Sermon Central
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"Once For All" Cleansing Series
Contributed by Andrew Farley on Nov 28, 2017 (message contributor)
Summary: The fourth in a series of messages about the complete sufficiency of the Gospel.
Theologians and Christian authors will often agree with John that "your sins have been forgiven on account of [Jesus’] name" (1 John 2:12). But later you find them essentially saying that confession is needed to cause God to forgive you. The problem is that both statements can’t be true at the same time. Either we’ve been forgiven, or there’s a condition for us to be forgiven.
To resolve this dilemma, some Christian thinkers have proposed the following: Christians are forgiven eternally in God’s heavenly record books. However, unless Christians keep short accounts with God through daily confession of sins, they can’t experience God’s cleansing during life on earth. Hence, they claim that 1 John 1:9 is the believer’s "bar of soap" to maintain daily fellowship with God. And they use terms such as judicial, patriarchal, and forensic as they delicately dance around the reality of once-for-all forgiveness and push the idea of a two-tiered forgiveness system in which eternally God is satisfied, but right now we somehow maintain our own daily cleansing through a confession ritual.
This line of thinking is nothing short of rampant today in Christian teaching, and 1 John 1:9 is their one and only hallmark verse. Note that if verse 9 were not to mean what they claim it means (a daily "bar of soap" for Christians), the entire theology they have crafted would fall to pieces. Seminaries around the world warn us not to develop theologies based principally around one verse, but this has been an unfortunate exception among scholars and pastor-teachers alike.
First, it’s important to recognize that this verse stands as the only one of its kind. No other verse in the epistles appears to place a conditional "if" on forgiveness and cleansing. So if there was a method for maintaining daily cleansing, the Romans were unaware of it. If there was a prescription for keeping short accounts with God, the Galatians had no exposure to it. If there was a need to ask God for forgiveness, the Ephesians weren’t privy to it. Similarly, the Corinthians, Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians also missed this teaching.
If there were a daily method to maintain good status (fellowship) with God through ongoing confession of sins or pleas for forgiveness, wouldn’t you think it’d be mentioned in at least one epistle? Did God accidentally leave it out? Certainly not! The fact is that we must take a closer look at 1 John 1:9 to understand John’s intended audience and the context of this peculiar verse.
From the beginning of John’s first chapter, we see him addressing prominent heresies in the early church. John begins his letter with words such as heard, seen, looked at, and touched to describe his interactions with Jesus. He does this to emphasize the physicality of Jesus.
Today, we take for granted that Jesus was physical. Of course he was! No argument there. But two millennia ago early forms of Gnostic thought infiltrated the church and popularized the idea that Jesus was only spirit. Early Gnostics claimed that God would never stoop so low as to take on human flesh. So the apostle John purposely uses physical words in his opening statement to challenge this Gnostic heresy. Later, he says that anyone who doesn’t believe that Jesus came in human flesh is not from God (1 John 4:3).
