Little Children, Keep Yourselves From Idols

Little Children, Keep Yourselves from Idols

1 John 5:18–21 NKJV

We know that whoever is born of God does not sin; but he who has been born of God keeps himself, and the wicked one does not touch him.

We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.

And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.

Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.

When we take 1 John 5:21 by itself, it is a bit jarring. The epistle does not address bowing down before graven images such as we see in the Old Testament. The Jews finally learned the lesson through the Babylonian exile not to bow down to idols and the worship of other gods. The Christians who came out from Judaism consistently affirmed that idols and strange gods were not to be worshiped. Many of the Gentiles had worshiped such before they became Christians and were to forsake them and worship the true God revealed in Jesus Christ. This would have been taught from the very beginning of the local church to which this epistle was written. So why would John in the final verse of this epistle reaffirm this teaching to keep one’s self from idols. It is true that some might have been tempted in this way to go back to the Pagan temples for “social” purposes or to buy the sacrificial meat that was sold there. Others who belonged to guilds who were dedicated to foreign gods might have felt compelled to offer incense to this god (patron). This seems to have been a problem for some of the seven churches John addresses in Revelation. Revelation also seems to indicate that one could not buy or sell in the public markets without offering incense to the gods. When they did so, their hand was stamped to allow them to enter and show that they offered the required piety. (mark of the beast?) But there is another possibility that John addresses in 1 John to which this charge to avoid idolatry might refer.

In our study of 1 John, we noticed that there had been a schism in the church. Some felt themselves to have outgrown the need of the teaching of Jesus and to connect directly to God to become perfect. Some think that these were a cult called the “Gnostics” who emphasized the gaining of secret knowledge open only to the initiated. Gnosticism, “Christian Gnosticism” indeed became a great issue in the Church which the church fathers, such as Irenaeus, had to deal with. But the Greeks had long been the worshipers of knowledge. They had various mystery religions such as the Cult of Dionysius (Bacchus) or the mysteries at Elysium which emphasized knowledge which could only be understood by the initiated. There were different degrees of enlightenment in which what was taught at the higher degrees was different than that taught to the newly initiated.

We learned that in this Church that these “perfect ones” had left to found their own sect. They felt that the others who had stayed were too stupid to understand the “true knowledge.” These had apparently come from the leadership of the church. The ones who had been left behind felt deeply about this rejection. This is why John is so adamant that those who had stayed and to whom this epistle is directly addressed were the true church and possessed the true knowledge. They were in fellowship with the Father and the Son. They had the unction of the Holy Spirit who leads the believer into all truth. The Son cannot be bypassed to address the Father directly. The one who has not the Son does not have the Father also. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, No one comes to the Father except through Him. (John 14:6) Therefore, it would be apostacy to leave the church to join those who had never really been part of the true church anyway. They proved this by their leaving.

We now take a look at the concluding paragraph of the epistle. We are confronted again with the truth that one who has been born of God does not sin. This verse has caused all kinds of distress to the believer if taken at face value. The idea of Christian perfectionism in this life haunted Wesley and his followers and left them in constant fear of losing their salvation. It is distressing that Wesley only found a handful of believers whom he felt had come to perfection in love in this life. and he was not one of them! But we found the answer of how to deal with this conflict earlier in our study of the epistle. John tells us that anyone who says “I have not sin” is a liar. Note that “have” is a present tense verb. It does not say “had” as though this was true in the past but not in the present. Why is this important? On the surface, the person who looks for Christian perfection within one’s self will always be anxious and disappointed. Who could be saved? Even if one had their slate of sin erased when they received Christ would soon accumulate new sins. John must mean something else.