Bible Commentaries
1 John 3

Part Second. Intermediate Condition of the Divine Fellowship—Righteousness (1 John 2:28 to 1 John 4:6)

XVIII. Ground or Reason of this Condition in the Righteous Nature of God—The New Birth unto Righteousness

“If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of him. Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be called the sons of God.”—1 John 2:29; 1 John 3:1

THE apostle passes to a new thought or theme; a new view of the fellowship in which he would have us to be partakers with himself and all the apostles. It is “fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” He has viewed it as a fellowship of light. He now views it as a fellowship of righteousness. “God is light,”—that is the key-note to the former view. “God is righteous,”—that is the keynote to the present view. It is introductory to the third,—“God is love.”

For it is an indispensable condition of this fellowship with God that we realise in ourselves, and in our doings, what is in accordance with his nature. If therefore it is his nature to be righteous, it must be our nature to do righteousness. But that to us is a new nature. It implies that we are born of him to whose nature ours is to be conformed; that we are “born of God.” (It is thus that the last verse of the second chapter is connected with what goes before; and thus also the abrupt change, as regards the person spoken of, between that last verse and the preceding one, may be explained. In the one (28th) it is Christ the Son; in the other (29th) it is God the Father. There could be no misunderstanding among John’s readers, as if it was Christ that was meant in the latter verse as well as in the former; for not only would it be contrary to all gospel usage, and to the very gospel itself, to speak of believers us being born of Christ; but the very next verse (3:1) makes all plain. Besides, the verse in question (9th) is to be read in the light of one farther back (24th). Our abiding in the Son is there represented as carrying with it our abiding in the Father; it is our abiding in the Father as manifested in the Son. And the condition of this abiding in the Father is being born of him; that our righteous doing may be in harmony with his righteous nature. The doer of righteousness alone can abide in the righteous God. And the doer of righteousness is “born of God.”)

“Born of God!” The idea seems to strike John’s mind with fresh astonishment. Familiar as it is, he sees in it, as it here occurs to him, new cause of wonder; “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God!” For this rapturous exclamation in the beginning of the third chapter is based on the principle of sonship brought out in the last verse of the second; “If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of him.”

The starting-point in this new line of argument is the statement that “God is righteous.” It is analogous to that given before, that “God is light.” And as there, so here, the inference is obvious. Only the doer of righteousness can be really born of him, and the doer of righteousness certainly is so.

For to be born of God implies community of nature between him and us. I cannot be really his child unless I am possessed of the same nature with him. So the Lord Jesus himself teaches in two remarkable passages (Matthew 5:5-45, John 8:38-44). In both of these passages, but especially in the last, there is a general principle involved. A family likeness, in features of character as well as of countenance, will betray an evil paternity, and must prove a good one; “I speak that which I have seen with my Father; and ye do that which ye have seen with your father.” You say that you are Abraham’s children. If that were true, you would do the works of Abraham. He would not like you have sought to kill me, for telling the truth which I have heard of God. But I will tell you whose children you are, and who is your father. It is he whose deeds you do. You reply, We have one Father, even God. Nay; if God were your Father, you would do the work of your Father, which is “loving me;” for he loveth me. But you reject me, and so prove that, in spite of your claim to be God’s children, your actual paternity is very different; “Ye are of your father the devil.”

John may have had these words of his Master in his mind when he wrote down the brief and pithy maxim, “God is righteous, and every one that doeth righteousness is born of him” His object is to supply a searching test by which our abiding in God may be surely tried. For our abiding in God is our abiding in the Son; and through our abiding in the Son, abiding in the Father, as the Son abides in the Father. But that implies our being “born of God.” It is as “born of God” that the Son abides in the Father. And it must be as “born of God” that we, abiding in the Son, abide in the Father as he does.

The practical way of proving so high and holy a filiation is very simple: “If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of him.” It is a mode of proof which may, without irreverence, be applied in the first instance to the Son himself. We have his own warrant for so applying it (John 15:9-10). It is by keeping his Father’s commandments that he, as the Sons born of the Father, abides in the Father’s love. As the Father is known by him as righteous, so he, doing righteousness, is proved to be born of him. He doeth the works of his Father, and so evinces his sonship.

All through, the stress is laid on righteousness. That is the distinguishing characteristic which identifies him that is born of God; the common quality connecting what he does as born of God with the nature of him of whom he is born. Already this attribute of righteousness has been brought prominently forward in this epistle. God is righteous in forgiving sin (1 John 1:9). Jesus Christ is righteous as our advocate with the Father (1 John 2:1). But it is in the section on which we are now entering that righteousness bulks most largely.

“God is righteous;” that is his perfection. We are to “know that he is righteous.” His Son, born of him, knew this; “O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee, but I have known thee.” I have known that thou art righteous. It is a great matter to know that, in the midst of a world that knows it not.

For does the world know that God is righteous? Have “the workers of iniquity” that knowledge, when “they eat up God’s people like bread, and say God seeth not”? when they call not upon the name of the Lord? when they do deeds of darkness, and, because he keeps silence, think that he is altogether such an one as themselves?. Do we know that God is righteous? That God is kind, compassionate, merciful, bountiful,—all that we can easily know. Such knowledge is not too wonderful for us; it is not high or unattainable. But that he is righteous! Have we a fixed and firm knowledge of that? Do we understand what it means? Do we grasp the meaning of it and hold it fast?

Ah! it is not natural for us to do so. That God is righteous, absolutely and perfectly righteous;—that he thinks and feels and purposes and acts, always according to what ought to be, and never in accommodation to what is; that he makes uncompromising rectitude the rule of all his judgments and proceedings in all his dealings with men;—that he is not facile and bending, open to appeals and appliances from without, but inherently and unalterably righteous;—to know that; really to know it as a fact, and a great fact; true now and true for eternity; ah! such knowledge is not easy for me, a guilty and fallen man. It is not possible, unless I am “born of God.”

Jesus knew it; he knew the righteous Father. Born of God, he knew that God is righteous; and he did righteousness accordingly. How thoroughly he did so, let some cases in which he might have been tempted to do otherwise attest.

1. I cite an instance already referred to in a somewhat different connection. A young man comes to him asking the way to eternal life. He is rich, amiable, good; a keeper of the commandments from his youth; ingenuous, attractive, sincere; so that Jesus beholding him loveth him. May he not stretch a point in this goodly youth’s favour? May he not accept his goodness as being, if not all that strict law requires, yet on the whole sufficient? No. He knows that God is righteous. And, knowing that, he doeth righteousness, though his doing it drives the youth away, with what issue who can tell?

2. He draws near Jerusalem, and beholds the city. It is inexpressibly dear to him. If other Israelites hailed it as beautiful for situation, and boasted of it as the joy of the whole earth, the city of the great king; the great king himself may well have a favour for it. The anguish of his human soul, as he contemplates its present security and coming desolation, must be all but intolerable. Can there be no help? Is no indulgence possible for his own chosen city’s sin? May no miracle be wrought sufficient to rouse it to repentance? He knows that God is righteous; and he doeth righteousness. He weeps in the doing of it. The city’s fate rings his heart. But what can he say? What but “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”

3. He is in the garden; praying the prayer of agony; sweating great drops of blood. The cup is handed to him; the cup of woe; the cup of wrath; the cup of his Father’s judicial reckoning with him as answerable for all his people’s sins. “Father, if it be possible!” May it not be possible? Is there no way of salvation but through the shedding of my blood? No. He knows that God is righteous; and he doeth righteousness. “Father, thy will be done!”

Thus it is plainly seen that he is born of God. He knows the righteous Father. And knowing him as the righteous Father, he doeth righteousness as his only begotten Son.

You who believe are born of God as he is. I speak of his human birth; in which you, in your new birth, are partakers with him; the same Spirit of God being the agent in both, and originating in both the same new life. His birth was humiliation to him, though it was of God: your new birth is exaltation to you, because it is of God. His being born of God by the Spirit made him partaker of your human nature;—your being born again of God by the Spirit makes you partakers of his “divine nature.” You, thus born of God, come to be of the same mind with him who is the first begotten of the Father; especially as regards your knowing that God is righteous, and that it is, therefore, and must be, the impulse and characteristic of every one that is born of him to do righteousness. For if you are thus born of God, must you not be as thoroughly on his side, as unreservedly in his interest, in the great outstanding controversy between his righteousness and man’s sin, as is his well-beloved Son himself?

Is it really so? Was he ever seen as infirm and irresolute, as weak and wavering, in his moral judgments, as you too frequently are in yours? Was he ever equivocal or feeble in his utterances about God’s claims, and man’s duty, and man’s guilt? Did he ever hesitate to act upon the principle: “Let God be true and every man a liar?”

Nor will it do to say that he had not so much inducement as you have to tamper with God’s righteousness, and be disloyal to his throne. Personally, it is true that he had no need to have recourse to any expedient of accommodation or compromise. God’s judicial righteousness and his acceptance in God’s sight never could come into collision. Never could he have occasion to desire that God were less righteous than he is, in order that there might be hope for him. But when I think of him as taking my place, bearing my sin, receiving in his bosom the sword that should have smitten me; can I say that he had no cause to wish, had it been possible, that God might be less inflexibly and inexorably righteous than he there and then found him to be? And when I think of the exquisite tenderness of his sensibility; how he could not witness human suffering unmoved, or see a human soul perish, or run the hazard of perishing, without a tear;—I can scarcely fancy it less difficult for him than for me to acquiesce complacently in God’s righteousness reigning, as it must reign, not only “through grace unto eternal life,” but through wrath unto everlasting death. But that is what is implied in knowing that God is righteous. And to do righteousness, is to think and speak and act accordingly. It is to be unflinching and unfaltering in preferring God’s righteousness to man’s sin. It is to justify God’s righteousness and condemn man’s sin, with an entire and utter abandonment of all attempts, and even of all desire, to make terms between them. It is to proclaim internecine war between them; yes, even though the issue should be the triumph of God’s righteousness in the sinner’s inevitable ruin.

A hard saying this! Who can hear it? A heavy burden! Who can bear it? Who that is not born of God? Who but one who reaches, by the new birth, the position which the Son, in his birth, took as his? Who but one who, born again of the Spirit as he was born of the Spirit, comes to occupy the same point of view that he did; to see righteousness and sin, God’s righteousness and man’s sin, as he saw them; and to deal with them as he dealt with them in all his ministry, and especially on the cross.

First, in him, and with him,—born of God into fellowship with him in his birth,—you enter into that doing of righteousness on his part, which was the main design of his being born; which brings into perfect harmony, not God’s righteousness and man’s sin, but God’s righteousness and man’s salvation from sin. This is your first step, as born of God; and it is all-important for yourselves, and for your fellow-men. It places you on the very vantage-ground on which the Son himself stood, when, coming into the world, he surveyed its sad, sinful case, in the light of the will of God which he came to do, and the righteousness of God which he came to vindicate and fulfil. It enables you to draw the line sharp and dear, as he did, between that loving embrace of him and his cross which wins salvation for the chief of sinners from a righteous God, and in a way of perfect righteousness, that rejection of him which seals the fate of the very best of those who, refusing his righteous justifying mercy, brave his righteous retributive wrath. Thus, knowing for yourselves, in and with Christ, that God is righteous, you do righteousness, as he did.

And thus also, in your customary intercourse with other men, you act upon the deep conviction that God is righteous; that his righteousness admits of no relaxation; that there is between it and all manner of iniquity a terrible incompatibility; that there is one only way in which the workers of iniquity can be righteously delivered; and that all who are not found in that way, be they ever so respectable, ever so amiable, are righteously condemned. Fully to realise that assurance, and to act upon it, without any wavering;—as if you still regarded being in Christ of little moment or being out of Christ of little peril;—so to live in your closet and in the world, at home and abroad, under the constant urgent sense of there being safety only in Christ, and only ruin out of Christ, for you, for all, for any;—that is to do righteousness, in the knowledge that God is righteous.

Ah! what an insight into the righteous nature and character of God; what a measure of cordial oneness of principle and sentiment with him; entering into his very mind and heart; does all this involve! How far removed is it from that loose, easy-going sort of Christian virtue which would not itself do iniquity, but is very tolerant of those who do it; not, like Lot’s righteous soul, vexed with evil; nor, like Lot, preaching righteousness; but rather prone to look on sin with indifference or complacency, and to let the sinner go on, without warning or entreaty, to his doom. If you know that God is righteous, and make conscience of doing righteousness accordingly, you cannot be thus tame and acquiescent; thus cold and callous. To you, righteousness, God’s righteousness, is not a name but a reality. To be conformed to it, to submit to it, is life. To be ignorant of it, or opposed to it, or far from it, is death. Do you know that? Do you know it so as to feel it for others as well as for yourselves? Can you look out upon the world that knows not the righteous Father, and not be more in earnest than you are.

“Who is on the Lord’s side—who?” Who is in the interest of the “righteous Father”? Who is he whose soul burns within him at the thought of the righteous Father being so little known?—-whose bowels of compassion melt at the sight of men perishing in the world that know him not? Truly he is “born of God.” None but one born of God can be so like his only-begotten Son.

Is not this a position eminently high and holy? Is it not a position, our occupancy of which may well be matter of surprise even to ourselves? Does it not imply a wondrous manner of love bestowed on us by the Father, that on such a footing, in such a sense, and for such an end, “we should be called the sons of God?”—born of him; so born of him as to do righteousness, even as he is righteous; to uphold practically the very righteousness which is his essential characteristic, the peculiar and consummate glory of his infinitely perfect nature I do not speak now, at least not yet, of the amazing love manifested by the Father in the provision made for our being called or constituted his sons, through the giving up of his own dear Son for us, to bear our guilt as criminals, that we may share with him his grace and glory as the Son. What at present we have to consider is, not how we become sons of God, but rather what it is to be sons of God; what oneness of nature and character, of sentiment and sympathy, of feeling and action, between God and us,—especially in respect of that righteousness of his which we thus come to know,—our being his sons, or being born of him, implies. He would have us to be his sons, as he had Jesus to be his Son, when he was on the earth; knowing him as the “righteous Father,” and doing righteousness as he is righteous. He would have us, as his sons, to be true and loyal to him, as Jesus his Son was, in the great outstanding controversy of his righteousness with the world’s sin; as faithful; and as tender too. He would have us, as his sons, to go on the very errand on which his Son, as his righteous servant, went; and in his very spirit; with the law of God in our heart, and rivers of water running down our eyes because men will not keep that law.

Ah! to be thus the sons of God; as thoroughly at one with God as Jesus his Son was; witnessing everywhere and evermore that God is righteous; righteous to punish; righteous to forgive and save! What an attainment! What a responsibility! What a rank! Well may it prompt the abrupt ejaculation,—“Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be called the sons of God.”

XIX. The Divine Birth—The Family Likeness

“If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of him. Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called [the] sons” [children] “of God!” [and so we are!] “Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him” [God] “not. Beloved, now are we [the] sons” [children] “of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear” [when that shall appear “we shall be like him” [God]; “for we shall see him as he is.”—1 John 2:29 to 1 John 3:2 [1]

[1] As explanatory of my exposition, I must advert to one or two points of verbal detail, in regard to the reading and interpretation of these verses. First, in almost all the most authoritative manuscripts of this book,—though not in that which is called the received text, and which was in use when our translation was made,—there is a brief phrase inserted after “that we should be called the sons of God;”—“and so we are.” These words are now generally admitted to be genuine. The sense is not really affected, whether they are allowed or excluded; for undoubtedly, according to common usage, “being called the sons of God” means actually becoming the sons of God. But they add to the emphasis of this noble appeal; and they are characteristic of the writer. Secondly, the pronoun “he,” “him,” is in these verses to be understood always of God the Father. It must be so understood in the first verse of the third chapter; and consistency requires it to be so understood throughout; all the rather since otherwise the sense is broken, instead of being complete. But thirdly, what is most important is the phrase, “when he shall appear.” It is that which leads readers of our translation to bring in our Lord Jesus Christ, as if he must be the party referred to; especially as they are apt to connect the phrase with what is said before of “his coming” (2:28). But there is no pronoun at all here in the original; and what is supplied should be “it,” rather than “he.” The connection is not with the remoter passage, in a previous section, now ended, but with what goes before in the very same verse: “It doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when that does appear, we shall be like him;” like God whose sons we are; “for we shall see him as he is.”

THE first verses of the third chapter are to be viewed as inseparable from the last verse of the second. It is that verse which starts the new line of thought; our “knowing that God is righteous, and doing ‘righteousness accordingly,” in virtue of our “being born of him.” Born of him! That is what awakens John’s grateful surprise, and occasions his exclamation, “Behold, what manner of love!” His discourse now is an expansion of that thought.

I. In every view that can be taken of it, our being called the sons of God is a wonderful instance of the Father’s love. That we—Who? The lost and guilty; who have forfeited by sin whatever claim we might have on God originally; who have become rebels against his authority and criminals under the sentence of his law; who, if left to ourselves, would rather continue estranged from him for ever than consent to return and be reconciled to him in peace;—That such as we should be called the sons of God! And then how? Through his own Son making common cause with us, that we may have a common standing with him; and by his own Spirit making us willing, almost against our wills, to acquiesce in that arrangement. And to what effect? That we may be to him what his own Son is to him; the objects of the same love; sharers of the same rank. Well may we exclaim, “Behold what manner of love!”

But it is chiefly one element or feature in this high calling that the apostle has before him when he breaks out into this rapturous exclamation; our being the sons of God as “born of him” (2:29); our undergoing a divine birth which, making us partakers of the divine nature, makes us thereby really and truly children of God; children, in a sense, by nature; and therefore fitly acknowledged as children.

Observe the peculiar turn of expression. As exactly rendered, it is not that we should be called “the sons,” but rather, that we should be called “children,” of God. It is not said merely that we are called his sons, as having him standing to us in the relation of a Father; but that we are called his children; his divinely-born children; deriving from a divine birth a divine nature; children of God, in respect of our being born of God. (A reference to the original will confirm this criticism. Τέκνα Θεοῦ is the phrase ; not υἱοὶ Πατρός. And there is no definite article, as in the English. The expression suggests something more than mere legal and relational filiation; it points to communication of nature.)

Of course this last view does not exclude the other; on the contrary, they virtually coincide. The thought of our being born of God immediately suggests the thought of the Father’s love. It is fatherly love that explains our being called children of God in virtue of our being born of God. It is the very glory and perfection of the love which the Father bestows on us, that we are thus called or constituted children of God. For it is conceivable that in some other way, and on some other footing, we might be called children of God.

In point of fact, men dream of their being God’s children altogether irrespectively of any new divine birth,—anything like “being born of God.” Paul, at Athens, quoted a Greek poet as saying, “We are also his offspring.” From him we have our origin, and “in him we live, and move, and have our being.” Simply as his dependent offspring, we may think that we are entitled to be called his children, and to call him Father. We may speak of his love in creating us and caring for us as fatherly love. It is not however really so, in any valid scriptural sense. At any rate it is not the “manner of love” which John thinks it so amazing a wonder that the Father should have bestowed upon us in our being called children of God.

Again, our being “called children of God” may be considered simply as an act of adoption, very much analogous to what is practised among men. Viewed in that light, it is unquestionably an instance of fatherly love; and fatherly love of no ordinary kind. It is as if a judge were not only to procure a pardon for the criminal he has doomed to death, and hand it to him on the scaffold as he is awaiting execution; but were to take him home, and, by a legal deed, constitute him his son and heir; or as if the monarch were to admit into the royal household a vanquished and forgiven rebel, to be on the same filial terms with him, and enjoy the same filial privileges, as his own first-begotten.

Or take the better example of the reception of the prodigal son. The sympathising witnesses of that scene of reconciliation might well utter the ejaculation, Behold, what manner of love the father has bestowed on him! He himself could never cease to feel the wonder of it. And yet even this is not the manner of love that awakens John’s admiring rapture; or at least not the whole of it. The parable, for its purpose, is complete, although it takes no express notice of anything on the father’s part but his welcoming his son, “once dead but now alive,—once lost but now found;” or anything on the son’s part but his “coming to himself and going to his father.” But he who uttered the parable spoke of our being “born again;” “born of the Spirit;” as explicitly as his beloved disciple speaks here of our being “born of God.” And we cannot know what manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us in our being called the children of God, unless we realise our being so in virtue of this new divine birth. Here the parable does not help; it may even, if taken alone, mislead. It teaches its own lesson; but it does not teach the whole truth of God on the subject of our being “called children of God.” The prodigal’s mind underwent a mighty revolution with reference to his father and his father’s house. It must have done so before he could be willing, either to accept the father’s terms of pardon and peace, or to accommodate himself afterwards to the father’s character and way of life; and without such willingness he could not have been really his son. That surely implied a great change of mind, which the parable, however, does not fully, or indeed at all explain.

But we know well, as spiritual men, how the corresponding change in our nature must be wrought. We must be born of God; so born of God that it shall be as truly our nature to do righteousness as it is his nature to be righteous. It is not merely that we need to be made willing to embrace his righteous overtures of mercy, in order to our personal acceptance in his sight. That doubtless requires that we should be born of God; for no man ever yet was found willing to know and submit to the righteousness of God, or unreservedly to consent to be “justified freely by God’s grace through the redemption that is in Christ,” without so thorough a revolution in his whole inner man, so complete an abandonment of his own way of peace, and such entire acquiescence in that of God, as could only come from his being indeed born of God. To be born of God to this effect, to the effect of our coming to be of the same mind with him, in the great and vital matter of a sinner’s justification, and our justification as sinners;—that is much. It is the proof or manifestation of a fatherly love bestowed on us that is of a very wonderful sort indeed. But that is not all. Not only are we to be of one mind with the righteous Father as to the manner of our return and reconciliation to him; we are so born of God as to be ever after of the same mind with him, as to the whole of his righteous laws, and his righteous administration of them; “doing righteousness as we know that he is righteous.” That is what his heart is set upon; that is his fatherly love. It goes far beyond his simply consenting to regard us, in spite of all our estrangement, as still his children, if we consent to be so regarded. It is very different from his merely passing an act of indemnity, and by a summary and sovereign process of will, executing, as it were, a deed whereby we are declared to be in law his children. That is all the love which a father can bestow in adopting a child, according to the usages of earth. But it is not all that our Father in heaven bestows upon us, when we are called children of God. He contemplates a far more thorough filiation, a more intensely real sonship, than what can result from any such transaction outside of us;—any agreement between him and us, however generous and gracious. He “begets us” to himself (James 1:18); “we are born of God,” by an inward communication of his nature to us. He must have us to be, not titular, but real and actual children; children by participation of nature as well as by deed of adoption; by a new creation as well as a new covenant; of one mind and heart, of one character and moral frame with himself; “doing righteousness,” as we “know that he is righteous;”—so, and no otherwise, “born of him.”

“Behold what manner of love” is this that “the Father hath bestowed upon us!” That in such a sense, and to such an effect, the righteous God should be bent on our “being called his children;” his very children; his children in respect of our being made partakers of his righteous nature as God! Truly it is a love which it would never have entered into man’s heart to conceive, that in this marvellous way of such a new birth, “we should be called children of God.”

II. And we are his children; “Beloved, now are we children of God.” Our being called children of God is a reality; our being born of God makes it so. The world may not know us in that character, for “it knows not God,” and has never known him. We “know that God is righteous;” but the world does not so know him, has not so known him, will not and cannot so know him. How then should it know us, when, born of God, we do righteousness as he is righteous? On the contrary, for this very reason, because we are called children of God, and indeed are so,—therefore “the world knoweth us not.”

In this respect our position in the world is identical with that of Christ himself. He was called the Son of God, and was so; therefore the world did not own him any more than it owns us; because “it knew not him whose Son he was.” (Here especially the reference of the pronoun, in the last clause of the first verse, to the Father, is to be noted. I introduce the thought of the world’s disowning of the Son, not under that clause, but rather under the previous “us,” in virtue of the filial oneness of Christ and his people. The clause in question explains the world’s ignorance of both, as arising out of its ignorance of the righteous God whose sons or children he, and in him we, are.) The world could not understand his thorough sympathy with God; his burning zeal for God; his holy anger kindled at the sight of whatever outraged the righteous character and claims of God; his lofty, uncompromising loyalty to God’s righteous government and law; his tender concern for the little ones given to him by God, that they might be shielded from man’s wrong and led in God’s righteous way. His being the Son of God, not in name only but in nature also;—his being so constantly and consistently true, in all his life, and in his death, to what his sonship involved;—was the very thing which made him incomprehensible to the world. Even his own chosen ones, when he was in the crisis and agony of doing righteousness, knew him not. The three who should have watched with him in the garden, slept. When he was on his way to trial and death, they all forsook him and fled. They knew him not as the Father’s “righteous servant, by his righteousness justifying many, through bearing their iniquities;” because they knew not the righteous Father himself, laying upon him their iniquities. He was left alone with the Father in that last scene of all (John 16:32). All throughout he was constrained painfully to realise the fact that his mission from the righteous Father, and the righteous meaning of it, were but dimly apprehended by his closest friends, and were wholly set at nought by a world “that by wisdom knew not God.”

