The first faint cry of the baby is a wail no doubt; but in its very utterance there is a half triumphant undertone.

Boyhood, youth, opening manhood--at least in those who are physically and intellectually gifted--generally possess some share of "the rapture of the strife" with nature and with their contemporaries.

"Youth hath triumphal mornings; its days bound From night as from a victory."

But sooner or later that which pessimists style "the martyrdom of life" sets in. However brightly the drama opens, the last scene is always tragic. Our natural birth inevitably ends in defeat.

A birth and a defeat is thus the epitome of each life which is naturally brought into the field of our present human existence. The defeat is sighed over, sometimes consummated, in every cradle; it is attested by every grave.

But if birth and defeat is the motto of the natural life, birth and victory is the motto of every one born into the city of G.o.d.

This victory is spoken of in our verses as a victory along the whole line. It is the conquest of the collective Church, of the whole ma.s.s of regenerate humanity, so far as it has been true to the principle of its birth[276]--the conquest of the Faith which is "The Faith of _us_,"[277]

who are knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of the Son of G.o.d, Christ our Lord. But it is something more than that. The general victory is also a victory in detail. Every true individual believer shares in it.[278] The battle is a battle of soldiers. The abstract ideal victory is realised and made concrete in each life of struggle which is a life of enduring faith. The triumph is not merely one of a school, or of a party. The question rings with a triumphant challenge down the ranks--"who is the ever-conqueror of the world, but the ever-believer that Jesus is the Son of G.o.d?"

We are thus brought to two of St. John's great master-conceptions, both of which came to him from _hearing_ the Lord who is the Life--both of which are to be read in connection with the fourth Gospel--the Christian's _Birth_ and his _victory_.

I.

The Apostle introduces the idea of the birth which has its origin from G.o.d precisely by the same process to which attention has already been more than once directed.

St. John frequently mentions some great subject; at first like a musician who with perfect command of his instrument, touches what seems to be an almost random key, faintly, as if incidentally and half wandering from his theme. But just as the sound appears to be absorbed by the purpose of the composition, or all but lost in the distance, the same chord is struck again more decidedly; and then, after more or less interval, is brought out with a music so full and sonorous, that we perceive that it has been one of the master's leading ideas from the very first. So, when the subject is first spoken of, we hear--"every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him."[279] The subject is suspended for a while; then comes a somewhat more marked reference. "Whosoever is born of G.o.d is not a doer of sin; and he cannot continue sinning, because of G.o.d he is born." There is yet one more tender recurrence to the favourite theme--"every one that loveth is born of G.o.d."[280] Then, finally here at last the chord, so often struck, grown bolder since the prelude, gathers all the music round it. It interweaves with itself another strain which has similarly been gaining amplitude of volume in its course, until we have a great _Te Deum_, dominated by two chords of Birth and Victory. "This _is_ the conquest that has _conquered_ the world--the Faith which is of us."

We shall never come to any adequate notion of St. John's conception of the Birth of G.o.d, without tracing the place in his Gospel to which his asterisk in this place refers. To one pa.s.sage only can we turn--our Lord's conversation with Nicodemus. "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of G.o.d--except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of G.o.d."[281] The germ of the idea of entrance into the city, the kingdom of G.o.d, by means of a new birth, is in that storehouse of theological conceptions, the psalter. There is one psalm of a Korahite seer, enigmatical it may be, shadowed with the darkness of a divine compression,[282] obscure from the glory that rings it round, and from the gush of joy in its few and broken words. The 87th Psalm is the psalm of the font, the hymn of regeneration. The nations once of the world are mentioned among them that know the Lord. They are counted when He writeth up the peoples.

Glorious things are spoken of the City of G.o.d. Three times over the burden of the song is the new birth by which the aliens were made free of Sion.

This one was born there, This one and that one was born in her, This one was born there.[283]

All joyous life is thus brought into the city of the new-born. "The singers, the solemn dances, the fresh and glancing springs, are in thee."[284] Hence, from the notification of men being born again in order to see and enter into the kingdom, our Lord, as if in surprise, meets the Pharisee's question--"how can these things be?"--with another--"art thou that teacher in Israel,[285] and understandest not these things?" Jesus tells His Church for ever that every one of His disciples must be brought into contact with two worlds, with two influences--one outward, the other inward; one material, the other spiritual; one earthly, the other heavenly; one visible and sacramental, the other invisible and divine. Out of these he must come forth new-born.

Of course it may be said that "the water" here coupled with the Spirit is _figurative_. But let it be observed first, that from the very const.i.tution of St. John's intellectual and moral being things outward and visible were not annihilated by the spiritual transparency which he imparted to them. Water, literal water, is everywhere in his writings.

In his Gospel more especially he seems to be ever seeing, ever hearing it. He loved it from the a.s.sociations of his own early life, and from the mention made of it by his Master. And as in the Gospel water is, so to speak, one of the three great factors and centres of the book;[286]

so now in the Epistle, it still seems to glance and murmur before him.

"The water" is one of the three abiding witnesses in the Epistle also.

Surely, then, our Apostle would be eminently unlikely to express "the Spirit of G.o.d" _without_ the outward water by "water _and_ the Spirit."

But above all, Christians should beware of a "licentious and deluding alchemy of interpretation which maketh of anything whatsoever it listeth." In immortal words--"when the letter of the law hath two things plainly and expressly specified, water and the Spirit; water, as a duty required on our part, the Spirit, as a gift which G.o.d bestoweth; there is danger in so presuming to interpret it, as if the clause which concerneth ourselves were more than needed. We may by such rare expositions attain perhaps in the end to be thought witty, but with ill advice."[287]

But, it will further be asked, whether we bring the Saviour's saying--"except any one be born again of water and the Spirit"--into direct connection with the baptism of infants? Above all, whether we are not encouraging every baptised person to hold that somehow or other he will have a part in the victory of the regenerate?

