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Introduction
The pandemic we’ve gone through recently, bringing with it a bit of pressure on attending the means of grace which sustain our Christian walk with God, has flushed out a number of those who professed faith but found the cost of sustaining it too onerous or burdensome for them.
Now John in these verses has been dealing with a broadly similar situation and is laying out for his readers (or listeners) the very basic and fundamental issues bearing on the day to day experience of Christian discipleship, and he’s been doing that in the immediately preceding few verses.
The point of the Gospel was to save us from sin … not just its consequences … and that’s why repentance gets bundled together with faith in both the preaching of the Lord Jesus and that of the early church.
You see, the point of the Gospel is all about our sin.
· Not our feelings of inadequacy … they are a consequence of our sin.
· Not our unhappiness … that is a consequence of our sin.
· Not our felt needs … those all arise from our sin because need came in when humanity fell into sin, people having been satisfactorily provided for by God before then.
So what about the Gospel and our sin?
Christ died on the Cross for our SIN and rose to life for our JUSTIFICATION from the charge of sin that stood against us.
Our SIN is the thing that gives rise to the NEED for the Gospel, which is the message by means of which we put our trust in God to save us when we come up before the Righteous Judge of all the earth from the consequences of our sin, and it does so as we cast ourselves on the unmerited mercy of His Cross.
It hasn’t totally saved us from sin’s PRESENCE, but it has totally saved us from its PENALTY.
And this Gospel has also made provision to save us from sin’s POWER … a power that comes from ‘the world’ around us, the fleshly human nature that lives within us and the direct assaults of the enemy of souls who works against the better interests of all who serve the Lord.
So, given that this is what the Gospel offers, how do we test that it has actually done this in us?
The big question for the rest of this book - having set out what faith does - is this: how do we accredit the claim to saving faith in the lives of individual believers, and then on the flip side of that same coin, how do we set about identifying and discounting that which is fake?
You see, historically, people who have in fact abandoned authentic Christian faith have across the course of human history SELDOM come right out and said ‘I don’t believe any more’.
It has become much more socially accepted after Kant and then Nietzsche led the way to do that and openly deny the faith, but even yet it seems much more common for people to object to something in order to justify walking out on the faith.
To object to something in the area of the doctrine of the Church or in the area of the issue of idolatry (worshipping created things rather than the Creator God and falling into homosexual practices or into sheer old fashioned promiscuity or into rampant materialism) and to then try to re-define THEIR faith and practice on an erroneous basis.
In such a world as this, or John’s in the 70s AD around Ephesus, HOW are we to accurately identify that which is true Christian faith AND WHAT IS NOT authentic Christianity?
In the real world we inhabit, in order to preserve real saving Gospel faith in us and in our churches, we need to be able to answer that question.
Particularly in hard times and also in times when important aspects of Biblcal faith stand in marked opposition to the spirit of the age, this re-defining of core issues of Christian truth, life and experience need to be clearly recognised
Now the three tests of authentic Christianity in 1 John are obedience, love and sound doctrine but in these verses John applied the first of those tests, obedience, to the claim to know God, to love God and to have fellowship or to be in union with God.
And that’s important because we NEED assurance in our Christian faith to be able to persevere in faith through a life that is affected by the effects of sin in a world which is hostile to God.
We need to be able to discern for our own sakes and for others’ what constitutes genuine and false ‘assurance’ of saving faith.
So John applies the test of obedience first of all to the claim to know God.
1) The claim to know God
v. 3 “We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands.”
Now, at first sight that looks like the sort of comment that will simply strike fear into the souls of any believer.
Let me just remind you of 1 John 2:1-2 which says:
“My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. 2 He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”
We need to keep hold of that because it is straight after verses 1 & 2 that John writes these words in v. 3 about knowing we have come to know Him if we keep His commands.
So, firstly, what does it mean to ‘know him’ and secondly what sort of thing does John mean when John refers to ‘keeping His commands’?
a) Knowing Him
John is picking up a major New Testament theme here now as he raises the idea of knowing God.
Biblically, to ‘know’ God means to be in a covenant relationship with Him.
You see it in a lot of places in the Old Testament being used in that way
But with the New Covenant prophesied by the Old Testament prophets this gets taken to another level, so you could, for example, turn to Jeremiah 31:33-34 and read:
““This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
To know God in both Old and New Testament terms is to be in covenant with Him, with promises and obligations entailed in the relationship the covenant creates.
It is a COMMITTED relationship.
But when it comes to the New Covenant relationship, the relationship the Covenant creates has eternal life much more clearly spelled out as its consequence.