That same world has not known God since, any more than it did before; his children have still to live in the midst of a world that knows not him, and therefore will not know them. This is their trial, as it was Christ’s. And in one respect it is to them, if not a sorer or more painful, yet a more perilous trial, than it was to him. If the world knew not him, he in a corresponding sense knew not it. If the world had no sympathy with him in what he knew of the righteous Father, he had no sympathy with the world in what it thought of the righteous Father. If men, not knowing God whose only begotten and well beloved Son he was, could not enter into his deep views of God’s righteous character and claims, he had no leaning toward their loose notion of all in God’s government being made to bend and give way to them, that they might not die. That never could be his infirmity. But it is ours; it is our temptation. Children of God as we are called, and really are; “born of God,” so as to be partakers of his nature, and to “do righteousness as he is righteous;” we are not so thoroughly rid of the old nature but that still we have too strong an inclination to think as the world thinks, and feel as the world feels, about the righteous God and his righteousness.

Especially when there comes to be a heavy strain upon us as God’s children; and a strong case is made out for some concession; and we begin to doubt if we have not been too stiff and strict in refusing this or that compliance, or condemning this or that liberty and ask if we might not perhaps do more good, and better serve the cause of righteousness and a righteous God, by being a little less precise and more accommodating. Yes; we might in that way disarm somewhat the world’s hostility, and win a character for amiable courtesy and a liberal spirit. The world might come to know us, so as to like us better than it does now; better than it likes our more scrupulous brethren. But would not its knowing us in that way be just in proportion to our ceasing so far practically to be God’s children, “doing righteousness as he is righteous?” Let us be upon our guard against so great a danger. Let us lay our account with having to judge and act on principles which the world cannot understand. Let us be God’s children indeed; though on that very account the world that has not known God should not know us.

III. For, whatever the world may think or say, “we are the children of God,” his dear children; sharers of his divine nature; the objects of his fatherly love. It concerns us to bear this in mind; to apprehend and feel it to be true. It is our safety to do so. It is what is due to ourselves; it is what God expects, and has a right to expect, from us.

And it is especially on our community of nature with God, as being “born of him” and so “called his children,” that we are to dwell. It is not so much with a view to heighten our sense of privilege, as to deepen our sense of obligation, that John so emphatically repeats this assertion;—“Now are we the children of God.” It is our nature, as such, being born of God, to “do righteousness, as we know him to be righteous.” That is a new nature in us, and it is to be cultivated, exercised, developed, ripened. The field in which it is to grow and be matured is not at all congenial or favourable. It is the world, which not knowing him who begets, cannot be expected to know us who are begotten of him. It is the world, whose influences are all hostile to what is the great characteristic of the new nature in us which our being born of God creates, our “doing righteousness as we know that God is righteous.” Still that is our nature; our new nature: “Now are we the children of God.” And be the world ever so unpropitious in its atmosphere and soil, we are here in it as “trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord,” to grow as his children, “that he may be glorified.”

That is what is John’s chief design, in reminding us, in this connection, that we are the children of God. Other views are not to be excluded. The high rank in God’s kingdom; the intimate, familiar footing in his house; the warm place in his heart; which that wondrous manner of love bestowed upon us in our being called his children implies;—these all are animating and spirit-stirring motives to face the worst the world can do to us, through its not knowing us any more than it knows him whose children we are. It is a legitimate source of comfort and encouragement when, disallowed of men, we have to fall back upon “the witness of the Spirit, witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God; and if children then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” It is, moreover, a strong and telling appeal that is made to our sense of honour, to every noble and generous impulse of the new nature in us, when we are reminded that we are sent as God’s children into the very midst of a world that knows neither our Father nor ourselves; and sent for this very end, that we may approve ourselves to be his children indeed; and may “let our light so shine before men, that they may see our good works, and glorify our Father which is in heaven.” In the face of the world’s ignorance of us and of our Father, and its ignorant opposition to us and to our Father; though the world may refuse to acknowledge us as God’s children, and give us credit for being what we profess to be; still let us not lose our own sense of the reality of what we are. Let us stay ourselves on the conviction that our being God’s children is not a matter of opinion, dependent on the world’s vote, but a matter of fact, flowing from the amazing manner of love which the Father hath bestowed upon us. And let us be put, as the saying is, upon our mettle, to make good our claim to be God’s children, by such a manifestation of our oneness of nature with him of whom we are born, as may, by God’s blessing, overcome some of the world’s ignorant unbelief, and lead some of the world’s children to try that manner of love for themselves, to taste and see how good the Lord is.

These are important and relevant practical considerations, to which we do well to give heed.

But they must not thrust aside the apostle’s main design, which is that our own personal holiness may be preserved and may grow. We are the children of God, as born of him; so born of him as to have the great fundamental principle of his righteous nature wrought and implanted in us. And our task, our trial, our probation, is, to give that principle fair play and full scope, in opposition to the world which disowns it; to act out all that is implied in our being God’s children, in the very heart of the world which knows neither him nor us; to grow in filial likeness and filial love to God amid all the adverse influences of the world’s ignorant ungodliness. “Now are we the children of God,” as being “born of him;” having his moral image stamped upon us; his moral nature formed in us. That is what we are ever more and more to realise ourselves to be, amid all the drawbacks and disadvantages of our present state.

IV. And we are to do so all the rather, because these drawbacks and disadvantages will not last long. We are only at the beginning of our life as God’s children. What we are, in that character, we grasp, or try to grasp, by faith; “what we shall be does not yet appear.” But it is to appear soon. And one thing we know about it is, that our participation in God’s nature, as his children, must then be perfect, for our knowledge of him will be perfect: “We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” This suggests two thoughts.

In the first place, what is set before us, as matter of hope in the future life, is not something different from what is to be attained, enjoyed, and improved by us, as matter of faith, and of the experience of faith, in the present life. It is not that now we are the children of God, and that hereafter we are to be something else, or something more. The sole and simple contrast is between what we are now, as children of God, and what we shall be hereafter as such. “Now we are the children of God;” “born of him;” partakers of his nature; “doing righteousness, as he is righteous,” in the midst of a world that knows us not as doing righteousness, any more than it knows him, the righteous Father, whose righteousness we do. But “the world passes away, and the lust thereof;” and, lo! “new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness!” What shall we then be as children of God, in a new world, that knows both him and us, all whose arrangements and ongoings are in sympathy with him and us? “It doth not yet appear.” There is a veil hiding that glory from our eyes; and John does not lift it.

But, secondly, one thing he tells us plainly enough. When it does appear what we are to be; when that is no more hidden but disclosed; we shall be like God whose children we are as being born of him; “for we shall see him as he is.”

We shall be like him; we shall be such as he is, not almost but altogether. We are like him now. We are of his mind and on his side in all that pertains to his righteous character and government; his righteous condemnation of all iniquity; his righteous way of saving sinners. But the likeness is broken and imperfect. It is a real family likeness so far as it goes, a real oneness of nature; it identifies us as his children. But the features of resemblance are faint at the best, and marred by traces ever reappearing of our old likeness to the world and its prince, whose children we once were. It will be otherwise when “what we shall be” is made manifest or appears. Then our likeness to God will be complete; for then “we shall see him as he is.”

“We shall see him as he is;” for “the pure in heart shall see God.” The full light of all his perfection as the righteous God will open upon our view; we shall know the righteous Father as the Son knows Him.

The Son knows him;—“O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee; and these have known that thou hast sent me.” Here are the two extremes—“The world hath not known thee; but I have known thee.” And here also is, as it were, the intermediate position occupied by us;—“these have known that thou hast sent me.” They do not know thee yet, as I, O righteous Father, know thee. But they are in the way of learning thus to know thee; for they know me as sent by thee. I am educating and training them in that knowledge of thee which I would have them to possess as perfectly as I possess it myself; “I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it.” Nor will I desist until they know thee, as I know thee, by experience of thy love; “the love wherewith thou hast loved me dwelling in them and I in them” (John 17:25-26).

So Jesus, the first-begotten among many brethren, is teaching us now to know, as he knows, the righteous Father, through the love wherewith the Father loveth him dwelling in us, and himself dwelling in us. The school is ill-suited, in many respects, to the teaching; and the scholars are not so apt as might be wished. The school is but dimly lighted and badly aired; the atmosphere is too full of dust and smoke; the learners also are often drowsy; and the lesson-object is seen through a glass darkly. But lo! the hour comes when the benign master, the loving elder brother, leads us into the spacious, lofty, bright hall of his Father’s many-mansioned house, and presents us to the Father, face to face, saying, “Behold I and the little ones whom thou hast given me.” Then there is clear sight; unclouded vision; a full and perfect understanding of the righteous Father; a full and perfect understanding between him and us; as full and perfect an understanding as there is in the case of his own beloved Son himself. All that is dark or doubtful about his character and ways is cleared up. There is nothing anywhere to awaken a suspicion or suggest a question; nothing to give a partial or distorted view of what he is or what he does. We see him as he is; and so seeing him, we approve, and love, and are like him evermore!

Is not this a hope “full of glory”? And is it not a hope full of holiness too? Surely it must be true that “every man that hath this hope in God,” the righteous Father,—the hope of being like him through seeing him as he is—“purifieth himself even as Jesus, the Son, is pure.”

Verses 2-3

XX. The Divine Hope Perfecting the Sinless Family Likeness

“Beloved, now are we the sons [children] of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but when he shall appear” [when that shall appear] “we shall be like him [God], for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him [God], purifieth himself, even as he [Christ] is pure. Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law; for sin is the transgression of the law.” —1 John 3:2; 1 John 3:4

THE crowning glory and joy of sonship is to be like him whose sons we are; and that glory, that joy, is set before us. What we are to be, as sons of God, does not now appear. But it is to appear. And when it does appear, we know that we shall be like him. That one element or feature of our future state as children of God, hidden as that state is, we know. What more, or what besides, there may be in it to make it blessed, we cannot know; for “what we are to be does not yet appear.” Only we do know that when it does appear, it will be found to have this blessedness in it; that “we shall be like God.”

It must be so; for “we shall see God as he is.” Other things about our future state as children of God we cannot know until what we are to be, which does not now appear, shall appear. But one thing we do know, that we are to “see God as he is,” and therefore to “be like him.” That is our hope; a divine hope; “hope in God;” tending towards the perfecting, even here, of the family likeness that attests our divine filiation, or our being “born of God.” For “every man that hath this hope in him, (that is, in God,) purifieth himself, even as he, (that is, Christ) is pure” (1 John 3:3).

There is, as usual, some difficulty here as to the pronouns “him” and “he.” The first “him” evidently points to God the Father, whose children we are. The hope which we have of being like God, because we shall see him as he is, is a hope “in him,” or upon him, having him as its object and its ground. It is the last “he” that may seem uncertain. It is a different word in the original from the previous word “him;” which again is the same as that used in the previous verse about God. The “he” in the close of the verse,—“even as he is pure,”—is emphatically demonstrative. It means “that one,” “that child of God,” “that Son.” So clear is the identification of the person. Both pronouns, it is to be noticed,—the “him” and the “he,”—are expressed in the original, and not left to be supplied. The first naturally refers to the person previously spoken of, God the Father, whose children we are. The second as naturally refers to some other person, already distinctly enough indicated, in whom the ideal of our ultimate perfection in respect of likeness to God is realised, and in whom, therefore, the model and standard of our duty, as aiming at that likeness, is to be found. That person is evidently Christ the Son. The verse, accordingly, interpreted in strict consistency with the exact grammatical construction, may and must run thus;—Every man, every one, every one of God’s children, every child of God,—having this hope in God, the hope of seeing him as he is and being like him,—purifieth himself, even as that child of God, that Son of God, that Christ, is pure.

Thus the apostle, having set before us the high ideal, brings in the model of its actual realisation. The ideal is our being therefore like God whose children we are; our being like him, because we shall see him as he is. This ideal as to what we shall be implies a striving after it as we now are. For “every one who hath this hope in God purifieth himself.” And we strive all the better because we have a model of its realisation; “even as the Son is pure.”

I. We must look then here, as always, to Christ. He had a hope in God, or upon God; a hope having God for its object, and God for its ground and warrant. “Thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breast” (Psalms 22:9). “My flesh shall rest in hope” (Psalms 16:9). It was hope for himself as the Son; and it was hope in and upon God his Father. And it was substantially the same hope that we have as children that he had as the Son. True; he could not say, with reference to himself, and his own knowledge or consciousness,—It doth not yet appear what I shall be; at least not exactly as we say it. He knew better what he was to be, than we can know what we are to be. But even he, in his human nature and human experience, did not adequately know this; for even he walked by faith and not by sight. It really did not yet appear what he was to be. There was much, very much, of the joy set before him, that his human soul, in its earthly condition, could not comprehend. The Father had in store for him as his beloved Son such a recompense, such a fulness of consummated joy and glory; that, Son as he was, he could not beforehand comprehend or imagine it. One thing, however, he did know, that whatever the future discovery or development, to himself or others, of his sonship was to be, it would be all in the line of his being like the Father; and being like the Father through seeing him as he is.

I would speak with reverence and diffidence here. I try to put myself in the position of him who, as regards this very matter, is held up before me as my pattern; I mean, as regards my purifying myself now, in virtue of my having this hope in or upon God my Father, that I am to be like him hereafter, when I shall see him as he is. Christ was as I am; else the reference to him here is vain. He had the same hope in or upon God that I have; the hope of seeing him as he is, and being therefore like him. Is it wrong to say that he did not always see God as he is, while he was on earth? I speak of him as man; and it is as man that he is here set before me. Was he not in circumstances in which what he actually saw of God was to a large extent identical with what we see of God? Did he always see him as he is, any more than we do? He saw him in his actings; and in whatever explanation of his actings he was pleased by revelation to give. He saw him, in that way, more clearly than we see him. But did he see him otherwise, any more than we see him otherwise? Did he see him as he is? Were there not to him the same clouds and darkness around the throne of God his Father that there are to us? Was not God’s way to him, as to us, in the deep, and his path in the mighty waters? The medium of vision, at all events, was the same to him that it is to us. It was through the dim and hazy atmosphere of things as they are, with what light revelation sheds on them, that he, like us, had to see God; not as he is in himself, but as he is in his dealings with a world whose fall has made his providence of forbearance, grace, and judgment, a strange and awful mystery to all intelligences; a mystery which the last day alone is to unfold. Jesus lived under that providence, as we do; and saw God, through it, as we do. That is not quite seeing him as he is.

To see God as he is, when the present strange problem—a dispensation of long-suffering patience, subservient to a dispensation of present mercy and salvation, and preparatory to a dispensation of retribution and reward,—is at last solved;—to see God as he is, when the shifting shadows of time flee away, and the repose of the final settlement of all things comes;—that was to Christ a matter of hope; exactly as it is to us. It must have been so. And if it was so, is it too much to say that this included, even in his case, the idea of his hoping to be like God, when he was thus to see him as he is, in a sense and to an extent not within the reach and range of his human experience, when it was among the ordinary conditions of humanity here on earth that he had to see him? Is there no trace of a conflict between his natural human will and the divine will of the Father, in the deep movements of his soul in its agony? Was it never an effort with him to bring his own mind into harmony, or to keep his own mind in harmony, with the mind of the Father? Is he not now more like the Father,—I speak of his human consciousness, his human sense and feeling,—now that he fully “sees of the travail of his soul and is satisfied,” and sees therefore God the Father as he is, in the consummated issue of his mighty plan,—than he could be when he had to bow his meek and uncomplaining neck to the untried yoke; to meet the experimentally-unknown doom; when, “though he was a Son, he had to learn obedience by the things which he suffered;” when, “in the days of his flesh he offered up prayers and supplications unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared?”

That was his trial, as it is ours; to be in a position in which, seeing God as he is, and being consequently thoroughly like him, in respect of full and ultimate contentment, complacency, satisfaction, and joy, is “a thing hoped for.” It is in such a position that our purifying of ourselves is to be wrought out, even as it was in such a position that his being pure was manifested and approved. We, having this hope in God our Father, are to purify ourselves even as he, having this hope also in God his Father—how shall the sentence run to a close?—purified himself?—nay, that will not do,—was pure?—that might do, but it is not enough,—“is pure? Yes; that is the way of putting it that pleases the disciple who records the Son’s own saying; “Before Abraham was, I am.”

He is pure." It is not enough to say that he was pure; that in the condition and experience in respect of which he is here held out as an encouragement and example to us, he kept himself pure, as we have to make ourselves pure. The use of the present tense is most significant, “he is pure.” It is the essential purity of his human nature, as then and now eternally welded into his divine, that is set before us. And the precise lesson is this. The task of purifying ourselves is assigned to us in such circumstances, however unpropitious and unfavourable, as were yet not found to be incompatible or inconsistent with his essential purity. His being pure, in such circumstances, is a motive for our purifying ourselves; his purity, moreover, in these circumstances is the model and measure of what we should wish ours to be. We, having the same hope in God that he had; the hope of being like God because we shall see him as he is; are to purify ourselves as he is pure.

“He is pure.” It is with reference to his being a model to us that he is said to be so; we are “to purify ourselves as he is pure.” And we are to purify ourselves as he is pure, in the very same world which he, in his perfect purity, defied,—“Which of you convinceth me of sin?” He has really, in this matter, no advantage over us. He, as to his being pure; and we, as to our purifying ourselves; are on the same footing. We have to realise our sonship, as he had to realise his sonship, in a world that knows not God; and we have to realise it, like him, in hope. So realising it, and having this joint hope with him in God, we purify ourselves as he is pure.

II. With all this, the commission of sin is incompatible. “He that doeth righteousness,” and he alone, “is born of God” (1 John 2:29). For God is righteous; and every one that is born of God must partake of his righteous nature; and be a doer of righteousness, as God his Father is righteous. The doing of sin is inconsistent with so righteous a parentage; for it is the doing of that which is against law; “Whosoever committed sin transgresseth also the law; for sin is the transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4).

Sin is lawlessness; insubordination to law. It is to be so regarded; especially by us who, on the one hand, being born of God, make conscience of doing righteousness as God is righteous (1 John 2:29); and who, on the other hand, having this hope in God,—that we are to be like him when we shall see him as he is,—make conscience of purifying ourselves, as our model, his own beloved Son, is pure (3:2, 3). We are to look upon sin as a breach of law. That is our security against committing sin, and so compromising the righteousness which we do, and the purity to which we aspire.

There are other views that may be taken of sin; and some that may even seem more spiritual than this, and more in keeping with our character and position as sons of God. For there is a temptation to over-refining here; a temptation to which many in John’s day yielded, with most disastrous results to the interests of righteousness and purity; a temptation which may even yet beset us. Am I a child of God, born of him, standing to him in the same relation with his beloved Son? I seem to be raised above the commonplace consideration of sin being wrong because it is against the law. Sin should be offensive to me on higher grounds. Does it not shock the heavenly instincts of my new-born nature? Do I not feel it now to be beneath me to commit sin? It is a degradation unworthy of my rank and prospects. There can be no need of law to restrain me. Sin is not to be shunned by me merely because some legal enactment prohibits and condemns it. I loathe its foulness; I despise its baseness; I spurn its ingratitude.

So far, such feelings are gracious, generous, honourable; and they are to be cherished accordingly. But it is dangerous to trust to them, as if they might supersede what may seem the homelier and humbler reason for not committing sin; that it is against the law.

Do I feel or fancy that that is not altogether a filial motive, that it somewhat grates upon my ear and wounds my sensibility, that it scarcely comes up to my notion of what a filial frame of mind should be, and almost subjects me again to the bondage of legal constraint and a legal covenant? Trust me, I may be inclined to say; leave me to myself; and you may be very sure that I shall not commit sin. I have no wish for it; no heart for it. I am upon honour not to commit sin. But why bring in again the element of law? Why be ever reminding me not to break the law? Let me beware of the insidious entrance of such a thought into my heart. Am I not, in suffering it even for a moment, already committing sin? Am I not committing the very sin by which Adam fell, the sin by which the angels fell, the sin of counting it an irksome thing to be governed by law as being under authority, and aspiring to a sort of liberty of independence which no created being can ever assume or usurp without just offence to God and inevitable ruin to himself.

And let me look to that Pure One, who is to be my pattern in my life-task of purifying myself. How did he keep his purity intact when he was in the midst of that world which has not known God? Was he above law? Was he not “made under the law?” Was it not “obedience” that “he learned by the things which he suffered?” Shall I aspire to a more transcendental style of purity than he exemplified? Shall I adopt a method of self-purification more refined than that Pure One himself has by his practice sanctioned? Is the disciple to be above his master, the servant above his lord? Ah! let me remember that if I have to sustain the character of a child of God here; to prove myself to be born of God and partaker of his righteous nature; to purify myself as hoping hereafter to be like God when I shall see him as he is; it is in the midst of a world that has not known him that I have all this to do. And what is more, it is in the midst of a world that has known mo. and that I have known, too well. Let me think of the sympathy that there still is between that world and me; how far too congenial its ungodly and unholy spirit still is to my spirit. How am I to keep myself unspotted from the world, and purify myself in it as Christ is pure? How but by entering into his mind as he takes upon him the form of a servant, and becomes obedient? He who is himself pure; immaculately, incorruptibly, inviolably pure; essentially pure in his human nature as well as his divine; manifested and maintained this purity in the attitude of one saying: “Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart” (Psalms 40:7-8). Much more must it be in that attitude that I purify myself; I, who am not by nature “separate from sinners;” I, in whom there is still always too much of a leaning to their side. How .shall I guard against worldly conformity, against compromises and compliances, against ingenious casuistry or special pleading, that would try to reconcile with a high toned spirituality more or less of indifference or indulgence towards the world and its lusts? “To the law and to the testimony” let me be ever subject. Let me be true and loyal to the law. Let me love and fear the law. Let me take my stand on the law of my God; doing righteousness according to the law of the righteous Father; unsparingly and unflinchingly, without equivocation or evasion, condemning, shunning, hating sin as “the transgression of the law.”

Verses 4-6

XXI. The Secret of Sinlessness—Abiding in the Sinless One as Manifested to Take Away Our Sins

“Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law; for sin is the transgression of the law. And ye know that he was manifested to take away our sins; and in him is no sin. Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him.”—1 John 3:4-6

FOUR arguments against committing sin, or transgressing the law, are here suggested; all of them connected with him whose essential purity is to be our model in purifying ourselves: I. The end or design of his manifestation,—“to take away our sins;” II. His own sinlessness,—“in him is no sin;” III. Our oneness with him,—“whosoever abideth in him sinneth not;” IV. The incompatibility of sin with any real acquaintance with him,—“whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him.” The four may be reduced to two: the first and second being, as it were, doctrinal; the third and fourth experimental: the former turning on what he is to us, as our Saviour; the latter, on what we are in him as his saved ones.

I. “Ye know that he was manifested to take away our sins; and in him is no sin” (1 John 3:5).

Let us consider, in the first place, for what end he was manifested; it was to “take away our sins.” Some would understand this phrase as denoting here exclusively the cleansing of our nature from its sinful lusts and habits; and as having no distinct reference at all to the removal of contracted guilt. It is admitted that when the phrase occurs elsewhere it is the taking away of guilt by means of atoning blood that is meant; as in the Baptist’s testimony, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). But it is contended that here that thought is somewhat irrelevant, since it is moral purification, and not legal satisfaction or legal purging, sanctification in a moral, and not in a legal or sacrificial sense, that John is speaking of; and since, moreover, he seems to make that depend rather on what the Son is manifested to be, than on what he is manifested to do; on his person rather than on his work. There is no doubt truth in these remarks. But I cannot help thinking that they have led to an unnecessary and undue limitation of the force and fullness of this pregnant phrase. I would not, in that other passage, restrict it to the mere legal removal of the guilt of the world’s sin, without including in it also the removal of the sin itself, in its moral pollution and power. Nor am I inclined here to shut out the idea of the expiation of the gulls of our sins, though the other idea of moral purification from them is confessedly the uppermost or leading one. In fact, the two are inseparable: they are really one. I can scarcely conceive of John pointing to the manifestation of him in whom is no sin, as a source of moral purity, as taking away our sins out of our nature, without having in his mind, and wishing us to have in our mind, as a material part of the process by which that object is attained, his taking away our sins out of the record of their guilt, “the book of God’s remembrance.”

It confirms this view to remember that John has just described sin as “the transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4). He has fastened upon this as constituting the essence of sin, that it is against law. He is of the same mind with Paul, in that saying of his,—“The carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Romans 8:7). He, like Paul, knows that as our sins are against the law, so the law is against our sins. It is against our sins, in such a sense and to such an effect as to keep us, on account of them, helplessly under condemnation. We are under the law’s just sentence of death, Nay, more, the law, of which our sins are the transgression, is so against our sins as by a natural reaction to stir up in us more and more, the more closely it is brought to bear upon us, that very opposition to itself, and rebellion against itself, in which the sinfulness of our sins consists. In the grasp and under the power of the law, as condemned criminals, we are fettered; and can no more get rid of our sins than a doomed felon can shake off his irons.