We need no other answer than that which is implied in the very force of the word here used by St. John--"all that is born of G.o.d conquereth the world." "That is born" is the participle perfect.[288] The force of the perfect is not simply past action, but such action lasting on in its effects. Our text, then, speaks only of those who having been born again into the kingdom continue in a corresponding condition, and unfold the life which they have received. The Saviour spoke first and chiefly of the initial act. The Apostle's circ.u.mstances, now in his old age, naturally led him to look on from that. St. John is no "idolater of the immediate." Has the gift received by his spiritual children worn long and lasted well? What of the new life which should have issued from the New Birth? Regenerate in the past, are they renewed in the present?

This simple piece of exegesis lets us at once perceive that another verse in this Epistle, often considered of almost hopeless perplexity, is in truth only the perfection of sanctified (nay, it may be said, of moral) common-sense; an intuition of moral and spiritual instinct.

"Whosoever is born of G.o.d doth not commit sin: for his seed remaineth in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of G.o.d." We have just seen the real significance of the words "he that is born of G.o.d"--he for whom his past birth lasts on in its effects. "He _doeth_ not sin," is not a sin-doer, makes it not his "trade," as an old commentator says. Nay, "he is not able to be" (to keep on) "sinning." "He cannot sin." He cannot!

There is no physical impossibility. Angels will not sweep him away upon their resistless pinions. The Spirit will not hold him by the hand as if with a mailed grasp, until the blood spirts from his finger-tips, that he may not take the wine-cup, or walk out to the guilty a.s.signation. The compulsion of G.o.d is like that which is exercised upon us by some pathetic wounded-looking face that gazes after us with a sweet reproach.

Tell the honest poor man with a large family of some safe and expeditious way of transferring his neighbour's money to his own pocket.

He will answer, "I cannot steal:" that is, "I cannot steal, however much it may physically be within my capacity, without a burning shame, an agony to my nature worse than death." On some day of fierce heat, hold a draught of iced wine to a total abstainer, and invite him to drink. "I cannot," will be his reply. Cannot! He can, so far as his hand goes; he cannot, without doing violence to a conviction, to a promise, to his own sense of truth. And he who continues in the fulness of his G.o.d-given Birth "does not _do_ sin," "cannot be sinning." Not that he is sinless, not that he never fails, or does not sometimes fall; not that sin ceases to be sin to him, because he thinks that he has a standing in Christ. But he cannot go on in sin without being untrue to his birth; without a stain upon that finer, whiter, more sensitive conscience, which is called "spirit" in a son of G.o.d; without a convulsion in his whole being which is the precursor of death, or an insensibility which is death actually begun.

How many such texts as these are practically useless to most of us! The armoury of G.o.d is full of keen swords which we refrain from handling, because they have been misused by others. None is more neglected than this. The fanatic has shrieked out--"sin in my case! I _cannot_ sin. _I_ may hold a sin in my bosom; and G.o.d may hold me in His arms for all that. At least, I may hold that which would be a sin in you and most others; but to _me_ it is _not_ sin." On the other hand, stupid goodness maunders out some unintelligible paraphrase, until pew and reader yawn from very weariness. Divine truth in its purity and plainness is thus discredited by the exaggeration of the one, or buried in the leaden winding-sheet of the stupidity of the other.

In leaving this portion of our subject we may compare the view latent in the very idea of infant baptism with that of the leader of a well-known sect upon the beginnings of the spiritual life in children.

"May not children grow up into salvation, without knowing the exact moment of their conversion?" asks "General" Booth. His answer is--"yes, it may be so; and we trust that in the future this will be the usual way in which children may be brought to Christ." The writer goes on to tell us how the New Birth will take place in future. "When the conditions named in the first pages of this volume are complied with--when the parents are G.o.dly, and the children are surrounded by holy influences and examples from their birth, and trained up in the spirit of their early dedication--they will _doubtless come to know and love and trust their Saviour in the ordinary course of things_. The Holy Ghost will take possession of them from the first. Mothers and fathers will, as it were, put them into the Saviour's arms in their swaddling clothes, and He will take them, and bless them, and sanctify them from the very womb, and make them His own, without their knowing the hour or the place when they pa.s.s from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. In fact, with such little ones it shall never be very dark, for their natural birth shall be, as it were, in the spiritual twilight, which begins with the dim dawn, and increases gradually until the noonday brightness is reached; so answering to the prophetic description, 'The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.'"[289]

No one will deny that this is tenderly and beautifully written. But objections to its teaching will crowd upon the mind of thoughtful Christians. It seems to defer to a period in the future, to a new era incalculably distant, when Christendom shall be absorbed in Salvationism, that which St. John in his day contemplated as the normal condition of believers, which the Church has always held to be capable of realization, which has been actually realized in no few whom most of us must have known. Further; the fountain-heads of thought, like those of the Nile, are wrapped in obscurity. By what process grace may work with the very young is an insoluble problem in psychology, which Christianity has not revealed. We know nothing further than that Christ blessed little children. That blessing was _impartial_, for it was communicated to all who were brought to Him; it was _real_, otherwise He would not have blessed them at all. That He conveys to them such grace as they are capable of receiving is all that we can know. And yet again; the Salvationist theory exalts parents and surroundings into the place of Christ. It deposes His sacrament, which lies at the root of St.

John's language, and boasts that it will secure Christ's end, apparently without any recognition of Christ's _means_.

II.

The second great idea in the verses at the head of this discourse is _Victory_. The intended issue of the new birth is conquest--"all that is born of G.o.d conquers the world."