The Lord Himself defined the new covenant blessing with great clarity in His Upper Room discourse in John 17:3
Those first three verses there in John 17 go like this:
““Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
We need to understand what John’s motivation is in writing what he does in our verse here 1 John 2:3.
He declares why he rehearses the things that he does in this letter when he sums it all up in 1 John 5:13, where he says:
“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”
His goal is to be positive as he raises this covenant language and reminds us of the Lord’s teaching in that farewell teaching session for the disciple in the Upper Room the night before the crucifixion.
Oh yes, writes John here: “We know that we have come to know him …”
It IS possible.
It IS feasible.
It IS realistic to KNOW that we are in this saving covenant relationship with our Saviour God.
And, of course, given what John also heard of the Saviour’s promise to send the Holy Spirit and given what John also saw with his own eyes when the promised Spirit came (as promised by Old Covenant prophets as well as from the lips of the Lord Himself) on the Day of Pentecost when the Spirit of Prophecy was poured out (that is, the Holy Spirit who enables hearing directly from God as Joel promised) … given all of THAT, then knowing God in such a close personal and relational way became the penitent, faithful believer’s everyday reality.
Now, like every relationship human beings enter into the closeness and the warmth and the reality we actually feel in that varies.
It fluctuates for all manner of reasons.
But knowing God and KNOWING that we know God is central to the purpose of this book, cropping up in 1 John 2:4, 13; 3:1, 6; 4:6, 7, 8; 5:20.
It’s a big deal in this book and it’s a big deal in John’s social and historical context.
Pagan religion wasn’t a matter of knowing the various gods but of placating them.
It was about avoiding the unfortunate things they would throw at you as and when they were displeased … and they were a pretty easily displeased bunch, by all accounts!
Pagans never ‘knew’ God.
There was no real quest for a relationship with them.
Now, there was a lot said about ‘knowledge’ in the first century Greek & Roman world, but it was esoteric knowledge, the sort of thing that purported to give you the password to the afterlife.
But John has already spelled out in vv. 1-2 that Life, and life eternal, is all about Jesus and His atoning death on the Cross … which is (according to John 1:18) how Jesus has made the Father known to us NOT as a password but as a personal being.
We find reassurance, then, in knowing God as a personal being Who exerts this great influence in our lives through the experience of KNOWING Him that we are changed and are moved to keep our covenant obligations as we enjoy the covenant promises.
(So that’s ‘knowing Him’ … now ‘keeping His commands’).
b) Keeping His commands
Now, the ideas of the Greek-Roman world were that the spiritual world as all that mattered, that the physical world was really insignificant and that anything you did in the body (because you felt like it) was irrelevant.
They had a way of rationalising away the moral implications of doing anything they felt like.
John is speaking out against that sort of background to say that eternal life comes through the new covenant relationship with the One True Living God, Who by His death and resurrection has sealed its promises for His covenant- keeping people.
But it comes about through knowing and living alongside the Lord, this utterly character-changing person.
That’s how the Old Testament prophets had predicted it would be, as the Lord we know and are influenced by as we live alongside Him and in fellowship with Him gives us changed motives, desires and therefore behaviours.
That’s why 1 John 2:4 is telling us here:
“Whoever says, “I know him,” but does not do what He commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person.”
So, the questions all the commentaries want to ask at this point seem to be
i) what commands have we got to obey to be a genuine believer, and
ii) how can John be saying the Gospel is just another form of ‘legalism’, where you attracted to the bait of mercy onto the hook of striving to be a better person all over again?
The commentators therefore spill ink over whether these are the Old Testament laws and if so which ones, or whether these are the Lord’s commands in the Sermon on the Mount, or what?
Well, I reckon the answer is probably yes to all that plus some stuff I haven’t found anyone debating about yet.
Look, let’s try and cut through all that
The context here is one of the covenant relationship alluded to by the concept of ‘Knowing God’.
That phrase was a piece of Hebrew that referred to being a vassal of the King in the Ancient Near Eastern suzerainty treaties and described living with the King as your Lord.
Obviously that entailed keeping that sort of king’s written laws but also to living under his authority as king.
So as Judith Lieu puts it in her 1, 2 & 3 John commentary: the commands here are “not a particular set of instructions about behavior” but “an acceptance that to be brought into and to remain in a relationship with God is to recognize and respond to whatever God requires.”
So, by way of illustration here, my working dogs have protocols – rules – which we stick to when getting them out of their kennels, returning them, feeding them and so on.