If we are spiritual men at all, we know this well. We know and have felt, that the more the law approves itself to us, as “holy, and just, and good;” the more it comes home to us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in its high excellency and deep spirituality; the more our conscience and our heart are on its side; the more we see and apprehend of its just authority and holy beauty; the more we strive after complete conformity to it; the more we “would do good:” so much the more, while we are thus under the law, is “evil present with us” (Romans 7). An impotent sense of failure deadens and depresses us, while the feeling of our prostrate bondage in our sins irritates our natural enmity against God. And if we do not relapse into indifference, or take refuge in formality, or sink into sullen gloom, we are shut up to the one only effectual way of ending this miserable struggle between the law and our sinful nature; the way of free grace and sovereign mercy; the way of embracing him whom “God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood;” “in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.” Then indeed “sin shall no more have dominion over us, when we are not under the law but under grace;” when “there is now to us no condemnation because we are in Christ Jesus;” when we know him as “his own self bearing our sins in his own body on the cross, that we being dead to sin might live unto righteousness.”

All this, I think, must be held to be comprehended in the fact stated “he was manifested to take await our sins.” And it is all consistent with the object for which John reminds us of it; our purifying ourselves, as he is pure. He was manifested to take away our sins, root and branch. The very completeness of that work of atonement by which he takes them away, in respect of the condemnation and punishment which as transgressions of the Law they bind upon us, secures also his completely taking them away, in respect of the carnal mind in us, of whose enmity against God and insubordination to his law they are the fruits. His purging our conscience from the guilt of them, is the very means of his purging our hearts from the pollution of them. Their power to condemn us he takes away; and so he takes away also their power to rule over us. They can never again subject us to the law’s curse; and therefore they can never again provoke in us resistance or resentment of the law’s authority.

Nor is this all. In virtue of his being manifested to take away our sins, we receive the Holy Spirit. The obstacle which our sin, as a breach of the law, interposed to his being graciously present with us and in us is taken away. The Divine Spirit dwells and works in us; causing us to love the law which is now magnified, not in our destruction but in our salvation, not in our death but in our life; and to hate the thought of transgressing it any more. A new nature, a new heart, a new spirit, as respects the law of God and God the lawgiver, a new character as well as a new state, is the result of Christ being manifested to take away our sins. We know that, personally, practically, experimentally; and our knowledge of it is what enables as well as moves us to purify ourselves as Christ is pure.

It is so all the rather because, secondly, we are to consider that he is manifested as himself the sinless one: “In him is no sin.” Here again let us remember that sin is viewed in the light of the law: it is the transgression of the law: it is against law. The precise point of this declaration concerning the sinless one lies in that declaration concerning sin. In him is no sin, because in him is no lawlessness; nothing that is against the law. It is his being manifested as in that sense without sin, that makes his manifestation to us,—or our looking to what he is, as well as our looking to what he does,—effectual towards the taking away of our sins out of our heart and nature. In him, as “manifested to take away our sins,” “there is no sin;” nothing of what needs to be taken away from us; nothing of that sin which is the transgression of the law.

I do not ask you now to dwell on the thought that this sinlessness of his, his being himself free from all liability to the law as a transgressor, was an essential condition of his taking upon himself our liabilities, so as to take them away from us. I ask you rather to consider the mighty moral power which his being manifested as the sinless one has, in itself and of itself, to take away our sins; not merely to take away their guilt lying upon us, but to take them bodily, as it were, as to their very substance and spirit, from within us. In that view, it is all-important that we look at his sinlessness in strict and definite connection with the law.

How do we conceive of him as without sin? He is before us as one in whom there is no sympathy with what is vile and polluting; or with what is mean and base; or with what is unfair and untrue; or with what is dishonourable and unhandsome; or with what is unkind, ungenerous, unloving. Not a thought, not a feeling, not an affection is in him that could offend the purest taste, the most fastidious delicacy. Benevolence without the slightest alloy of selfishness; integrity such as the breath of suspicion cannot touch; seraphic mildness, sweetness, calmness, that no storm of passion has ever ruffled; a soul attuned to all the melodies of heaven, on which no jarring note of earth’s discord can ever strike; a divine dignity; a divine gracefulness in look and being, in air and carriage, infinitely removed from man’s uncertain temper and the rude strife of tongues—some such ideal, some such picture, rises before our eye. And the contemplation of it may be profitable as well as pleasant; for all these representations of the one only perfectly sinless man are true; and contemplating them, we may to some extent be moved to imitate as well as admire. But we do not thus, “with open face, behold as in a glass the glory of the Lord,” so as to be really “changed into the same image, from glory to glory.” For the glory of the Lord, manifested in and by him as the sinless one, is his never “transgressing the law.” In him is no sin; nothing of what is against the law; against the law under which he was made when he was made of a woman. It is into the image of that glory that we, beholding it, are to be changed “by the Spirit of the Lord.”

Does this seem to be a lowering of our high ideal of perfect sinlessness, as exemplified in him? Does it sound strange to hear it spoken of as his glory? Do we feel it to be almost a sort of outrage and offence to speak of this as his moral glory, that he never broke the law, and never wished to break it? What glory, what moral grandeur, is there in that? Much, I answer; much every way. It is man’s highest glory. It is the highest glory of angels. It is the highest glory of the Son himself, manifested to take away our sins, that in him, in this sense, is no sin. “He learned obedience,” I repeat, “by the things which he suffered.” And he learned it perfectly; for in him is no sin; no possibility of any thought adverse to the learning of obedience, entering into, or rising up in, his mind. That is his essential impeccability; his being incapable of even the faintest surmise of impatience under the law of his God and Father, or the most remote approach to a desire that it were anything else than obedience, anything less or anything more, that he had to learn. Is not that “a glory which excels”? Is it not worth while to behold it,—and to aim at being changed into the same image with it, from one degree of it to another, from glory to glory, by the Spirit of the Lord? Behold it! See! It is no mere negation; no mere abstinence from evil, or absence of evil. Nor is it any mere spontaneous development of native, innate good. It is positive, practical, perfect obedience to God’s holy law. It is the doing of his will with the whole heart. It is to live for no other end but that his will be done. So in his life did he manifest his sinlessness who said, “I must be about my Father’s business:” “The cup which my Father giveth me, shall I not drink it?’ Thus it is seen that “in him is no sin.” (See “Cunningham Lectures on the Fatherhood of God,” appendix, expositions of Revelation 20:3, and Hebrews 5:8-9.)

II. With this sinless person we are one; “abiding in him as the sinless one manifested to take away our sins.” And that is our security against sinning—”Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not.”

This is the statement of a fact. It is not the enforcing of a duty, as if it were said,—whosoever abideth in him should not sin, and must not sin; let him not sin. It is not even the drawing of an inference or the announcement of what will probably be, and may be expected to be, the issue of oneness with the Lord, as if it ran thus,—whosoever abideth in him will not sin, or is not likely to sin. It is the broad statement of a present fact,—“Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not;” as is also the converse—“Whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him.” Between abiding in Christ and sinning there is such an absolute incompatibility, that whosoever sinneth is for the time not merely in the position of not abiding in Christ, but in the position of not having seen or known him. In so far as he is sinning, his is virtually the very same case with that of the man who has never either seen or known Christ. The statement is very emphatic and very categorical. It is more than a mere assertion of a sort of moral inconsistency or incongruity, a certain manifest unsuitableness, in the view of common-sense and right feeling. It is an assertion of absolute incompatibility, in the nature of things; and it is a very strong assertion of that, put in two forms, positively and negatively, to make it all the stronger. Let us see how it must be so.

1. We abide in Christ by faith; by that faith, wrought in us by the Spirit, which unites us to Christ. Our abiding in him by this faith implies oneness; real and actual oneness; not oneness only in the eye of the law, so that we are regarded and treated as one, in the Judge’s dealings with him for us, and with us in him; not oneness merely in the sense of an ordinary alliance or partnership, with a community of goods and interests, of lives and fortunes; but real and actual oneness of nature. As the husband and the wife are made of twain one flesh; so Christ and we are one spirit. “He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.” Our abiding in him is our realising this oneness. It is our apprehending ourselves to be consciously one with him, of the same nature, of the same mind, with him, of the same way of thinking and feeling with him. It implies our taking the same view that he does of all things, of God and his law, of righteousness and sin, of guilt and judgment, of holiness and grace and love; our entertaining the same sentiments with reference to them all. It is this which secures our closing with him at first as our Saviour, and carries our consent to his saving us in his own way and on his own terms, so glorifying to the Father, so costly to him, so gracious to us. It is this also which ever after secures our not sinning. We cannot be thus abiding in Christ, realising our oneness of mind and nature with him, and at the same time sinning. The thought or feeling of opposition to the law, or of impatience under it; the wish that we were more free to act as we choose; is no thought or feeling or wish of his: for “in him is no sin.” When we sin, when we suffer any such thought or feeling or wish to find harbour in our breasts; we cease for the time to be abiding in him. Between him and us, not then and there abiding in him, there is really as entire a separation as if we had never seen or known him: as wide and deep a gulf as that which lay between the rich man in hell and Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom. It is not fixed like that gulf; not yet. But let us beware lest it become fixed. Let us be thankful that it may still be made to disappear. And let us remember that this can only be through our repenting again, as at the beginning,—believing again, as if we had never believed before,—embracing the Lord Jesus, as if now for the first time we saw and knew him,—“doing the first works,”—becoming anew and afresh, by the grace of the Spirit, “members of Christ’s body, of his flesh and of his bones,”—getting shut up into him anew and afresh, so as to be again of one mind and heart with him, abiding once more in him in whom is no sin. For we may be very sure that when we sin, we are none the better for all that we have seen or known of Christ; none the safer. It is the same thing to us as if we had never seen him, neither known him at all. (Compare the exposition in Lecture VI.)

2. We abide in Christ by his Spirit abiding in us. That is a filial spirit—the Spirit of God’s Son in us crying Abba Father—the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba Father. A servile frame of mind grieves and vexes the Holy Spirit, and hinders his continuing to dwell in us. He dwells in us only when we cry Abba Father, and therefore sin not. Sin is ever the fruit of that servile frame of mind which is characteristic of one that has not seen or known the Son. Abiding in him, through his Spirit abiding in us, we have a filial heart towards God. And a filial heart “sinneth not.” For a filial heart has no temptation and no desire to go against the will, or the law, of the righteous Father.

From all this we may see how the stress of practical exhortations against sin is to be brought to bear upon a child of God; upon us, who are children in the Son. For it is very important that there should be exhortation, direct and pointed. It is not enough to put the matter in the form of doctrinal statement or anticipated consequence; as if we said: Being God’s children in Christ you do not sin; or you will not sin. It is good for you to hear a voice of authority and command: Sin not. And yet that is not the way in which the matter is put here. It is not an order issued, but a fact announced; “whosoever abideth in him sinneth not.” What then? Is the hortatory method to be given up? Nay; it is only necessary to shift a little, as it were, the point of its application. I state it as a fact that whosoever abideth in him sinneth not. And therefore I issue the command: Abide in him, It is his own command “Abide in me.” And that is the right position for the hortatory or commanding mode of appeal. If you would not sin; that you may not sin; that it may be impossible for you to sin—“abide in him who was manifested to take away your sins, and in whom is no sin.” Cleave to him; grow up into him; get into his mind; drink into his spirit. Enter into the design of his being manifested, and into the way in which, being manifested, he accomplishes that design. Enter into the secret of his sinlessness. Keep close to him, abide in him, and sin not.

And forget not the positive, any more than the negative, result of your abiding in him; your “bringing forth much fruit” (John 15:5). For it is only in the line of the positive, in the line of bearing fruit, that you can be sure even of the negative,—not sinning. Nay, if your negatively not sinning is the effect of your abiding in Christ, it really resolves itself into your actually and positively bearing fruit, and becomes identical with it. “In him is no sin;” no rebellion against that will of God which he comes to do; no insubordination to that law of God which is within his heart; nothing that hinders, or possibly can hinder, his doing that will and keeping that law always and thoroughly. You “abide in him and sin not.” You have in you now nothing more than he had, in so far as you abide in him, of that sullen, slavish, selfish frame of mind; bent on getting its own way, and doing its-own pleasure; grudging God and men their due; which hinders all cheerful, loyal obedience. You therefore, abiding in him, in whom is no sin, that there may be no sin in you, go about with Into doing good. Yours is that “pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father,” which is this, “to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction,” as well as to keep “yourselves unspotted from the world.”

Verse 6

XXII. The Secret of Sinlessness—Our Abiding in Christ—The Seed of God Abiding in Us—Our Being Born of God

“Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him. . . Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth [abideth] in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.”—1 John 3:6; 1 John 3:9 (I reserve the exposition of the intermediate verses, because I think they can be best considered after we have as far as possible ascertained the sense in which it is said of believers in Christ that they do not and cannot sin.)

THESE strong statements—that one abiding in Christ does not sin, and that one born of God cannot sin;—are often perplexing, not to say distressing, to serious minds. How is it if I am forced to ask. I sin, every day, every hour, every moment, I may say, in thought or word or deed. Must I therefore conclude that I am not in Christ; not born of God? It is a real practical difficulty. Let us fairly grapple with it.

I. These texts do not teach, either the doctrine of perfection, or that other doctrine which is apt to usurp its place; the doctrine that God sees no sin in his people, or that what would be sin in others is not sin in them. When I say that this latter doctrine is apt to supplant the other, I do not mean that all who believe in the perfection or perfectibility of the saints on earth are antinomians. I speak simply of what I hold to be a strong tendency in the nature of things I am told that it is possible for a Christian to live without sinning; that he may be so sanctified as to be incapable of sinning; that such holiness is attainable; nay, that no one can be long a Christian without attaining it; that no one can be sure of his Christianity unless he has attained it. But I see in the most Christian of men, I feel in myself in my most Christian mood, much that is not easily reconcilable with this immaculate sinlessness, unless I can persuade myself that what looks very like sin is not really sin. I am tempted to do so; to defend, on the ground of Christian character, what otherwise I would give over to just condemnation; to stand up for the harmlessness in a believer of ways that would confessedly hurt or ruin the unconverted. And so I really open the door to those perversions of such texts as, “He that is spiritual is judged of no man,” “To the pure all things are pure,” which have wrought sad havoc with the plain morality of the Bible.

II. There is another mode of dealing with the statements before us which I cannot feel to be satisfactory. It is to limit or restrict their comprehensiveness; and to understand the apostle as speaking, not of sin absolutely and universally, but of sin more or less voluntary and presumptuous, According to this view, one abiding in Christ and born of God does not and cannot sin deliberately, intentionally, knowingly. He may be overtaken in a fault; he may be compassed about with infirmities; he may have his occasional aberrations and failings. But he does not lay plans and go into evil with his eyes open.

Is that true? Was it true of David? Or of the man in Corinth who was excommunicated for incest, and upon repentance restored? Is it any relief to me, when I am staggered by the hard saying that the true Christian does not and cannot commit sin, to be told that it may be so modified as to mean that he does not and cannot sin voluntarily. Will that modification meet my case? Alas! no. For I dare not persuade myself that I never sin voluntarily. The saying excludes me, and tells against me, as much as ever. And then, is it safe to make such a distinction as this between two sorts of sin: and to make it for such a purpose as this? May it not again let in the notion of some evil being tolerable and venial after all in a child of God? Where and how is the line to be drawn?

III. It may help us out of the difficulty if we first look at the statements before us in the light, not of what we are now by grace, but of what we are to be in the future state of glory. It will be true then that we sin not; it will be impossible for us then to sin. What will make it true that we sin not? What will make it impossible for us to sin? Simply, our abiding in Christ; our being born of God; his seed abiding in us.

It is most important that we should endeavour to form some distinct idea of this feature or characteristic of heaven’s holiness; its absolute inviolability; its being perfectly secure against the possibility of sin ever marring it. Saints in glory do not and cannot sin. Wherein consists this impossibility of sinning? Of what sort is it? Plainly it cannot be a merely physical or natural inability; it must be of a moral kind. It is not outward coercion or prevention; it is not enforced sinlessness, which would be no sinlessness at all. Neither is it sinlessness dependent on external circumstances; such as want of opportunity or absence of temptation. The impeccability is and must be an attribute of the inner man; of the saint himself, as perfectly sanctified in his whole nature. If in the heavenly world I am not to sin; to be incapable of sin that cannot be in consequence of any mere change in. my outward position; any mere translation from one locality to another, from one system of things to another. It was not his expulsion from Paradise that made Adam peccable, or capable of committing sin. He was so from the first in Paradise, for there he sinned. It is not his return to Paradise, nor his promotion to a Better state than that of Paradise, that will make him impeccable. His impeccability must be otherwise attained and secured.

It is true that change of place and of circumstances may do much; and it is a great change that is before us. “We look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.” It will, indeed, be a very different atmosphere that we breathe in heaven from what so often deadens, stupifies, and paralyses our Christian life on earth. We shall be there under other influences and in the midst of other companionships. No more is there any course of this world for us to walk after; no more any prince of the power of the air to intoxicate us with the poisonous vapour of his ungodliness; no more any children of disobedience, seducing us to have our conversation among them. It will, unquestionably, be a blessed relief. To be rid of Satan and of Satan’s wiles; to be for ever quit of those worldly ways and habits around us here that are so apt to draw us into conformity with themselves; to be where there is no more any antagonism between what is and what ought to Be; to be where God is all in all;—it may well be imagined to be like “a bird escaping out of the snare of the fowler; the snare is Broken; and we are escaped!” “Oh! that I had wings like a dove, that I might flee away and be at rest!” “Woe is me that I sojourn in Meshech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!” But let me Beware. If I imagine that it is my being in heaven that is to make me pure and sinless, or render it impossible for me to sin, I am under a sad and most unsafe delusion. Let it be granted that then all I come in contact with will be holy, and all conducive to holiness; with “nothing to hurt or to destroy in all God’s holy mountain.” Still, place me there, continuing simply such as I am here; and not only is it not true of me that I cannot sin; but it is true of me that I cannot but sin. Evidently, therefore, its being impossible for me to sin in the future state, must depend upon something else than mere change of scene. And what follows? It must depend upon something that may be actually realised more or less perfectly here. It must depend upon what may be and must be realised here, in the inner spiritual history and experience of every child of God.

Let me remind you that this impeccability lies in the will; the seat of it is the will. It is because, in the state of glory, my will is made “perfectly and immutably free to do good alone,” that my will is, or that I myself am, incapable of doing evil. (See Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter IX, “Of Free Will.” In the state of glory, the will is still free: “neither forced, nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined, to good or evil.” But it is so thoroughly renewed as to be incapable of an evil choice, “being made perfectly and immutably free to do good alone.”) And let me also remind you that sin, the sin which it will then be impossible for me to commit, is “the transgression of the law;” of the law of God which is the expression of his will. His will is perfectly and immutably free. His law is its free utterance; the free forth-going of his free will. Your impeccability,—its being impossible for you to sin,—is its being impossible for you to will otherwise than he wills; to think or feel otherwise than he does, as to that law of his which is his will. And if it is your will that is to be thus free; free, as his will is free, to do good alone; and therefore incapable of an evil choice; then your impeccability must be, if I may say so, itself voluntary; voluntarily accepted and realised. The position in which I find it impossible to sin must be attested by my own consciousness as a position that is freely and voluntarily mine.

Let me try to imagine myself as regards this matter in the heavenly state. I cannot sin. Why not? What hinders me? Is it that my hands are tied? Is it that my will is fettered? Am I not free? Yes; I am free as God is free. And therefore I can no more sin than God can sin. In the very same sense in which God cannot sin, I cannot sin. My will can no more go against his law than his own will can go against it. For why is it that God cannot sin?—that his will cannot go against his law? Is it not because the law is his will? Is it not because the law is his nature? Yes. The law is his will, his spontaneous will. And it is his nature; the very essence of his moral character and being is in his law. For the law is love; and God is love. The law is holy; and God is holy. He cannot sin, or transgress the law, because he cannot go against his own will, or against his nature. Sin in him, were the thought admissible, would be self-contradictory; suicidal. “He cannot deny himself.” Now in heaven am I in this respect such as he is?—really, literally, absolutely such as he is? Yes, that is my heaven! It is my being thus like him when I see him as he is. When, clear from the darkness in which now he hides himself in a world that knows him not, his glory shines unclouded; then I “see him as he is” so as to be “satisfied when I awake with his likeness.” It is the likeness of him who cannot sin.

IV. Let me try to bring out more clearly this principle as one that must connect the future with the present. Why is it that in heaven, my will being free as God’s will is free, I can no more sin than he can sin? What answer would John give to that question if you could put it to him now? As thus;—“In whatever sense, and with whatever modifications, thou didst, in thy experience when here, find that to be true which thou hast so emphatically put,—as the test, apparently, of real Christianity,—it is all true of thee there, where thou art now! How is it so Why is it so?” “Because I abide in the Son of God, and God’s own seed abides in me, as being born of God;” is not that his reply? What other reply can he give?

No doubt he may also say, “I am no more in a world that knows not God; exposed to its flattery or its rage. I have nothing now to apprehend from Satan’s subtilty. I have laid aside the body of corruption that used to weigh me down. The lusts of the flesh solicit and trouble me no more. Evil propensities, the remains of my old original and inveterate depravity, are all thoroughly put away. Not a vestige of any root of bitterness remains in me; nor is there any exposure to trial or temptation from without.” These are great and inestimable advantages. “But,” he would add, “not one of them secures, nor do they altogether secure, my impeccability; or its being impossible for me to sin. Excepting only immunity from Satan’s subtilty, man in Paradise enjoyed them all; and yet he was peccable; he sinned. Without any exception, the unfallen angels enjoyed them all; and yet they showed themselves peccable; some of their number fell. My heaven is no heaven at all, if in respect of this matter of my not sinning, or its being impossible for me to sin, I am no better off than Adam was in the garden, or the angelic hosts in their first estate. But I am better off. And what, you ask, makes me better off? My abiding in the Son of God, and having God’s own seed abiding in me, as being born of him. First, I “abide in the Son of God” evermore, uninterruptedly; and therefore I see God as his Son sees him; I feel towards God as his Son feels. Secondly, as born of God, I have “his seed abiding in me,” evermore, uninterruptedly; his seed, conveying me his nature, as truly as a plant’s seed imparts its nature to its successor, or a man’s seed imparts his nature to his child.”

“These two causes combined,” John might say, “ensure my not sinning; make it impossible for me to sin by transgressing the law. For, in virtue of the first, the law is to me what it is to the Son of God, the God-man; not merely an enforced rule; far less a yoke of bondage; but an inward principle also of free, spontaneous choice. It is within my heart, as it is within his. There can no more spring up in my heart than there can spring up in his, the slightest or faintest feeling of impatience under it, or of a longing to be without it or above it. And then, in virtue of the other, the law is to me what it is to God himself. It. is the expression of my nature, as it is of his. Being what I am, as born of him, his seed abiding in me, I can no more go against it than he, being what he is, can go against it himself.”

Is this the secret of the saint’s impeccability in heaven? Is it at all a true and fair account of his not sinning, of its being impossible for him to sin?

Then does it not follow that it is an impeccability that may be realised on earth? For the causes of it are realised on earth; first, your abiding in the Son of God; secondly, your being born of God so as to have his seed abiding in you. And so far as they are realised on earth, they cannot but make it impossible for you to sin here, in the very same way in which, when realised perfectly in heaven, they will make it impossible for you to sin there. For they are causes whose efficacy does not at all depend on time or place or circumstances. They act here and now as they will act then and there. They make God’s will be done on earth, even as it is in heaven.

V. Viewed thus in the light of “what we shall be,” and of the bearing of what we shall be on what we are, John’s statements assume a somewhat different aspect from what they are apt to wear when taken by themselves. They become not one whit less solemn but greatly more encouraging.

For one thing, you may now regard them as describing a precious privilege, as well as imposing a searching test. They show you the way of perfect holiness; how you are to be righteous, even as Christ is righteous,—even as God is righteous.

I suppose that it is your desire to be so; if it is not, you are none of Christ’s, and are not children of God. Your earnest longing is, I assume, that you were placed in such circumstances, or that there were wrought in you such a frame of spirit, as would make it impossible for you ever to sin any more.

Well, if it is so, should it not be matter of satisfaction to you to be told that you have even now within your reach, realisable in your experience, the elements or conditions, so to speak, of that very state of things which you so warmly covet? John takes it for granted, that “having this hope in God;”—the hope that when “it does appear what you shall be,” it will imply your being “like him whose children you are, because you shall see him as he is”, “you purify yourselves even as his own Son is pure.” And surely in that view he does you a kindness when he tells you how this purifying of yourselves as Christ is pure may become possible, even to the extent of its being as impossible for you as for him to commit sin or to transgress the law. He does no sin; he can do no sin; he cannot have a thought or wish to transgress the law. Why? Because he is the Son of God, his only begotten Son, of one nature with the Father. Even when he takes your nature, he is, on that account, sinless and impeccable. And the good news here is, that you also are becoming impeccable in him. Of course, it is good news to you only if impeccability is really the object of your desire; your hope; your heaven. Is it so? Would it be heaven to you not to sin; to be incapable of sinning; to be so situated and so minded, that for you to sin would be as truly anti really an impossibility as for Christ or for God? Then these texts are for you. They let you into the secret of this impeccability; they show you wherein it consists. They set it before you, not as something to be reached some time, somewhere, somehow, in some other world, through some mysterious unknown processes to be gone through at death and the resurrection; but as what you may have experience of, and must have experience of, in this present world, and under this present dispensation of the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit makes you really one with the Son of God, so that, abiding in him, you par. take of his sonship; his filial relation to the Father and filial heart towards the Father. And the Holy Spirit also implants in you and puts within you the seed of God, the germ of God’s own nature and God’s own life, so that you are in very truth born of God. When thus in your adoption, rightly viewed, and in your regeneration, the Holy Spirit unites you to the Son, and assimilates you to the Father;—when thus you abide in the Son, in whose son-ship you share, and the seed of God your Father, of whom you are born, abides in you;—you have already, in present possession and for present use, all that is essential to impeccability.

VI. Taking this view, I confess I do not feel so much concern as otherwise I might feel about reconciling such strong statements as that one abiding in Christ sinneth not, or that one born of God cannot sin, with the acknowledged and lamented fact that he does sin. John has dealt with that fact already, and told us how to deal with it. It is not his business here to be making allowance for it. It would be beside his purpose altogether, and indeed against it, to be qualifying his high and bold appeal to honest aspirants after perfection, by concessions to those whose object would seem to be to ascertain, not how, and how far, perfection may be reached, but how far they may stop short of it. John has not any such Christians in his eye. Or if he has, it is to bring to bear upon them the whole artillery of these startling statements, in all their strictest and most literal force. They are to be solemnly warned that sin is absolutely incompatible with abiding in Christ and being born of God—all sin, any sin, every sin; that “whosoever sinneth hath not seen Christ, neither known him.” To them John has nothing else to say. He cannot otherwise meet their question as to the extent to which sin, still cleaving to a child of God, may be admitted not to vitiate his title. For indeed it is most dangerous to be considering the matter in that light or on that side at all. It is almost sure to lead, first to calculations, and then to compromises, fatal to singleness of eye and the holy ambition that ought to fire the breast; calculations first, about the quantity and quality of the residuum of old corruption which we must lay our account with finding in the purest God-born soul; and then compromises, under the sort of feeling that, as the proverb says, what cannot be cured must be endured.

I beseech you to turn from that downward, earthward way of looking at this great theme; and to look upward and heavenward. I speak to you as believing you to be in earnest about purifying yourselves even as Christ is pure. I tell you that the gospel makes full provision for holiness; and no provision at all for sin. It contemplates, not your sinning, but your not sinning; nay, its being impossible for you to sin. If it did not, it would be no gospel to you. For you are weary of sinning; weary of finding it always so possible, so easy to sin. The risings of a rebellious spirit in you against God, and his will, and his law; your feelings of irksomeness, as if his commandments were grievous, his ways dark, his sayings harsh, his service hard, himself austere; are a continual grief to you. Well, may it not be some consolation, some encouragement, to know, that you have within you, if you will but stir up the gift that is in you, the elements of a holier and happier life? For these are indeed, when rightly considered, most precious assurances; “Whosoever abideth in Christ sinneth not;” “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for God’s seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.” Let a few practical inferences be suggested.

1. I think the texts teach, or imply, the doctrine of the final perseverance of the saints; the impossibility of their either wholly or permanently falling away from a state of grace. I cannot understand statements so strong as “sinneth not,” or “cannot sin,” especially when taken in connection with the reasons given, “abiding in Christ;” “being born of God;” “the seed of God abiding in him,”—in any sense consistent with the idea of one who by faith has been united to Christ, and by adoption and regeneration made a child of God, proving ultimately a castaway. It may be quite true that it is not John’s immediate design to dwell on that tenet. But nevertheless he uses words that seem very plainly to assume it. It is not easy to see how any one could be called upon to recognise in himself, as actually his now in possession and experience, the principle, if I may so speak, of impeccability, excepting upon grounds precluding the risk of his losing altogether his character and standing in Christ.

2. The texts teach however, very plainly, that this doctrine, whatever may be its practical use and value in its right place, and when turned to legitimate account, cannot give to any man security in sin; cannot make him safe when he is sinning, when he is committing sin or transgressing the law. When he is sinning, he can draw no assurance whatever from his “having seen and known Christ.” Virtually, to all intents and purposes, he is exactly in the same position with one who “has not seen him, neither known him” (1 John 3:6). Never, at any moment, may I reckon on a past act of God towards me,—his calling me, justifying me, adopting me in his Son; or a past work of God in me,—his regenerating me by his Spirit;—as giving me any present confidence, if my present state is one of sin. Not only is this not right; I believe it to be impossible. I believe that no man ever yet felt himself secure in sinning now, on the ground of his having been brought to “see and know” Christ long ago. His feeling of security, in so far as he has such a feeling, does not really spring from that belief as to the past, but from ignorance now of Christ and of God; from present unbelief. For the present, he is an unbeliever, not seeing or knowing Christ; no better than if he had never seen or known him. The moment he comes again to believe, and has his eyes opened to see and know Christ; Christ looking on him when he is sinning as he looked on Peter;—security there is none; confidence there is none; only bitter weeping. He repents, and does the first works. He believes, as if he had never believed before. He realises again, as at the first, his abiding in Christ and God’s seed abiding in him. Our sinning, therefore; our feeling it to be possible for us to sin; is in fact, and as a practical matter, absolutely incompatible with our abiding in Christ and being born of God. We are only really abiding in Christ, and consciously and influentially, if I may say so, born of God so as to have his seed abiding in us,—in so far as we do not sin,—in so far as we cannot sin.

3. For this, let me again remind you, is John’s true design and purpose; it is to put you in the way of not sinning; of its being impossible for you to sin. It is to let you into the secret of sinlessness, of impeccability; that you may be successful in purifying yourselves as Christ is pure. Realise your abiding in Christ, your being born of God, his seed abiding in you. And realise all that, as you may realise it, not as what is to be in heaven; when it will appear what you shall be; but as what may be, and must be, and is on earth; even when “it doth not yet appear what you shall be.” Do not imagine that you must wait till you get to heaven until you can know what it is not to sin; to be beyond the possibility of sinning. No doubt it is only in heaven that you can know that perfectly. But you may know something of it on earth. You need not imagine that if you know nothing of it on earth, you can know anything of it in heaven. For it is not, I repeat, any change of scene that will make you know it. Some have fancied that by getting out of the world into the wilderness they might come not to sin; nay, might get themselves into a state in which they could not sin. Away from society’s pomps and vanities, its pleasures and vices, in the solitude of the desert, they have sought for immaculate and impeccable holiness; they have sought for it painfully, with tears and stripes. Alas! they have sought for it in vain. But you may find it, in the midst of all evil, if you seek it aright, in the way of abiding in Christ, and having God’s seed abiding in you, as being born of him. And you will find it, if you apprehend the force of the Lord’s own words: “As thou, Father, hast sent me into the world, even so have I sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified through the truth.”

Verses 7-8

XXIII. The Secret of Sinlessness—The Contrasted “Doings”—Doing Righteousness and Doing Sin—Their Incompatibility in Respect of Their Opposite Origins or Parentages—God and the Devil

“Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he [Christ] is righteous. He that committeth [doeth] sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.”—1 John 3:7-8

THESE verses are embedded, as it were, between the two already considered (1 John 3:6 and 1 John 3:9); which teach what may be called the secret of sinlessness as a possible attainment, and one that a child of God must apprehend and realise. They fit into that theme, placing in marked contrast the two opposite lines of conduct,—“doing righteousness and doing sin,”—and tracing them up to their respective sources, a righteous nature on the one hand, indicating a divine birth; and a sinful nature on the other, betraying a devilish origin. Thus they shut out the very idea of any mixture of the two characters, or anything intermediate between the two. Thus also they connect the argument with the introductory statement at the beginning of this second part of the epistle, “If ye know that God is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of God” (1 John 2:29). For this doing righteousness, which at once implies and tests our being born of him who is righteous, must evince a family likeness to him, or a participation of nature with him. It must, therefore, be very thorough and complete, and cannot be compatible with doing sin. For that, evincing an opposite family likeness and participation in an opposite nature, points not to a divine birth or our being born of God, but to a very different parentage, our being of the devil.

The passage before us opens accordingly with a very solemn warning: “Little children, let no man deceive you.” It assumes an urgent and serious danger. There are those who will do their utmost to deceive you, and the point on which they will try to deceive you is a very vital one. It is so all the rather because it is one on which your own hearts may be but too willing to be deceived. It turns upon the indissoluble connection that there is between being and doing; between character and conduct; between what a man is and how he acts.

The false teachers of John’s day held that one might reach in some mysterious way a height of serene, inviolable, inward purity and peace, such as no things without, not even his own actions, could stain. In a less transcendental form, the same sort of notion practically prevails in the world. It used perhaps to be more common than it is now to give a person credit for having right principles, though his practice might be often wrong; to admit his claim to a good heart, in spite of his habits being to a large extent bad. But the delusion is one against which we still need to be cautioned.

John meets it by bringing out in marked contrast the two opposite natures, one or other of which we must all share; that of God and that of the devil. As it is the nature of God to be righteous, so it is the nature of every one who is born of God to be righteous also. So he who is pre-eminently the Son of God is righteous; and we who are children of God in him are righteous as he is righteous. But his being righteous necessitates his doing righteousness; to imagine otherwise in his case would be a profane calumny. So also to think that we can be righteous as he is righteous, if our being righteous does not necessitate our doing righteousness, must be a gross and grievous delusion. On the other hand, it is the devil’s, nature to be evil; and being evil, he cannot but be doing evil. If we are doing evil, doing sin; that proves our identity of nature with the devil; we are of the devil. And being of the devil, the originator of sin,—sinning from the beginning,—we cannot be children of God as Christ is his Son. For he was manifested for this very purpose, that he might destroy the works of the devil.

Let us consider the three steps in this argument, as thus adjusted.

I. “He that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as Christ is righteous.” It is clearly moral character that is here in question, not legal standing. There is no reference to Christ’s vicarious righteousness; its imputation to us through our oneness with him by faith, and our consequent justification in the sight of God. That doctrine, so clearly revealed elsewhere underlies, as we have already seen, the whole of John’s teaching in this epistle. But to import it into this passage is to destroy the sense. Of course it is equally destructive of the sense to use the passage as a support to the doctrine of justification by works, as if it meant that the doer of righteousness is thereby, on the ground of his personal doing of righteousness, justified or accounted righteous before God. John is not thinking of justification at all, but rather of sanctification; of holiness of life being inseparable from holiness-of nature. The precise lesson taught, the great principle asserted, is that righteousness, moral righteousness, cannot possibly exist in a quiescent or inactive state; that it never can be a latent power or undeveloped quality; that wherever it is it must be operative. It must be working, and working according to its own essential nature. Moreover, it must be working, not partially but universally; working everywhere and always; working in and upon whatever it comes in contact with, in the mind within and the world without. Otherwise, it is not righteousness at all; certainly not such as we see in Jesus; it is not “being righteous as he is righteous.” Therefore being righteous and doing righteousness are not twain, but one; one in the very nature of things, by divine ordination and arrangement. God has joined them; and what God has joined man may not put asunder. The attempt to separate them on either side, or to confound them, is a fatal error.

Hence those err who would sink the being in the doing as if the doing were all in all,—quite as much as those who would divorce the doing from the being, and leave the being all alone.

“He can’t be wrong whose life is in the right,” is a perilous half-truth. Doing righteousness, in the sense of merely leading what is called a virtuous life, being irreproachable in manners, and performing acts of kindness, may thus be made to constitute the sum and substance of religion and morality. Evidently that is not John’s teaching. On the contrary, it is with the inward frame of mind that he is chiefly occupied; it is about the heart being right with God that he is concerned. The very righteousness, pure and holy, which is the distinguishing characteristic or attribute of the moral character of God, is to become the attribute of ours, as it is of Christ’s. Far from undervaluing, or as it were postponing, the inward, or being righteous; he lays on that the whole stress of his appeal about the outward, or doing righteousness. For the very reason of his appeal is this, that if there be not the being there cannot be the doing; and therefore, on the other hand, if there be the doing, it proves and insures the being.

This last is the important practical consideration here. But it is so only when we rightly understand what doing righteousness, in John’s notion of it, really is. It is not merely performing righteous actions; doing things that are in themselves, or in their own essential nature, right and good. The abstract form righteousness is significant and all-important. To do a righteous deed is one thing: to be doing righteousness in the doing of it is another. The difference may be immense.

Jesus “went about doing good.” And in doing good he was ever doing righteousness. For he did good because he knew that to do good is to do what is righteous in the judgment of the righteous Father. He did good, not as doing himself a pleasure or his fellow-men a service, but as doing the Father’s righteous will. To do good thus is to do righteousness indeed. Viewing it in that light, we cannot err, or go too far, in the way of identifying it with being righteous. So to do righteousness is really to be righteous; in the highest and holiest sense; according to the most perfect type and model; “even as Christ is righteous.” It is a vain dream, a fond imagination, for any of us to aspire to being righteous in any other manner or after any other fashion. The humble path of obedience to the righteous Father,—the consistent doing of righteousness as we know, and because we know, that God is righteous (1 John 2:29),—is practically being righteous, So Christ, the Son of God, is the Father’s righteous servant, doing the Father’s righteousness. So let us, as born of God, be the Father’s righteous servants in Christ; doing righteousness as Christ does righteousness, and being righteous as Christ is righteous.

II. As “doing righteousness,”—through its being thus associated or identified with “being righteous as the Son is righteous,”—proves our being “born of God;” so “doing sin” proves a very different relationship, a very different paternity. “He that committeth” or doeth “sin is of the devil.” That is his genealogy or pedigree. And the reason is plain. The devil is the author of sin; it is he who “sinneth from the beginning.” The “doer of sin” cannot, as such, have any other father than the originator of sin. And he cannot repudiate the ancestry. It is fastened upon him by the same law or principle which enables “the doer of righteousness” to claim kindred with the righteous Father, in respect of his “being righteous as his own Son is righteous.” The medium of proof is the same. It is this, that what one does is really what one is; the doing being the index or identification of the being. “He that committeth” or doeth “sin is of the devil;” for, by doing sin, he shows his identity of nature with him who is a sinner from the beginning. And it is upon identity of nature, proved practically, that the question of moral and spiritual parentage must ultimately turn.

That is the question which John raises here, and to which he afterwards returns (1 John 3:10). It is with a view to that question that he lays down the essential moral truth involved in his two contrasted propositions or arguments; first, “He that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he, the Son, is righteous,” and so, as “born of God,” may assert a divine paternity; secondly, “He that doeth sin is of the devil,” the original and archetypal sinner: he must consent, therefore, to trace his genealogical line from a devilish beginning and in a devilish stream.

And still the test is the consistency or identity of the doing with the being. The doer of righteousness is righteous, as Christ the Son, who is one in nature with the Father, is righteous. The doer of sin is not so, but on the contrary is of the same nature with the devil, who “sinneth from the beginning.” He who is born of God, knowing that God is righteous, can do nothing but righteousness, in so far as he realises his position; being himself righteous as Christ is righteous. He that is of the devil can do nothing but sin, as the devil has been doing all along from the beginning. So far as his nature is allowed full development, that is its working. But that proves a paternity the opposite of divine.

Thus two parentages are here contrasted. Two fathers, as it were, desire to have us as children. They are wide as the poles asunder. Of the one relationship it is the characteristic not to sin; of the other, to be always sinning. The one father never has sinned, never could sin, being the “righteous Father.” The other has been always a sinner; sinning from the beginning; his first act being to sin. Each father imparts his own character to his children. The Virtue or the vice; the wholesome purity or the poisonous matter; the sweet charm or the sour taint; runs in the blood. The children of the one father have infused into them the seed or germ of his impeccability; his being of such a nature that it is impossible for him to sin. The children of the other inherit his absolute incapacity of not sinning; his being of such a nature that it is morally impossible for him not to sin.

It is a terrible inheritance. It is the devil’s nature to sin. When we sin we give proof of its being our nature too. And it is a nature which we derive from him. It was he that communicated it to us. Our relation to him, therefore, in respect of our thus sharing his nature, is very close. It may be true that it is only in a figurative sense that we can be called “children of the devil,” or said to be “of the devil.” Still the figure has in it a sad reality. If it is natural for us to sin, he is the father of that nature in us. His seed is in us; the seed of his nature, his natural life, which is to sin, to do nothing but commit sin. And let us remember John’s definition of sin (ver. 4), and Paul’s (Romans 8:7). The essence of sin is refusing to be subject to law, That is the sin which “the devil sinneth from the beginning;” he sinneth by insubordination. That is his nature, his natural life. And he put the seed of it in us when he said to Eve, “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree in the garden?”

This phrase, therefore—“being of the devil,”—as used here and elsewhere in Scripture, does not imply what in human opinion would be accounted great criminality or gross immorality. To call any one a devil, or a child of the devil, is to impute to him, according to ordinary notions, an extreme depravity. We paint the great Apostate Spirit in the blackest colours of foul pollution, rancorous hate, and wanton cruelty; and it is only monsters of vice among ourselves that we characterise as satanic. Thus we extricate ourselves from the shame of so discreditable a lineage as is involved in being of the devil. But neither John nor his Master will let us off so easily. The sin which lost Satan heaven was neither lust nor murder. It was not carnal at all, but merely spiritual. It was not even lying, at least not at first,—though “he is a liar, and the father of it.” It was pure and simple insubordination and rebellion; the setting of his will against God’s; the proud refusal, at the Father’s bidding, to worship the Son. So “the devil sinneth from the beginning.” And when you so sin, you are of your father the devil. Peter was sinning in that way when Jesus called him Satan. There was nothing of what we might be inclined to stigmatise as satanic in his very natural wish to arrest his Master’s fatal journey. It was an impulse of generous affection which burst out in the expostulation,” Be it far from thee.” But he was “of the devil” then, notwithstanding. Therefore Jesus said to him, “Get thee behind me, Satan; thou art an offence unto me” (Matthew 16:23). Not saying it thyself, thou wouldst hinder me from saying to my Father, “Thy will be done.” And that is devil’s work.

In order then to enter into the full meaning of John’s solemn testimony, it is not needful to wait till some horrid access of diabolic fury or frenzy seizes us. It is enough if “the tongue speaketh proud things,” or the heart conceives them. “Our lips are our own; who is lord over us?” Or, why are they not our own? May they not at least occasionally be our own,—this once; for singing one Vain song, or uttering one idle word, or joining in an hour’s not very profitable, but yet not very objectionable, talk? Is there any rising up in us of such a feeling as this, as if it were hard that we may not occasionally take our own way and be our own masters? It is the devil’s seed abiding in us; the seed of the devil’s sin, and of his sinful nature.

Thus this testimony is of wide range and searching power, when the Spirit brings it home. The law says—Thou shalt love God with all thy heart; thou shalt not covet. Let that commandment come to me, in its real spiritual force; and how thoroughly, how helplessly, how miserably, does it make me out to be a very child of the devil! Many laws I cannot charge myself with breaking; I do not feel them to be irksome; the laws of my country and of society, for example; the laws Of just dealing between man and man; the laws of kindness, courtesy, good breeding, good taste and feeling; the law of chivalry; the law of honour. Of all such laws I can cheerfully acknowledge the authority. But this law,—the law binding me by peremptory statute to love God supremely, and not to covet, not to love at all except as he loves, me feel that I cannot own. There is that in me which makes me rebel against what it enjoins being made matter of law at all. I would have it left to my own discretion. I object to love upon compulsion, or to worship, or to obey. Yes, there it is! That is it! I have in me the seed, the root, the germ, of the satanic spirit and the satanic nature. I cannot bring myself to be thoroughly under authority and law, when the authority and law are God’s. And why? Why but “because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be?”

III. “But for this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.”

The expression “to destroy the works of the devil,”—if it is to meet the previous statement, must be understood as meaning, in substance, that the Son of God was manifested to undo what the devil has done and is doing; to counteract and counterwork him, in respect of all his doings generally; but especially in respect of his imparting to us, as his children, the germ or seed of his own sin of insubordination to the authority and law of God. The phrase, indeed, might be taken in a wide sense; and might lead us to consider the many various ways in which the gospel tends to redress, and has actually to a large extent redressed, the manifold wrongs and mischiefs that the devil, by introducing moral evil and turning it to account, has wrought in the earth. But evidently the reference here is rather to the one inherent quality, than to the various effects, of the devil’s working. The Son of God was manifested to destroy the works of the devil—to destroy in you that sort of doing, or working, which you have derived from the devil; that sinning, or committing sin, which is his nature, and of which he has implanted in you the seed.

It is a work of destruction which he is manifested to do, or which his being manifested does; for we need not be very particular as to which of these ways of putting the matter is to be preferred: they are virtually the same. Execution is to be done upon what is the essence of all the devil’s works, so far as our sharing in them as his children is concerned; the spirit of suspicion, impatience, and rankling discontent, under God’s loving rule, which the devil insinuates into our hearts, and fosters, inflames, and irritates there.

In thus destroying the works of the devil, in this sense and to this effect, his being manifested as the Son of God was, in itself alone, a great step. For he was manifested, in the very form, in the very position, which the devil had himself felt, and had persuaded us to feel, to be grievous, irksome, and intolerable. He, being the Son, “took upon him the form of a servant.” He was so manifested as to make it plain, beyond all question, that there is no such root of bitterness as the devil would insinuate that there is, in a creature’s subjection as a servant to the law of God his Creator, in a Son’s subjection as a servant to the law of God his Father. The Son of God is manifested as submitting to that place of subordination to authority which the devil and his angels spurned; giving himself to a service infinitely more humiliating than they were called to when they were commanded to worship him. It was a great blow to the works of the devil; it cut up by the roots the very pith and staple of his power to work at all; when the Son of God was thus manifested; when it was made patent to all the universe that it was no degradation or bondage for the Son himself to be the servant of the Father; when it was seen that his being so was not incompatible with sonship, but was in fact its very perfection. (See the Fatherhood of God; Appendix I. Exposition of Revelation 22:3.)

This, however, is not all; it is only a small part of what he does in destroying, to me and to all his people, the works of the devil. The Son of God might have been manifested as sustaining the very character of a servant, under authority and law, which the devil found, and which the devil makes me find, so provocative of an inward sense of impatience and spirit of rebellion; and he might have been manifested as sustaining that character in such a way as to win me over to the conviction that it is, if I can but reach it, my highest freedom and joy. But what of that, if I cannot reach it? And I cannot reach it, unless the Son of God, thus manifested, does two things on my behalf.

In the first place, he must make my relation to the Father such as his own is. In order to that, and as an indispensable preliminary to that, he must abolish and destroy the relation in which the devil has got me, along with himself, to stand to God; the relation of a guilty criminal to a righteous and avenging judge. Fain would the devil keep me in that relation to my God; scowling impotent defiance, or writhing under the lashings of despair. Or he would set me to the task of painfully working out for myself deliverance; and all in vain. The Son of God is manifested to make short work of all that. I see him taking my relation to God as his, that I may take his relation to God as mine. And I have literally nothing to do but say Yes! Yes; I allow him to take my relation to God as his, the relation of a condemned criminal, a sentenced transgressor of the law!—to take it, so as to exhaust all the curse of it, and destroy it, as the devil’s work, for so it is, utterly and for ever! Wondrous condescension, is it not, on my part! And I accept his relation to God, the relation of a beloved son and faithful servant, as mine! More wondrous condescension still! Ah! let me be ashamed to hesitate here. Let me be willing to be to the Father all that his own Son is, in both views of this wonderful substitution and most blessed union.

But, secondly, that I may be willing, he must put within me his own heart towards God, as well as place me in his own relation to God. For this purpose also the Son of God is manifested; not only that through his entering into my guilty relation to God the righteous judge, and making an end of it for me, I may enter into his relation to God the righteous Father, and make full proof of it, in him; but also that, through the Spirit dwelling in me, as in him, I may have the same heart that he has to cry, “Abba, Father.”

Let me never forget that it is for this double purpose that the Son of God is manifested. Root and branch, the works of the devil must be destroyed. The seed, the germ, the principle of all his works must be eradicated. Suspicion, dislike, servile dread, criminal sullenness, self-justifying pride, must all be scotched and killed. These are the devil’s works. They must be all destroyed. Let me look to the Son of God as he has been and is manifested; and are they not, through my so looking, destroyed? I cannot think and feel, with reference to God and his authority and law, as the devil does, when I look to the Son of God manifested for this very purpose, that I may think and feel as he does; that God may be to me what he is to him, and his law to me what it is to him; that thus in me he may “destroy the works of the devil.”

Verses 10-12

XXIV. Connection of Doing Righteousness with Brotherly Love as Proving a Divine Birth, in Contrast with the Unrighteous and Unloving Spirit Indicating a Devilish Parentage

“In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother. For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.”—1 John 3:10-12

THE antagonism between the righteous Father and the great adversary, and between their respective seeds or offsprings, is here announced in such a way as to run it up to a very precise point. The question to which of the two you belong; which of the two parentages or fatherhoods, God’s or the devil’s, is really yours; is brought to a narrow issue. It is put negatively; and it is all the more searching on that account. The want of righteous doing, the absence of brotherly love, is conclusive against your being of God; “Whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.” These two things are here virtually identified; or the one is represented as implying the other. The general is now made particular; what was general and abstract, “doing righteousness” (1 John 2:29), is now reduced to a particular practical test, “loving one’s brother.” What sort of love is here meant will appear more clearly as we proceed. It is, at any rate, love whose obligation is not of yesterday; the commandment rendering it obligatory is of old standing, of ancient date: “For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.” And the question arises—What message or commandment is here referred to?