But over, above and beyond all of that when they are out with me their eyes are pretty much on me, because they are keen to discover the mystery of what I want from them over and above the regular standard ‘rules’ or protocols that they are very well aware of.
And so here too, it’s more about being in a relationship where we recognise His glory, excellence and authority and obey God’s commands because both He and they are excellent, beautiful and compulsive because of our relationship to the One Whose will they represent.
We’ve looked at what s meant by knowing God, at what ‘keeping His commandments actually entails, and now John draws conclusions about how to recognise NOT knowing God in this authentic Gospel way, so that we are duly warned and advised and can recognise this.
c) NOT knowing God, in practice
If that’s how the New Covenant’s obedience to God from the heart works, then it’s pretty obvious in John’s view that if there’s no obedience to God it’s got to be because you simply don’t know Him, don’t know what He’s like, what He is nor what He does.
You are not CHARMED by Him.
You are not ENTHRALLED by Him.
You do not even KNOW Him, says John.
And it will show.
so, v. 4: “Whoever says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person.”
Your actions are written over by what’s in your heart.
That is the big foundational issue … others will now flow from that in terms of the claim to love God (which can also be an Old Testament covenant term) and the claim to union with God (which is distinctly New Testament in its background).
2) The claim to love God
v. 5 “But if anyone obeys his word, love for God is truly made complete in them.”
Having made that negative statement about not fleshing out in our behaviour the effect that it has on a person to know God, John is now, as it were, stating the other side of the coin.
Love for God shows itself in this way: obeying His Word.
In the person who OBEYS God’s Word, says John, in THAT person the love of God has been perfected.
So having spent time on the foundational issue, let’s come mor briefly to the two other issues John adds next.
First, this claim to love God …
a) Completing God’s love
So … is God’s love somehow incomplete, then, and needs some sort of work on it to complete it?
Well, I’m not sure we could stomach that as an idea because God IS love, from eternity to eternity as 1 John 4:8 tells us:
“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
Karen Jobes helps us out with this:
“In Johannine thought, God’s love, which is indeed perfect, must be lived out in the believer’s life; therefor the goal of Gods love for believers is reached in the transformation of how believers treat others.”
(Jobes 2014 p. 84)
So it IS the case that the Lord’s love for His people has the goal of moral transformation, however it doesn’t come about by laying obligations on His people but by motivating change by being taken up with the wonder of His character … in this case by the wonders of His love.
b) God’s Word
v. 5 “if anyone obeys his word, love for God is truly made complete in them.”
It is ‘His Word’.
Is that Jesus’s Word or God’s Word?
Well, John’s boundary beating ambiguity continues here … is there much difference in the authority or truthfulness or infallibility of the Word of the Lord Jesus and the Word of God the Father?
What comes with the recognition of the Incarnate Christ is the recognition that they are united, one God … in different persons of the three in One.
The thing is, the word of the Lord Jesus in red in your New Testament are no mor or less true than the Word of God the Father inspired by God the Holy Spirit across the rest of the pages in your Bible.
It’s important to realise, recognise and LIVE with that.
Some of those written words may have been fulfilled or superseded, I’m thinking especially of the Old Testament laws a things like that.
But they still authoritatively declare to us aspects of the character and the truth of the God Who speaks truth in His Word.
So if you claim to love God but don’t show your adherence to Him by keeping His Word … you’re a fake.
c) What is this KEEPING His Word?
τηρέω
1) to attend to carefully, take care of 1a) to guard 1b) metaph. to keep, one in the state in which he is 1c) to observe 1d) to reserve: to undergo something
That’s not helping us a lot, until we go back to the written covenants and suzerainty treaties of the Ancient Near East again which regulated and emshrined the relationship that would exist between the King and his loyal subjects … a model that Jehovah used to illustrate to the Israelites that how they were to get on with Him.
The old Hebrew word for making a covenant was the word ‘cut’ … it was ‘to cut a covenant’, literally to cave it in stone (is this ringing any bells from Moses and Mount Sinai) and then to deposit the covenant stone in the local temple to some local or international deity … just as the Ten commandments were carved of tablets of stone and deposited inside the Ark of the Covenant which then set off around the desert leading the people of Israel as a campaigning ancient near eastern king would lead his armed host.
The word of the covenant was deposited, retained, ‘kept’,then.
And part of this ‘keeping’ was that it was regularly privately and publicly read and rehearsed so that people would live within its provisions.
But Jeremiah and the prophets promised a new covenant that would be written on new hearts, hearts not of stone but of flesh, going right to the (ahem) HEART of God’s people … Who by definition hid or kept His Word in their hearts.