The idea is apt to suggest itself, not unnaturally, that it is our Lord’s commandment in the beginning of the gospel: “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another;” “This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you;” “These things I command you, that ye love one another” (John 13:34, and John 16:12-17).

But may not “the beginning” be held to date, not from Christ’s teaching, but from the real beginning of the gospel, immediately after the fall? Does not the mention of Cain indicate as much? Is not the law or message of love in question that which was violated in the beginning, when Cain, being of that wicked one, slew his brother?

God’s commandment, heard from the beginning, is that we should love another. Therefore “he that loveth not his brother doeth not righteousness,”—the righteousness required to make good or verify the fact of his being “born of God.” He “committeth or doeth sin;” the sin which is “the transgression of the law.” He is “of the devil;” like Cain, who “was of that wicked one, and slew his brother.”

We are thus carried back to the earliest manifestation of the distinction between the children of God and the children of the devil in the old familiar history of Cain and Abel.

Of Abel little is recorded in the history. But it is plainly implied, in what is said of him here, that he loved his brother. We read that “Cain talked with Abel his brother.” And we read this in immediate connection with what the Lord said to Cain on the subject of his rejected offering;—“But unto Cain, and to his offering, he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin”—a sin-offering —“lieth at the door”—at thy disposal, and available for thee. After that “Cain talked with Abel his brother.” It is in that connection that we read of his doing so.

It is not needful to suppose that his talk was, at least in the first instance, a deliberate plot to draw his intended victim into his power. It is quite probable, or rather more than probable, that the conversation began in good faith. The walk of the brothers in the field may have been as much without any purpose on the one side, as without any suspicion on the other, of anything like treachery or violence. It is quite natural that Cain should have talked with Abel his brother. And the talk might turn on the recent incident of the two acts of worship; on the disappointment which Cain had experienced, and the explanation of it which the Lord had been pleased to give him. That “Cain was still wroth, and his countenance still fallen,” we may well believe. He has not been able to bring himself to submit to God and his righteousness. He is in no mood for being amiable to one who seems to him to be a favoured rival. But he does not meditate actual wrong. He would startle at the thought of fratricide, when the talk with Abel his brother begins.

As it goes on, we may imagine Abel, warmly and affectionately enforcing the gospel message which Cain has just got from heaven; opening up its gracious meaning; trying to persuade his misjudging brother that there is really no respect of persons with God, no partiality for one above the other; but that for both alike there is acceptance, as well-doers, if they can claim to stand on that footing, and for both alike, if not well-doers, a sin-offering at the door and at command;—as near to thee, brother, as to me, as available for thee as for me, as much at thy service as at mine;—thine, as freely as it is mine, if thou wilt but have it to be thine.

Had I, brother, sought acceptance as a well-doer, needing no atoning blood of the slain lamb, coming merely with a tribute of grateful homage, the Lord would have had as little respect to me and my offering as he had to thee and thine. Nay, less. I must have been more decidedly and justly rejected; for of sinners I am chief. But, in my sin, I looked and saw the sin-offering at my door. And, brother, it lieth at thy door too, if thou wilt but consent, as a sinner, to make use of it. Has not our God been telling thee so? Is not this his gospel to thee as well as to me?

Is it too much to conceive of righteous Abel thus manifesting his being of God; thus doing righteousness and loving his brother? Is it at all conceivable that he should deal otherwise with his brother, or not deal thus with him, while Cain gave him the opportunity, by talking with him in the field? Could anything else be the burden of the talk than his beseeching his brother to be reconciled to God by the sacrifice of the slain lamb?

And is it not just by his manner of requiting such brotherly dealing with him on the part of Abel that Cain manifests his being of that wicked one? Is not that the explanation of his slaying him. For “wherefore slew he him”? Because his own works were evil, and his brothers righteous.”

That was the real reason; though of course he did not avow it to himself. Probably he was not conscious of it. He had some plausible plea of self-justification or of self-excuse. His younger brother took too much upon him; affecting to be on a better footing with God than he was, and to be entitled to dictate and prescribe to him. It was bad enough that God should have rejected his plea of well-doing, or of righteousness; and bid him come, not with “God I thank thee” on his proud lips, but with “God be merciful to me a sinner” in his broken heart. That one who is his junior in age, and in strength so completely at his mercy, should press the same humiliating lesson, is more than he can stand. He cannot reach God; else his anger would find vent against him. But the meek and unresisting child of God is in his hands. And therefore he slays him; “because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.”

Well did our Lord say of the Jews who sought to kill him: “Ye are of your father the devil; and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning.” And he was so, “because he abode not in the truth, for there is no truth in him.” To lie and hate the truth, is his nature; “when he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own;” it is his native speech, his vernacular; for “he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44). And you are of him; for it is “because I tell you the truth that ye believe me not” (John 8:45); and it is that which provokes you to “seek to kill me” (John 8:40).

Here then are two instances of the children of God being manifested, and the children of the devil: Abel, and his brother Cain who slew him; Jesus, and the Jews who sought to kill him. It is the first that John cites; but the second throws light upon it. For Abel is to Cain instead of Jesus; and Cain is to Abel what he would have been to Jesus. The antagonism is clearly and sharply defined. On the one side there is love, brotherly love; love to one who slays his lover, and love to him as still a brother; which is indeed “doing righteousness as God is righteous,” and therefore betokens a divine birth. On the other side there is hatred, deadly hatred; hatred of the righteous for his righteousness; which is “a work of the devil,” and savours accordingly of a devilish parentage.

For what brings out the antagonism in both cases is truth or righteousness; truth, as the Lord puts it (John 8); righteousness, as John puts it here; the truth of God; the righteousness of God. Whosoever doeth righteousness is of God; born of God. And such an one will, like Abel, love his brother; not sinning, or transgressing the law which commands love to men as brethren. “Whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God.” And such an one “loveth not his brother,” but “doeth the work of the devil;” being like Cain, who “was of that wicked one, and slew his brother, because his own works were evil and his brother’s righteous.”

Mark how these opposite dispositions towards truth and righteousness, the truth and righteousness of God, operate in producing the opposite dispositions of love and hatred.

1. Consider that old message or commandment, heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. On what is it based? It cannot, since the fall, be based on our joint participation in the ills to which the fall has made us heirs. Companions in guilt, shut up as criminals in the condemned cell, together awaiting execution, can scarcely be expected, need scarcely be exhorted, to love one another. There is not much mutual love lost in a band of outlaws or a community of rebels. “Hateful and hating one another” is apt to be the characteristic of the tribe. They may call one another brothers, sworn brothers; in the riot of a common feast, in the presence of a common foe. But there is little real confidence or cordiality in their fellowship. It is not, it cannot be, to guilty and sinful men, in their natural condition of guilt and sinfulness, estranged from God and at enmity with God, that “the message” or commandment “heard from the beginning,” to love one another, is now addressed. At least it is not to such that it can be addressed with any hope of its being complied with and obeyed. It is a message or commandment that plainly, from its very nature, proceeds upon the fact of their being a method of extrication, actual or possible, out of that wretched state. It is redemption, and redemption alone, with the regeneration which is involved in it, that makes mutual brotherly love among men, in its true and deep sense, a practicable duty, an attainable grace. It is only one who, “being born of God, doeth righteousness as knowing God to be righteous,” that is capable of really loving his fellowman as a brother. Only righteous Abel can so love even murderous Cain.

If you are the children of the righteous Father, you can so love even those who “despitefully use you and persecute you.” For as his children you are one in sympathy with the righteous Father; you are of one mind with him; you are on his side in the great cause of righteousness, and of a righteous salvation, which lies so near his heart. Submitting yourselves to his righteous and sovereign grace; receiving pardon and peace, a new nature and a new life, on the footing of your oneness with his righteous servant and beloved Son; you are now, as his children, being born of him, altogether for his righteousness and against the world’s sin.

What brotherhood then can there be between you and the men who sin; and who harden themselves, or justify themselves, in their sin? Is there not a great gulf between you and them? Are they not cut off from you? Are you not precluded from holding them to be your brethren?

Nay; it is only now, now for the first time, that you are in a position, that you have the heart, to feel anything like a brother’s love towards them. And it is the very sharpness of the line that severs you from them that makes your brotherly love towards them burn bright and keen and warm. You love them as brethren now, in a sense and manner in which you never could love them before; however closely you and they might be knit together, as issuing from the same womb, or dwelling in the same house, or associated in the same calling, or walking in the same way.

Yes; though you have “known that man after the flesh” known him intimately, known him affectionately, known him so as to love him as a very brother when you sat together at the godless festive board, or drained together the cup of sinful pleasure; yet now henceforth you “know him no more.” It is after another fashion than that of the flesh that you know him now; and after another fashion that you love him; with an intensity of brotherly longing for his good, unfelt, unimagined before. What sacrifice would you have made for him then? You would “lay down your life” to save his soul now. He was your playmate, your plaything then; you used him; you sported with him; you enjoyed him. And you had a kindly enough feeling towards him. He was profitable to you; or you found him always very pleasant to you. But he is far more to you now. He is precious, oh! how precious, in your eyes; precious, not as the congenial companion of a passing hour, but as one whom you would fain grasp as a brother for eternity.

2. No such brotherly love is possible for him who, not doing righteousness, is not of God. His frame of mind is that of Cain; a frame of mind that but too unequivocally identifies him as one of the devil’s children, and not God’s. For there is no room for any intermediate position here. Either you are of God; or you are like Cain, who “was of that wicked one, and slew his brother.” It was the contrast between his brother and himself that moved Cain to this act; and before he was moved to it, that contrast must have become very irksome and intolerable. It was not because he was void of natural affection, or because his disposition was one of wanton cruelty and bloodthirstiness; it was not in the heat of sudden passion, or in a quarrel about any earthly good, that Cain slew his brother; but “because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.”

It is this which chiefly marks the instigation of the devil; and his fatherhood of Cain, and such as Cain.

No doubt he has a hand in every sin or crime that his children commit. He fans the flame of lust, and fires the hot blood of furious passion. He sharpens the wits of wily craft, and helps the plotter in many a stratagem. He infuses fresh bitterness into the malign temper of envious hate, whoever or whatever its object may be. But he has a special grudge and spite against “the seed of the woman who is to bruise his serpent-head.” More than anything else on earth;—infinitely more than any remains or remnants of good that the fall has left in human nature and human society;—for these he can turn to his own account and make his own use of;—does that wicked one detest the faintest trace of the footsteps, the slightest breathing of the spirit, of him “whose goings forth have been from of old;” who has been ever in the world, the wisdom and the word of God, the light and the life of men. Wherever his power appears, setting up God’s righteousness and its claim to vindication against man’s sin and its boast of impunity, there Satan’s malice is stirred. And he makes his children fierce even to slaying; as he made Cain.

He does so commonly by fretting and irritating the conscience, while at the same time he fortifies the stronghold of stout-heartedness and pride. For these two in combination, an uneasy conscience and an unbroken heart, are in his hands capable of being wrought mightily to his purpose. Let the truth and righteousness of God be brought so near to a man, by the divine word and Spirit, as to stir and trouble thoroughly his inward moral sense, while his desire and determination to stand his ground and not give in remains unabated, or rather is inflamed and aggravated; let the process go on; and let all attempts towards an accommodation, between the conscience’s increasing soreness and the heart’s increasing self righteousness and self-will, be one after another frustrated and foiled;—you have then the making of a Cain, a very child of the devil, who, if need be and opportunity serve, will not scruple to cut short the terrible debate and end the intolerable strife by slaying his brother Abel; by “crucifying the Lord of glory!” O my fellow-sinner, let us beware! Let us not be “as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother.”

I may think that there is no risk of my being as Cain; it will be long before I slay my brother Abel! But let me give good heed to what John records as the natural history, as it were, of Cain’s sin. He “slew his brother; and wherefore slew he him? because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.”

Let me ask myself a plain but pointed question. Is there no child of God, no godly man or woman of my acquaintance, the thought of whom, or the sight of whom, or his or her talk in the field, troubles me and makes me feel uncomfortable? Many professing Christians I know and like. Many who pass for serious and evangelical I can meet and converse with, easily and satisfactorily enough. There were four hundred prophets of the Lord that Ahab had no sort of objection to have near him and to listen to. But there was one Micaiah that he did not care to send for. “I hate him,” said the king, “for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil.” Is there any Micaiah who is thus a sort of eyesore to me? Any Abel who provokes in me a kind of Cainish spirit?

It is not, strictly speaking, envy, or mere jealousy of another’s superior excellence. It is the tacit rebuke administered to my shortcoming and sin; the awakening of a lurking consciousness of something wrong in my state of heart or way of life, the unsettling of my security, the begetting in me of I scarcely know what to call it—dissatisfaction, apprehension, an uneasy and unpleasant feeling of my not being altogether, in some particulars, what I ought to be, or might be;—it is that which disturbs me, in the presence of some child of God, or in the thought of such all one, as an unquestionable type of godliness.

Ah! it is a dangerous symptom; you brother, as well as I, may give good heed to it. It is the very germ of Cain’s murderous mood. It may not lead you to slay your Abel; him or her who is thus obnoxious to you; whose eminent nearness to God causes you to be too sensible of your distance. You have other ways of getting rid of the troubler of your peace without raising the cry, Crucify him; away with him. You can evade his company, keep out of hearing of his voice, and elude the glance of his eye. You can shut him out of your mind, and bid him be to you as if he was not. Or you may try another plan. You may open your ears to whispers against him; you may sharpen your sight to discover faults and follies in him; you may “sit and speak against your brother, slandering your own mother’s son,” if by any means you can make him out to be not so very immaculate or so very heavenly, after all, but that you may stand your ground and pass muster beside him in the end. What is all that but slaying your brother; slaying him virtually if not literally; slaying him very cruelly? And wherefore? “Because your own works are evil and your brother’s righteous.” Be not deceived. Be very sure that “in this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.”

I draw an important practical inference from the views now submitted. They may teach us something of the nature, and what may be called the genesis, or natural history, of brotherly love.

We are accustomed, when we speak of the particular affection of brotherly love, as distinguished from the general affection of love or charity, to rest the distinction chiefly on the opposite characters of those who are the objects of the two affections respectively. Charity or love—I speak of it in its earthward, not its heavenward direction-has for its objects men, all men, indiscriminately; men, as such. Brotherly love has for its objects the children of God; the members of the family or brotherhood of Christ’s people; who have one Father, one Lord and elder Brother, one Spirit, one hope, one home. We love all men with a love of benevolence; we love the brethren with a love of congeniality and delight. So far as it goes, this is of course a true account.

But does not John’s statement here suggest a somewhat different, or at least an additional, explanation? May not the root of the distinction lie in the subject of the affection rather than in its objects; in the person loving, rather than in the persons loved? Is not the character of the affection determined by the character of him in whom it; dwells, even more than by the character of him to whom it goes forth?

At all events, when my character is changed, the character of all my love,—let who may be its objects, and let it have ever so many objects, differing ever so widely,—is changed in a corresponding manner. There is not one of those I loved before whom I love now as I used to do. My love to every one of them is a quite new love. The wife of my bosom, the child of my house, the servant and stranger within my gates, the beggar at my door, the queen reigning over me, the companion of my leisure, the partner of my business, the holy man of God, the wretched prodigal, the child of misery and vice—there is not one of them whom I love now as I did before. It is a new affection that I feel to every one of them.

And what is it that is new about it? Is it not that it is all now brotherly love? Is it not that one and all of the varieties of natural affection,—not stifled, not lost or merged, but subsisting still, as distinct as ever and stronger than ever,—have infused into them this one common element of brotherhood in the Lord? In me, in my heart, there is brotherly love to every one; equal brotherly love to all.

It does not call forth the same response from all; it has not the same free course with respect to all. In some, alas! it is deeply wounded, meeting with what sorely tries and grieves it, as when the sad cry breaks forth, “Who hath believed our report?”—“All day long have I stretched forth my hands to a perverse and gainsaying generation.” In others, again, it finds a blessed, present recompense; and the fellowship of saints on earth becomes the foretaste of heaven’s joy. But is it not the same affection, real, true, deep brotherly love, that is so sorely vexed in the one instance, and so richly gratified in the other? Was it not the same affection in the heart of Jesus that caused him-to “rejoice in spirit,” as he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes; even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight”?—was it not, I ask, the very same affection that caused him to exclaim, as he drew near to the city, and wept over it, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings; and ye would not”?

Verses 13-16

XXV. Brotherly Love the Fruit and Test of Passing from Death unto Life—The World’s Hatred—The Love of God

“Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you. We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him. Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”—1 John 3:13-16

THERE is an emphatic meaning in the address (1 John 3:13), “my brethren.” It prepares the way for the use of the first person “we” (1 John 3:14). You are of the company of the brethren, as I am. I address you as such, when I exhort you “not to marvel if the world hate you.” For why should you not marvel at this? Why should you not count it strange or take it amiss.

For this, among other reasons: because we know,—you and I, as brethren, know,—that to love as brethren is a grace belonging entirely to the new life of which we are partakers. It is the very mark of our possessing that life. Why then should we marvel if the dead are incapable of it? It is the world’s nature to hate the godly; it was our nature once; and if it is not so now, it is because we have undergone a great change; “we know that we have passed from death unto life because we love the brethren.” It must be so. The absence of this brotherly love is, and must be, a fatal sign of death, and of continued death; “he that loveth not his brother abideth in death.” For not to love a brother is to hate him; and to hate him is to murder him; and to murder him is to forfeit life: “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.” Whereas, on the other hand, the presence of this brotherly love is a blessed sign of life; for it marks our oneness with the Living One; our insight into the manner of his love and our sympathy with it: “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”

Here then we have, in broad contrast, the way of the world, which is death, and the way of God, which is life. It is the way of the world to hate, and so to hate as to murder. It is the way of God to love, and so to love as to lay down life to save. And it is in virtue of this contrast that the test holds good: “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.”

The world’s hatred; God’s love; these are what are here contrasted. And yet there is one point at least of partial similarity. The affection, in either case, fastens in the first instance upon objects opposed to itself. The world hates the brethren; God loves the world, “the world lying in the wicked one.” And in a sense too the ends sought are similar. The world, which hates, would assimilate those it hates to itself, and so be soothed or sated; God, who loves, would assimilate those he loves to himself, and so have satisfaction in them. This indeed may almost be said to be a universal characteristic of sentient and intelligent mind; be it pure and benevolent or depraved and malevolent; be its ruling passion hatred or love. It is, so far, common to the wicked one and the Holy One. The wicked one, in whom the world lies, hates; and his hatred fastens upon the brethren. In his hatred he will not scruple about murdering them outright in cruellest fashion. But he is as well, or even better pleased, if he succeeds in murdering them after a milder method; by getting them to listen to his wily speech. The Holy One loves; and his love fastens on the lost. It is a love in spite of which he must, at the last, acquiesce in the inevitable ruin of multitudes, whom alas! its manifestation fails to touch. But his heart is set on winning them to his embrace, and having them to be of one mind and nature with himself. And his love has this advantage over the opposite affection. Who ever heard of the wicked one laying down his life to secure the accomplishment of his object?—or any Cain who is of the wicked one?”But hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”

I. Of the world’s hatred of the brethren two things are said: it is natural, and it is murderous.

In the first place, it is natural; not marvellous, but quite natural. The Lord prepared his disciples beforehand to expect it, warning them not to look for any other treatment at the world’s hands than he had met with. It should not, therefore, be matter of surprise to you if the world hate you. And yet it is sometimes apt to be so. Notwithstanding all warnings, and all the experience of others who have gone before him, the recent convert, the young Christian, fresh, buoyant, enthusiastic, may fancy that what he has to tell must pierce all consciences and melt all hearts. He goes among his fellows, eager to appear in his new character, to bear his new testimony, to sing his new song. Alas! he comes in contact with what is like a wet blanket thrown in his face, cold looks and rude gestures of impatience, jeers and jibes, if not harsher usage still. Instead of the welcome he anticipated, as he hastened forth, with face all radiant from the heavenly fellowship, and lips divinely touched with a live coal from off the altar, crying,—I have found him, come and see; he meets with chilling indifference, or contempt, or anger. He is tempted to give up as hopeless the task of dealing with the dead. But no. Count it not strange, brother, that you fall into this trial. Why should you? Is their reception of you very different from what, but yesterday perhaps, yours would have been of one coming to you in the same character and on the same errand? Surely you know that love to the brethren, brotherly love, true Christian, Christ-like love—willing to give a cup of cold water to a disciple in the name of a disciple, and welcome the least of the little ones for the Master’s sake—is no plant of natural growth in the soil of corrupt humanity; that, on the contrary, it is the fruit of the great change by means of which a poor sinner “passes from death unto life.” Have you not found it to be so in your own case? Would anything short of that have made you love the brethren, and hear them gladly, when speaking in a brotherly way to you? Would anything else have overcome your hatred of them? Then “marvel not,” nor be impatient, “if the world hate you.”

Again, secondly, the world’s hatred of the brethren is murderous, as regards its objects: “He that loveth not his brother abideth in death: whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.”

“Loveth not,” “hateth,” “murdereth!” There is a sort of dark climax here! Not loving is intensified into hating, and hating into murdering. The three, however, are really one; as the Lord teaches in the sermon on the mount, to which undoubtedly John here points (Matthew 5:21-24). Not to love is to hate; and to hate is to murder. If, therefore, you would be safe from the risk of being a murderer, see that you are not a hater. And if you would not be in danger of being a hater, see that you are a lover.

It is a solemn lesson that is thus taught; and it would seem to be meant for you who are apt to marvel if the world hate you, as well as for the world that hates you. In that application, it may suggest some important practical thoughts.

1. When Abel first caught a glimpse of Cain’s state of mind towards him, he might feel as one who painfully dreamed. He must have been slow to take it in. They had grown up together in the same home; worked and played together; prayed together at the same mother’s knee; listened together to the same father’s teaching; done one another many offices of kindness; enjoyed much pleasant intercourse in house and field. While that strange conversation about God and his worship goes on, Abel is startled as he sees Cain’s dark frown betokening growing wrath. Hate gleams more and more from those kindling eyes. Is it fear that pales the meek martyr’s face, or is it anger that agitates his frame, as that hoarse voice threatens and that cruel arm is raised? Not so. It is horrible surprise at first; and then deep concern, tender pity, bitter grief. That Cain has ceased to love him as a brother,—that is what chiefly wounds him; wounds him more keenly than the stroke that fells him to the ground. Has he lost, can he not win back, a brother’s love? Is there such hatred, so murderous, in one who is still so dear to him? Will he rather slay me than taste and see how good our God is who has provided for us both the same sin-offering of the lamb? It is a bitter sorrow. But it is not the bitterness of a sense of his own wrong; it is the bitterness of the melancholy insight he has got into his poor brother’s dark and miserable heart.

Ah! think;—when you come in contact with some one to whom you would fain commend the Saviour and the sacrifice you have yourself found so precious,—an old familiar friend perhaps with whom your intercourse has been wont to be frequent and sweet,—a humble neighbour who has often been glad to see you under his lowly roof, to accept your alms in his poverty or your kindly sympathy in his distress; and when you begin to discover that, as a child of God, you are not so welcome now as you were when like himself you were a child of the world; when he treats you coldly or rudely, and makes it plain that he would fain in any way get rid of you;—think rather of his case than of your own. It may be hard for you to bear with his irritability and incivility; and you may be provoked, if not to retaliate, yet to let him alone and make your escape. But consider him; and have pity upon him. This malignant spirit of dislike to righteousness, and to him whose works are righteous, is far worse for him to cherish than for you to suffer. Leave him not. Rather stay by him and plead with him; even though his hatred rise to murder.

2. For you need, for yourselves, and with special reference to the world’s hatred of you, to be ever on your guard, lest somewhat of the old dark spirit should creep in again into your own hearts. And remember it may insinuate itself very insidiously and stealthily.

Consider once more the stages or steps: not loving; hating; murdering. Ah! how easily may the first of these begin: not loving. It is a simple negation; no taking of any positive step; but only, as it were, not taking any step at all; or not this or that particular step; giving up; letting alone; using less energy of prayer and pains; feeling less interest.

Who is it that you have ceased, or are ceasing, to love with a true brotherly love like Christ’s? Is it one still unconverted and unsaved? You have been dealing with him, as you think, faithfully and affectionately; pleading with him for Christ, and with Christ for him. You have had much patience, and have persevered long. Nor has it been mere taskwork with you; it has been a work of love. You have felt a real concern for his soul, a real longing for his salvation. But somehow the case is not very hopeful; it was not very hopeful at first, and it is becoming less so, or at least not more so. You are getting reconciled to the idea of failure and disappointment. You are not at first conscious of a diminished regard for your poor brother; but you are becoming less sanguine, and gradually less earnest. The work of love becomes more like taskwork now. You will do your duty; you will continue to be kind to him, to warn and exhort him, to set Christ before him, and urge him to believe and live. But there is less cordiality in what you do and say; you bestow less of your heart upon him. This may be natural, in a sense and measure perhaps unavoidable, and not altogether unreasonable. There may be a limit to your earnest striving, in love, with an obdurate sinner, as there is a limit to the striving, in love, of God’s own Spirit with him. But beware. It is not because he ceases to love that the Spirit ceases to strive. See that it be not otherwise with you; that it be not your ceasing to love that makes you cease to strive. If it be Christ’s mind that you should shake off the dust of your feet as a testimony of judgment against any one whom you have been plying with the testimony of mercy, he will make that plain enough to you by unmistakeable indications of his will. And you will see all the more clearly, and judge all the more fairly, if there be no ceasing to love; no growing coldness and indifference; no feeling of a sort of apathetic acquiescence in the inevitableness of that poor soul’s fate. No such feeling is there in the tears of Jesus over Jerusalem. Beware, I repeat, of any such feeling insinuating itself into your bosom. Not to love, with a love that yearns to save, and weeps rivers of waters for the lost, is to hate; and to hate is to murder. “Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation.”

Or is it one of Christ’s little ones; one of the fatherless and widows whom you visit in their affliction; one whose feet you have counted it a privilege to wash? The service has been a delight; that suffering saint’s chamber has been to you a Bethel. You have got in it far more than you have given of spiritual refreshment and consolation. So you say and feel, under the impulse of your first love for that brother in Christ. But on further acquaintance you find, or think you find, things in him or about him that are fitted to damp and repel your ardent advances. He is not so perfect as you thought; his person not so pleasant; his room not so tidy. Infirmities come out; disagreeable incidents occur; rude friends interfere. It is not romance now, but reality. You are not quite so enthusiastic as you were in your esteem of him, or quite so frequent and regular in your calls upon him. A sort of weariness comes over you when you knock at his door; a sort of distasteful recoil arrests you as you enter his chamber. It is plain that your Christian admiration, your brotherly love towards him, is not exactly what it was; not so glowing and so gushing. It may be as real and genuine; it may be even more trustworthy, because it is more sober. If so, it is well. But beware. It may be otherwise. There may be an approximation to a state of mind not quite so right or safe;—“not loving your brother,” ceasing to love him as your brother in Christ, allowing natural or accidental causes of estrangement or indifference to cool your brotherly affection. And what then? May there not come something worse? A certain half-unconscious dislike; a certain pleasure, even in hearing him ridiculed or defamed; a not unwilling participation in the idle talk that, exaggerating defects, and overlooking or misrepresenting excellencies, would take away his fair name and reputation, and play the murderer as regards his Christian character and standing?

Be on your guard against this spirit of the world finding harbour again in your breasts. I speak to you who have “passed from death unto life,” and who know what it is to love the brethren; to love all men with a true brotherly love in the Lord, a love that looks on them as immortal beings, having near them a Saviour dying for them, having in them a Spirit striving with them, having before them a Father waiting to be gracious. Even you need to be warned against the world’s evil temper of dislike and envy. Consider how insidious it is. It begins with what may attract little observation and awaken little alarm; a change, scarcely noticeable, or if noticed easily explained by altered circumstances, sobering age, sad experience, repeated disappointment, or any of the thousand causes that make the heart beat less wildly as time rolls on. Consider also its deadly danger. The “not loving,” or not loving so purely and so truly, comes to be hating, avowed or unavowed, distaste, disinclination, displeasure, dislike; estrangement, suspicion, envy. And to hate is to “murder;” one way or other, by neglect or by calumny, by ill thoughts or ill words or ill deeds, it murders. Consider, finally, how natural it is so natural that only your “passing from death unto life” can rid you of it, and make you capable of its opposite. You need not marvel if the world thus hate; for it is its nature. Nor need you marvel that you should still require to be exhorted not thus to hate; for it is your nature too. Grace may overcome it; grace alone can do so. And even grace can do so only through continual watchfullness and prayer, continual recognition of the life to which you pass from death, and continual exercise of the love which is the characteristic of that life.

II. Of this love, as of the hatred, two things are said. In the first place, it is natural now to the spiritual mind; natural as the fruit and sign of the new life; “We know that we have passed from death unto life because we love the brethren.” It is natural to us, in our old state of death, to hate; it is, or should be, natural to us, in our new state of life, to love. For our life is our participation with Christ in his life; and his life, like the Father’s, is manifested in love; or is love. Our life, therefore, is also love; it is our loving as the Father loves, and as the Son loves. And this, secondly, implies that the love in question is the very opposite of the murderous hatred of the devil; it is self-sacrificing, like the love of God himself: “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16).

It is a high ideal of this love to men as brethren that is set before us. It is sympathy with God in his love to us; and in that love as measured by his laying down his life for us. Whom does he thus love? Us: and all such as we are; or as we were, when his love reached us. “Scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” “When we were without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” For us sinners, for us without strength, for us ungodly, he laid down his life. And it was a brotherly love to us that moved him to do so. It was as our brother that he sacrificed himself for us. It is that we may be his brethren that he would have us to perceive his love in sacrificing himself for us, and to believe it.

Oh! to be enabled to enter more and more into this brotherly love of Jesus; to apprehend its nature; to imbibe its spirit! Truly it is the opposite of the hatred of a brother which marks one abiding in death. That hatred prompts to take away another’s life; this love to lay down one’s own. “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer;” but here is one so loving his brother, that to save him alive he sacrifices himself. Cain was bent on slaying his brother: Abel, was anxious, at the risk of death, to win Cain. We, in our hatred, because he was righteous and we were evil, slew a greater than Abel. He loved us with more than Abel’s love when “he laid down his life for us.”

We know that we have passed from death unto life, when we love our fellow-men with a brotherly love like his; when we are so bent on saving and blessing them, that we are willing not only to give our whole lives for their good, but to suffer all loss, even death itself, at their hands. Even when they are still our enemies, because the enemies of our Lord; even while they hate us, and persecute us, and say all manner of evil against us; how does it become us still to love them as brethren, with a love that would seek them as brethren, and welcome them as brethren, and live and die for them as brethren! Can they be more hostile or injurious to us, than we were to Christ when he loved us and laid down his life for us? Have they wearied us as we have wearied him? or provoked us as we have provoked him? or pierced us as we have pierced him? How shall we not continue to care for them and plead with them, as Christ continued to care for us and plead with us,—oh! how long, how patiently, how tenderly,—if by any means he might bring us to receive him as laying down his life for us! And when, by his Spirit, they are moved and melted, and on the footing of that great propitiation reconciled to God and to us; how shall we set bounds to the warmth and cordiality of our embrace of them as now our brethren indeed! Can we grudge any service or sacrifice to show our love, even should it be the laying down of our lives for them, as he laid down his life for us?

This is our security against the evil spirit of Cain coming in again to trouble us. It is to make full proof of the better spirit of Abel, or of him in whom Abel, like us, believed, even Jesus, who so loved us, even when dead in sins, that he gave himself for us, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God; and who so loveth us, as his brethren, for whom he laid down his life, that he would have us to be sharers as his brethren with him in all the love with which the Father loveth him and all the glory which the Father giveth him.

Verses 17-21

XXVI. Righteousness or Truth in Brotherly Love—Essential to the Answer of a Good Conscience in Ourselves and Before God

“But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth. And hereby we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before him. For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.”—1 John 3:17-21

THE lesson here is sincerity. It is with special reference to the grace or affection of brotherly love, that this lesson is in the first instance enforced; and the manner in which the subject is introduced is noticeable.

The highest possible model or ideal has been presented for imitation: “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” Then immediately, by way of contrast, the testing case put is made to turn on one of the simplest and commonest instances of the exercise of human pity: “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” It looks almost like irony or sarcasm. Your love to the brethren, to men as brethren, should reach to your laying down your lives for them. Yes! And it would, if that were necessary, or might do them good. So you say, and think. But what if, having this world’s good, and seeing your brother have need, you shut up your bowels of compassion from him? How then dwelleth the love of God in you? Is that loving as God loves?

Beware of self-deception in this matter. It is easy to imagine what you would do to win or help a brother; and yeti may please yourselves by carrying the imagination to any length you choose. If a great act of self-sacrifice would avail, you would not shrink from it. But what if you grudge some far readier and easier service, a gift to the needy out of your abundance, or a visit of sympathy to the widow out of your leisure, or a word in season to the weary out of the fullness of your own happier experience, or a helping hand to snatch a perishing soul from the pit and set him on the rock on which the Lord has set you? You will lay down your life for one who is, or who may be, a brother! And yet you cannot lay down for him your love of this world’s good; your love of ease and selfish comfort; your fastidious taste, that shrinks from contact with squalid wretchedness and vulgar ways; your proud or shy reserve, that keeps the humble at a distance; your false shame, that sends you in upon yourself when you should be sowing beside all waters.

Thus somewhat sternly John’s tender expostulation—for it is very tender—is introduced: “My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue.” There is enough in the world of that sort of love. “Let us love in deed and in truth.” It is only thus that we can “know ourselves to be of the truth,” or to be true, and so can “assure our hearts before God.” We can have no such assurance if our consciousness hints that there is guile in our spirit. “For if our heart condemn us,” how can we face him “who is greater than our heart and knoweth all things;” all things about our heart; its secret windings and subtle refuges of lies? It is only “if our heart condemn us not,”—condemn us not, that is, as unrighteous and insincere in the matter on hand,—it is only then that we can “have confidence toward God.”

Thus John brings out into prominence a general principle connecting conscience and faith, with immediate reference to his particular topic of brotherly love.

The principle may be briefly stated. There can be no faith where there is not conscience; no more of faith than there is of conscience; no firm faith without a clear conscience. In plain terms, I cannot look my God in the face if I cannot look myself in the face. In a sense, I must be able to justify myself if I would took on God as justifying me; I must be able to acquit myself of guile if I would reckon on his acquitting me of guilt. If my heart condemns me, much more must he condemn me who is greater than my heart, and knoweth all things.

But must not my heart always condemn me? Must I not be always confessing that my heart condemns me, and that therefore the searcher of it must condemn me much more? No, This is not the language of legitimate confession, although it is often used as such. On the contrary, it is rather a protest against the very sort of confession which it is too commonly employed to express. It rebukes all conventionalism; all formal routine or covert guile; all false dealing with myself and with God. It demands, in worship and fellowship, that I approach him who is greater than my heart and who knoweth all things, as one whose heart does not condemn him.

Reserving the special application of this principle to the grace of brotherly kindness, I ask you for the present to consider it more generally with reference to the divine love; first, as you have to receive it by faith; and, secondly, as you have to retain it and act it out in your loving walk with God and man.

I. I am a receiver of this love. And it concerns me much that my faith, by which I receive it, should be strong and steadfast; which, however, it cannot be unless my conscience, in receiving it, is guileless. David experienced this; and he describes his experience in the thirty-second Psalm. There was a time, he says, when he kept silence; when there was guile in his spirit. Then he had no rest. He was unwilling to be thoroughly searched and tried by God; to have the hurt of his soul otherwise than slightly healed; to have the deadly sore probed to the bottom, that the oil and balm to be poured in might reach the root of the disease. If his heart condemned him; and there was one greater than his heart, knowing all things, whose “hand day and night was heavy upon him” (Psalms 32:3-4). He got enlargement and assurance only when he tried the more excellent way of full and frank confession, apprehending full and free forgiveness (Psalms 32:5-7). Then his heart did not condemn him, and he had confidence towards God; being of the truth, he assured his heart before God.

It must be noticed, however, that the ground of this assurance or confidence is not the consciousness of integrity, thus declared to be indispensable, but that gracious dealing on the part of God for which it makes way. The negative form of John’s language is not without its meaning here—“if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.” It describes simply the removal of an obstacle; a hindrance or obstruction taken out of the way. A haze or mist of earth is dispelled, that the sun from heaven may give light and warmth. A work of the devil is undone, that the work of God may be wrought. For this inward misgiving, this secret consciousness of insincerity, “our heart condemning us,” is of that wicked one. It comes of his lie still heeded, and, as it were, half believed. We must let it go, that the truth may make us free.

The plain question then is, Are you dealing truly with God as he deals truly with you? Are you meeting him, as he meets you, in good faith? Is reserve on your part laid aside, as it is thoroughly laid aside on his part? He makes advances to you in his gospel, advances most generous and free; he gives you assurances most firm and faithful. These are the ground and warrant of your confidence before him; these alone, and not anything in yourselves, in your own consciousness of integrity, or in your conscience acquitting you of deceit. But they can be so only when they have their free course and their perfect work in you. And that they cannot have if there is guile in your spirit, if your heart condemns you.

May not this be the explanation of that want of assurance of which some anxious souls complain? They are not at ease; they have not comfort, peace, liberty: they feel as if they could not win Christ, so as to be sure of being in him. They see how complete he is for them, as well as how complete they would be if once in him; and they would fain win him and be found in him. But they cannot. Why not? What is there between him and them? Guilt it cannot be; for guilt of deepest dye he takes away; but it may be guile. Sin it cannot be; but it may be silence; keeping silence. Let them not lay the blame of their unquiet and unsatisfied state of mind upon God, or Christ, or the Holy Spirit; upon the gospel way of salvation, or upon the gospel call. All the persons of the Godhead are in favour of their assuring their hearts before God. In the Father, they have rich, free, sovereign grace; altogether gratuitous; unbought and unconditional. In the Son, they have an infinitely precious atonement, an infinitely meritorious work of righteousness, meeting all claims in law against them and upon them. In the Spirit, they have an almighty agency, shutting them up into Christ, and taking of what is his to show to them. Then in the gospel, they have all this love of the one God,— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,—made over to them, if they will but have it, without price and without reserve; just in order that they may assure their hearts before God. The whole plan of salvation contemplates that result, and makes fun and adequate provision for its being realised.

If it is not, why is it not? Look well to this question, my brother. See if there is not in you some double-dealing, for which “your heart condemns you.” Is all straightforward? Is all real and downright earnest with you? Or are you toying and playing with spiritual frames as if it were all a mere affair of sentimentalism? Or are you brooding over your own gloomy thoughts with that sort of morbid self-satisfaction that feeds on doubt and despair.

Thus, first, is it a real thirsting for God, a genuine and strong desire for his face and favour, that is moving you; such as will break through obstructions and “take the kingdom by force”? Or is it the old Israelitish temper of peevish and petulant discontent, rather pleased than not to have to complain that you cannot find the living water? And is all right as regards your perfect willingness to fall in with God’s plan? Is there no disingenuousness here; no dislike of being indebted wholly to free grace; no hesitancy about letting go your last hold of the prop on which you have been leaning, and casting yourself, as by a leap in the dark, into the arms of the waiting Saviour? Above all, thirdly, is there a clear understanding as to the terms on which you would choose to be with God? Is there no shrinking from the footing on which Christ would place you with his Father and your Father, his God and your God? Is there a sort of half-consciousness in yon that you would really apprehend and welcome the mediation of Christ better than you do, if it were meant merely to establish a relation between God and you, so far amicable as to secure your being let alone now and let off at last; and that in consideration of certain specified and ascertainable acts of homage; without its being insisted on that God and you should become so completely one? If your heart misgive you and condemn you on such points as these, it is no wonder that you have not peace with him “who is greater than your heart, and knoweth all things.”

But, beloved, now your hearts condemn you not! “You are of the truth” you are true yourselves, and truth is your object; the truth; the truth of God. Then you can have no objection to take in the truth, full and entire, no matter what humiliating discoveries it gives you of your own character and state; or what demands it makes upon you for submission to the sovereignty and grace of God. You have no quarrel with the gospel method of salvation for anything in it that abases you and exalts the Lord alone; if you are “of the truth.” Nor can you now be cleaving to any righteousness of your own. You cut the last cord that binds you to the old natural way of making your peace with God, and sink into the embrace of him who is himself your peace. And it is peace, immediate, full, free, unreserved, that you are eager to have. No truce or compromise will content you now. You cannot be too completely reconciled to God, or brought into friendship too intimate, or fellowship too close and confidential, with your Father in heaven.

Is it so? In all this your hearts condemn you not. Then why should you not “have confidence toward God”? Is it not precisely thus that he is willing, in truth and faithfulness, to deal with you? Then taste and see that God is good; suffer the love of God to dwell in you, without obstruction on your part or any partial dealing any more.

II. Not only as receiving God’s love does it concern me to see to it that my heart condemns me not; but as retaining it, and acting it out, in my walk and conduct. Otherwise, “how dwelleth the love of God in me”?

The apostle Paul speaks of “holding faith and a good conscience; “holding the mystery of faith in a good conscience. “Herein,” he says, “do I exercise myself, that I have always a conscience void of offence, toward God and toward men.” This was, in a large measure, the secret, or at least one indispensable condition, of his confident boldness, as a worker and a witness for Christ. His heart did not misgive or condemn him, as to any part of his habitual demeanour and behaviour. If it had, he would have been instantly smitten with a sort of moral or spiritual paralysis. For the absence of conscious, or half-conscious, guile, is not more essential to your standing fight with God, as regards your acceptance and peace, than it is to your continuing to stand right with him in the whole work of faith and labour of love by which you have to glorify him.

What a source of imbecility and unhappiness, even for the Lord’s own people, is there in this; “their heart condemning them!” Peter’s heart must have condemned him, more or less consciously, when he entered the high-priest’s hall, and mingled with the servants. What had he to do $here at all; getting in as he did; taking the place he did, and the character? Could he fail to have some misgivings, as he stood beside the fire warming himself, like any ordinary onlooker, while false testimony, that he could have contradicted, was swearing away his master’s life? He “kept silence” and slunk away among the menials of the office. He must have felt that either he should not have been there at all, or if there, he should have been at his master’s side. He could not “assure his heart before God,” or “have confidence toward God.” It is all the less surprising, in these circumstances, that he should have fallen when sharper trial came. He was not found “holding faith and a good conscience.”

May we not thus account for the want of joy and power that too often characterises your practical Christianity? Your experience is felt to be lacking in life; your influence somehow does not tell. May it not be because “your heart condemns you”? “Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth.” Is that happiness yours? Is there nothing in which you allow yourself about which you have a doubt? Have you a latent suspicion that you are not quite acting up to the standard of attainment at which you ought to aim; that you are not following out your convictions to the full extent to which they might lead you; that you are tolerating what may be at least of questionable expediency? You may have your excuses; your reasons why you cannot be expected to be altogether so heavenly as one, or so self-denied as another, or so decided and outspoken as a third, or so emphatic a protester against the world’s follies as a fourth. But do these reasons satisfy you? Do they keep your mind at ease? Or have you occasional qualms.

It is a great matter if the eye be single; if your heart do not condemn you. The consciousness of integrity is, of itself, a well-spring of peace and power in the guileless soul. The clear look, the erect gait, the firm step, the ringing voice, of an upright man, are as impressive upon others as they are expressive of himself. But that is not all. The assurance or confidence of which John speaks, is not self-assurance or self-confidence. No. It is “assurance before God;” it is “confidence toward God.”

Why does the apostle make “our heart condemning us” so fatal to our “assuring our heart before God”? It is because “God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” He assumes that it is with God we have to do; and that we feel this. Our own verdict upon ourselves is comparatively a small affair; we ask the verdict of God. “With me,” says Paul, “it is a very small matter that I should be judged of man’s judgment; yea I judge not mine own self.” I am not consciously self-convicted; “yet am I not thereby justified; but he that judgeth me is the Lord.”

If indeed my heart condemns me, there can be little room for question as to what I am. Even then, however, what is fatal to my peace and power, is not my heart condemning me; but God’s being greater than my heart, and knowing all things. My own heart is not likely to condemn me without God condemning me also, and still more. But does it follow that, if my heart acquit me, he must do the same? The contrary, rather, might be inferred. My heart not condemning me might be no proof or presumption that God did not condemn me, He may not acquit me as easily as I acquit myself; for he is greater than my heart, and knoweth all things. There is, therefore, not a little grace here; in our being permitted to infer, from our own heart not condemning us, a like acquittal on the part of God.

And yet how should it not be so if we are his children? Does not the Spirit witness with our spirit that we are so? And that, not merely generally, with reference to the general question of our being God’s children; but specifically, with reference to our being at each successive moment in our Christian experience, and each successive step in our Christian life, his children; his children, not in right of a past act of adoption and work of regeneration, but in virtue of a present filial heart and filial frame of mind towards him. It is thus that “the Spirit witnesseth with our spirit.”

Our spirit witnesses first; faithfully; for we are upon honour. How is it with you, brother, with reference to this present duty; this present trial? What are you thinking and feeling about it? That it is hard, too hard; that too much is asked of you, or laid upon you; but that you must do, or bear, as best you may, simply because you cannot help it? These are servile thoughts and feelings; they breathe the spirit of bondage, not the spirit of adoption. Your heart condemns you; your own spirit witnesses against you; the Divine Spirit therefore cannot witness for you. You cannot lift an honest filial eye to your Father; for “he is greater than your heart, and knoweth all things.” But if now, by grace, yea get the victory over these risings of the old slavish mind in you, and have again somewhat of the same mind that was in him who was ever saying, “Abba, Father,” as to every business, every cup, every cross; ah! then your heart condemns you not of servile guile, and the sullen, dogged sense of bondage is all gone. Your own spirit witnesses, not of past but of present sonship. It is “Abba, Father” with you and in you, here and now; you are here and now crying, “Abba, Father.” And another there is who is in you here and now crying, “Abba, Father;” the Spirit of adoption; the Spirit of God’s own Son. So he witnesses with your spirit that you are the sons of God; that you are so here and now, at this moment, in the doing of this painful business, in the drinking of this bitter cup, in the bearing of this heavy cross. And thus he gives you great enlargement and assurance, great boldness and confidence, as you walk abroad in the light of God’s loving face shining upon you, to manifest his love everywhere and always among your fellowmen, his love as “dwelling in you.”

For I must advert again to the immediate occasion of this appeal of John on the subject of sincerity or truthfullness. It is brotherly love of which he is discoursing; the duty of loving all men as brethren; loving every man as a brother; with a true and real brotherly love; a love that has respect to his being, or becoming, a brother in the Lord. Judge yourselves here, that you may not be judged. What says your heart, your conscience, as to this matter? Does it acquit you? Does it absolve you from the blame of blood-guiltiness? Paul could take the people among whom he had lived and laboured to record, the day he bade them farewell, that he was pure from the blood of them all; for he had not shunned to declare unto them the whole counsel of God. May I venture to do so? Woe is me! Can you venture? Have you done what you could? Are you doing what you can? Or have you misgivings? Here, a stumbling-block is put in the way of an inquirer by some sad inconsistency, or some cold repulse! There, a precious opportunity of showing a little kindness, or speaking a word in season, is lost irretrievably? Ah! are these hands of yours clean which you hold out to some dear friend, or some well-disposed neighbour, or some stranger at your gate; clean from the sin of careless dealing with that man, as regards the welfare of his soul for eternity? Are you conscious of indifference or insensibility about his spiritual state being your prevailing temper, in your intercourse with this or that person in your house, or in your social circle? Are you conscious of estrangement, alienation, distance, dislike? Does your conscience tell you that you are not treating him kindly as regards his own good, or not treating him faithfully as regards the claims of God? Ah! then, you cannot face your own heart; and how then can you, with open eye and upward gaze, face your God? If there be even a lurking suspicion of duty possibly neglected, or of wrong possibly done, rest not till all is righted. “If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first he reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.”

And generally I would urge the vast importance of guilelessness and unreservedness, in the whole domain of your spiritual experience. Why is it that we see so many joyless, cheerless, one might almost say useless Christians? Why so many living and walking in such a way as to give the notion of godliness being all gloomy doubt, painful discipline, self-absorbing anxiety, listless musing? Awake! Arise! Shake off the chains that bind you. Go forth in open day, under the open sky, to meet your God and Father, with your heart open to him, as his heart is open to you. Stand fast in the liberty with which Christ makes you free. Be upright. Be honest, frank, and fearless. Be yourselves; out and out yourselves. Dare to avow yourselves what you are, to God, to your own hearts, to all men. Be of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; yourselves time; receiving all truth, declaring all truth; everywhere, and always. Be honest, thoroughly honest, in the closet, in the family, in the market-place, in the parlour. Be transparently honest to yourself and to your brother. Be honest to your God and Father in heaven. Do but consent to treat him as he treats you. His whole heart, he himself wholly, is yours; all his love; all his fullness. Let your whole heart be his. Be you yourselves his; with no reserve; be altogether, now and for ever, his.

Verses 22-23

XXVII. Righteousness Essential to Our Pleasing God and to His Hearing Us

“And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight. And this is his commandment, That we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment.”—1 John 3:22-23

THIS is one of the strongest assertions that we have in Scripture of the efficacy of good works, as bearing on our relation to God. It has no reference, however, to the question of our acceptance or justification; it raises an ulterior question. It manifestly connects a certain privilege with a certain practice, in the case of true Christians, considered as already in a state of grace. And it connects them, so as to make the privilege dependent upon the practice.