Let me ask you then, how is your Bible reading going?
ow is your Bible MEMORY going?
How is your heart being exposed to and quietly shaped by the Lord and His revealed word each day?
Check out v. 5 here:
“If anyone obeys his word, love for God is truly made complete in them.”
So, you claim that you really do love God?
Then the characteristic of such a person is found in growing obedience and conformity to His Word.
3) The claim to fellowship/ union with God
And now finally John addresses the claim to fellowship or to union with God, vv. 5-6
“This is how we know we are in him:
Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did.”
The NET Bible helps us I think just a little bit more with this …
“By this we know that we are in him.
The one who says he resides in God
ought himself to walk just as Jesus walked.”
If you claim solidarity with this God … which is what the teaching of the New Testament says it’s all about, the you’ll catch on to the character of your influential ‘Friend’.
The Greek is interestingly put:
ὁ λέγων ἐν αὐτῷ μένειν
The person saying that they remain in Him
ὀφείλει
owes it
καθὼς ἐκεῖνος περιεπάτησεν
Just as that one walked
καὶ αὐτὸς περιπατεῖν
So also to walk Himself.
a) Remaining in Him
Remaining in Him is a favourite verb in John’s writings.
More than 55% of all occurrences of this verb in the New Testament come from John’s pen.
The fantastic picture of the believer ‘remaining’ in Christ and Christ in them is pictured. beautifully in Jesus’ analogy of the vine and the branches in John 15 …
The rootstock of the Vine functions as the life source and the branches (which will bear the fruit) need to be joined to that rootstock and STAY there, drinking up the goodness on offer in order to be fruitful.
That’s fellowship.
That’s UNION.
So the Greek word μένω (menō) translated resides indicates a close, intimate (and permanent) relationship between the believer and God.
That is the mark of authenticity in professed Christian faith.
It is very important to note that for the author of the Gospel of John and the Johannine Epistles every genuine Christian has this type of relationship with God, and the person who does not have this type of relationship (cf. 2 John 9) is not a believer at all (in spite of what he or she may claim).
Now we know that John writes so that Christians won’t sin, but says very clearly that if and when we do there’s provision from God for that, and THAT … using that regularly … is the characteristic of those who remain faithfully in Him.
So now …
b) This is the reality of remaining in Him
The expectation of those human beings who do walk with God is that they will be seeking NOT to sin but will (crucial bit) walk with God not turn against Him in their weakness and failure … and that does not mean that they won’t cut across the covenant but that when they do sin they will go straight to the God of the Covenant to find the mercy the covenant provides for those who turn BACK to the God of the Covenant in repentance and fresh faith to walk with Him again.
Jesus walked in the Covenant He had with God.
And if we are authentic followers of Christ, we walk in the covenant we have with God.
And if we claim to have fellowship or union with our God then this is what it means … we walk as He did, which in His case as it must be in ours, means we walk in the New Covenant of Grace, faith and repentance.
Conclusion
Assurance.
It’s really important.
John is writing to those churches around Ephesus that have received something of a blow from people who were in amongst them but not actually of them, because they had not got and kept a grip on Christ.
John is writing to STEADY those believers, and he does so
i) by distinguishing genuine Christians from false believers … separating the real thing from the wrong thing so that the behaviour and conduct of false believers doesn’t stumble or mislead the staggering true believers, and then he steadies them secondly
ii) by giving reassurance of their genuiness and authenticity to those who were truly staggering but at least equally as truly in Christ.
When people we’ve reckoned as being among us wander off either into ideas that are not consistent with God’s ways or His Word, or alternatively just wander off altogether, it can shake us.
Anglican Evangelicals have been shaken this week by what some are seeing as the defection of the retired Bishop of Rochester Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali to the Church of Rome.
You see, when people we thought were pretty much on the right road with God do this sort of thing, we can be stumbled and distracted … it shake our walk with God ourselves if we don’t watch it, especially if they gone from the faith without going literally, physically away in person (as was the case with a number of folks in the churches 1, 2 & 3 John are written to, as we’ve seen previously).
So, just as Jesus seeks to prepare his disciples in the parable of the soils and the sower, John also teaches us to discern this apparent falling away of people around us, so that we ourselves don’t get stumbled by it through a failure of understanding.
He teaches us that living in His covenant and walking in His ways is the touchstone of authentic faith, to which we are to aspire and which (alone) we are to credit as Christianity … which is here defined as walking in His way.
In times of pressure and challenge and of shaking we need to keep this key insight as our key insight, to preserve our life in Christ, remaining and walking in His ways.
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