The privilege is, that “whatsoever we ask, we receive of him.” This is partly an explanation of the previous statement (1 John 3:21), and partly an additional thought. The “confidence which we have toward God” is such as emboldens us to ask what we will. And we ask confidently, because we know that God will not refuse us anything that we ask.

But it is the fact itself here asserted, and not our sense or apprehension of it, that chiefly claims attention. It is certainly a strong assertion, “Whatsoever we ask we receive of him.” And it is altogether unqualified; absolute and unrestricted. We are on such terms with God that he will deny us nothing;—that is the plain unequivocal meaning of what John says. And it is not to be modified or explained away by any supposed exceptions or reservations. It must be taken in all its breadth as literally true, in connection with the practice on which it is dependent.

That practice is obedience, “we keep his commandments;”—or the performance of good works, “we do those things which are pleasing in his sight.” For there are not two separate acts or exercises here spoken of; but only one. “Doing things pleasing in God’s sight” is not something over and above “keeping his commandments,” or something different from it. That cannot be. For it is not merely doing things, any things, that may be pleasing in his sight; but doing “those things;” which must mean doing the things which he has commanded, and none other.

Is, then, this second clause a mere redundancy? Nay, it adds much to the meaning. For one thing, it implies that when “we keep his commandments,” or do the things commanded, we do them as “things pleasing in his sight”—we take that view of them in the doing of them. And further, it implies that God is really pleased with them. They are done in obedience to his commandments, and so done as to be in very truth “pleasing in his sight.” They do please him; and it is because they do please him, that he is so pleased with us who do them, that he can refuse us nothing that we choose to ask. He derives real gratification from what we do for him. What then will he not do for us?

To make this view of the matter clear, let us take our Lord himself as our example, in respect of both of these sayings of his beloved disciple.

I. “We keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.” So John writes; and so also Jesus speaks; “He that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please him” (John 8:29). That was the hold which he had on the Father. It is, in a measure, the same hold that John says we have on the Father. “I do always those things that please him.” “We do those things that are pleasing in his sight.” The language is the very same; the sense and spirit in which it is used must be the very same also. Let us consider it as used by Jesus; let us try to enter into his mind and heart in using it.

There is indeed in it, as used by him, a depth of meaning which we dare not hope, or even try, to fathom. It touches what must ever be an inscrutable mystery; the ineffable mutual complacency of the great Three in One, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and especially the Father’s ineffable complacency in the Son o£ his love, as fulfilling on earth and in time the counsel of the Godhead which dates from everlasting in heaven. But Jesus uttered the words for our sakes; and as expressing a human feeling which we may understand, and with which he would have us to sympathise. That human feeling in the bosom of Jesus must have been very simple, and intensely filial; realising intensely his filial relation to the Father, and his filial oneness with the Father. There is, if I may venture so to speak, a childlike simplicity, a sort of artless straightforwardness, in his saying so confidingly, so lovingly, so naturally, “I do always those things that please him.” It is almost as if the words came out, half-unconsciously, from his lips; as if he were thinking aloud. And certainly it is not of himself and his merit that he is thinking; but of the Father and the Father’s love. I always please him; what I do always pleases him; is the quiet comfort he takes in a trying moment. For it is indeed a trying moment. He has the cross in view. Men, displeased with him, are to “lift him up,” and leave him to die in his agony alone. Not so the Father. He leaves me not alone; he is with me; “for I do always those things that please him.”

Somewhat similar are the circumstances in which John would have us to say; “we do those things that are pleasing in his sight.” We are not to marvel if the world hate us; the source of its hatred we know (1 John 3:13). And we know also the source of that better spirit of brotherly love with which it is to be met (1 John 3:14-16). Only let there be, on our part, open, guileless, unreserved sincerity (1 John 3:17-21). Let our heart, as in the sight of God, acquit us of all secret dishonesty. Let there be truth in the inner man; the truth in love. Then we have the confidence of little children toward God. And, as little children, we join with John, and with Jesus, in saying,—Whatever the world may do to us, we are not alone; the Father is with us, and heareth us, for “we do those things that are pleasing in his sight.”

There is nothing then here of a legal spirit; nothing of the Pharisee’s self-righteous gratitude: “God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are.” It is not thus that John asks us to join with him in saying “we do those things that are pleasing in God’s sight.” Rather, he makes our saying this the very test of our entire freedom from all guile in our spirits; all that sort of guile which such prayer as the Pharisee’s implies. For the Pharisee’s prayer represents him as keeping God’s commandments, in so far as he does keep them, merely to gain a selfish end and serve a selfish purpose. If he cares about doing what pleases God at all, it is merely with that view. He may be in earnest, ever so much. It is the earnestness of one seeking to make terms with an adversary, and win his favour or forbearance by a measure of forced submission. It is the earnestness of one striving to effect a truce or compromise, on conditions ever so severe, for a boon ever so far off, and apt to be lost after all. Take the man who is serving God most anxiously, and with most painstaking observance of the letter of the commandments, on that footing; on the footing of his having thus to win his way to such kind and measure of God’s countenance as he thinks he needs, or cares to have. Ask that man, as before God, and in the eye of his own conscience, Is all clear and open, free and forth-flowing, between you and him whom you so painfully serve? Is there not, on the contrary, reserve and restraint; a holding back, as it were, of confidence on both sides; something still outstanding between him and you which makes you feel that all is hollow and unsatisfying?

Oh, to be converted, and become as little children! First, to be made willing as little children, that all this misunderstanding should be ended, and this breach thoroughly healed at once, and once for all, as the Father would have it to be, in the Son. And then, as little children, to know something of a little child’s touching and artless simplicity, as we look with loving eye into the loving eye of the Father, and lovingly lisp out the touching words: “We keep his commandments and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.”

Therefore now, O humble and simple child of God, if, in saying this, you feel yourself to be identified with the holy child Jesus; if your saying it is really his saying it in you by his Spirit; if it is as one with him that you say it, or in all honesty would fain say it; do not hesitate, or have any scruple, from any apprehension of its being presumptuous, or any misgiving lest it should savour of self-righteousness. There can be no risk of that, if you say it in and with Christ. There was no self-righteousness in him; there could not be. For he began his work, himself already personally accepted as righteous; and it was as a Son that he learned obedience. He makes you one with himself in his acceptance and in his sonship. He asks you to let him make you thus one with himself; on the ground of his making himself one with you in your sin and death. You are as he is when you join with him in his saying, “I do always those things that please him.” There is no self-righteousness here; scarcely even self-consciousness. It is all direct, outward upward motion of the soul; the outgoing of filial trust and love and loyalty; the fond and guileless unreserve, one would say, of an unreflecting child, who would be amazed if any doubt were cast on his father’s being always with him, and always hearing him; for his heart bears him out in saying, with a child’s simple and artless love,—I keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.

Only make sure that with reference to this matter there is no guile in your spirit; that your heart does not condemn you. And there is one plain and practical test or safeguard. Your doing those things that are pleasing in God’s sight, is simply your keeping his commandments. If your heart is not right with God, you will be seeking to recommend yourself to him, by services or sacrifices that you think may give you some extra claim upon him, and almost lay him under obligation to you, as if you could benefit or profit him. You will be going about to establish or make good certain meritorious and tangible grounds of confidence, that may avail you when you have to plead with him in the judgment. But does not all that imply deceitful and double-dealing both with him and with yourselves? If you would really please him, he has told you how to do so. You are not to cast about for ways and means of winning his favour; his favour is freely yours, in his Son. And what now will he have at your hands? How, on the footing on which he would have you to be with him, are you to please him? How, but just as his own Son pleased him? It was his meat to do the will of him that sent him, and to finish his work. He kept the Father’s commandments, and so abode in the Father’s love.

II. “And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him.” In this saying also we have the countenance of Jesus; for we find him using it: “Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always” (John 11:41-42). It was beside the grave of Lazarus. What it was that he had been asking, is not said. So far as appears, the prayer for the answer to which he gives thanks consisted not of articulate words but of tears and groans. At all events he was heard; what he asked, whatever it was, he received of the Father. And while openly acknowledging this, for the sake of the bystanders, he is careful to explain that it is no exceptional case. “Thou hearest me always;” “whatsoever I ask, I receive of thee always;” thou never refusest me anything. Why Jesus was so anxious, in this instance, publicly to connect the miracle he was intending to do with the Father’s hearing his secret prayer, it is perhaps useless to conjecture. It was a signal display of his power to overcome the corruption of the grave that he was about to give; that power which be is to put forth on a wider scale when he comes again. It was fitting, one might say, that in giving it he should, with more than ordinary explicitness and solemnity, carry the Father along with him. But his studied generalisation of his thanksgiving is remarkable. “I knew that thou hearest me always.” Never doth the Father leave me alone; for I do always those things that please him; and he heareth me always; I have his ear always; and whatsoever I ask I receive of him.

The Lord’s manner of asking varies much. He weeps. He groans in the Spirit. He offers up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears. He asks, sometimes, as it might seem, almost incoherently (John 12:27). Once, at least, he asks conditionally, “Father, if it be possible.” But, be his manner of asking what it may, always the Father heareth him; always, whatsoever he asks, he receives of him.

“Thou hearest me always!” It is a blessed assurance. And the blessedness of it really lies, not so much in the good he gets from the Father’s hearing him, as in the Father’s hearing him itself; not so much in what he receives, as in his receiving it from the Father. For this is the charm, the joy, the consolation, of that access to the Father and that influence with the Father which you now have in common with the Son. It is not that you may enrich and gratify yourselves with what you win by asking from him. But it is literally that whatever you ask you receive of him, as his gift; the proof that he is ever with you and heareth you always. Do you not lay the stress on the “him”? Whatsoever you ask you receive of him.” You might have to do with one as to whom your only consideration would be, how much you could get out of him or extract from him. There is a common proverb about quartering upon an enemy. And there is no little satisfaction in the idea that you have a powerful and wealthy patron at your command, on whose resources you may draw at pleasure. But it is not thus that you stand with God. In these other instances, the chief, if not the whole value of any influence you have, is merely the amount of actual benefit obtained. The asker cares little or nothing for the motive which leads the giver to give, or far the disposition towards himself that the gift implies and indicates. It is all the same to him, whether it be extorted by menace; or wrung reluctantly by importunity; or made matter of cold and cautious stipulation. So as only he gets, any how, and on any terms, a certain amount or quantity of what he wants, he is content. That is not the mind of Christ, when he says, “The Father is with me” “thou hearest me always.” The support which this thought gives to him is not that it warrants him in demanding any personal benefit he may choose to specify, that would be pleasing to flesh and blood. No. It is its imparting to his inmost consciousness the sense of his being such a Son to the Father, so clear in the Father’s sight, that the Father can refuse him nothing. He may ask what he will; and he is sure to receive it of the Father.

Ah! how then shall I ask anything at all? If such is my position, in and with Christ, how shall I have the heart or the hardihood to ask anything at all of the Father, except only that he may deal with me according to his good pleasure? If I am really on such a footing with the Father that “he heareth me always,” and “whatsoever I ask I receive of him;” if I have such influence with him; if, as his dear child, pleasing him, and doing what pleases him, I can so prevail with him that he can refuse me nothing; what can I say? What can I do? I can but cast myself into his arms and cry, Thou knowest better than I, O my Father! Father, thy will be done!

Yes. And under that blessed committal of all to him, what freedom may I not use? When told that I and my doings are so pleasing to him that I may ask what I will and it shall be done; the very abundance of the grace silences me. It is enough for me, Father, that such is my acceptance in thy sight. But can I wield the sceptre? Can I use so tremendous a power as this, that whatever I ask thee to do thou doest? Nay. I am thy servant. Undertake thou for me. Enough for me to be assured that I so find grace and favour in thy sight that I have but to ask, thee to do anything and it is done. Enough! Nay, more than enough! I can ask nothing on these terms, I must leave all to thee. But leaving all to thee, I pour out all the more freely my whole soul to thee, I spread out my whole case to thee. I speak to thee of all that is upon my mind and heart. I tell thee all my desire. My groaning is not hid from thee.

Let us look in closing at the two specimen commandments, if one may so call them, or the two parts of the one specimen commandment, which John expressly mentions in this connection.

1. “That we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ.” The keeping of this commandment is the doing of what is pleasing in the Father’s sight. It is so in proportion to the love with which he loveth the Son, and loveth us in the Son. We can do nothing that will please the Father more. It is what his heart is set on; that the Son of his love should be the object of our faith.

Is there not here a word in season for you, O sinner, whoever you are, however guilty and however helpless, poor and needy, lost and undone? You, as it might seem, are in no condition to keep God’s commandments so as to please him; and you cannot venture to ask anything, or to hope that you will receive anything, at his hands. Nay; but here is something that you may do, and that will be very pleasing to him. “Believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ.” It is true that he will not be pleased with your keeping any other commandment; but he will be pleased with your keeping that one. You may not be in circumstances to do anything else that will be pleasing in his sight; but you are in the very circumstances to do that which will please him best. He asks you if you will not do, him this pleasure, “to believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ.” Be it that you cannot receive anything you ask otherwise than on the footing of your keeping his commandments and doing those things that are pleasing in his sight. Here is the commandment for you, here and now, to keep; here is the thing pleasing in his sight for you, here and now, to do. Without faith it is impossible to please God; but faith pleases him; it pleases him well. Then believe now.

And take a right view of the duty of believing. It is not using a great liberty to believe on the name of Jesus; it is simply “keeping the commandment of God.” The liberty is all the other way. You use a great liberty when you refuse to believe. Be not disobedient; displease not God by unbelief; rather please him by believing. And believing, ask what you will, and it shall be given you.

Keep on believing. Continue to believe more and more, simply because you see and feel it more and more to be “his commandment that you should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ.” Unbelief, in you who have believed, is aggravated disobedience. And, as such, it is and must be especially displeasing to God. It is his pleasure that his Son should be known, trusted, worshipped, loved; honoured as he himself would be honoured. You cannot displease the Father more than by dishonouring the Son; refusing to receive him, and rest upon him, and embrace him, and hold him fast, and place full reliance upon him as redeemer, brother, friend. Do not deceive yourselves by imagining that there may be something rather gracious in your doubts and fears; your unsettled and unassured frame of mind; as if it betokened humility, and a low esteem of yourselves. Beware lest God see in it only a low esteem of his Son Jesus Christ. Beware of guile. May not your staggering, hesitating faith be but half faith after all? May it not be that you are unwilling to be wholly Christ’s, and to have Christ wholly yours. Can that be pleasing to God? “What shall we do that we might work the works of God?” asked the Jews, and the Lord replied: “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he has sent.” Therefore let us believe; and let us be “strong in faith, giving glory to God.”

2. “And love one another as he gave this commandment.” The keeping of this commandment of love, as well as the keeping of the former commandment of faith, is the doing of that which is very pleasing in God’s sight; and, therefore, in the keeping of it we may with much confidence reckon and rely on the assurance that “whatsoever we ask we shall receive of him” that “he will hear us always.”

I do not know—who can tell me? What connection there was between the silent prayer of Jesus at tile grave of Lazarus, and the utterance of that voice of power, “Lazarus, come forth!” Evidently the Lord wished it to be seen and known that in some very special manner the Father was with him, and went along with him, in that great work.”Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I know that thou hearest me always; but because of the people that stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me.” He would have it understood that he did the work as one whom the Father had on this occasion heard; as one whom “the Father heareth always,” and whom “the Father hath sent.” For he was to do it, not as a thing that might please himself, but as a thing that would please the Father. He “loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus,” and he was about to manifest and gratify his love by a very signal proof and token. But he would have all men to observe that it was not merely on the impulse of a spontaneous burst of affection that he acted, but as doing what the Father commanded, and what would be pleasing in the Father’s sight. Loving, in that way, Martha and her sister and Lazarus, he knew that in the practical outgoing of his love towards them; in whatever loving words he was to say, and whatever loving works he was to do; he might be sure of the Father being with him. For “he pleased the Father;” he sought to please the Father, and did please the Father. Therefore he was sure of receiving what he asked; sure of the Father hearing him then and hearing him always.

Go ye and do likewise. Love one another; love your brother; love as a brother every one with whom you have anything to do; love him with the love that would fain have him for a brother. And let your love still always be “the keeping of God’s commandment,” and “the doing of what is pleasing in his sight.” Let it not be, as it were, at your own hand that you love, but in obedience to the commandment of God. This may, in one view, be felt by you to be a sort of damper; a drawback upon the warm spontaneous flow of your affections. It may seem to detract from the generous enthusiasm of your good will and your good offices. It takes away the chivalry and romance of this virtue. It makes Christian philanthropy a very humble and homely duty. You are to go among your fellows,—not loving them of your own accord, and at your own discretion showing your love,—but loving them in obedience to “the commandment of God;” and in all the expressions and acts of your love, simply bent on doing what is “pleasing in his sight.” But after all, if this is a lowlier, it is a far more becoming and safer position for you to occupy. And it is one in which, if you honestly occupy it, you may with all the greater confidence rely on his hearing you now, and always. You do good and communicate; you are fruitful in every good work; you wash the feet of saints; you visit the fatherless and widows; you speak a word in season to the weary; you stretch out a helping hand to all that need; not merely as indulging your own loving impulses, but rather as carrying out God’s loving purposes. You do these things because they are “well pleasing in his sight.” Doing them thus, in singleness of eye, what encouragement have you to expect that he will be with you in the doing of them; that he will hear your prayer for those to whom you do them; and that whatsoever you ask on their behalf you will receive of him!

But in all this, let us see to it that we are “of the truth;” simple, guileless, upright; as regards our whole life and walk of faith and love. Only then can we have confidence before God that whatsoever we ask we shall receive of him. Let us lay to heart the Psalmist’s acknowledgment,—“If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me;” and his thanksgiving, —“But verily God hath heard me; he hath attended to the voice of my prayer. Blessed be God, which hath not turned away my prayer, nor his mercy from me.” Let us lay this to heart, not in any spirit of self-righteousness or vain-glory; but in simple sincerity, as little children, honouring our Father; according to the quaint thought of an old writer: —“I find David making a complete syllogism, perfect in mood and figure. The first premiss being, ‘If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me’ and the second, ‘But verily God hath heard me; he hath attended to the voice of my prayer;’ I look for his drawing the conclusion: Therefore I regard not iniquity in my heart. But no. When I expected him to put the crown on his own head, he places it on God’s;—‘Blessed be God, which hath not turned away my prayer, nor his mercy from me.’ I like David’s logic better than Aristotle’s; that whatever be the premiss God’s glory is the conclusion.” (Fuller’s Good Thoughts in Bad Times.)

XXIX. Our Righteousness Exercised in Trying the Spirits; The Test, Confessing that Jesus Christ Is Come in the Flesh

“Hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of anti-Christ, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.”—1 John 3:24 to 1 John 4:4

THE appeal in the beginning of the fourth chapter springs out of the closing statement in the third: “Hereby we know that God abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us.” This evidently throws us back into ourselves; into some consciousness on our part of his having given us the Spirit. It is an inward or subjective test. Have we in us the Spirit as given to us by God! If so, we have the Spirit in us “confessing that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” And by his confessing that truth, we may distinguish his indwelling in us from all attempts of any anti-Christian spirit, or any false prophets or teachers inspired by an anti- Christian spirit, to effect a lodgment in our hearts. For this is their characteristic; they refuse to “confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”

The meaning of that confession, objectively considered, has been already brought out in what John says of Anti-Christ as “denying that Jesus is the Christ;”—and so virtually “denying the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:21-25). I am inclined to think that we have now to deal with it more subjectively; as a matter of inward experience rather than of doctrinal statement. For the starting-point is our “knowing that God abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us.” It is the fact of the Spirit confessing in us, and not merely to us, that we have to ascertain and verify; and therefore the test must apply inwardly;—Have we in us “the Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh?” As it stands here, therefore, I think we are called to deal with that formula rather experimentally than dogmatically; and so to make it all the more available for the searching of our hearts.

Taking that view, I shall consider, in the first place, what the inward confession of the Spirit in us that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh may be held to imply; and then, secondly, how our realising this in our experience secures our personal and practical victory over all anti-Christian spirits or prophets who deny that great and blessed fact.

I. It properly belongs to the Spirit to “confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” He had much to do with the flesh in which Jesus Christ came. He prepared for him a body in the Virgin’s womb, so as to secure that he came into the world pure and sinless. And all throughout his sojourn on earth the Spirit ministered to him as “Jesus Christ come in the flesh;” he could not minister to him otherwise. It is the flesh, or humanity, of Jesus Christ that brings him within the range of the Spirit’s gracious care. It was his human experience that the Spirit animated and sustained; and it is with his human experience also that the Spirit deals when he “takes of what is Christ’s and shows it unto us.” His object is to make us one with “Jesus Christ as come in the flesh.” That practically is his confession to us and in us. Let us see what it implies.

1. He identifies us with Jesus Christ in his humiliation. There is no real humiliation on the part of the Son if his coming in the flesh is denied. He might be conceived of as coming gloriously, graciously, condescendingly, in his own original and eternal nature alone; taking the mere semblance of a body, or a real body now and then, as the Gnostic dreamers taught. But there would have been no humbling of himself in that, and no room for any concurrent humbling testimony or work of the Spirit in us. It is Jesus Christ as come in the flesh, “made of a woman, made under the law,” that the Spirit owns and seals. And he confesses or witnesses this in us by making us one, and keeping us one, with our Lord in that character, as “Jesus Christ come in the flesh.” In our divine regeneration he brings us to be,—what, through his interposition, Jesus Christ in his miraculous human generation became,—servants under the yoke; subject to the authority and commandment of God; willingly subject; our nature being renewed into the likeness of his.

2. The Spirit identifies us with Jesus Christ, not only in his humiliation but in its conditions and liabilities. For “to confess Jesus Christ come in the flesh,” is not merely to admit the fact of his incarnation, but to admit it with whatever consequences necessarily, in terms of law, flow from it. His coming in the flesh is not simply an incident or .event in history; it has a special meaning in the moral government of God. It brought him, not merely into the position of one made under the law, but into the position, under the law, of those whose place he took.

The old deniers of his coming in the flesh saw this; and it was their chief objection to the doctrine. They might have allowed that the mysterious efflux or emanation of Deity that they seemed to own as a sort of Saviour did somehow identify himself with us, by making common cause with us, and even temporarily assuming our nature with a view to purge and elevate it. But they perceived that the literal incarnation of the Son of God, truly and fairly admitted, carried in its train the vicarious substitution and atonement. Modern teachers in the same line think that they may hold the first without the last. But I am mistaken if any incarnation they may thus hold does not slip insensibly, in their handling of it, into some modification, suited to modern turns of thought, of the old vague notion of a certain divinity being in every man; and in some one man perhaps pre-eminently as the type and model of perfect manhood. That, however, is not to “confess Jesus Christ come in the flesh;” for his coming in the flesh, accepted as a reality, implies his really putting himself alongside of those in whose flesh he comes, and serving himself heir to all the ills to which their flesh is heir.

Let us look, then, at “Jesus Christ coming in the flesh,” the Son of God taking our nature into oneness with himself. He takes it pure and sinless, so far as he is personally concerned; but he takes it with all the liabilities which our sin has entailed upon it, And the Spirit, confessing in us that he is come in the flesh, makes us one with him in this view of his coming; our guilt and condemnation being now his, and his taking our guilt and bearing our condemnation being ours. His coming in the flesh is his consenting to be crucified for us; the Spirit in us confessing him as come in the flesh makes us willing to be crucified with him. And so, by means of this confession, the true Spirit of God and of Christ opens to us a prospect of glory and joy such as no lying spirit of anti-Christ can hold out. If it was not really in the flesh that he came; or if, coming in the flesh, he failed to redeem by substitution those whose flesh he shared; then flesh, or human nature, can have little hope of reaching the blessedness of heaven. But having really come in the flesh, and in the flesh suffered for sin, he raises the flesh in which he suffered to the highest capacity of holy and happy being. “In my flesh I shall see God,” was the hope of the patriarch Job. It is made sure by Jesus Christ come in the flesh, and by the Spirit confessing in us that he is come.

II. This accordingly is the secret of our present victory over anti-Christian spirits and men: “Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them” (1 John 4:4). The intimation (1 John 4:3) that the spirit of anti-Christ is already, even now, in the world, is fitted to make this assurance very welcome. For war is proclaimed; war that is to last as long as the world lasts. It is the old war, proclaimed long ago, between the serpent’s seed and the woman’s. But it has taken a new form; and that its final one. From the first manifestation of it,—from the day when Cain slew his brother—it might be seen to turn upon the question of the worship of God by atoning sacrifice. Is there, or is there not, to be the shedding of blood for the remission of sins? That, more or less clearly, with variations suited to the varied aspect of the church and the world, has ever since continued to be in substance the point at issue. Now that Christ has come in the flesh, it is so more than ever. “Jesus Christ come in the flesh” is its ultimate expression and embodiment. In the contest about this high theme, “you, little children, have overcome them.” The victory is already yours: for “you are of God.”

Two questions here occur;—1. What is the nature of the victory? 2. How is it connected with your being of God?

1. The victory is a real victory got over the false prophets or teachers, who are not of God, whom the spirit of anti-Christ inspires. And it is a victory over them personally; not over their doctrines and principles merely; but over themselves: “Ye have overcome them.” True, it is, in a sense, a war of doctrines or of principles that is waged; its field of battle is the field of argument and controversy. You and they meet in discussion and debate; and when you succeed in refuting their reasonings, you may feel the complacency of a personal triumph over them as, vanquished, they seem to quit the field. But even though vanquished they may argue still. They are silenced, merely, and not subdued; and their silence is only for a time. You may soon have the battle to fight over again; and in the incessant fighting of it, you may be doomed to suffer wounds, in your temper at least, if not in your faith; in your equanimity of spirit towards men, if not in your peace of mind within yourselves, or even your peace with God. I cannot think that that is the victory on which John congratulates his “little children” so affectionately.

No doubt such victory is valuable, as the sort of war in which it is won is inevitable. It is idle to effect to run down controversy, as long as there is error abroad among men. It is mere prudery to be always groaning over the symptoms of irritability which controversialists have exhibited, and bemoaning evermore their lack of a smooth and oily tongue. All honour to the champions of God’s holy word and blessed gospel, who have waxed valiant in fight against the adversaries of both! All sympathy with them in their indignant sense of what touches the glory and insults the majesty of him whose battles they fight; with large allowance for the heats into which, being but men, they may suffer their zeal to hurry them! And all thankful joy in the success with which they wield the weapons of their keen logic, their learned study, their burning eloquence, in baffling the sophistries of heresy and infidelity, and rearing an impregnable defence around the battlements on which the banner is planted which God “has given to them that fear him, that it may be displayed because of the truth!”

But that is not exactly the victory which is here meant when it is said, “ye have overcome them.” For what really is your contest with them? It is not about an abstract proposition, a mere article in a creed. It is not whether you can prove that Jesus of Nazareth was man as well as God, or God as well as man; or they can prove the reverse. No. “Jesus Christ come in the flesh” is not with you a mere matter of disputation. It is a pregnant and significant fact in God’s government of the universe, grasped by you as such, and apprehended as such in your experience. By faith you know and feel what it means. You identify yourself with him in his coming in the flesh; consciously and with entire community of mind and heart; and in the very doing of this you “have already overcome them.”

For it is the fact that they dislike; not argument about the fact. It is the actual “coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh,” and his actual accomplishment, in the flesh, of all that in the flesh he came for, that they resent and resist. It is that which Satan, the original spirit of anti-Christ, would fain have set himself to hinder; moving Herod to slay Jesus in his childhood, and Judas to betray him in his manhood; tempting Jesus himself to make shipwreck of his integrity. And it is your actual personal participation with him, as “Jesus Christ come in the flesh;” your being really one with him in that wondrous humiliation, in its spirit and its fruit; that, so far as you are concerned, they seek to frustrate. In realising that, you get the better of them; confessing thus Jesus Christ come in the flesh, you have overcome them It is not that you are able to discuss with them, as debatable questions in argument, the reality and the meaning of Jesus Christ having come in the flesh. You may have to do so, and if you do so on a clear call of duty, you are sure of divine support and help; perhaps even of success and triumph. But that is not your having already overcome them. Very gladly would they often drag you into this snare; making you mistake the chance of overcoming them in a discussion about Jesus Christ come in the flesh, for the certainty of your having overcome them through your simply confessing him in that character. But be not drawn down to lower ground. Stand upon your position of oneness with him whom you confess as Jesus Christ come in the flesh. Meet thus any and all anti-Christs; anti-Christian spirits, anti-Christian prophets. They are not to be overcome. You have already overcome them.

2. Your having overcome them is connected with your “being of God” (1 John 4:4); which again is intimately connected with your” confessing that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” (1 John 4:2). Your being of God is the intermediate link between your confessing that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh (1 John 4:2), and your having overcome them who reject that truth (1 John 4:4).

“Ye are of God” (1 John 4:4). This, let it be observed, is what has previously been asserted of the Spirit that “confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” He “is of God” (1 John 4:3). And it is denied concerning any spirit refusing to confess that. Such a spirit “is not of God.”

Now what, as applied to the Holy Spirit, does this mean? How,—in what sense and to what effect,—is the Spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh said to be “of God”?

He is of God essentially, being himself God; proceeding from the Father and the Son; one with them in the undivided essence of the Godhead. He is of God, if I may so say, officially; condescending in infinite love, to be the gift of the Father and the Son to guilty and sinful men. But here more particularly, he is of God as confessing, or in virtue of his confessing, that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. He is on the side of God, or in the interest of God; he consults and acts for God; he takes God’s part and is true to God. It is as being thus of God that the Spirit confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. He contemplates, if I may so say, that great fact with all its issues from the divine point of view; in its bearing on the divine character and nature, the divine government and law. He is “of God” in it; in that fact and in all its issues.

Do I take too great a liberty in speaking thus of the Holy Spirit? I scarcely think so when I call to mind how this phrase describes Christ’s own position in the world with reference to the Father. He was “of God;” he was so in a very emphatic and significant sense; not only as regards his origin and mission; his coming from God and being authorised by God; but also, and specially, as regards his end and aim all through his humiliation, obedience, and sacrifice. He was “of God;” on the side and in the interest of God. It was the zeal of God’s house that ate him up. It was the doing of God’s will, and the finishing of God’s work, that was his meat. It was the glorifying of his Father, and the finishing of the work which his Father gave him to do, that ministered to his satisfaction in his last farewell prayer. Of him pre-eminently it might be said: “He is of God.” And in his being thus “of God,” as to the whole mind and meaning of the phrase, the Holy Spirit is with him and in him. Jesus Christ come in the flesh is, in this sense emphatically, confessed by the Spirit. The Spirit is with him, and in him, as the Spirit that is of God; and as being to him the Spirit that is of God. He and the Spirit are at one in being both “of God.” And you, in the Son and by the Spirit are “of God;” as truly of God as is the Spirit, or as the Son was when God “gave not the Spirit by measure to him.”

The essential characteristic of the spirit of anti-Christ is that it is, in the sense now explained, “not of God.” It does not look at the Saviour and the salvation as on the side of God; rather it takes an opposite view, and subjects God to man. It subordinates everything to human interests and human claims; looks at everything from a human and mundane point of view; measures everything by a human standard; submits everything to human opinion; in a word, conceives and judges of God after the manner of man. This, indeed, may be said to be the distinctive feature of all false religions, as well as of all corruptions of the true religion. They exalt man. They consider what man requires, what he would like, what is due to him. Even when they take the form of the most abject and degrading superstition, that is still their spirit. They aim at getting God, by whatever means of persuasion and prostration, to do the bidding of man. For it is the essence of our corrupt human nature, of which these corrupt worships are the expression, to care and consult for self, and not for God. This is the essence of the spirit of anti-Christ; the spirit that breathes and moves in the false notions that have gained currency in the church respecting “Jesus Christ come in the flesh.” Their advocates give man the first place in their scheme. Their real objection lies against those views of gospel truth which assert the absolute sovereignty of God, and put forward pre-eminently what he is entitled to demand,—what, with a due regard to his own character, government, and law, he cannot but demand. They dislike such representations as bring in the element of God’s holy name and righteous authority, and lay much stress upon that element, as one of primary consideration in the plan of saving mercy. Hence they naturally shrink from owning explicitly Jesus Christ as come in the flesh to make atonement by satisfying divine justice. They prefer some loose and vague way of putting the fact of his interposition, and the manner of it. Admitting in a sense its necessity, they are unwilling to define very precisely, either the nature of the necessity, or the way in which it is met. He came in the flesh, to redeem the flesh, to sanctify, elevate, and purify it. He came in the flesh, to be one with us, and to make us, in the flesh, one with him. So they speak and think of his coming in the flesh. Any higher aim, any prior and paramount design involved in this great fact, viewed in its relation to the nature and supremacy of God, his holiness and justice, as lawgiver and judge, they are slow to acknowledge. Hence their gospel is apt to be partial and one-sided; looking rather like an accommodation of heaven and heaven’s rights to earth and earth’s wishes and ways, than that perfect reconciliation and perfect assimilation of earth to heaven for which we hold it to have made provision;—our heavenly Father’s name being hallowed, his kingdom coming, his will being done, in earth as it is in heaven. Their system is not “of God” as the primary object of consideration; for they themselves are not out and out, in this sense, “of God.”

But “ye are of God, little children,” in this matter; in the view that you take, and the conception that you form of Jesus Christ come in the flesh; of the end of his coming, and the manner in which that end is attained. You look at that great fact, first and chiefly in its relation to God, and as on the side of God. It is from God and for God that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. So he always taught; and so you firmly believe. He placed God always first; the glory of God, the sovereignty of God, the will of God always took precedency. Man’s concerns and interests were subordinate to that. Nothing is more conspicuous in “Jesus Christ come in the flesh,” throughout his whole ministry, in all his life and in his death, than this loyalty to God his Father, prevailing even over his amazing tenderness and pity for men. He was truly of God, even when his being so might tell against men; tell to their destruction rather than their salvation. He does not shrink from the darkest issues which, in that view, his coming in the flesh carries in its bosom. He did not shrink from them when realised in his own person, and in his personal experience, as the suffering substitute of the guilty. He does not shrink from them as they are to be realised in the persons, and in the personal experience, of those who “will not come unto him that they may have life.”

If you are “of God,” you are of his mind. You approve of this principle; you recognise the propriety of what is due to God being first attended to and provided for, in preference even to what may be needed by man. What God, being such as he is, must require, since “he cannot deny himself,” that is the first question; then, and in subordination to that, what can be done for men. It is a great matter for you to view the whole plan of salvation, as being yourselves, in this sense, “of God.” It is your doing so that secures your having overcome all spirits of anti-Christ. If thus “you are of God,” you are already raised to a higher platform than they can occupy, so as to have a loftier and wider range of vision. Your profound reverence for the majesty of God; your loyal, loving recognition of his holy and righteous sovereignty; your deep, admiring esteem of his government and law; your calm conviction that the Lord reigneth; your intense desire that the Lord should reign; your determination, may I say, that the Lord shall reign; lifts you out of the region of human questionings and all doubtful disputations. It is your very humility that lifts you up. You sit at the feet of Jesus Christ come in the flesh. You stand beside his cross. You do not now stumble at the mystery of its bloody expiation; or quarrel with the great propitiation-sacrifice through unbelief of its necessity. The ideas of justice needing to be satisfied; punishment inevitably to be inflicted; one willing to bear it in your stead being found; that one being “Jesus Christ come in the flesh;” do not now offend you. Nay, being “of God,” on his side and in his interest in the whole of this great transaction, you can meekly, in faith, commit to him and leave in his hands even the most terrible of those ultimate and eternal consequences, involving the aggravated guilt and final ruin of many, that you cannot but see to be inseparably mixed up with the confession that “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”

Verse 24

XXVIII. Our Righteousness Attested by Obedience, as Implying Our Abiding in God, and His Abiding in Us by the Spirit Given by Him to Us

“And he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth [abideth] in him, and he in him. And hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”—1 John 3:24; 1 John 4:1

THIS is another fruit of the keeping of God’s commandments; or another view of the blessedness of doing so. It ensures our abiding in God, and his abiding in us; and that in a manner that may be ascertained and verified. Two practical questions are thus virtually put and answered. I. How may we abide in God? So abide in him as to have him abiding in us? By keeping his commandments. How may we know that he abides in us? By the Spirit which he giveth us,—and giveth us in a way that admits of the gift being verified by trial.

I. In the keeping of God’s commandments there is this great reward, that he that doeth so “dwelleth in God, and God in him.” Negatively, it has been already shown that there can be no such mutual indwelling if there is on our part disobedience to God’s commandments. Sin, as “the transgression of the law,” is incompatible with such high and holy communion (1 John 3:6). It is the positive form of the statement that is now before us. Obedience, or the keeping of God’s commandments, actively promotes this communion. It is more than the condition of it; it is of its very essence. If this mutual indwelling is not to be mere absorption, which some dreamers in John’s day held it to be—if it is not to be the swallowing up of our conscious individual personality in the infinite mind or intelligence of God—if it is to conserve the distinct relationship of God to man, the Creator to the creature, the Ruler to the subject, the Father to the child;—it must be realised and must develop itself, or act itself out, through the means of authority or law on the one side, and obedience or the keeping of the commandments on the other. It is, in fact, the very consummation and crown of man’s old, original relation to God; as that relation is not only restored, but perfected and gloriously fulfilled, in the new economy of grace.

For consider the divine ideal, if I may so speak, involved in the creation of man after the image of God, and in the footing on which it pleased God to place man towards himself. Evidently God contemplated obedience, or the keeping of his commandments, as the normal state or character of man. While that state or character continued, there was the best understanding between the parties; between God and man; they were on the best of terms with one another. There was entire complacency on both sides; each resting and dwelling in the other with full and unalloyed satisfaction. You would not say, in these circumstances, that this mutual indwelling of man in God and God in man was, in any proper sense, procured or obtained by man’s obedience, by his keeping the commandments of God. You would rather say that it had in that way its proper outgoing or forth-going, its conscious realisation. It is man’s method of intercourse with God; the only competent, the only conceivable method, if God and man respectively are to keep their relative positions as distinct intelligences. It is only along the line of God ruling and man obeying, that the two, as separate persons or individuals, can so walk together as to get into one another’s minds and hearts, and thus abide in one another. Such mutual indwelling of God in man and of man in God, becoming day by day more close, confidential, loving; through man’s increasing insight into the exceeding excellency of the commandments he is keeping, or rather of him whose nature and will they discover, and through God’s increasing delight in the growing intelligence and sympathy with which man keeps them; might seem to be complete; having in it all the elements of perfection, as regards both the holiness and the happiness of man. Can God and man be more to one another?

Alas, the drawback of a conditional standing, and a possible fall, is fatal. It leaves an opening for suspicion creeping in, upon the hint of a seeming friend, who would insinuate that restraint is irksome and independence sweet. Then all mutual indwelling is over. God and man must dwell apart. There may indeed be some sort of formal dealing between them; at least man fondly imagines that there may. He thinks that he can so far keep God’s commandments as thereby to right himself with God; to the extent at least to which he cares to be righted. He will make certain terms with God, or conceive of God as making certain terms with him; and he will be punctilious in the fulfilment of these terms. But that is not really keeping God’s commandments. It is the keeping of a pact, if you will; the doing of his part in a bargain. And if the two parties concerned were equals, or if the relation between them were one of mutual independence, this might lay a foundation for some sort of mutual indwelling, by faith and love, in one another. Even in that case, however, the foundation is too narrow and precarious. If the mutual indwelling is to be real and thorough, there must be something more than the fulfilment of certain stipulated conditions between the parties. They must submit themselves, each to the other, cordially and without reserve; they must study to obey and please one another. Between God and man especially, the introduction of the conditional element, of anything that savours of the striking of a bargain or the making of terms, is and must be destructive of all real fellowship or intercommunion. No obedience rendered on that footing or in that spirit can ever secure your dwelling in God and his dwelling in you. In point of fact, it is apt,—if not from the first to occasion a breach,—yet ever afterwards, when a breach occurs, to widen, deepen, and perpetuate it, however it may be meant, and may seem to bridge it over.

The practical value of a free gospel is, that it places your “keeping of God’s commandments” on a different footing, and breathes into it a different spirit. You look to Jesus, and are one with him. You are in the same position of advantage for keeping God’s commandments in which he was. You start, as he did, on the walk and work of obedience, not as seeking acceptance, but as already accepted; not as a servant on trial, but as a son abiding in the house evermore. You are not only what unfallen Adam was when the task of keeping God’s commandments was set before him; you are as Christ was when the same task was set before him.

Consider then what sort of keeping of God’s commandments his was; and how it must have conduced to his abiding in the Father, and the Father’s abiding in him. Of course that mutual indwelling never could, through all his keeping of the Father’s commandments, become more full and complete, in principle and essence, than it was before he began to keep them. But we may well imagine that to his human consciousness, and in his human experience, the sense of it must have been growing more intense, and more intensely soothing and beatific, as his keeping of them went on, and on, to its terrible and triumphant close. Among the things about obedience which he learned by suffering, surely this was one, that it has a mighty power to promote, enhance, and intensify the indwelling of man in God, and of God in man. He learned the grief and pain which such obedience as he had undertaken to render involved. Did he not learn something of its joy and pleasure too, the joy and pleasure of apprehending and feeling, more and more, in his human soul, his dwelling in the Father and the Father’s dwelling in him throughout it all?

I dare not venture upon particular illustration here. But I ask you, in any hour of deep and private meditation, and after you have prayed, or while you are praying, for the help of the Spirit, to put yourself alongside of Christ, in the sorest and hardest of the experiences which his keeping the Father’s commandments entailed upon him. Try to enter into what his soul was feeling when it was “exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.” There was anguish, agony; the anguish and agony of having guilt to answer for, and a penal death to die. But was he not then and there, in his keeping of the Father’s most dread and awful commandments, and through his keeping of them, dwelling in the Father and the Father in, him, in a sense and with a depth and force of meaning, of which that human soul of his could not otherwise have had any experience? What insight, what sympathy, what rest, repose, and peace,—the rest, repose, and peace of unutterable complacency, on his part, in the Father and on the Father’s part in him, must there have been in his utterance of these simple words, “It is finished; Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit!”

Let our keeping of God’s commandments be like his. Let us seek grace that it may be so. In our case, as in his, this may imply a bitter cup to be drunk; a heavy cross to be borne. Like him, we have to learn obedience by suffering. Let the obedience we thus learn be of the same sort as his. Let it be the giving up of our own will, always, everywhere, that God’s will may be done. We shall then prove how good and acceptable and perfect that will of God is. We dwell thus in God when our will is merged in his will; we have rest and repose in him; our will in his will, our thoughts in his thoughts; our ways in his ways. And he dwells in us his will in our will; his thoughts in our thoughts; his ways in our ways. We enter into his mind and heart; and he enters into ours.

II. The manner of God’s abiding in us, or at least the way in which we may know that he abides in us, is specified;—“Hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us.” We are to distinguish here between our dwelling in God and his dwelling in us. Both are to be known as facts of our own consciousness, not as revealed truths merely, but as realised experiences. The one, however, our dwelling in God, is to be thus known by our “keeping his commandments;” the other, God’s dwelling in us, by “the spirit which he giveth us.” The one we know by what we do to God;—the other, by what God does in us. And yet, the two means of knowledge are not far apart. They are not only strictly consistent with one another; they really come together in one point.

For the Spirit is here said to be given to us;—not in order to our knowing that God abideth in us, in the sense of his opening our spiritual eye and quickening our spiritual apprehension;—but rather, as the medium of our knowing it, the evidence or proof by which we know it. He giveth us the Spirit; and by that token, his giving us the Spirit, we are taught by the Spirit to know that God dwelleth inns. The question therefore as to what this gift of the Spirit may be, is thus narrowed to a precise point.

Is it the gift of the Spirit enabling men to perform supernatural works that is meant? That can scarcely be the gift of the Spirit for such works was never a sure sign of God’s really and savingly dwelling in those who did them. Surely it must be the gift of the Spirit for the ordinary purposes of the Christian life and walk that John has in view; the gift of the Spirit common to all believers in all ages. God giveth us the Spirit in order that, by the Spirit being given, we may know that he dwelleth in us. He means us, therefore, to recognise this gift as a sure evidence of that fact. And how are we to recognise the Spirit as given to us? How otherwise than by recognising the fruit of the gift? The Spirit given to us is, as to his movement or operation, unseen and unfelt. But the fruit of the Spirit is palpable and patent.”It is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” For “against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22-23).

“Against such there is no law.” That is an important addition or explanation here. There is nothing in the gift of the Spirit, or in the fruit of the Spirit as given, that is contrary to law; nothing, therefore, that can again bring us under the risks and liabilities of law. On the contrary, the Spirit being given, with such fruit, is precisely what secures that kind of keeping of the commandments on our part, by which we “dwell in him.” For, I must repeat, it is as the Spirit of adoption that he is given; “God sendeth forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.”

Thus the two elements and conditions, the two means and evidences, of this mutual indwelling of us in God and of God in us meet together. We dwell in God by keeping his commandments; he dwells in us by giving us his Spirit. But our keeping his commandments and his giving us his Spirit are really one; one and the same fact viewed on opposite sides. It is not any sort of keeping his commandments on our part that will ensure or attest our dwelling in him. It is not any way of giving us his Spirit on his part that will ensure or attest his dwelling in us. Our keeping his commandments in the spirit of bondage; in a legal, self-righteous, formal, and servile frame of mind; is not our dwelling in God. God’s enabling us, by the power of his Spirit, to work miracles, would not be his dwelling in us. Our dwelling in him is our keeping his commandments, as his Son did, on the same filial footing and with the same filial heart. His dwelling in us is his “sending forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.”

III. From all this it follows that the counsel or warning, “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they be of God” (1 John 4:1), is as needful for us as it was for those to whom John wrote. We may think that it is the Spirit of God whom we are receiving into our hearts and cherishing there, when it may really be another spirit altogether: one of the many spirits inspiring the “many false prophets that are gone out into the world.” Therefore we must “try the spirits.”

Do you ask how, or by what test?—”Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God.”

The full meaning of this pregnant and searching test will be afterwards considered. Meanwhile, as bearing on the subject now in hand, it admits of at least one obvious application.

The Spirit that is of God will ever honour Christ; and especially Christ come in the flesh; which means not only Christ incarnate, but also and emphatically Christ crucified. The person and work of Christ, as the outward object of our faith, the ground of our confidence before God outside of us and apart from us, the true Spirit of God will ever magnify and glorify. He will not consent to substitute for that any inward experience, however heavenly, as superseding it or setting it aside. That is what false prophets, moved by an anti-Christian spirit, are apt to do. It was a very marked characteristic of their teaching in John’s own day. An inward light, an inward sense, something, or much of a Christ in them; an inward revelation, or rapture, or elevation, a sort of mystical indwelling of God or of Christ in them, they extolled and cried up; making it the sum and substance of all Christianity, the whole gospel of the grace of God. Now any spirit that fosters such a tendency is not of God. Any spirit that would encourage us to look in upon ourselves and not out to Christ for peace or holiness is not of God. Inward experience is very precious; it is indispensable. A growing inward consciousness of our “keeping God’s commandments,” or, in other words, of our conformity of mind and heart and will to God’s character and law,—a growing inward consciousness of the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace—we must have; and we must seek to have it more and more, if we would have real communion with God. But if we are rightly exercised, how will this affect our views of “Christ come in the flesh,” our feeling of our need of him and of his exclusive sufficiency for us? Will it make us at all the less inclined to be ever looking to Christ, ever leaning on Christ, ever laying hold of Christ, ever having recourse to Christ, and that blood of Christ which cleanseth from all sin? Nay, on the contrary, our growing aquaintance with God, our growing delight in his law, our growing apprehension of the blessedness of perfect oneness, in nature and in will, with him, will only give us deeper convictions of sin, and open up to us new and fresh discoveries of our corruption and our guilt, and lead us to be ever saying, with reference not to past but to present evil in us: “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” And to be ever taking refuge in Paul’s last stronghold—“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.”

Let us then, acting upon the belief that “whatsoever we ask, we receive of him,” be ever asking God to give us the Holy Spirit, that we may know experimentally his dwelling in us. We cannot have too much of this gift of the Spirit, if it is indeed the Spirit “confessing Christ” that we ask God to give. We need not be afraid of having too much of the inward fruit of the Spirit; nor need we shrink from recognising the Spirit given to us by God as the spirit of assurance; “the spirit of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” If indeed we find ourselves leaning to the imagination that we have got past the stage at which we need to be living, as sinners, upon Christ the Saviour, and are tempted to live upon inward frames and feelings; putting the Spirit’s work in us instead of Christ’s work for us; then we do well to beware. But there is really no incompatibility between the two; our coveting, asking and obtaining more and more of the inward testimony of the Spirit, and our being by that very testimony—as it unfolds to us more and more God’s high ideal and our sad coming short of it—shut up more and more into Christ as the Lamb of God; with whose atoning blood and justifying righteousness we feel more and more that we can never for a single moment dispense.

Finally, let us remember that it is in the actual “keeping of God’s commandments” that we find all this great mystery of “our dwelling in God and his dwelling in us, practically cleared up. In the onward path of the just, which is as the shining light, shining more and more unto the perfect day, we come to know the Spirit given to us, by his “confessing Jesus Christ as come in the flesh.” Let us therefore so keep God’s commandments as not to vex or grieve the Holy Spirit. For we do vex and grieve him when our keeping them is either ungracious on the one hand; or, on the other hand, becomes to us a ground of confidence before God. As the Spirit of God, he is vexed by our submission to God being any other than a submission of the whole heart; filial altogether, and not servile at all. And as “the Spirit confessing Jesus Christ come in the flesh,” he cannot but be vexed if we unduly lean even on his own work in us, to the disparagement of what is the one only ground of a sinner’s hope, from first to last, “Christ and him crucified.” But let us keep the commandments of God simply, humbly, lovingly; not as doing any great thing, but only as doing his will, and content that his will be done. So keeping his commandments, we abide in God, and so also we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us.